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Indian Empire British Raj Crown Rule ← ← 1858–1947 → → → Flag Coat of arms Anthem God Save the Queen/King The British Indian Empire, 1909 Capital Calcutta (1858–1912) New Delhi (1912–1947) Language(s) Hindustani, English and many others Government Monarchy Emperor/Empress of India (1876–1947)  - 1858–1901 Victoria¹  - 1901–1910 Edward VII  - 1910–1936 George V  - 1936 Edward VIII  - 1936–1947 George VI Viceroy²  - 1858–1862 The Viscount Canning  - 1862–1863 The 8th Earl of Elgin  - 1864–1869 Sir John Lawrence  - 1869–1872 The Earl of Mayo  - 1872–1876 The Lord Northbrook History  - Established 2 August 1858  - Disestablished 15 August 1947 Currency British Indian rupee ¹ Reigned as Empress of India from May 1, 1876, before that as Queen of the United Kingdom. ² Governor-General and Viceroy of India

Colonial India
Portuguese India	1510–1961
Dutch India	1605–1825
Danish India	1696–1869
French India	1759–1954
British India 1612–1947
East India Company	1612–1757
Company rule in India	1757–1857
British Raj	1858–1947
British rule in Burma	1826–1947
Princely states	1765–1947
Partition of India	1947
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The British Raj (rāj in Hindustani: राज / راج, pronounced: /rɑːdʒ/, lit. "reign"^[1]) is the name given to the period of British colonial rule in South Asia between 1858 and 1947;^[2] it can also refer to the dominion itself, and even the region under the rule.^[3] The region, commonly called India in contemporary usage, included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom,^[4] as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. After 1876, the resulting political union was officially called the Indian Empire and issued passports under that name. As India, it was a founding member of the League of Nations, the United Nations, and a member nation of the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and 1936.
The system of governance was instituted in 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (and who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India), and lasted until 1947, when the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states, the Union of India (later the Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern half of which, still later, became the People's Republic of Bangladesh). The province of Burma in the eastern region of the Indian Empire became a separate colony in 1937, and gained independence in 1948.

Contents 1 Geographical extent 2 British India and the Native States 2.1 Major provinces 2.2 Minor provinces 2.3 Native states or Princely states 2.4 Organization 3 Famines, epidemics, and public health 4 Timeline 5 History 5.1 Company rule in India 5.2 Indian rebellion of 1857 5.3 Economic and political changes 5.4 Beginnings of self-government 5.5 World War I and its aftermath 5.6 World War II 5.7 Independence and partition 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References and further reading 8.1 Contemporary general textbooks 8.2 Monographs and collections 8.3 Articles in journals or collections 8.4 Classic histories and gazetteers 8.5 Tertiary sources 8.6 Related reading 9 External links

Geographical extent

The British Indian Empire and surrounding countries in 1909

The British Raj extended over all regions of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In addition, at various times, it included Aden Colony (from 1858 to 1937), Lower Burma (from 1858 to 1937), Upper Burma (from 1886 to 1937), British Somaliland (briefly from 1884 to 1898), and Singapore (briefly from 1858 to 1867). Burma was directly administered by the British Crown from 1937 until its independence in 1948. The Trucial States of the Persian Gulf were theoretically princely states of British India until 1946 and used the rupee as their unit of currency.
Among other countries in the region, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), was ceded to the United Kingdom in 1802 under the Treaty of Amiens. Ceylon was a British Crown Colony, but not part of British India. The kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan, having fought wars with the British, subsequently signed treaties with them, and were recognized by the British as independent states.^[5][6] The Kingdom of Sikkim was established as a princely state after the Anglo-Sikkimese Treaty of 1861. However, the issue of sovereignty was left undefined.^[7] The Maldive Islands were a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965, but not part of British India.

British India and the Native States

Main articles: British India and Princely state

The British Indian Empire on the eve of independence in 1947. The provinces of British India are shown in different (non-yellow) colors; the princely states are in yellow

The British Indian Empire in 1893

The British Indian Empire (contemporaneously India) consisted of two divisions: British India and the Native States or Princely States. In its Interpretation Act of 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions:^[8]

The expression British India shall mean all territories and places within Her Majesty's dominions which are for the time being governed by Her Majesty through the Governor-General of India, or through any Governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India. The expression India shall mean British India together with any territories of a Native Prince or Chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty, exercised through the Governor-General of India, or through any Governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India. (52 & 53 Vict. cap. 63, sec. 18)

(In general the term "British India" had been used (and is still used) to also refer to the regions under the rule of the British East India Company in India from 1600 to 1858.^[9] The term has also been used to refer to the "British in India."^[10])
Suzerainty over 175 Princely States, some of the largest and most important, was exercised (in the name of the British Crown) by central government of British India under the Viceroy; the remaining, approximately 500, states were dependents of the provincial governments of British India under a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, or Chief Commissioner (as the case might have been).^[11] A clear distinction between "dominion" and "suzerainty" was supplied by the jurisdiction of the courts of law: the law of British India rested upon the laws passed by the British Parliament and the legislative powers those laws vested in the various governments of British India, both central and local; in contrast, the courts of the Princely States existed under the authority of the respective rulers of those states.^[11]

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Major provinces

At the turn of the 20th century, British India consisted of eight provinces that were administered either by a Governor or a Lieutenant-Governor. The following table lists their areas and populations (but does not include those of the dependent Native States):^[12] During the partition of Bengal (1905–1911), a new province, Assam and East Bengal was created as a Lieutenant-Governorship. In 1911, East Bengal was reunited with Bengal, and the new provinces in the east became: Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.^[12]

Province of British India[12]	Area (in thousands of square miles)	Population (in millions of inhabitants)	Chief Administrative Officer
Burma	170	9	Lieutenant-Governor
Bengal (including present-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa)	151	75	Lieutenant-Governor
Madras	142	38	Governor-in-Council
Bombay	123	19	Governor-in-Council
United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand)	107	48	Lieutenant-Governor
Central Provinces (including Berar)	104	13	Chief Commissioner
Punjab	97	20	Lieutenant-Governor
Assam	49	6	Chief Commissioner

Minor provinces

In addition, there were a few minor provinces that were administered by a Chief Commissioner:^[13]

Minor Province[13]	Area (in thousands of square miles)	Population (in thousands of inhabitants)	Chief Administrative Officer
North West Frontier Province	16	2,125	Chief Commissioner
British Baluchistan (British and Administered territory)	46	308	British Political Agent in Baluchistan served as ex-officio Chief Commissioner
Coorg	1.6	181	British Resident in Mysore served as ex-officio Chief Commissioner
Ajmer-Merwara	2.7	477	British Political Agent in Rajputana served as ex-officio Chief Commissioner
Andaman and Nicobar Islands	3	25	Chief Commissioner

Native states or Princely states

Main article: Princely state

A Princely State, also called Native State or Indian State, was a nominally sovereign entity of British rule in India that was not directly governed by the British, but rather by an Indian ruler under a form of indirect rule such as suzerainty or paramountcy. Military, foreign affairs, and communications power were under British control. There were 565 princely states when the Indian subcontinent became independent from Britain in August 1947.^[14]

Organization

The proclamation to the "Princes, Chiefs, and People of India," issued by Queen Victoria on November 1, 1858. "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." (p. 2)

An 1887 souvenir portrait of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, a full 30 years after the Great Uprising

Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Act for the Better Government of India (1858) made changes in the governance of India at three levels: in the imperial government in London, in the central government in Calcutta, and in the provincial governments in the presidencies (and later in the provinces).^[15]
In London, it provided for a cabinet-level Secretary of State for India and a fifteen-member Council of India, whose members were required, as one prerequisite of membership, to have spent at least ten years in India and to have done so no more than ten years before.^[16] Although the Secretary of State formulated the policy instructions to be communicated to India, he was required in most instances to consult the Council, but especially so in matters relating to spending of Indian revenues.^[15] The Act envisaged a system of "double government" in which the Council ideally served both as a check on excesses in imperial policy-making and as a body of up-to-date expertise on India.^[15] However, the Secretary of State also had special emergency powers that allowed him to make unilateral decisions, and, in reality, the Council's expertise was sometimes outdated.^[17] From 1858 until 1947, twenty seven individuals would serve as Secretary of State for India and direct the India Office; these included: Sir Charles Wood (1859–1866), Marquess of Salisbury (1874–1878) (later three-time Prime Minister of Britain), John Morley (1905–1910) (initiator of the Minto-Morley Reforms), E. S. Montagu (1917–1922) (an architect of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms), and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence (1945–1947) (head of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India). The size of the advisory Council would be reduced over the next half-century, but its powers would remain unchanged; in 1907, for the first time, two Indians would be appointed to the Council.^[18]
In Calcutta, the Governor-General remained head of the Government of India and now was more commonly called the Viceroy on account of his secondary role as the Crown's representative to the nominally sovereign princely states; he was, however, now responsible to the Secretary of State in London and through him to British Parliament. A system of "double government" had already been in place in the East India Company rule in India from the time of Pitt's India Act of 1784.^[18] The Governor-General in the capital, Calcutta, and the Governor in a subordinate presidency (Madras or Bombay) was each required to consult his advisory council; executive orders in Calcutta, for example, were issued in the name of "Governor-General-in-Council" (i.e. the Governor-General with the advice of the Council).^[18] The Company's system of "double government" had its critics, since, from the time of the system's inception, there had been intermittent feuding between the Governor-General and his Council; still, the Act of 1858 made no major changes in governance^[18] However, in the years immediately thereafter, which were also the years of post-rebellion reconstruction, the Viceroy Lord Canning found the collective decision-making of the Council to be too time-consuming for the pressing tasks ahead.^[18] He therefore requested the "portfolio system" of an Executive Council in which the business of each government department (the "portfolio") was assigned to and became the responsibility of a single Council member.^[18] Routine departmental decisions were made exclusively by the member, however, important decisions required the consent of the Governor-General and, in the absence of such consent, required discussion by the entire Executive Council. This innovation in Indian governance was promulgated in the Indian Councils Act of 1861.
If the Government of India needed to enact new laws, the Councils Act allowed for a Legislative Council—an expansion of the Executive Council by up to twelve additional members, each appointed to a two-year term—with half the members consisting of British officials of the government (termed official) and allowed to vote, and the other half, comprising Indians and domiciled Britons in India (termed non-official) and serving only in an advisory capacity.^[19] All laws enacted by Legislative Councils in India, whether by the Imperial Legislative Council in Calcutta or by the provincial ones in Madras and Bombay, required the final assent of the Secretary of State in London; this prompted Sir Charles Wood, the second Secretary of State, to describe the Government of India as "a despotism controlled from home."^[20] Moreover, although the appointment of Indians to the Legislative Council was a response to calls after the 1857 rebellion, most notably by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for more consultation with Indians, the Indians so appointed were from the landed aristocracy, often chosen for their loyalty, and far from representative.^[21] Even so, the "tiny advances in the practise of representative government were intended to provide safety valves for the expression of public opinion which had been so badly misjudged before the rebellion." (Bayly 1990, p. 195). Indian affairs now also came to be more closely examined in the British parliament and more widely discussed in the British press.^[22]
Although the Great Uprising of 1857 had shaken the British enterprise in India, it had not derailed it. After the rebellion, the British became more circumspect. Much thought was devoted to the causes of the rebellion, and from it three main lessons were drawn. At a more practical level, it was felt that there needed to be more communication and camaraderie between the British and Indians; not just between British army officers and their Indian staff, but in civilian life as well. The Indian army was completely reorganised: units composed of the Muslims and Brahmins of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, who had formed the core of the rebellion, were disbanded.^[23] New regiments, like the Sikhs and Baluchis, composed of Indians who, in British estimation, had demonstrated steadfastness, were formed. From then on, the Indian army was to remain unchanged in its organization until 1947.^[24] The 1861 Census had revealed that the English population in India was 125,945. Of these only about 41,862 were civilians as compared with about 84,083 European officers and men of the Army.^[25] In 1880 the standing Indian Army consisted of 66,000 British soldiers, 130,000 Natives, and 350,000 soldiers in the princely armies.^[26]
It was also felt that both the princes and the large land-holders, by not joining the rebellion, had proved to be, in Lord Canning's words, "breakwaters in a storm."^[23] They too were rewarded in the new British Raj, by being officially recognised in the treaties each state now signed with the Crown.^[24] At the same time, it was felt that the peasants, for whose benefit the large land-reforms of the United Provinces had been undertaken, had shown disloyalty, by, in many cases, fighting for their former landlords against the British. Consequently, no more land reforms were implemented for the next 90 years: Bengal and Bihar were to remain the realms of large land holdings (unlike the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh).^[24]
Lastly, the British felt disenchanted with Indian reaction to social change. Until the rebellion, they had enthusiastically pushed through social reform, like the ban on suttee by Lord William Bentinck.^[23] It was now felt that traditions and customs in India were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily; consequently, no more British social interventions were made, especially in matters dealing with religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows).^[24]

Famines, epidemics, and public health

Main articles: Famines, epidemics, and public health in the British Raj and Timeline of major famines in India during British rule (1765 to 1947)

See also: Chalisa famine, Doji bara famine, Agra famine of 1837–38, Orissa Famine of 1866, Rajputana famine of 1869, Bihar famine of 1873–74, Great Famine of 1876–78, Indian famine of 1896–97, and Indian famine of 1899–1900

During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died^[27] and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people died.^[27] Recent research, including work by Mike Davis and Amartya Sen,^[28] attribute these famines directly to British policy in India.
The first cholera pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. 10,000 British troops and countless Indians died during this pandemic.^[29] Deaths in India between 1817 and 1860 are estimated to have exceeded 15 million persons. Another 23 million died between 1865 and 1917.^[30] The Third Pandemic of plague started in China in the middle of the 19th century, spreading disease to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone.^[31] Waldemar Haffkine, who mainly worked in India, was the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1925, the Plague Laboratory in Bombay was renamed the Haffkine Institute.
Fevers had been considered one of the leading causes of death in India in the 19th century.^[32] It was Britain's Sir Ronald Ross working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calcutta who finally proved in 1898 that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes.^[33] In 1881, around 120,000 leprosy patients existed in India. The central government passed the Lepers Act of 1898, which provided legal provision for forcible confinement of leprosy sufferers in India.^[34] Under the direction of Mountstuart Elphinstone a program was launched to propagate smallpox vaccination.^[35] Mass vaccination in India resulted in a major decline in smallpox mortality by the end of the 19th century.^[36] In 1849 nearly 13% of all Calcutta deaths were due to smallpox.^[37] Between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths from smallpox.^[38]
Sir Robert Grant directed his attention to the expediency of establishing a systematic institution in the Bombay for imparting medical knowledge to the natives.^[39] In 1860, Grant Medical College became one of the four colleges recognized by it for teaching courses leading to degrees (others being Elphinstone College, Deccan College and Government Law College, Mumbai).

Timeline

Viceroy	Period of Tenure	Events/Accomplishments
Charles Canning	1 Nov 1858 21 Mar 1862	1858 reorganization of British Indian Army (contemporaneously and hereafter Indian Army) Construction begins (1860): University of Bombay, University of Madras, and University of Calcutta Indian Penal Code passed into law in 1860. Upper Doab famine of 1860–61 Indian Councils Act 1861 Establishment of Archaeological Survey of India in 1861 James Wilson, financial member of Council of India reorganizes customs, imposes income tax, creates paper currency. Indian Police Act of 1861, creation of Imperial Police later known as Indian Police Service.
Lord Elgin	21 Mar 1862 20 Nov 1863	Dies prematurely in Dharamsala
Sir John Lawrence	12 Jan 1864 12 Jan 1869	Anglo-Bhutan Duar War (1864–1865) Orissa famine of 1866 Rajputana famine of 1869 Creation of Department of Irrigation. Creation of Imperial Forestry Service in 1867 (now Indian Forest Service).
Lord Mayo	12 Jan 1869 8 Feb 1872	Creation of Department of Agriculture (now Ministry of Agriculture) Major extension of railways, roads, and canals Indian Councils Act of 1870 Creation of Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a Chief Commissionership (1872). Assassination of Lord Mayo in the Andamans.
Lord Northbrook	3 May 1872 12 Apr 1876	Mortalities in Bihar famine of 1873–74 prevented by importation of rice from Burma. Gaikwad of Baroda dethroned for misgovernment; dominions continued to a child ruler. Indian Councils Act of 1874 Visit of the Prince of Wales, future Edward VII in 1875–76.
Lord Lytton	12 Apr 1876 8 Jun 1880	Baluchistan established as a Chief Commissionership Queen Victoria (in absentia) proclaimed Empress of India at Delhi Durbar of 1877. Great Famine of 1876–78: 5.25 million dead; reduced relief offered at expense of Rs. 8 crore. Creation of Famine Commission of 1878–80 under Sir Richard Strachey. Indian Forest Act of 1878 Second Anglo-Afghan War.
Lord Ripon	8 Jun 1880 13 Dec 1884	End of Second Anglo-Afghan War. Repeal of Vernacular Press Act of 1878. Compromise on the Ilbert Bill. Local Government Acts extend self-government from towns to country. University of Punjab established in Lahore in 1882 Famine Code promulgated in 1883 by the Government of India. Creation of the Education Commission. Creation of indigenous schools, especially for Muslims. Repeal of import duties on cotton and of most tariffs. Railway extension.
Lord Dufferin	13 Dec 1884 10 Dec 1888	Passage of Bengal Tenancy Bill Third Anglo-Burmese War. Joint Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission appointed for the Afghan frontier. Russian attack on Afghans at Panjdeh (1885). The Great Game in full play. Report of Public Services Commission of 1886-87, creation of Imperial Civil Service (later Indian Civil Service, and today Indian Administrative Service) University of Allahabad established in 1887 Queen Victoria's Jubilee, 1887.
Lord Lansdowne	10 Dec 1888 11 Oct 1894	Strengthening of NW Frontier defense. Creation of Imperial Service Troops consisting of regiments contributed by the princely states. Gilgit Agency leased in 1899 British Parliament passes Indian Councils Act of 1892 opening the Imperial Legislative Council to Indians. Revolution in princely state of Manipur and subsequent reinstatement of ruler. High point of The Great Game. Establishment of the Durand Line between British India and Afghanistan, Railways, roads, and irrigation works begun in Burma. Border between Burma and Siam finalized in 1893. Fall of the Rupee, resulting from the steady depreciation of silver currency worldwide (1873–93). Indian Prisons Act of 1894
Lord Elgin	11 Oct 1894 6 Jan 1899	Reorganization of Indian Army (from Presidency System to the four Commands). Pamir agreement Russia, 1895 The Chitral Campaign (1895), the Tirah Campaign (1896–97) Indian famine of 1896–97 beginning in Bundelkhand. Bubonic plague in Bombay (1896), Bubonic plague in Calcutta (1898); riots in wake of plague prevention measures. Establishment of Provincial Legislative Councils in Burma and Punjab; the former a new Lieutenant Governorship.
Lord Curzon	6 Jan 1899 18 Nov 1905	Creation of the North West Frontier Province under a Chief Commissioner (1901). Indian famine of 1899–1900. Return of the bubonic plague, 1 million deaths Financial Reform Act of 1899; Gold Reserve Fund created for India. Punjab Land Alienation Act Inauguration of Department (now Ministry) of Commerce and Industry. Death of Queen Victoria (1901); dedication of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta as a national gallery of Indian antiquities, art, and history. Coronation Durbar in Delhi (1903); Edward VII (in absentia) proclaimed Emperor of India. Francis Younghusband's British expedition to Tibet (1903–04) North-Western Provinces (previously Ceded and Conquered Provinces) and Oudh renamed United Provinces in 1904 Reorganization of Indian Universities Act (1904). Systemization of preservation and restoration of ancient monuments by Archaeological Survey of India with Indian Ancient Monument Preservation Act. Inauguration of agricultural banking with Cooperative Credit Societies Act of 1904 Partition of Bengal (1905); new province of East Bengal and Assam under a Lieutenant-Governor.
Lord Minto	18 Nov 1905 23 Nov 1910	Creation of the Railway Board Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 Government of India Act of 1909 (also Minto-Morley Reforms) Appointment of Indian Factories Commission in 1909. Establishment of Department of Education in 1910 (now Ministry of Education)
Lord Hardinge	23 Nov 1910 4 Apr 1916	Visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911: commemoration as Emperor and Empress of India at last Delhi Durbar King George V announces creation of new city of New Delhi to replace Calcutta as capital of India. Indian High Courts Act of 1911 Indian Factories Act of 1911 Construction of New Delhi, 1912-1929 World War I, Indian Army in: Western Front, Belgium, 1914; German East Africa (Battle of Tanga, 1914); Mesopotamian Campaign (Battle of Ctesiphon, 1915; Siege of Kut, 1915-16); Battle of Galliopoli, 1915-16 Passage of Defence of India Act 1915
Lord Chelmsford	4 Apr 1916 2 Apr 1921	Indian Army in: Mesopotamian Campaign (Fall of Baghdad, 1917); Sinai and Palestine Campaign (Battle of Megiddo, 1918) Passage of Rowlatt Act, 1919 Government of India Act of 1919 (also Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 1919 University of Rangoon established in 1920.
Lord Reading	2 Apr 1921 3 Apr 1926	University of Delhi established in 1922. Indian Workers Compensation Act of 1923
Lord Irwin	3 Apr 1926 18 Apr 1931	Indian Trade Unions Act of 1926, Indian Forest Act, 1927 Appointment of Royal Commission of Indian Labour, 1929 Indian Constitutional Round Table Conferences, London, 1930-32, Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 1931.
Lord Willingdon	18 Apr 1931 18 Apr 1936	New Delhi inaugurated as capital of India, 1931. Indian Workmen's Compensation Act of 1933 Indian Factories Act of 1934 Royal Indian Air Force created in 1932. Indian Military Academy established in 1932. Government of India Act of 1935 Creation of Reserve Bank of India
Lord Linlithgow	18 Apr 1936 1 Oct 1943	Indian Payment of Wages Act of 1936 Burma administered independently after 1937 with creation of new cabinet position Secretary of State for India and Burma Indian Provincial Elections of 1937 Cripps' mission to India, 1942. Indian Army in Middle East Theatre of World War II (East African campaign, 1940, Anglo-Iraqi War, 1941, Syria-Lebanon campaign, 1941, Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, 1941 Indian Army in North African campaign (Operation Compass, Operation Crusader, First Battle of El Alamein, Second Battle of El Alamein) Indian Army in Battle of Hong Kong, Battle of Malaya, Battle of Singapore Burma Campaign of World War II begins in 1942.
Lord Wavell	1 Oct 1943 21 Feb 1947	Indian Army becomes, at 2.5 million men, the largest all-volunteer force in history. World War II: Burma Campaign, 1943-45 (Battle of Kohima, Battle of Imphal) Bengal famine of 1943 Indian Army in Italian campaign (Battle of Monte Cassino) British Labour Party wins UK General Election of 1945 with Clement Attlee as prime minister. 1946 Cabinet Mission to India Indian Elections of 1946.
Lord Mountbatten	21 Feb 1947 15 Aug 1947	Indian Independence Act 1947 (10 and 11 Geo VI, c. 30) of the British Parliament enacted on 18 July 1947. Radcliffe Award, August 1947 Partition of India India Office changed to Burma Office, and Secretary of State for India and Burma to Secretary of State for Burma.

History

Main article: History of the British Raj

Company rule in India

Main article: Company rule in India

Although the British East India Company had administered its factory areas in India—beginning with Surat early in the 17th century, and including by the century's end, Fort William near Calcutta, Fort St George in Madras and the Bombay Castle—its victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 marked the real beginning of the Company rule in India. The victory was consolidated in 1764 at the Battle of Buxar (in Bihar), when the defeated Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, granted the Company the Diwani ("right to collect land-revenue") in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The Company soon expanded its territories around its bases in Bombay and Madras: the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1766–1799) and the Anglo-Maratha Wars (1772–1818) gave it control over most of India south of the Narmada River.
Earlier, in 1773, the British Parliament granted regulatory control over East India Company to the British government and established the post of Governor-General of India, with Warren Hastings as the first incumbent.^[40] In 1784, the British Parliament passed Pitt's India Act which created a Board of Control for overseeing the administration of East India Company. Hastings was succeeded in 1784 by Cornwallis, who promulgated the 'Permanent Settlement of Bengal' with the zamindars.

Map of India showing British Expansion between 1805 and 1910

Lord Cornwallis, the Governor-General who established the Permanent Settlement in Bengal

Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, who rapidly expanded the Company's territories with victories in the Anglo-Maratha Wars and Anglo-Mysore Wars

At the turn of the 19th century, Governor-General Wellesley began what became two decades of accelerated expansion of Company territories.^[41] This was achieved either by subsidiary alliances between the Company and local rulers or by direct military annexation. The subsidiary alliances created the Princely States (or Native States) of the Hindu Maharajas and the Muslim Nawabs, prominent among which were: Cochin (1791), Jaipur (1794), Travancore (1795), Hyderabad (1798), Mysore (1799), Cis-Sutlej Hill States (1815), Central India Agency (1819), Kutch and Gujarat Gaikwad territories (1819), Rajputana (1818), and Bahawalpur (1833).^[41] The annexed regions included the North Western Provinces (comprising Rohilkhand, Gorakhpur, and the Doab) (1801), Delhi (1803), and Sindh (1843). Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, and Kashmir, were annexed after the Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1849; however, Kashmir was immediately sold under the Treaty of Amritsar (1850) to the Dogra Dynasty of Jammu, and thereby became a princely state. In 1854 Berar was annexed, and the state of Oudh two years later.^[41]
The East India Company also signed treaties with various Afghan rulers and with Ranjit Singh of Lahore to counterbalance the Russian support of Persia's plans in western Afghanistan. In 1839, the Company's effort to more actively support Shah Shuja as Amir in Afghanistan, led to the First Afghan War (1839–42) and resulted in a military disaster for it. As the British expanded their territory in India, so did Russia in Central Asia with the taking of Bukhara and Samarkand in 1863 and 1868 respectively, and thereby setting the stage for The Great Game of Central Asia.^[42]
In the Charter Act of 1813, the British parliament renewed the Company's charter but terminated its monopoly, opening India to both private investment and missionary work.^[41] With increased British power in India, supervision of Indian affairs by the British Crown and parliament increased as well; by the 1820s, British nationals could transact business under the protection of the Crown in the three Company presidencies.^[41] In the Charter Act of 1833, the British parliament revoked the Company's trade license altogether, making the Company a part of British governance, although the administration of British India remained the province of Company officers.^[43]
Starting in 1772, the Company began a series of land revenue "settlements," which would create major changes in landed rights and rural economy in India. In 1793, the Governor-General Lord Cornwallis promulgated the permanent settlement in the Bengal Presidency, the first socio-economic regulation in colonial India.^[44] It was named permanent because it fixed the land tax in perpetuity in return for landed property rights for a class of intermediaries called zamindars, who thereafter became owners of the land.^[44] It was hoped that knowledge of a fixed government demand would encourage the zamindars to increase both their average outcrop and the land under cultivation, since they would be able to retain the profits from the increased output; in addition, the land itself would become a marketable form of property that could be purchased, sold, or mortgaged.^[45] However, the zamindars themselves were often unable to meet the increased demands that the Company had placed on them; consequently, many defaulted, and by one estimate, up to one-third of their lands were auctioned during the first three decades following the permanent settlement.^[46] In southern India, Thomas Munro, who would later become Governor of Madras, promoted the ryotwari system, in which the government settled land-revenue directly with the peasant farmers, or ryots.^[45] Based on the utilitarian ideas of James Mill, who supervised the Company's land revenue policy during 1819-1830, and David Ricardo's Law of Rent, it was considered by its supporters to be both closer to traditional practice and more progressive, allowing the benefits of Company rule to reach the lowest levels of rural society.^[45] However, in spite of the appeal of the ryotwari system's abstract principles, class hierarchies in southern Indian villages had not entirely disappeared—for example village headmen continued to hold sway—and peasant cultivators came to experience revenue demands they could not meet.^[47]
Land revenue settlements constituted a major administrative activity of the various governments in India under Company rule.^[48] In all areas other than the Bengal Presidency, land settlement work involved a continually repetitive process of surveying and measuring plots, assessing their quality, and recording landed rights, and constituted a large proportion of the work of Indian Civil Service officers working for the government.^[48] After the Company lost its trading rights, it became the single most important source of government revenue, roughly half of overall revenue in the middle of the 19th century.^[48] Since, in many regions, the land tax assessment could be revised, and since it was generally computed at a high level, it created lasting resentment which would later come to a head in the rebellion which rocked much of North India in 1857.^[49]

Indian rebellion of 1857

Main article: Indian rebellion of 1857

The rebellion began with mutinies by sepoys of the Bengal Presidency army; in 1857 the presidency consisted of present-day Bangladesh, and the Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar and UP. However, most rebel soldiers were from the UP region, and, in particular, from Northwest Provinces (especially, Ganga-Jumna Doab) and Oudh, and many came from landowning families.^[50] Within weeks of the initial mutinies—as the rebel soldiers wrested control of many urban garrisons from the British—the rebellion was joined by various discontented groups in the hinterlands, in both farmed areas and the backwoods. The latter group, forming the civilian rebellion, consisted of feudal nobility, landlords, peasants, rural merchants, and some tribal groups.^[51]

Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856, who devised the Doctrine of Lapse

A 1912 map of the Great Uprising of 1857 showing the centres of rebellion including: Meerut, Delhi, Cawnpore (Kanpur), Lucknow, Jhansi, and Gwalior

Lakshmibai, The Rani of Jhansi, one of the principal leaders of the rebellion who earlier had lost her kingdom as a result of the Doctrine of Lapse

After the annexation of Oudh by the East India Company in 1856, many sepoys were disquieted both from losing their perquisites as landed gentry in the Oudh courts and from the anticipation of any increased land-revenue payments that the annexation might augur.^[52] Some Indian soldiers, misreading the presence of missionaries as a sign of official intent, were persuaded that the East India Company was masterminding mass conversions of Hindus and Muslims to Christianity.^[53] Changes in the terms of their professional service may also have created resentment. As the extent of British jurisdiction expanded with British victories in wars and with annexation of territory, the soldiers were now not only expected to serve in less familiar regions (such as Lower Burma after the Second Burmese War in 1852-53), but also make do without the "foreign service" remuneration that had previously been their due.^[54]
The civilian rebellion was more multifarious in origin. The rebels consisted of three groups: feudal nobility, rural landlords called taluqdars, and the peasants. The nobility, many of whom had lost titles and domains under the Doctrine of Lapse, which derecognised adopted children of princes as legal heirs, felt that the British had interfered with a traditional system of inheritance. Rebel leaders such as Nana Sahib and the Rani of Jhansi belonged to this group; the latter, for example, was prepared to accept British paramountcy if her adopted son was recognized as the heir.^[55] The second group, the taluqdars had lost half their landed estates to peasant farmers as a result of the land reforms that came in the wake of annexation of Oudh. As the rebellion gained ground, the taluqdars quickly reoccupied the lands they had lost, and paradoxically, in part due to ties of kinship and feudal loyalty, did not experience significant opposition from the peasant farmers, many of whom too now joined the rebellion to the great dismay of the British.^[56] Heavy land-revenue assessment in some areas by the British may have resulted in many landowning families either losing their land or going into great debt with money lenders, and providing ultimately a reason to rebel; money lenders, in addition to the British, were particular objects of the rebels' animosity.^[57] The civilian rebellion was also highly uneven in its geographic distribution, even in areas of north-central India that were no longer under British control. For example, the relatively prosperous Muzaffarnagar district, a beneficiary of a British irrigation scheme, and next door to Meerut where the upheaval began, stayed mostly calm throughout.^[58]

Economic and political changes

A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today. Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty.

—Jawaharlal Nehru, on the economic effects of the British rule, in his book The Discovery of India, ^[59]

In the second half of the 19th century, both the direct administration of India by the British crown and the technological change ushered in by the industrial revolution, had the effect of closely intertwining the economies of India and Britain.^[60] In fact many of the major changes in transport and communications (that are typically associated with Crown Rule of India) had already begun before the Mutiny. Since Dalhousie had embraced the technological change then rampant in Britain, India too saw rapid development of all those technologies. Railways, roads, canals, and bridges were rapidly built in India and telegraph links equally rapidly established in order that raw materials, such as cotton, from India's hinterland could be transported more efficiently to ports, such as Bombay, for subsequent export to England.^[61] Likewise, finished goods from England were transported back just as efficiently, for sale in the burgeoning Indian markets.^[62] However, unlike Britain itself, where the market risks for the infrastructure development were borne by private investors, in India, it was the taxpayers—primarily farmers and farm-labourers—who endured the risks, which, in the end, amounted to £50 million.^[63] In spite of these costs, very little skilled employment was created for Indians. By 1920, with the fourth largest railway network in the world and a history of 60 years of its construction, only ten per cent of the "superior posts" in the Indian Railways were held by Indians.^[64] The Indian railways system, by 1900, provided India with social savings of 9% of India's national income (about 1.2 billion rupees).^[65]
The rush of technology was also changing the agricultural economy in India: by the last decade of the 19th century, a large fraction of some raw materials—not only cotton, but also some food-grains—were being exported to faraway markets.^[66] Consequently, many small farmers, dependent on the whims of those markets, lost land, animals, and equipment to money-lenders..^[66] More tellingly, the latter half of the 19th century also saw an increase in the number of large-scale famines in India. Although famines were not new to the subcontinent, these were particularly severe, with tens of millions dying, and with many critics, both British and Indian, laying the blame at the doorsteps of the lumbering colonial administrations.^[67]
Taxes in India decreased during the colonial period for most of India's population; with the land tax revenue claiming 15% of India's national income during Mogul times compared with 1% at the end of the colonial period. The percentage of national income for the village economy increased from 44% during Mogul times to 54% by the end of colonial period. India's per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it had increased to $618 by 1947^[68]

The 1909 Map of Indian Railways, when India had the fourth largest railway network in the world. Railway construction in India began in 1853.

"The most magnificent railway station in the world." Stereographic image of Victoria Terminus, Bombay, which was completed in 1888

The Agra canal (c. 1873), a year away from completion. The canal was closed to navigation in 1904 in order to increase irrigation and aid in famine-prevention.

Beginnings of self-government

The first steps were taken toward self-government in British India in the late 19th century with the appointment of Indian counsellors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the Indian Councils Act of 1892. Municipal Corporations and District Boards were created for local administration; they included elected Indian members.
The Government of India Act of 1909 — also known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Gilbert Elliot, fourth earl of Minto, was viceroy) — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures, known as legislative councils. Indians had previously been appointed to legislative councils, but after the reforms some were elected to them. At the centre, the majority of council members continued to be government-appointed officials, and the viceroy was in no way responsible to the legislature. At the provincial level, the elected members, together with unofficial appointees, outnumbered the appointed officials, but responsibility of the governor to the legislature was not contemplated. Morley made it clear in introducing the legislation to the British Parliament that parliamentary self-government was not the goal of the British government.
The Morley-Minto Reforms were a milestone. Step by step, the elective principle was introduced for membership in Indian legislative councils. The "electorate" was limited, however, to a small group of upper-class Indians. These elected members increasingly became an "opposition" to the "official government". The Communal electorates were later extended to other communities and made a political factor of the Indian tendency toward group identification through religion.

John Morley, the Secretary of State for India from 1905 to 1910, and Gladstonian Liberal. The Government of India Act of 1909, also known as the Minto-Morley Reforms allowed Indians to be elected to the Legislative Council.

Picture post card of the Gordon Highlanders marching past King George V and Queen Mary at the Delhi Durbar on December 12, 1911, when the King was crowned Emperor of India

Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers with the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia during World War I

World War I and its aftermath

Main article: Indian Army during World War I

The 15th Sikh Regiment being given a heroes' welcome upon their arrival in Marseille, France during World War I.

World War I would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. 1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of the British Indian Army would take part in the war and their participation would have a wider cultural fallout: news of Indian soldiers fighting and dying with British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia, would travel to distant corners of the world both in newsprint and by the new medium of the radio.^[69] India’s international profile would thereby rise and would continue to rise during the 1920s.^[69] It was to lead, among other things, to India, under its own name, becoming a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and participating, under the name, "Les Indes Anglaises" (The British Indies), in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp.^[70] Back in India, especially among the leaders of the Indian National Congress, it would lead to calls for greater self-government for Indians.^[69]
In 1916, in the face of new strength demonstrated by the moderate nationalists with the signing of the Lucknow Pact and the founding of the Home Rule leagues, and the realization, after the disaster in the Mesopotamian campaign, that the war would likely last longer, the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, cautioned that the Government of India needed to be more responsive to Indian opinion.^[71] Towards the end of the year, after discussions with the government in London, he suggested that the British demonstrate their good faith – in light of the Indian war role – through a number of public actions, including awards of titles and honors to princes, granting of commissions in the army to Indians, and removal of the much-reviled cotton excise duty, but most importantly, an announcement of Britain's future plans for India and an indication of some concrete steps.^[71] After more discussion, in August 1917, the new Liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, announced the British aim of “increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”^[71] Although the plan envisioned limited self-government at first only in the provinces – with India emphatically within the British Empire – it represented the first British proposal for any form of representative government in a non-white colony.^[71]
Earlier, at the onset of World War I, the reassignment of most of the British army in India to Europe and Mesopotamia had led the previous Viceroy, Lord Harding, to worry about the “risks involved in denuding India of troops.”^[69] Revolutionary violence had already been a concern in British India, and outlines of collaboration with Germany were being identified by British intelligence; consequently in 1915, to strengthen its powers during what it saw was a time of increased vulnerability, the Government of India passed the Defence of India Act, which allowed it to intern politically dangerous dissidents without due process and added to the power it already had – under the 1910 Press Act – both to imprison journalists without trial and to censor the press.^[72] Now, as constitutional reform began to be discussed in earnest, the British began to consider how new moderate Indians could be brought into the fold of constitutional politics and simultaneously, how the hand of established constitutionalists could be strengthened.^[72] However, since the Government of India wanted to check the revolutionary problem, and since its reform plan was devised during a time when extremist violence had ebbed as a result of increased governmental control, it also began to consider how some of its war-time powers could be extended into peace time.^[72]

Edwin Montagu, left, the Secretary of State for India, whose report led to the Government of India Act of 1919, also known as the Montford Reforms or the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms

Consequently in 1917, even as Edwin Montagu announced the new constitutional reforms, a sedition committee chaired by a British judge, Mr. S. A. T. Rowlatt, was tasked with investigating revolutionary conspiracies and the German and Bolshevik links to the violence in India,^[73][74][75] with the unstated goal of extending the government's war-time powers.^[71] The Rowlatt committee presented its report in July 1918 and identified three regions of conspiratorial insurgency: Bengal, the Bombay presidency, and the Punjab.^[71] To combat subversive acts in these regions, the committee recommended that the government use emergency powers akin to its war-time authority, which included the ability to try cases of sedition by a panel of three judges and without juries, exaction of securities from suspects, governmental overseeing of residences of suspects,^[71] and the power for provincial governments to arrest and detain suspects in short-term detention facilities and without trial.^[76]
With the end of World War I, there was also a change in the economic climate. By year’s end 1919, 1.5 million Indians had served in the armed services in either combatant or non-combatant roles, and India had provided £146 million in revenue for the war.^[77] The increased taxes coupled with disruptions in both domestic and international trade had the effect of approximately doubling the index of overall prices in India between 1914 and 1920.^[77] Returning war veterans, especially in the Punjab, created a growing unemployment crisis^[78] and post-war inflation led to food riots in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal provinces,^[78] a situation that was made only worse by the failure of the 1918-19 monsoon and by profiteering and speculation.^[77] The global influenza epidemic and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 added to the general jitters; the former among the population already experiencing economic woes,^[78] and the latter among government officials, fearing a similar revolution in India.^[79]

The Jallianwala Bagh couple of months after the April 1919 massacre which killed about 1,516 people^[80]

To combat what it saw as a coming crisis, the government now drafted the Rowlatt committee's recommendations into two Rowlatt Bills.^[76] Although the bills were authorised for legislative consideration by Edwin Montagu, they were done so unwillingly, with the accompanying declaration, “I loathe the suggestion at first sight of preserving the Defence of India Act in peace time to such an extent as Rowlatt and his friends think necessary.”^[71] In the ensuing discussion and vote in the Imperial Legislative Council, all Indian members voiced opposition to the bills. The Government of India was nevertheless able to use of its "official majority" to ensure passage of the bills early in 1919.^[71] However, what it passed, in deference to the Indian opposition, was a lesser version of the first bill, which now allowed extrajudicial powers, but for a period of exactly three years and for the prosecution solely of “anarchical and revolutionary movements,” dropping entirely the second bill involving modification of the Indian Penal Code.^[71] Even so, when it was passed the new Rowlatt Act aroused widespread indignation throughout India which finally culminated in the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre and brought Mohandas Gandhi to the forefront of the nationalist movement.^[76][81]
Meanwhile, Montagu and Chelmsford themselves finally presented their report in July 1918 after a long fact-finding trip through India the previous winter.^[82] After more discussion by the government and parliament in Britain, and another tour by the Franchise and Functions Committee for the purpose of identifying who among the Indian population could vote in future elections, the Government of India Act of 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was passed in December 1919.^[82] The new Act enlarged both the provincial and Imperial legislative councils and repealed the Government of India’s recourse to the “official majority” in unfavorable votes.^[82] Although departments like defense, foreign affairs, criminal law, communications and income-tax were retained by the Viceroy and the central government in New Delhi, other departments like public health, education, land-revenue and local self-government were transferred to the provinces.^[82] The provinces themselves were now to be administered under a new dyarchical system, whereby some areas like education, agriculture, infrastructure development, and local self-government became the preserve of Indian ministers and legislatures, and ultimately the Indian electorates, while others like irrigation, land-revenue, police, prisons, and control of media remained within the purview of the British governor and his executive council.^[82] The new Act also made it easier for Indians to be admitted into the civil service and the army officer corps.

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to the right of Mahatma Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference in London, October 1931

A greater number of Indians were now enfranchised, although, for voting at the national level, they constituted only 10% of the total adult male population, many of whom were still illiterate.^[82] In the provincial legislatures, the British continued to exercise some control by setting aside seats for special interests they considered cooperative or useful. In particular, rural candidates, generally sympathetic to British rule and less confrontational, were assigned more seats than their urban counterparts.^[82] Seats were also reserved for non-Brahmins, landowners, businessmen, and college graduates. The principal of “communal representation,” an integral part of the Minto-Morley reforms, and more recently of the Congress-Muslim League Lucknow Pact, was reaffirmed, with seats being reserved for Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, and domiciled Europeans, in both provincial and Imperial legislative councils.^[82] The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms offered Indians the most significant opportunity yet for exercising legislative power, especially at the provincial level; however, that opportunity was also restricted by the still limited number of eligible voters, by the small budgets available to provincial legislatures, and by the presence of rural and special interest seats that were seen as instruments of British control.^[82] Its scope was, however, unsatisfactory to the Indian political leadership, famously expressed by Annie Beasant as something "unworthy of England to offer and India to accept"^[83]
In 1935, after the Round Table Conferences, the British Parliament approved the Government of India Act of 1935, which authorised the establishment of independent legislative assemblies in all provinces of British India, the creation of a central government incorporating both the British provinces and the princely states, and the protection of Muslim minorities.^[62] At this time, it was also decided to separate Burma from British India in 1937, to form a separate crown colony. The future Constitution of independent India would owe a great deal to the text of this act.^[84] The act also provided for a bicameral national parliament and an executive branch under the purview of the British government. Although the national federation was never realised, nationwide elections for provincial assemblies were held in 1937. Despite initial hesitation, the Congress took part in the elections and won victories in seven of the eleven provinces of British India,^[85] and Congress governments, with wide powers, were formed in these provinces. In Britain, these victories were to later turn the tide for the idea of Indian independence.^[85]

World War II

Main article: India in World War II

An Italian soldier surrenders to an Indian Jawan during the successful Allied campaign of Operation Crusader

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on India’s behalf without consulting Indian leaders, leading the Congress provincial ministries to resign in protest. The Muslim League, in contrast, supported Britain in the war effort; however, it now took the view that Muslims would be unfairly treated in an independent India dominated by the Congress.
The British government—through its Cripps' mission—attempted to secure Indian nationalists' cooperation in the war effort in exchange for independence afterwards; however, the negotiations between them and the Congress broke down. Gandhi, subsequently, launched the “Quit India” movement in August 1942, demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British from India or face nationwide civil disobedience. Along with all other Congress leaders, Gandhi was immediately imprisoned, and the country erupted in violent demonstrations led by students and later by peasant political groups, especially in Eastern United Provinces, Bihar, and western Bengal. The large war-time British Army presence in India led to most of the movement being crushed in a little more than six weeks;^[86] nonetheless, a portion of the movement formed for a time an underground provisional government on the border with Nepal.^[86] In other parts of India, the movement was less spontaneous and the protest less intensive, however it lasted sporadically into the summer of 1943.^[87]
With Congress leaders in jail, attention also turned to Subhas Bose, who had been ousted from the Congress in 1939 following differences with the more conservative high command;^[88] Bose now turned to the Axis powers for help with liberating India by force.^[89] With Japanese support, he organised the Indian National Army, composed largely of Indian soldiers of the British Indian army who had been captured at Singapore by the Japanese. From the onset of the war, the Japanese secret service had promoted unrest in South east Asia to destabilise the British war effort,^[90] and came to support a number of puppet and provisional governments in the captured regions, including those in Burma, the Philippines and Vietnam, the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India), presided by Bose.^[91] Bose's effort, however, was short lived; after the reverses of 1944, the reinforced British Indian Army in 1945 first halted and then reversed the Japanese U Go offensive, beginning the successful part of the Burma Campaign. Bose's Indian National Army surrendered with the recapture of Singapore, and Bose died in a plane crash soon thereafter. The trials of the INA soldiers at Red Fort in late 1945 however caused widespread public unrest and nationalist violence in India.^[92]

Independence and partition

Main article: Partition of India

Map of the Indian Empire showing the prevailing majority religions of the population for different districts in 1909

In January 1946, a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain.^[93] The mutinies came to a head with mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, followed by others in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi. These mutinies found much public support in India then gripped by the Red Fort Trials, and had the effect of spurring the new Labour government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick Lawrence, and including Sir Stafford Cripps, who had visited four years before.^[93]
Also in early 1946, new elections were called in India in which the Congress won electoral victories in eight of the eleven provinces.^[94] The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of the partition. Muhammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed August 16, 1946, Direct Action Day, with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a Muslim homeland in British India. The following day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and quickly spread throughout India. Although the Government of India and the Congress were both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India’s prime minister.
Later that year, the Labour government in Britain, its exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, and conscious that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support, nor the reliability of native forces for continuing to control an increasingly restless India,^[95][96] decided to end British rule of India, and in early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948.
As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated. With the British army unprepared for the potential for increased violence, the new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power, allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan for independence. In June 1947, the nationalist leaders, including Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad on behalf of the Congress, Jinnah representing the Muslim League, B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan; the plan included a partition of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal.
Many millions of Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu refugees trekked across the newly drawn borders. In Punjab, where the new border lines divided the Sikh regions in half, massive bloodshed followed; in Bengal and Bihar, where Gandhi's presence assuaged communal tempers, the violence was more limited. In all, anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people on both sides of the new borders died in the violence.^[97] On August 14, 1947, the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor General in Karachi. The following day, August 15, 1947, India, now a smaller Union of India, became an independent country with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru assuming the office of the prime minister, and the viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, staying on as its first Governor General.

See also

British Empire portal

• Imperialism in Asia
• Colonialism
• British Empire
• British rule in India for other periods when parts of India were under British rule.
• India Office
• Colonial India
• Indian independence movement
• List of Indian Princely States
• List of Indian Federal Legislation
• Governor-General of India
• Commander-in-Chief of India
• British Indian Army
• Indian Civil Service
• Order of the Indian Empire
• Anglo-Indian
• Anglo-Burmese people
• Macaulayism

Notes

1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989: from Skr. rāj: to reign, rule; cognate with L. rēx, rēg-is, OIr. rī, rīg king (see RICH).
2. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989. "b. spec. the British dominion or rule in the Indian sub-continent (before 1947). In full, British raj.
3. ^ *Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989. Examples: 1955 Times 25 Aug. 9/7 It was effective against the British raj in India, and the conclusion drawn here is that the British knew that they were wrong. 1969 R. MILLAR Kut xv. 288 Sir Stanley Maude had taken command in Mesopotamia, displacing the raj of antique Indian Army commanders. 1975 H. R. ISAACS in H. M. Patel et al. Say not the Struggle Nought Availeth 251 The post-independence régime in all its incarnations since the passing of the British Raj. For the latter usage, see: Google Scholar references: ("British Raj" in the primary sense of "British India," i.e. "regions of India under British rule") 1. "The important case of Islamic economics was a consciously constructed effort arising directly out of the anti-colonial struggle in the British Raj" 2 "... time" (1882: v). In keeping with the purpose of the Gazetteer (and indeed all such Gazetteers published for provinces in the British Raj), Atkinson's treatment ..." 3. "... Robert D’Arblay Gybbon-Monypenny, who had been born in the British Raj and educated at Sandhurst, afterwards seeing active service in the First World War ..." 4. "... In contrast, during the independence struggle in the British raj, the emphasis had always been on nationalism..." ("British Raj" in the second sense of "British India," i.e. "the British in India") 5. "Koch and the Europeans were entertained at clubs in the British Raj from which native Indians (called "wogs" for "worthy oriental gentleman") were excluded. ..." 6. "... prejudice and vindictiveness towards one's own race and, especially, toward someone of a different race who, as a servant in the British Raj, occupies a ..."
4. ^ First the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland then, after 1927, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
5. ^ "Nepal." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008.
6. ^ "Bhutan." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008.
7. ^ "Sikkim." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 5 August 2007 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-46212>.
8. ^ Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. IV 1907, pp. 59-60
9. ^ 1. Imperial Gazetteer of India, volume IV, published under the authority of the Secretary of State for India-in-Council, 1909, Oxford University Press. page 5. Quote: "The history of British India falls, as observed by Sir C. P. Ilbert in his Government of India, into three periods. From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century the East India Company is a trading corporation, existing on the sufferance of the native powers and in rivalry with the merchant companies of Holland and France. During the next century the Company acquires and consolidates its dominion, shares its sovereignty in increasing proportions with the Crown, and gradually loses its mercantile privileges and functions. After the mutiny of 1857 the remaining powers of the Company are transferred to the Crown, and then follows an era of peace in which India awakens to new life and progress." 2. The Statutes: From the Twentieth Year of King Henry the Third to the ... by Robert Harry Drayton, Statutes of the Realm - Law - 1770 Page 211 (3) "Save as otherwise expressly provided in this Act, the law of British India and of the several parts thereof existing immediately before the appointed ..." 3. Edney, M.E. (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, University of Chicago Press. 480 pages. ISBN 9780226184883 4. Hawes, C.J. (1996) Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833. Routledge, 217 pages. ISBN 0700704256.
10. ^ Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. II 1908, p. 463,470 Quote1: "Before passing on to the political history of British India, which properly begins with the Anglo-French Wars in the Carnatic, ... (p.463)" Quote2: "The political history of the British in India begins in the eighteenth century with the French Wars in the Carnatic. (p.471)"
11. ^ ^{a b} Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. IV 1907, p. 60
12. ^ ^{a b c} Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. IV 1907, p. 46
13. ^ ^{a b} Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. IV 1907, p. 56
14. ^ Kashmir: The origins of the dispute, BBC News, January 16, 2002
15. ^ ^{a b c} Moore 2001a, pp. 424-426
16. ^ Moore 2001a, p. 424
17. ^ Brown 1994, p. 96
18. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Moore 2001a, p. 426
19. ^ Moore 2001a, p. 426, Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 104
20. ^ Quoted in Moore 2001a, p. 426
21. ^ Peers 2006, p. 76, Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 104, Spear 1990, p. 149
22. ^ Peers 2006, p. 72, Bayly 1990, p. 72
23. ^ ^{a b c} Spear 1990, p. 147
24. ^ ^{a b c d} Spear 1990, pp. 147-148
25. ^ European Madness and Gender in Nineteenth-century British India. Social History of Medicine 1996 9(3):357-382.
26. ^ Robinson, Ronald Edward, & John Gallagher. 1968. Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday [1]
27. ^ ^{a b} Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts. 1. Verso, 2000. ISBN 1859847390 pg 7
28. ^ Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. ISBN 0385720270 ch 7
29. ^ Cholera- Biological Weapons
30. ^ The 1832 Cholera Epidemic in New York State, By G. William Beardslee
31. ^ INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Plague Through History, sciencemag.org
32. ^ Malaria - Medical History of British India, National Library of Scotland
33. ^ "Biography of Ronald Ross". The Nobel Foundation. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1902/ross-bio.html. Retrieved 2007-06-15. 
34. ^ Leprosy - Medical History of British India, National Library of Scotland
35. ^ Smallpox History - Other histories of smallpox in South Asia
36. ^ Feature Story: Smallpox
37. ^ Smallpox and Vaccination in British India During the Last Seventy Years, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1945 January; 38(3): 135–140.
38. ^ Smallpox - some unknown heroes in smallpox eradication, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics
39. ^ Sir JJ Group of Hospitals
40. ^ The Regulating Act - 1773
41. ^ ^{a b c d e} Ludden 2002, p. 133
42. ^ Ludden 2002, p. 135
43. ^ Ludden 2002, p. 134
44. ^ ^{a b} Robb 2004, pp. 126-129
45. ^ ^{a b c} Peers 2006, pp. 45-47
46. ^ Tomlinson 1993, p. 43
47. ^ Peers 2006, p. 47, Brown 1994, p. 65
48. ^ ^{a b c} Brown 1994, p. 67
49. ^ Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 79
50. ^ Bandyopadhyay 2004, pp. 169-172 Bose & Jalal 2003, pp. 88-103 Quote: "The 1857 rebellion was by and large confined to northern Indian Gangetic Plain and central India.", Brown 1994, pp. 85-87, and Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, pp. 100-106
51. ^ Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 101
52. ^ Brown 1994, p. 88
53. ^ Metcalf 1991, p. 48
54. ^ Bandyopadhyay 2004, p. 171, Bose & Jalal 2003, p. 90
55. ^ Bandyopadhyay 2004, p. 172, Bose & Jalal 2003, p. 91, Brown 1994, p. 92
56. ^ Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 102
57. ^ Bose & Jalal 2003, p. 91, Metcalf 1991, Bandyopadhyay 2004, p. 173
58. ^ Brown 1994, p. 92
59. ^ Nehru 1946, p. 295
60. ^ (Stein 2001, p. 259), (Oldenburg 2007)
61. ^ (Oldenburg 2007), (Stein 2001, p. 258)
62. ^ ^{a b} (Oldenburg 2007)
63. ^ (Stein 2001, p. 258)
64. ^ (Stein 2001, p. 159)
65. ^ Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India, page 9 (2006)
66. ^ ^{a b} (Stein 2001, p. 260)
67. ^ (Stein 2001, p. 260) Quote: "The British knew about Indian famines well before the East India Company assumed political responsibility for India. Peter Mundy, an early seventeenth-century Company agent, reported a devastating series of bad harvests and food shortages in Gujarat and elsewhere in western India which drove cultivators and artisans to migrate, some making their way a thousand miles to the southern tip of India, where they continue to live. Mundy described the responses of the Mughal governor of the province, ..., he noted with appreciation the free food distributions ordered by Emperor Shah Jahan."
68. ^ Angus Maddison, The World Economy, pages 109-112, (2001)
69. ^ ^{a b c d} Brown 1994, pp. 197-198
70. ^ Olympic Games Antwerp 1920: Official Report, Nombre de bations representees, p. 168. Quote: "31 Nations avaient accepté l'invitation du Comité Olympique Belge: ... la Grèce - la Hollande Les Indes Anglaises - l'Italie - le Japon ..."
71. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Brown 1994, pp. 203-204
72. ^ ^{a b c} Brown 1994, pp. 201-203
73. ^ Lovett 1920, p. 94, 187-191
74. ^ Sarkar 1921, p. 137
75. ^ Tinker 1968, p. 92
76. ^ ^{a b c} Spear 1990, p. 190
77. ^ ^{a b c} Brown 1994, pp. 195-196
78. ^ ^{a b c} Stein 2001, p. 304
79. ^ Ludden 2002, p. 208
80. ^ Report of Commissioners, Vol I, New Delhi, p 105
81. ^ Patil, V.S.. Subhas Chandra Bose, his contribution to Indian nationalism. Sterling Publishers, 1988. 
82. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Brown 1994, pp. 205-207
83. ^ Chhabra 2005, p. 2
84. ^ (Low 1993, pp. 40, 156)
85. ^ ^{a b} (Low 1993, p. 154)
86. ^ ^{a b} (Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, pp. 206-207)
87. ^ Bandyopadhyay 2004, pp. 418-420
88. ^ Nehru 1942, p. 424
89. ^ (Low 1993, pp. 31-31)
90. ^ Lebra 1977, p. 23
91. ^ Lebra 1977, p. 31, (Low 1993, pp. 31-31)
92. ^ Chaudhuri 1953, p. 349, Sarkar 1983, p. 411,Hyam 2007, p. 115
93. ^ ^{a b} (Judd 2004, pp. 172-173)
94. ^ (Judd 2004, p. 172)
95. ^ Hyam 2007, p. 106 Quote:By the end of 1945, he and the Commander-in-chief, General Auckinleck were advising that there was a real threat in 1946 of large scale anti-British Disorder amounting to even a well-organised rising aiming to expel the British by paralysing the administration. Quote:...it was clear to Attlee that everything depended on the spirit and reliability of the Indian Army:"Provided that they do their duty, armed insurrection in India would not be an insolube problem. If, however, the Indian Army was to go the other way, the picture would be very different... Quote:...Thus, Wavell concluded, if the army and the police "failed" Britain would be forced to go. In theory, it might be possible to revive and reinvigorate the services, and rule for another fifteent to trwenty years, but:It is a fallacy to suppose that the solution lies in trying to maintain status quo. We have no longer the resources, nor the necessary prestige or confidence in ourselves.
96. ^ Brown 1994, p. 330 Quote: "India had always been a minority interest in British public life; no great body of public opinion now emerged to argue that war-weary and impoverished Britain should send troops and money to hold it against its will in an empire of doubtful value. By late 1946 both Prime Minister and Secretary of State for India recognized that neither international opinion no their own voters would stand for any reassertion of the raj, even if there had been the men, money, and administrative machinery with which to do so." Sarkar 1983, p. 418 Quote: "With a war weary army and people and a ravaged economy, Britain would have had to retreat; the Labour victory only quickened the process somewhat." Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 212 Quote: "More importantly, though victorious in war, Britain had suffered immensely in the struggle. It simply did not possess the manpower or economic resources required to coerce a restive India."
97. ^ (Khosla 2001, p. 299)

References and further reading

Contemporary general textbooks

• Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar (2004), From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India, New Delhi and London: Orient Longmans. Pp. xx, 548., ISBN 8125025960 .
• Bose, Sugata; Jalal, Ayesha (2003), Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edition. Pp. xiii, 304, ISBN 0415307872 .
• Brown, Judith M. (1994), Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiii, 474, ISBN 0198731132 .
• Hyam, Ronald (2007), Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918-1968., Cambridge University Press., ISBN 0521866499 .
• Copland, Ian (2001), India 1885-1947: The Unmaking of an Empire (Seminar Studies in History Series), Harlow and London: Pearson Longmans. Pp. 160, ISBN 0582381738 .
• Judd, Dennis (2004), The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiii, 280, ISBN 0192803581 .
• Kulke, Hermann; Rothermund, Dietmar (2004), A History of India, 4th edition. Routledge, Pp. xii, 448, ISBN 0415329205 .
• Ludden, David (2002), India And South Asia: A Short History, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Pp. xii, 306, ISBN 1851682376 
• Markovits, Claude (ed) (2005), A History of Modern India 1480-1950 (Anthem South Asian Studies), Anthem Press. Pp. 607, ISBN 1843311526 .
• Metcalf, Barbara; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2006), A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xxxiii, 372, ISBN 0521682258 .
• Peers, Douglas M. (2006), India under Colonial Rule 1700-1885, Harlow and London: Pearson Longmans. Pp. xvi, 163, ISBN 058231738 .
• Robb, Peter (2004), A History of India (Palgrave Essential Histories), Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. xiv, 344, ISBN 0333691296 .
• Sarkar, Sumit (1983), Modern India: 1885-1947, Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd. Pp. xiv, 486, ISBN 0333904257 .
• Spear, Percival (1990), A History of India, Volume 2, New Delhi and London: Penguin Books. Pp. 298, ISBN 0140138366 .
• Stein, Burton (2001), A History of India, New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiv, 432, ISBN 0195654463 .
• Wolpert, Stanley (2003), A New History of India, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 544, ISBN 0195166787 .

Monographs and collections

• Anderson, Clare (2007), Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion, New York: Anthem Press, Pp. 217, ISBN 9781843312499, http://atlantis.terrassl.net/anthempress.com/product_info.php?cPath=52&products_id=293&osCsid=9a2s9o8mdu8066m551rr407123 
• Ansari, Sarah (2005), Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh: 1947–1962, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, Pp. 256, ISBN ISBN 019597834X 
• Baker, David, Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820–1920, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiii, 374, ISBN 0195630491, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2059781?origin=JSTOR-pdf 
• Bayly, C. A. (1990), Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (The New Cambridge History of India), Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 248, ISBN 0521386500 .
• Bayly, C. A. (2000), Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society), Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 426, ISBN 0521663601 
• Brown; Louis, Wm. Roger, eds. (2001), Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 800, ISBN 0199246793 
• Butalia, Urvashi (1998), The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Pp. 308, ISBN 0822324946 
• Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan (1998), Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, (Cambridge Studies in Indian History & Society). Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 400, ISBN 0521596920 .
• Chatterji, Joya (1993), Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 323, ISBN 0521523281 .
• Copland, Ian (2002), Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917-1947, (Cambridge Studies in Indian History & Society). Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 316, ISBN 0521894360 .
• Fay, Peter W. (1993), The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-1945., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press., ISBN 0472083422 .
• Gilmartin, David. 1988. Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. 258 pages. ISBN 0520062493.
• Gould, William (2004), Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society). Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 320, ISBN 0521830613 .
• Hyam, Ronald (2007), Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918-1968., Cambridge University Press., ISBN 0521866499. .
• Jalal, Ayesha (1993), The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 334 pages, ISBN 0521458501 .
• Khan, Yasmin (2007), The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 250 pages, ISBN 0300120788 
• Khosla, G. D. (2001), "Stern Reckoning", in Page, David; Inder Singh, Anita; Moon, Penderal et al., The Partition Omnibus: Prelude to Partition/the Origins of the Partition of India 1936-1947/Divide and Quit/Stern Reckoning, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195658507 
• Low, D. A. (1993), Eclipse of Empire, Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xvi, 366, ISBN 0521457548 .
• Low, D. A. (2002), Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Amibiguity 1929-1942, Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 374, ISBN 0521892619 .
• Low, D. A., ed. (2004), Congress & the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle 1917-47, Second Edition, New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xviii, 513, ISBN 0195683676 .
• Metcalf, Thomas R. (1991), The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857-1870, Riverdale Co. Pub. Pp. 352, ISBN 8185054991 
• Metcalf, Thomas R. (1997), Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, Pp. 256, ISBN 0521589371 
• Nehru, Jawaharlal (1946), The Discovery of India, The John Day company, OCLC 186312138 
• Pandey, Gyanendra (2002), Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, ISBN 0521002508 
• Porter, Andrew, ed. (2001), Oxford History of the British Empire: Nineteenth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 800, ISBN 0199246785 
• Ramusack, Barbara (2004), The Indian Princes and their States (The New Cambridge History of India), Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 324, ISBN 0521039894 
• Shaikh, Farzana (1989), Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860—1947, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 272., ISBN 0521363284 .
• Talbot; Singh, Gurharpal Singh, eds. (1999), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 420, ISBN 0195790510 .
• Talbot, Ian (2002), Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 216., ISBN 0195795512 .
• Wainwright, A. Martin (1993), Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India, and the Balance of Power in Asia, 1938-55, Praeger Publishers. Pp. xvi, 256, ISBN 0275947335 .
• Wolpert, Stanley (2006), Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 272, ISBN 0195151984 .

Articles in journals or collections

• Banthia, Jayant; Dyson, Tim (1999), "Smallpox in Nineteenth-Century India", Population and Development Review 25 (4): 649–689, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0098-7921%28199912%2925%3A4%3C649%3ASINI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K 
• Brown, Judith M. (2001), "India", in Brown, Judith M.; Louis, Wm. Roger, Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 421–446, ISBN 0199246793 
• Caldwell, John C (1998), "Malthus and the Less Developed World: The Pivotal Role of India", Population and Development Review 24 (4): 675–696, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0098-7921%28199812%2924%3A4%3C675%3AMATLDW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 
• Derbyshire, I. D. (1987), "Economic Change and the Railways in North India, 1860-1914", Population Studies 21 (3): 521–545, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%281987%2921%3A3%3C521%3AECATRI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O 
• Drayton, Richard (2001), "Science, Medicine, and the British Empire", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 264–276, ISBN 0199246807 
• Dyson, Tim (1991), "On the Demography of South Asian Famines: Part I", Population Studies 45 (1): 5–25, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-4728%28199103%2945%3A1%3C5%3AOTDOSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V 
• Dyson, Tim (1991), "On the Demography of South Asian Famines: Part II", Population Studies 45 (2): 279–297, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-4728%28199107%2945%3A2%3C279%3AOTDOSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S 
• Frykenberg, Robert E. (2001), "India to 1858", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 194–213, ISBN 0199246807 
• Gilmartin, David (1994), "Scientific Empire and Imperial Science: Colonialism and Irrigation Technology in the Indus Basin", The Journal of Asian Studies 53 (4): 1127–1149, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-9118%28199411%2953%3A4%3C1127%3ASEAISC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S 
• Goswami, Manu (1998), "From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907", Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (4): 609–636, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-4175%28199810%2940%3A4%3C609%3AFSTSNE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q 
• Harnetty, Peter (1991), "'Deindustrialization' Revisited: The Handloom Weavers of the Central Provinces of India, c. 1800-1947", Modern Asian Studies 25 (3): 455–510, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%28199107%2925%3A3%3C455%3A%27RTHWO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5 
• Heuman, Gad (2001), "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 315–326, ISBN 0199246807 
• Klein, Ira (1988), "Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India", Modern Asian Studies 22 (4): 723–755, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%281988%2922%3A4%3C723%3APPAPUI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B 
• Klein, Ira (2000), "Materialism, Mutiny and Modernization in British India", Modern Asian Studies 34 (3): 545–580, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%28200007%2934%3A3%3C545%3AMMAMIB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I 
• Kubicek, Robert (2001), "British Expansion, Empire, and Technological Change", in Porter, Andrew, Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 247–269, ISBN 0199246785 
• Moore, Robin J. (2001a), "Imperial India, 1858-1914", in Porter, Andrew, Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 422–446, ISBN 0199246785 
• Moore, Robin J. (2001b), "India in the 1940s", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 231–242, ISBN 0199246807 
• Raj, Kapil (2000), "Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760-1850", Osiris, 2nd Series 15 (Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise): 119–134, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0369-7827%282000%292%3A15%3C119%3ACEATFO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 
• Ray, Rajat Kanta (1995), "Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800-1914", Modern Asian Studies 29 (3): 449–554, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%28199507%2929%3A3%3C449%3AACITAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J 
• Raychaudhuri, Tapan (2001), "India, 1858 to the 1930s", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 214–230, ISBN 0199246807 
• Robb, Peter (1997), "The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s", Modern Asian Studies 31 (2): 245–283, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%28199705%2931%3A2%3C245%3ATCSACO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K 
• Roy, Tirthankar (2002), "Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link", The Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (3): 109–130, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28200222%2916%3A3%3C109%3AEHAMIR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F 
• Simmons, Colin (1985), "'De-Industrialization', Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1947", Modern Asian Studies 19 (3): 593–622, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%281985%2919%3A3%3C593%3A%27IATIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K 
• Talbot, Ian (2001), "Pakistan's Emergence", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 253–263, ISBN 0199246807 
• Tinker, Hugh (1968), India in the First World War and after. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1918-19: From War to Peace. (Oct., 1968), pp. 89-107, Sage Publications, ISSN: 00220094 .
• Tomlinson, B. R. (2001), "Economics and Empire: The Periphery and the Imperial Economy", in Porter, Andrew, Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–74, ISBN 0199246785 
• Washbrook, D. A. (2001), "India, 1818-1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism", in Porter, Andrew, Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 395–421, ISBN 0199246785 
• Watts, Sheldon (1999), "British Development Policies and Malaria in India 1897-c. 1929", Past and Present (165): 141–181, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28199911%290%3A165%3C141%3ABDPAMI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 
• Wylie, Diana (2001), "Disease, Diet, and Gender: Late Twentieth Century Perspectives on Empire", in Winks, Robin, Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 277–289, ISBN 0199246807 

Classic histories and gazetteers

• Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. II (1908), The Indian Empire, Historical, Published under the authority of His Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Pp. xxxv, 1 map, 573. 
• Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. III (1907), The Indian Empire, Economic (Chapter X: Famine, pp. 475–502, Published under the authority of His Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Pp. xxxvi, 1 map, 520. 
• Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. IV (1907), The Indian Empire, Administrative, Published under the authority of His Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Pp. xxx, 1 map, 552. 
• Lovett, Sir Verney (1920), A History of the Indian Nationalist Movement, New York, Frederick A. Stokes Company, ISBN 81-7536-249-9 
• Majumdar, R. C.; Raychaudhuri, H. C.; Datta, Kalikinkar (1950), An Advanced History of India, London: Macmillan and Company Limited. 2nd edition. Pp. xiii, 1122, 7 maps, 5 coloured maps. .
• Smith, Vincent A. (1921), India in the British Period: Being Part III of the Oxford History of India, Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 2nd edition. Pp. xxiv, 316 (469-784) .

Tertiary sources

• Oldenburg, Philip (2007), ""India: Movement for Freedom"", Encarta Encyclopedia . Archived 2009-10-31.
• Wolpert, Stanley (2007), "India: British Imperial Power 1858-1947 (Indian nationalism and the British response, 1885-1920; Prelude to Independence, 1920-1947)", Encyclopædia Britannica .

Related reading

• Bairoch, Paul, Economics and World History, University of Chicago Press, 1995
• Bhatia, B. M., Famines in India: A study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special Reference to Food Problem, Delhi: Konark Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 1985
• Bowle, John, The Imperial Achievement, Secker & Warburg, London, 1974, ISBN 978-0316104098
• Chapman, Pat Taste of the Raj, Hodder & Stoughton, London — ISBN 0340680350 (1997)
• Coates, Tim, (series editor), The Amritsar Massacre 1919 - General Dyer in the Punjab (Official Reports, including Dyer's Testimonies), Her Majesty's Stationary Office (HMSO) 1925, abridged edition, 2000, ISBN 0-11-702412-0
• Davis, Mike, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World 2001, ISBN 1-85984-739-0
• Dutt, Romesh C. Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India, first published 1900, 2005 edition by Adamant Media Corporation, Elibron Classics Series, ISBN 1-4021-5115-2
• Dutt, Romesh C. The Economic History of India under early British Rule, first published 1902, 2001 edition by Routledge, ISBN 0-415-24493-5
• Forbes, Rosita, India of the Princes', London, 1939
• Forrest, G. W., CIE, (editor), Selections from The State Papers of the Governors-General of India - Warren Hastings (2 vols), Blackwell's, Oxford, 1910
• James, Lawrence, Raj - The Making and Unmaking of British India, London, 1997, ISBN 0-316-64072-7
• Keay, John, The Honourable Company - A History of the English East India Company, HarperCollins, London, 1991, ISBN 0-00-217515-0
• Moorhouse, Geoffrey, India Britannica, Book Club Associates, UK, 1983
• Morris, Jan, with Simon Winchester, Stones of Empire - The Buildings of the Raj, Oxford University Press, 1st edition 1983 (paperback edition 1986, ISBN 0-19-282036-2
• Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982
• Srivastava, H.C., The History of Indian Famines from 1858-1918, Sri Ram Mehra and Co., Agra, 1968
• Voelcker, John Augustus, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, Indian Government publication, Calcutta, 2nd edition, 1897.
• Woodroffe, Sir John, Is India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture, Madras, 1919.

External links

• British India Website
• The New Student's Reference Work/India (1914)
• Images of Empire Library, Bristol, UK
• October Offer regarding India’s constitution, of His Majesty's Government 18 October 1939
• August Offer regarding India’s constitution, of His Majesty's Government 8 August 1940
• British Ruled India (1757-1947) Bibliography of Books Articles and Dissertations Concentrating on 1914-1947

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The Partition of India

Contributed by Prof. Dr. Nazeer Ahmed, PhD

The partition of British India was an extraordinary event. It brought forth giant personalities, monumental egos, brilliant strategists, saints, scoundrels, politicians, thinkers, tinkers, stinkers, sages and sycophants. Like an angry volcano it spewed forth human passions in their ugliest form consuming oceans of humanity. In its aftermath it left more than a million dead, fifteen million refugees and tens of thousands of women abducted. Two nations inherited the Raj and were immediately locked in mortal combat. A third nation has sprung up since, while the first two, India and Pakistan, now nuclear armed, continue to stare at each other waiting to see who will blink first. The last chapter of the history of partition is yet to be written. The secret of whether it will have a tragic end with a nuclear holocaust or a happy new beginning with cooperation and brotherhood for the poverty stricken millions of the subcontinent is hidden in the womb of the future, dependent as is all human endeavor, on the wisdom of generations to come.

British India was a vast tapestry woven together by a masterful balance of local powers and sustained by an unabashed strategy of divide and rule. It was a mosaic of religions, languages, races, cultures, tribes, castes, historical memories, passions and prejudices. More than five hundred princely states, satraps of the British crown, dotted the landscape, surrounded by vast stretches of territories ruled directly by the Viceroy. The foreigners had come here in the 17^th century to trade. As the Mogul empire disintegrated and India imploded, the traders moved like dexterous chessmen capturing one territory after another. From the fall of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the drawing up of the Durand line in 1893-95 after the Second Anglo-Afghan war, there was a span of almost a century and a half. During this time British power moved inexorably, supplanting a divided India by force of arms as in Mysore and the Punjab or through treaties and manipulation as with the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nawab of Arcot.

The independence movements of India and Pakistan brought forth giants on the stage of world history. Mahatma Gandhi was at once a sage in the tradition of Indian sages, a staunch advocate of non-violent political change, a masterful tactician and a politician who deciphered the key to unravel the British Empire. His legacy inspired reformers and activists as far away as the United States wherein Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement drew inspiration. Qaid e Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a strict constitutionalist, a brilliant strategist, a secular gentleman, a champion of minority rights and a nationalist who was pushed in the direction of separatism by Congress stonewalling and became the architect of a new nation thereby changing the map of the world. Pandit Jawarlal Nehru was an internationalist, a brilliant post-modern secularist, indeed an agnostic, whose instincts for centralized, socialist planning obscured from him the reality of communal politics in a divided subcontinent. Sardar Patel was a fierce nationalist and right wing Congressman who moved towards a sectarian anti-Muslim bias in the twilight years of the British Raj. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad was a scholar whom destiny thrust into politics, the only man who fought unswervingly for a united India until the last moment. All of these stalwarts operated in the 19^th century paradigm of nationalism, colonial rule, parliamentary governance, and minority and majority rights. Together, they failed to foresee the horrors of partition or to muster the collective wisdom to forestall the carnage that accompanied it. The independence of India and Pakistan was their collective achievement. Partition was their collective failure.

A student of history may ask: who was the architect of partition? Iqbal? Jinnah? Gandhi? Nehru? Patel? The Congress party? The Muslim League? The Hindu Mahasabha? The Akali Dal? The British? No one person and no single party can take the credit or the blame for partition. It was a deadly serious game that had many players. The principal figures involved have acquired an iconic status in India and Pakistan. Often the hero of one is a villain for the other, so bitter was the experience of partition. Sixty years later, when one looks at them as historical figures, one finds them to be all too human, with their prides and their prejudices, their strengths and their limitations. They made choices like all humans and these choices had the human touch of triumph and tragedy. They were as much creators of history as were its victims.

Britain entered the First World War as the mistress of the world. The British navy ruled the seas. In 1914 an Englishman could boast that the sun never set on the British Empire. The array of nations beholden to the British crown included dominions such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and colonies such as India, Malaya and Nigeria. World War I was a spillover from the instability in the Balkans following the collapse of Ottoman power. It resulted from the unwillingness or the inability of the entente powers, Great Britain, France and Russia to accommodate the rising power of Germany. The Ottomans joined the war alongside Germany in the hope of recovering the East European territories they had lost in the war of 1911. It was a fateful decision which shattered the peace of the Middle East, the consequences of which are felt even today.

India was dragged into the Great War as a colony. Indian leadership, Gokhale, Tilak, Jinnah and Gandhi included, were disappointed that they were not consulted but could do nothing about it. Millions of Indian troops fought under British officers in Europe and the Middle East. In some sectors, such as Iraq, the Indian army conducted its own operations. The Indians hoped that their sacrifices would bring in a reward at the end of the war, perhaps a dominion status within the Empire, on par with Australia, South Africa and Canada. These hopes received a boost as the United States entered the war in 1917 and its idealist American President, Woodrow Wilson, proclaimed his famous 14 point plank as the basis for a general peace after the War. Included in these 14 points was the declaration that “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined”.

An attempt was made during World War I by the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League to present a unified demand to the imperial government in India for administrative reforms. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who was at the time a senior member of the Congress hierarchy, worked hard to achieve a common platform for the Congress and the League. The result was the Lucknow pact of 1916 in which the Congress conceded the right of Muslims for separate electorates. The pact was the highpoint of Congress-Muslim cooperation during the long and tortuous history of these two political parties. The credit for this achievement belongs primarily to Jinnah. The pact made it possible for the Congress and the League to make a unified demand to the colonial administration that eighty percent of representatives to the provincial legislatures be elected directed by the people.

The war ended in a triumph for the allies. Russia had pulled out of the conflict after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 so it was left to Britain and France to divide up the spoils of war. The British and French war aims were different from those of the Americans and included not just the preservation of their empires but their expansion into the former Ottoman territories. The British made it clear that Wilson’s 14 point proclamation did not apply to India. Instead the colonial noose was tightened around the Indian neck. The Government of India Act of 1919, sometimes referred to as Montagu-Chelmsford Act, revealed the true British intentions. It skirted the issue of dominion status and put India on a waiting list for 10 years during which period the major Indian provinces were to be ruled by a dual (diarchic) form of government wherein a provincial legislative council would monitor the activities of provincial ministers. This was a way of shifting the focus of national politics to the local provinces where it could be more easily contained. A separate Council of Princely states was formed to keep the major political parties in check.

The Indians were disappointed with the provisions of this Act. Protests erupted, the British responded with the repressive Rowlett Act. The demonstrations were brutally put down. It was during this period on April 13, 1919 that the infamous Jalianwala Bagh massacre took place near Amritsar wherein, under orders from the British General Dyer, hundreds of unarmed Indians, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus included, were gunned down in cold blood during a peaceful demonstration.

Even as the Great War raged in the heart of Europe, Britain and France entered into the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 partitioning the Ottoman Empire between them. Britain would secure Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, thus securing a land route from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea and from there to the British India Empire. France would control Syria and Southeastern Anatolia. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed (1918) and Istanbul was occupied by British troops, the scheming gathered momentum. By the Treaty of Sevres (1920), France, Britain, Greece, Italy and Armenia each claimed a piece of Ottoman territories leaving a tiny slice in Central Anatolia for the Turks. The Turkish nationalists rejected the terms of this Treaty, refusing to ratify it.

India was caught up in the turbulence created by the aftermath of the War. The British attempt to abolish the Khilafat in Istanbul dragged India into postwar politics. The Khilafat was an institution established by the companions of the Prophet Muhammed immediately after his death. It had survived fourteen centuries of Islamic history and its mantle had passed to the Turkish sultans in 1517. Although its influence had diminished in proportion to the loss of Islamic territories to European colonialism, it was still looked upon as the axis of Muslim political life, especially by the world of Sunni Islam. When the Treaty of Sevres awarded the Hejaz to Sharif Hussain as a reward for his collusion with the allies during the War, it cut the principal connection of the Caliph in Istanbul from his spiritual responsibilities as the “guardian of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina”. This was seen as an attempt to abolish the Khilafat. The Caliph himself became a de-facto British prisoner in Istanbul and had little authority to influence post war developments either in the former Ottoman territories or in the Turkish heartland of Anatolia. The emerging nationalist movement in Anatolia disregarded the edicts of the Sultan-Caliph proclaimed under British duress.

The attempt to abolish the Khilafat created an uproar among India’s Muslim religious establishment. India had lost its independence to British intrigue in the 18^th century but the Indian Muslims had taken some consolation in an independent Ottoman empire whose titular head was the Caliph for all Muslims.

The occupation of the Sultan’s territories and the removal of the sultan’s sovereignty over the holy sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem meant that the sun had set on Islam’s political domains. At this time, Muslim leadership in India was divided into four categories. The first were the Nawabs and the zamindars of United Provinces (UP) and Bengal who dominated the Muslim League since its founding in 1906. In the second group were the Aligarh trained would-be bureaucrats whose career goal was to secure employment in the administrative machinery of the British Raj. The third were the elite, British educated secular nationalists such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah who were working at the time for Hindu-Muslim cooperation and a common political platform for the Congress and Muslim League. The fourth group represented the religious establishment, the Deobandis and the ulema such as Maulana Muhammed Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali. The vast majority of Muslims, like the vast majority of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians were poor and destitute, often at the mercy of moneylenders and landlords, and had very little political involvement of any kind.

The Khilafat movement was started in 1919 by Muhammed Ali, Shaukat Ali and Hasrat Mohani at a time when the repressive Rowlett Act (1919) and the Jalianwala Bagh massacre (1919) had created a general feeling of animosity against the British. Gandhi, who was by this time emerging as the undisputed leader of the Congress party, saw in the Khilafat movement an opportunity to forge a united Hindu-Muslim stand against the British, and in combination with a peaceful non-cooperation movement, force the British to concede India’s political demands.

The non-cooperation movement was launched on September 1, 1920 under the leadership of Gandhi with the Ali brothers playing a supporting role. It was an alliance of convenience. The goals of the protagonists were different and it soon became clear that the inherent tensions in these goals would make their achievement impossible. First, the Khilafat was an issue for the Turks to resolve. If the Turks did not wish to carry the burden of the Caliphate, the Muslims in India could not force them to do so. Second, the preservation of the Ottoman Empire required the Arabs to acquiesce to Turkish rule. The goodwill between the Turks and the Arabs had been shattered by the Arab rebellion in which the British intelligence agent Lawrence of Arabia had played a key role. Third, the Khilafat movement received only lukewarm support from the elite Muslim leadership such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah who assessed correctly that the agitation in India was unlikely to affect the geopolitics of the Middle East. Jinnah, who was a constructive constitutionalist, desired an orderly transfer of power to India and had no use for the disruptive politics of the Khilafat movement or the non-cooperation movement of Gandhi. Fourth, even though the movement was headed by Gandhi himself, right wing Hindu leaders such as Malaviya were less than enthusiastic about it. Gandhi’s objective was swaraj (self rule) and for him the Khilafat was no more than a tactical battle in that ultimate goal whereas for the right wing ulema it was an end in itself. Fifth, neither the Muslims nor the Hindus were ready as yet for the sacrifices required of a national movement with the dual objectives of forcing the British to concede self rule and influencing international events in far away Istanbul.

Upset over British policy after the War, some molvis from jameet-e-ulema-e Hind, a conservative association of Muslim clerics, declared India to be “darul harab” (the abode of war) and advised Muslims to migrate to a country like Afghanistan which they considered “darul Islam” (the abode of peace). In 1920, more than fifteen thousand peasants from the NW Frontier and Sindh heeded the call and did perform the hijrat (migration) to Afghanistan where they were robbed and some were killed. The protests by Kerala Muslims against the British in August 1921 got out of hand and resulted in a Hindu-Muslim riot which was exploited by British propaganda to drive a wedge between the two communities. Lastly, in February 1922, a violent mob set fire to a police station in Chari-Chaura in UP resulting in the death of dozens of people.

The Khilafat movement and the concomitant non-cooperation movement of 1921 were both political failures. Gandhi realized that the discipline required for a non-violent, non-cooperation movement was not yet inculcated in the Indian masses. He called off the agitation on February 22, 1922 leaving the Khilafat movement in the lurch. Events in Anatolia took their own turn. The Turks went on to win their War of Independence, drive out the Greek, French and Italian armies invading their homeland, and establish a republic under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. In 1924 the Turkish National Assembly abandoned the Caliphate. The Khilafat movement in India fizzled out without a whimper.

In historical hindsight, the Khilafat movement did more harm than good. On the positive side of the ledger, this was the first and the only time when the two principal religious communities of India, the Hindus and the Muslims, conducted a mass campaign on a common platform. In the great province of Bengal, the movement was largely a success. It enabled the Bengalis to gain some experience in the politics of mass confrontation. But the price for this success was the injection of religious symbols into what had hitherto been a national, non-sectarian struggle. It was a religious movement which was grafted onto a secular national struggle for self rule. Gandhi used religious symbols to bring together Hindus and Muslims on a common platform and galvanize India towards political self awareness. The results were the opposite. The process awakened the latent communalism of both Hindus and Muslims.

The Khilafat movement thrust the molvis and the mullahs into the forefront of national politics eclipsing the role played hitherto by constitutionalists like Jinnah. Ironically it was Jinnah who saw the dangers of using religious and cultural symbols in a secular fight for independence and warned against it. But his warnings were not heeded either by the Congress or the Muslim leadership.

There were multiple ways the Indian milieu could have been sliced. The basis could have been language, region, land ownership, class conflict, wealth, poverty or historical experience. It was a fateful choice to slice it along religious lines. The leaders chose to define their identities as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs rather than Punjabis, Bengalis, North and South Indians, zamindars and kisans, money lenders and debtors, rich and poor, traditionalists and modernists. This choice dictated the history of South Asia.

The 1920s started as a decade of great promise for religious cooperation and national liberation. It ended with these hopes dashed, trust destroyed, suspicions enhanced and disharmony at its peak.

The political coordination between the Muslims and the Hindus, however limited its success, alarmed the British and impelled them to practice the politics of divide and rule more overtly. As long as the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were at each other’s throats, they were unlikely to unite in common opposition to foreign rule of their native land. Britain had conquered the huge subcontinent playing off one power center against another. As early as 1861, Elphinstone, the British governor of Bombay had observed, “divide and rule was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours in India”. Now this strategy was applied with full force to tighten the British grip on the Indian empire.The Malabar uprising against the British which had spilled over into a Hindu-Muslim riot was dubbed the “Moplah uprising” and was played up as an example of Muslim aggressiveness towards non-Muslims. In retribution, the British packed up hundreds of Malabar Muslims in freight trains, like canned sardines, and sent them to far off jails. Two thirds of those transported suffocated in the railway compartments.

There was an acceleration in Hindu-Muslim polarization in the Punjab, UP and Bengal. In 1922 Shraddhanada started the Arya Samaj with the intent of converting Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. In 1923 Savarkar wrote his book on Hindutva and came up with the concept of the two-nation theory, describing the Hindus and the Muslims as two separate nations. His proposed solution to his self articulated two nation theory was to convert, expel or marginalize the Muslims and Christians. In 1925, the Hindu Mahasabha, which was conceived at the fifth Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Conference in Delhi in 1918, was organized as a political party. Between 1923 and 1925 the Arya Samaj did convert thousands of Rajput Muslims to Hinduism. They were particularly active in the provinces of the Punjab and UP. The aggressiveness of the Arya Samaj fostered a sense of fear among the Muslims. In response, they established the Tablighi Jamaat and Tanzim movements in 1923. The Darul Uloom at Deoband launched a program to train ulema in Sanskrit so that they could counteract the propaganda of the Arya Samaj. These movements were a reflection one of the other. The right wing Hindus and Muslims saw in each other a mortal enemy to their own long term survival. Forgotten in this melee was the Lucknow pact of 1916 for which Jinnah had worked so hard. The populous Indus-Gangetic belt embracing Sindh, Punjab, UP, Bihar, Bengal and Assam which was at the time 40 percent Muslim, 52 percent Hindu and 4 percent Sikh was rent asunder along communal lines.

Religious extremism was often a camouflage for the cold politics of economic exploitation. It was a great game being played by the British and a small number of British trained lawyers for the future of one fifth of humanity. In addition to the sustained exploitation of India by British colonialism, there was rampant internal economic exploitation by Indians themselves. In Bengal, there was mass poverty and the province had experienced repeated bouts with famine and death. The peasantry was in the shackles of the money lenders. In Punjab and Sindh the big landowners were the political bosses. The politics of UP and the Central Provinces was dictated by the zamindars and nawabs. The masses were poor, indeed destitute, and had no say in the wheeling and dealing and the sloganeering going on in Delhi, Lahore, Calcutta and Bombay. The population of the princely states, numbering over 75 million, was not involved in the grand strategies worked out for them.

It is noteworthy that in the 1920s there was a Communist movement in India. The success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 inspired communists around the world to achieve the same in their native lands. The British, suspicious of Soviet intentions in Afghanistan and Northwest India, banned the communist party. Nonetheless many communists worked with the Congress Socialist Party, the left wing of Indian National Congress, forming a working relationship with stalwarts such as Jawaharlal Nehru. Their membership cut across religious lines. The Bengali intellectual, Muzaffar Ahmed, for instance, was one of the founders of the Communist party of India. However, except in Bengal, Communist influence on the overall flow of national politics was at best marginal. Bengal had a socio-political matrix dominated by tensions between landowners and peasants, money lenders and debtors. Here, Muzaffar Ahmed and others avoided the slogans of the Congress party dominated by Hindu property-owning classes, shunned Muslim exclusivity advocated by the League and helped the emergence of the Krishak Praja Party (KPP) in the 1930s. The KPP represented the interests of the indebted farmers of East Bengal and the exploited workers of Calcutta. It is in this context of increasing economic tensions and communal polarization that one has to examine the attempt by India’s British educated elite to establish a constitutional framework for the subcontinent.

Historical documents capture the essence of their age. Great moments produce great men and elicit from them their visions, hopes and aspirations which are enshrined in their declarations and documents. The American constitution is an illustration. It captured a moment in the history of this continent when it threw off the yoke of a foreign power and produced a declaration which has withstood the test of time for more than two hundred years. Historical documents grow out of the internal, often tragic struggles of a people. They reflect the soul of a people at a specific moment in history.

The Nehru Report was the first Indian attempt at framing a constitution for the subcontinent. It was a historical benchmark which exposed the internal fissures in the body politic of Hindustan. In hindsight, it was a document produced in haste, by well meaning intellectuals who had an insufficient grasp of the dynamics of Indian society. It proved to be a first step on the road to partition.

In 1925 the conservative party came to power in London. The British had kept a close watch on the Indian political pulse. Aware of the rising tide of Indian nationalism, the British government dispatched a group of seven members of the parliament to India in 1927. Headed by Sir John Simon, the mandate of the Simon commission was to draft a set of recommendations for self rule in India. However, the commission met a cold reception in India because it did not include even a single Indian member.

The central issue was the right of the Indians to draft their own constitution. The Congress led by Gandhi and the League led by Jinnah boycotted the commission.

The British Secretary of State for Indian affairs challenged the Indians to come up with a constitution that would be acceptable to a broad spectrum of communities. So confident was he of the divisions in the Indian ranks that he was certain that the Indians would fail in this effort. Mrs. Annie Besant, a British social activist and a friend of India, made an attempt to write such a constitution but her attempt received a cold reception in Indian circles.

An all-parties conference in Delhi in January 1928 failed to produce a framework for a constitution. Subsequent conferences in March and May were similarly unproductive. The main hurdle was an accommodation of the rights of the minorities and the differences on this issue between the Muslim League, the Indian National Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Sikh Akali Dal.

Unable to reach a consensus in the general caucuses, the third all-party conference held in May 1928 in Bombay delegated the responsibility of drawing up a constitution to a committee headed by Motilal Nehru. The committee consisted of eleven members. Motilal Nehru was the chairman while his son Jawarlal Nehru was the secretary. There were nine other members. Motilal Nehru, descended from Kashmiri Pundits, was a respected Congress leader, a liberal nationalist with roots in the United Provinces. The eclectic Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Prime Minister of India, protégé of Mahatma Gandhi, was a brilliant man educated at Harrow and Cambridge, a post-modern secularist with a keen sense of international events. However, he was socialistic in his impulse, influenced as he was in his formative years by the socialist movements in Pre-World War I England. The other members were local leaders, including two, Syed Ali Imam and Shoaib Qureshi, who were Muslim.

The Nehru report contained the following essential provisions

1. The citizens shall be protected under a Bill of Rights. All powers of the government are derived from the people.
2. There shall be no state religion.
3. India shall enjoy the status of a dominion within the British Empire.
4. There shall be a federal from of government with residual powers vested in the center.
5. There shall be a parliamentary form of government with a Prime Minister and six ministers appointed by the Governor General.
6. There shall be a bicameral legislature.
7. There shall be neither a separate electorate nor a proportionate weight for any community in the legislatures.
8. A recommendation that the language of the federation should be Hindustani written either in the Devanagiri or the Urdu script.
9. A recommendation that separate provinces be established in the Northwest Frontier, Sindh and Karnataka.
10. A recommendation that the provinces should be organized on a linguistic basis.
11. A recommendation that a Supreme Court be established.
12. Muslims should have a twenty five percent representation in the Central Legislature. In provinces where their population was greater than ten percent, proportionate representation for Muslims should be considered.

It is not hard to see the stamp of Jawaharlal Nehru on the Nehru Report. Even though the report called for a Federal structure, the constitution it proposed was unitary with residuary powers vested in the center. The socialist strand in Jawaharlal Nehru saw a nation state as essentially unitary with centralized planning and economic control, a philosophy which he vigorously put into practice as the first Prime Minister of independent India (1947-64). He was a secularist, who saw religion as a private matter for the individual which should not be reflected in matters of state. He was also an idealist who did not see the practical reality of religious dynamics in the vast subcontinent. Consequently, he failed to accommodate the anxieties of Muslim majority provinces in a central legislature which would be dominated, in a “one man one vote” parliamentary structure, by Hindu interests.

The Nehru Report was a step back in the Hindu-Muslim dialectic of pre-partition India. It negated the positive aspects of the Congress-League Lucknow pact of 1916 which had accepted the principle of separate electorates for the minorities. It threw open the question of minority protection in a parliamentary set up wherein the Hindus would be a majority.

The Nehru Report was accepted by the Indian National Congress but was rejected by the Muslim leadership. The main issue dividing the two was the vesting of residual powers. The Congress wanted residual powers to be with the Center. The League wanted them vested with the states. There was also the issue of separate electorates for the minorities. This issue was not a show stopper as some historians have suggested. In 1927 Jinnah had proposed to the Congress that the Muslims were willing to forego the demand for separate electorates if sufficient guarantees were instituted for the protection of minority rights.

In response to the Nehru Report, Mohammed Ali Jinnah drafted his famous 14 point proposal. The important elements of this proposal were the following

1. India shall have a federal constitution with residual powers vested in the States.
2. Adequate representation shall be given to the minorities in every state legislature.
3. Every state shall enjoy uniform autonomy.
4. Muslim representation in the Central Legislature shall be not less than one third.
5. The representatives of each community shall be elected by separate electorates.
6. Each community shall enjoy freedom of worship, association, propagation and education.
7. Sindh shall be separated from the Bombay presidency and be made a separate province.
8. Reforms should be introduced in the NW Frontier Province and Baluchistan in the same manner as all other provinces.
9. Any territorial adjustments to state boundaries shall not compromise the Muslim majorities in Punjab, Bengal and NW Frontier Province.
10. The minorities shall enjoy adequate representation in the services of the state and the Center.
11. There shall be adequate safeguards to protect Muslim culture, language, religion and personal laws.
12. The Central cabinet shall have one third Muslim representation.
13. No bill shall be passed in any legislature if three fourths of the members of a community in that body oppose such a bill on the basis that it will be injurious to that community.
14. No change shall be made in the constitution by the Central Legislature except with the contribution of the States.

Two significant observations are noteworthy about Jinnah’s 14 points. First, in 1929, Jinnah was still operating within a paradigm of minority rights and not “two nation theory” proposed by Savarkar five years earlier. Jinnah was still a peace maker between the Congress and the League and hoped that he could find common ground for the two. Second, the emphasis in the 14 points was on the reciprocal protection of minority rights, Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh alike, and not just the rights of Muslims. Jinnah worked hard to tone down the more strident demands of the right wing Muslim constituency and obtain the concurrence of the League. Students of history may argue whether the 14 points were hard demands or were bargaining openers. The negotiations and the hard bargaining did not take place. The 14 points were rejected by the Indian National Congress.

The Nehru Report and its aftermath constitute a milestone on the road to partition. Jinnah, who had hitherto worked hard to bring about a convergence of Congress and League viewpoints, was disillusioned. He was squeezed between Congress stonewalling and marginalized by the more strident Muslim leaders who felt that Jinnah was too nationalistic in his outlook and too accommodating in his approach. Although he took part in the Round Table Conferences in London in 1931-32, his heart was no longer with Indian politics. He settled in London as a barrister. It was only in 1935 that he returned to India at the invitation of Allama Iqbal to reorganize and lead the Muslim League. The Congress leadership had lost Jinnah whom the eminent Indian social activist and poet Sarojini Naidu had called “the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. Now they were to meet him as an advocate of the two nation theory, and finally as Qaid e Azam of a new nation, Pakistan. The wheels of fortune were turning. The march to partition had begun.

The overarching political context of the times was British imperialism, uncompromising in its determination to keep India in bondage despite the bloodletting of the First World War As late as 1935, the Secretary of State for India, Samuel Hoare, reiterated in the British parliament that the goal of British policy was to provide for the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire. The declarations, conferences and commissions were all directed towards ensuring a continuance of colonial rule. The power equations in Asia changed only as a result of the Second World War. Britain, exhausted by the War realized that its imperial hold on the Indian army was slipping and it could no longer subjugate an India which had become conscious of its own self.

Imperial British aims were reflected in the Simon Commission report of 1930. As stipulated in the Government of India Act of 1916, the British promised to look into further measures towards the attainment of a dominion status for India. The Simon Commission consisted of six members of the British Parliament, including Clement Attlee who was to become the British prime minister when India finally gained its independence in 1947. Indian political opinion was outraged at the absence of even a single Indian on the Commission that was to decide the fate of India. The Indian National Congress as well as the Muslim League boycotted the Commission. The voluminous Simon report recommended (1) the abolishment of diarchic rule, and (2) limited representative government in the Indian provinces. A separate electorate for Muslims was maintained as in the Government of India Act of 1919 but for a limited period. India was to remain a colony with the possibility of dominion status sometime in the undefined future.

It is in the context of the growing communal polarization in North India and the intransigence of Great Britain on the question of India’s independence that one has to assess the address of Allama Iqbal to the Indian Muslim League at Allahabad in 1930. It was in this historic address that he laid out his vision of an autonomous homeland for Muslims in northwestern India. Iqbal was one of the most influential Islamic thinkers of the 20^th century. His rousing poetry inspired generations of Muslims in the Urdu and Farsi speaking world. In his earlier years Iqbal was a national poet. His Taran e Hind, composed in 1904, sang of the beauty of the Indian homeland and the love of its people for their country. However, in his later years he shifted his focus to Islamic civilization and was convinced that Islam held the key to the moral emancipation of humankind. His inspiring poetry held up a memory of a glorious past and the vision of a lofty future and sought to rejuvenate a sullen Islamic community. In his Allahabad address, Allama Iqbal said:

“I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State, self-governing within the British Empire, or without the British Empire. The formation of a consolidated North-Western Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims at least of north-west India.”

“We are 70 million, and far more homogenous than any other people in India. Indeed, the Muslims of India are the only Indian people who can fitly be described as a nation in the modern sense of the word.”

The address was a crystallization of Iqbal’s political thinking. Even though he was deeply influenced by the tasawwuf of Mevlana Rumi and the ego of the German philosopher Nietzsche, Iqbal stayed within the framework of his heritage as an Indian Muslim. His political thinking follows the intellectual lineage of Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Shah Waliullah of Delhi. Indian Islam had turned away from its universal Sufi heritage during the reign of the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb (d 1707) and had sought its fulfillment in the extrinsic application of the Shariah. As elaborated in his book, “Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”, Iqbal accepted the premise that jurisprudence (as opposed to spirituality and ethics) was the foundation on which the edifice of Islam was to be erected. For him, the Shariah was not just a set of static rules and regulations but a dynamic tool in an evolving, expanding universe. Ijtihad was the “principle of movement” in the structure of Islam. India, with its vast non-Muslim majority presented a special problem in the application of this principle. Iqbal wrote: “In India, however, difficulties are likely to arise; for it is doubtful whether a non-Muslim legislative assembly can exercise the power of Ijtihad”. Hence, his deduction that only an autonomous Muslim state in northwest British India could discharge this function.

Allama Iqbal left some questions unanswered. His address called for the establishment of a state in the northwestern portion of British India consisting of Punjab, NW Frontier, Sindh and Baluchistan. In 1931 the Muslim population of these areas was only 25 million in a total Indian Muslim population of 70 million. What was to become of the other 45 million Muslims? Iqbal was silent on this issue. Noticeably, Bengal, a Muslim majority province, was absent in his address. While his prescription called for legislative autonomy for the Muslim majority areas of NW India, Iqbal offered no solution for Muslims who would stay as a minority in a non-Muslim or a secular state. He left this task to future generations of Muslim minorities in India, China, Europe and America.

The Allahabad address was a milestone on the road to partition. Iqbal gave a concrete philosophical foundation for the two-nation theory and was a source of inspiration for Jinnah. Iqbal was the principal figure who convinced Jinnah to return to India in 1935 from his retirement in England and lead the Muslim League. Upon Iqbal’s death in 1938, Jinnah eulogized him: ‘He was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets, philosophers and seers of humanity of all times…to me he was a personal friend, philosopher and guide and as such the main source of my inspiration and spiritual support’.

Meanwhile the British sponsored a series of round table conferences in London to hammer out a compromise between the various contestants on the Indian scene. These conferences revealed how deep were the divisions between the principal religious communities on how to share power in an independent India. The first round table conference in 1930 was attended by Gandhi, Jinnah, Ambedkar, Agha Khan, Malaviya, Sarojini Naidu as well as representatives from the Akali Dal and Hindu Mahasabha. The main issues on the table were a dominion status for India, separate electorates and electoral weights for Muslims and other minorities, preservation of statutory Muslim majorities in the Punjab and Bengal, federal structure in a future constitution, and separate representation for the so called untouchables. There was no meeting of the minds on these issues and the conference broke down. Gandhi launched a civil disobedience movement and many Congress workers were arrested. A labor government came to power in London in 1931, released the Congress workers and called a second round table conference. Jinnah was by now fed up with Indian politics and he did not attend. The second conference also broke down. A third round table conference called in 1932 was boycotted by the Congress party and nothing was accomplished.

The failure of the Indian parties to come to an agreement prompted the British to advance their own ideas for self government. The communal award of 1932 accepted the principle of separate electorates for the Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. Bowing to the demand of the Muslim Leaguers from UP for greater representation, the communal award increased Muslim representation in the UP legislature to 30 percent while their population was only 20 percent. To compensate for this increase, the representation of Muslims in the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal was decreased. In the Punjab, Muslims constituted 60 percent of the population and their representation in the provincial legislature was decreased to 50 percent. In Bengal, the Muslims constituted 55 percent of the population and their representation was decreased to 40 percent. Muslim politics in north India was as yet immature, dominated by zamindari interests in UP. The end result of their bargaining with the British was a loss of majority in all of the erstwhile provinces. It showed the futility of political horse trading to achieve increased representation for Muslims in regions where they were a small minority. The process worked both ways. Increased power for the Muslim nawabs and zamindars of UP would mean decreased power for the Muslims of the pivotal states of Punjab and Bengal.

The communal award also accorded a minority status to the so called Untouchables and awarded them separate electorates. Gandhi saw in this a grave threat to the cohesiveness of Hindu society. If the depressed classes were classified as a separate minority, the Hindus who constituted over 65 percent of the population in British India would be reduced to 49 percent, thereby losing their electoral majority. Gandhi started a fast unto death if this stipulation was not reversed. The fast applied tremendous pressures on Dr. Ambedkar and there were threats on his life if Gandhi died. Protracted negotiations took place between Ambedkar and representatives of Gandhi and an agreement was reached whereby seats would be reserved for the Untouchables in the provincial as well as central legislatures but only as a part of the overall seats allocated to the Hindus. The Gandhi-Ambedkar pact of 1932 was a major triumph for Gandhi. It confirmed his status as a social reformer of the first rank. The so called Untouchables stayed within the Hindu fold and in independent India have made noticeable gains in education, employment and politics.

In 1933, the British government appointed a commission under the chairmanship of Lord Linlithgow to review and recommend reforms for the administration of the British Raj. The result was the Government of India Act of 1935. The Act did not give the Indians the power to draft or enact their own constitution nor was there a Bill of Rights. It recommended the separation of Burma from British India and the establishment of Sindh and Orissa as separate states. It granted limited self government to the provinces. The elected provincial legislatures served at the pleasure of the British governors who had the authority to convene or dissolve them. The federal legislature was to be elected indirectly with substantial reservations for the princes and the viceroy’s nominees. Separate communal electorates were accepted for Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

The elections of 1937 were held under the Government of India Act of 1935. The Indian National Congress, as the oldest and best organized party, won 750 of a total of 1,771 seats. It had a majority of seats in Madras, United Provinces, Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa and held the largest number of seats in four other provinces including Bengal and NW Frontier. But it captured only 26 of the 491 seats reserved for Muslims. The Muslim League fared no better. It captured only 106 seats out of a total of 491 reserved Muslim seats. Significantly, it failed miserably in the Punjab where it won only two seats and 39 out of 250 seats in Bengal.

The Congress formed cabinets in the provinces where it had a clear majority. It joined coalitions in Assam and Sindh. Jinnah offered to form coalitions with the Congress in the critical UP and Bombay legislatures. But the Congress, buoyed by its success at the polls, rejected the offer. An elated Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru declared that there were only two political powers in the India, namely, the British and the Congress. He offered to cooperate with the League in UP only if it dissolved itself and joined the Congress.

In declining to cooperate with the League in 1937, the Congress missed a golden opportunity to forge a united political alliance in India. The League had cooperated with the Congress in some of the local electoral districts in UP and in return expected that the Congress would invite it to form a coalition government. Maulana Azad records in his book, “India Wins Freedom” that he had arranged for two of the senior members of the League, Chaudhari Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Ismail Khan to join the UP ministry. But the UP Congress went back on the tacit pre-election understanding for a coalition with the League. Only one ministerial seat was offered to the UP Muslims and that too if they abandoned their allegiance to the League and joined the Congress. Mohammed Mujeeb, a prominent member of the League recalls (Ref: India’s Partition, ed. by Musheerul Hasan, p. 410): “I was at home in Lucknow when the draft of the agreement proposed by Maulana Azad on behalf of the Congress was sent to Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman. My immediate reaction on reading it was that the Muslim League was being asked to abolish itself”. Ultimately, the lone Muslim seat in the ministry was given to Jameet e ulema e Hind, a religious party which had shifted its allegiance from the League to Congress.

Nehru was consistent, but consistently unrealistic on the communal issue. He was a statesman but his statesmanship failed him at critical moments. In 1937, he tried to crush the League in UP. The result was exactly the opposite. It only crushed the pro-congress elements in the League and forced them into a communal corner. A cooperative hand extended at this critical juncture might have paid rich political dividends. His passion for secular socialism made him insensitive to the depths of communal suspicions in the subcontinent. This failure showed up repeatedly in Nehru’s political career, first in the Nehru report of 1928, then in his decisions following the 1937 elections, and finally his sabotage of the British Cabinet Mission plan in 1946. His failures had a decisive impact on the events leading to partition. He was a political giant, next only to Gandhi in stature, and the subcontinent paid a heavy price for his misjudgments. Maulana Azad observers in his book India Wins Freedom: “Jawaharlal’s action (in refusing to give two ministerial seats to the League) gave the Moslem League in the U.P. a new lease of life. All students of Indian politics know that it was from the U.P. that the League was reorganized. Mr. Jinnah took full advantage of the situation and started an offensive which ultimately led to Pakistan”.

Following the elections of 1937, the Congress formed cabinets in seven out of eleven states where it had won a majority of Assembly seats. In addition, in Sindh and Assam it was part of the ruling coalitions. The Unionist Party, a coalition of traditional Muslim, Sikh and Hindu interests, ruled the Punjab. In Bengal the Praja Krishak Party formed the ministry. Thus in nine out of eleven provinces the Congress was either in power or part of a coalition that held power. The Muslim League was unable to command a majority in any of the provinces. This was a low point for the League. It seemed as if the League had become irrelevant to the power politics of India. It was only the singular focus and drive of Jinnah that galvanized the party and molded it into a force that was able within a decade to dictate the partition of the subcontinent.

The actions of the Congress in the two years that it was in power were perceived by the minorities to be a manifestation of a rising tide of political Hinduism. Since its electoral base in 1937 was predominantly Hindu (the Congress had won only 26 of 491 seats allocated to Muslims) it was understandably responsive to the demands of its Hindu constituency. However, it also displayed a noticeable insensitivity to the need of the Muslims in North India. First, Hindi written in the Devanagri script was introduced as the medium of instruction in schools. Urdu, which was the lingua franca of north India, and the cultural language of north Indian Muslims, was marginalized. This was seen by the Muslim elite as an attack on their culture. Second, the singing of Vande Mataram was introduced into schools. This song was written by the Bengali poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1876 as a protest against the British who had consolidated their grip on India and had made the singing of “God save the Queen” mandatory for all Indian school children. The words Vande Mataram may mean “I worship thee” or “I salute thee” depending on the interpretation. The context of the song which was set by Bankim Chanda in an anti-Muslim novel Ananda MathTemple and its evocation of the goddess Durga made it a controversial part of the Hindu-Muslim dialectic. Some Muslims looked upon the introduction of this song as an attempt to impose Hindu culture on non-Hindus. Some Christians and Sikhs also objected to the song on the grounds that it equated the motherland with the goddess Durga.

In historical hindsight, these “excesses” of the Congress would not be considered politically significant were it not for the charged political context of the times. It is worth remembering that the large provinces of Punjab and Bengal were not ruled by the Congress and were not subject to the Congress “reforms”. Princely India, consisting of 572 autonomous kingdoms and containing almost 25 percent of India’s total population was not affected. A certain amount of cronyism and partisanship was unavoidable in any elective government. Besides, it was not just the Muslims of UP who were unhappy with Congress rule. The Scheduled Caste Federation and the Justice Party of Tamil Nadu were also unhappy. In the larger matrix of the subcontinent the Congress “excesses” would have subsided over time and replaced by the give and take inherent in a democracy. In a pluralistic, democratic India, the center of gravity of political life would have floated towards a populist mass dictated by the dual convergence of self interest and the impossibility of either of the two principal religious communities dominating the other.

Some of the reforms proposed by the Congress ministries were perceived as an attempt to impose soft Hindutva. The Congress pushed mass education but secularized the curriculum under a scheme called the Wardha Taleemi Scheme. The vast network of madrassah-based religious schools in north India felt marginalized. The tricolor flag of the Congress was given official status and pictures of Gandhi were prominently displayed in schools. The land reforms proposed by the Congress ministries hit hard the landed Muslim aristocracy of UP. It was precisely this class that was at the helm of affairs in the Muslim League and they felt threatened. The vast province of UP was the crucible of communal politics. The end game of partition was played out in the Punjab and Bengal but it was UP that witnessed the first act. There were reports of favoritism, normal in any democratic setup, but highly suspicious in the charged atmosphere of the times. Nehru’s attempts to isolate and crush the Muslim League reinforced these suspicions. However, to be fair, Pandit Nehru was under tremendous pressure from some of his colleagues including Pant, Rajendra Prasad and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai to take a hard line against the League.

This was the first taste of power for the Congress party and it missed a golden opportunity to forge a national consensus. Nehru sought to bring more Muslims into the party and initiated a campaign of mass contact. The attempt fizzled out because the dominant Hindu communities of UP, savoring their new found power, had no inclination to share it with anyone else. To cap it all, Pandit Nehru wrote to Jinnah mocking the League as an elitist organization and taunting him that there were only two political forces left in India, namely, the British and the Congress party. “No”, retorted Jinnah, “there is a third force, and that is the Indian Muslims”. This was the parting of the ways for the two men who maintained a cold animosity towards each other until partition.

The war in Europe cast its long shadow on India. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Viceroy in India, Linlithgow, followed suit and declared that India was at war with Germany. Indians were outraged that they were dragged into a war that was not of their own choosing. In acting unilaterally, without even the hint of consultations, the viceroy had reminded India of her servile colonial status. Gandhi was especially in a dire predicament. He had opposed the war on moral grounds and had gone so far as to counsel the British not to fight the Nazis but to resist them non-violently. The opinion among India’s leaders was split. Within the Congress party, Nehru, Azad and Patel saw the menace of Nazism as worse than the evil of imperialism and were willing to cooperate with the British provided they gave India its freedom immediately. A free India would join the allies as an equal and willing partner in the war against the fascists. Jinnah extended his cooperation to the British in return for their backing of his demands for Muslim rights. On the other hand, Gandhi, supported by other senior Congress workers, remained adamantly opposed to the war on moral grounds.

The Congress ministries in the provinces resigned in protest against the unilateral declaration of war by the viceroy. The Muslim League, the Scheduled Caste Federation and the Justice Party of Tamil Nadu who had perceived Congress rule as oppressive, rejoiced and observed December 22, 1939 as “youm e najat” (deliverance day). The Congress party had a chance to show its metal as a national party and demonstrate its sensitivity to the minorities. In this attempt, it failed. The Muslims and the Scheduled Castes saw Congress rule as political tyranny. Even some of the British observers described the rule of Congress ministries as “a rising tide of political Hinduism”.

In a broader sense, the tug of war between the Congress and the League was a struggle between the old landed aristocracy and the emerging money lending class. The landed aristocracy had inherited their holdings as jagirs from the Moguls and the succeeding nawabs. These established land owners and the large farmers had come under pressure from the tax collectors appointed by the British East India Company under the so called reforms of 1793. Each collector was required to remit a fixed amount per acre to the British irrespective of the yield on the land. In lean times, the farmers could not pay the fixed tax and had to borrow money from the usurious money lenders to pay the tax collector. Defaults were common and the farmers and the land owners often lost their land to the tax collectors or the money lenders. A substantial percentage of land owners in UP were Muslim while the money lenders were predominantly Hindu. Some of the money lenders, the Marwaris from Gujarat, had become entrepreneurs and had joined the ranks of the emerging industrialists. The Congress party drew its financial backing from these industrialists while its voter base was primarily Hindu in spite of its broad national appeal. The Muslim League, on the other hand, represented the interest of the land owning class, and tended to champion their cause. The voter base of the League was almost exclusively Muslim.

Just as the power struggle between the landed gentry and the emerging merchant class in Cromwell’s England determined the evolution of English politics, the struggle between the Muslim landowners and the Hindu money lenders determined the shape of politics in 20^th century India. Whereas in England this struggle shifted political power from the landed class to the merchants, in India there was a divorce between the two. The landed class, the nawabs and the estate holders backed Jinnah and opted for Pakistan. The founders of the Muslim League in 1906, Nawab Viqar ul Mulk, Nawab Salimullah Khan, Sir Sultan Muhammed Shah all belonged to old, established landed aristocracy. The money lenders, merchants and the emerging industrialists such as the Birlas backed Gandhi and stayed in India.

Religion was the surface wave generated by this underlying power struggle between the old guard and new guard. The draft from this wave sucked in the masses and carried them to the holocaust accompanying partition. It is this underlying struggle that explains the opposition of the League to the land reforms introduced by the Congress party in 1937 in northern India. The land reforms hit hard at the Muslim landed gentry. The underlying struggle also explains the opposition of the Congress to the tax proposals advanced by Liaqat Ali Khan as the finance minister in the brief Congress-League coalition ministry in 1946. The taxation proposals hit hard at the Hindu merchant class and were vehemently denounced by their supporters in the Congress party. The price for the divorce was paid by the illiterate masses of India, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh alike.

While the major political parties jockeyed for position and argued among themselves the flames of war spread to Asia and the Pacific. In December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States. Hitler formed an alliance with Japan. The United States, in turn, declared war on Japan and Germany. The Japanese made rapid advances in the Pacific, capturing the Philippines, Indonesia, Indochina and Burma. By April 1942 they were on India’s doorsteps.

The Japanese thrust left the Indian leadership in a quandary. Their responses were predictably mixed. Nehru, Patel and Azad had their sympathies with the allies. But they desired that India’s participation in the war be one of free choice, not one dictated by the British. Gandhi was against armed resistance and wanted non-violent resistance and non-cooperation to contain the Japanese thrust. Jinnah supported the British war effort in the hope that the support would pay off political dividends. With the Japanese probing Indian defenses in the eastern state of Assam, Gandhi felt it was an opportune time to force the British to concede India’s freedom. Under his direction the Congress launched the Quit India movement. The goal was a non-violent, non-cooperation confrontation with the Raj to force an immediate transfer of power from the British to the Indians. The Muslim League did not overtly endorse the Quit India movement but did passively support it.

The British were in no mood to cede power in the midst of a war which at that time was going badly for them. Their response was to arrest the Congress leaders and a large number of Congress activists. After the arrests, there were violent demonstrations in the major cities which were put down with the help of Indian police and the army which was still loyal to the British. Nehru, Azad, Patel and other senior member of the Congress leadership spent the next three and a half years in the Ahmednagar prison in the Deccan. Gandhi was interned in the Agha Khan palace in Poona. In 1944 he started a fast in prison. His health deteriorated. The British, fearful of a backlash in case he died in prison, released him in 1944.

The resignation of the Congress provincial ministries in 1939 and the arrest of Congress leadership in 1942 was a boon to the Muslim League. Jinnah supported the British war effort and used the interregnum to consolidate the mass base for the League especially in the crucial provinces of the Punjab and Bengal. When the Congress leadership finally emerged from prison in 1945, India had changed. The British were exhausted. The League had grown to be a national organization claiming to represent all the Muslims of the subcontinent. There was widespread discontent in the country fueled by wartime scarcity, famine and British arrogance.

The formation of the Indian National Army (INA) during World War II was a major event in India’s struggle for independence. Subash Chandra Bose, a senior member of the Congress party, was forced to resign as President of the party in 1939 over policy differences with Gandhi. Bose believed that only armed resistance would compel the British to quit India while Gandhi emphasized nonviolence and non-cooperation. In 1941, when Japan entered the War, Bose made his way in disguise first to Germany where he met Hitler, and then to Japan where he formed the Indian National Army under Japanese patronage. The advancing Japanese armies overran Singapore and Malaya in March-April 1942. A large portion of the British army in the Pacific was Indian in origin. Over forty thousand Indian soldiers surrendered to the Japanese along with the British, the Australians and the New Zealanders. Of these, over thirty five thousand Indian soldiers, Muslim, Sikhs and Hindus alike, joined the Indian National Army under Bose.

The Japanese promised independence for India once the British were defeated and expelled. An Azad Hind (free India) government was set up under Subash Chandra Bose as an Indian government in exile. The INA was the vanguard of a military force spearheading an attack on India from Burma. The INA brigades did advance toward Kohima and Imphal in Assam but were stopped by allied forces. As the Japanese came under increasing pressure from the Americans in the Pacific theater, they pulled back logistic and air support from the Burma-India theater to defend their operations further east. Heavy rain and diseases took their toll. The INA was unable to advance any further than the hills of Assam. Bose died in an air crash on Taiwan in early 1945.

Even though the INA was unsuccessful in pushing the British out of India, its exploits caught the imagination of the Indian population. One may argue that it was the inspiration offered by the INA and the armed rebellions it fostered that was responsible for the ultimate British decision to quit India. News of an Asian power defeating the entrenched Europeans in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaya and Burma convinced many Indians that the British were not invincible after all. More than two million Indians served in the British Indian army. They fought valiantly in North Africa, southern Europe and the Far East. When the war was over they returned home to an India that was still a British colony. These soldiers had tasted victory in distant lands and were not inclined to accept a permanent colonial status for their motherland.

India was seething with resentment. The subcontinent was like a boiling pot where the steam was contained with difficulty by the Gandhian lid. The resentment did burst out soon after the war. The captured INA soldiers were put on trial in Delhi “for waging war on the King Emperor”. Among those accused of treason were Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. The trial of General Shah Nawaz Khan, Colonel Prem Sehgal and Colonel Gurbux Singh Dhillon at the Red Fort in Delhi attracted national attention. They were defended at the trial by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhulabhai Desai who took the position that the INA soldiers were soldiers of the Arizi Hukumate Azad Hind or the Provisional Government of Free India and as such should be treated as citizens of a free and sovereign Indian state. Jinnah appealed to the British to treat the prisoners with leniency.

The trial caused mass uproar. In February 1946, a section of the Indian Navy based in Bombay, observed a hartal (passive non-cooperation) ostensibly over the condition of food served to them. The hartal soon mushroomed into a full blown mutiny involving over 70 ships and 20,000 sailors stationed in Karachi, Bombay, Vishakhapatnam and Calcutta. The Congress tricolor and the League green flag were jointly hoisted over the commandeered ships. Elements of the Royal Indian Air Force joined in. The Indian army contingents based in Jabalpur were the next to defy orders from their British officers. Industrial workers from Bombay went on strike followed by workers in Ahmadabad. The situation was ominous for the colonial authorities.

The rebellion caught the attention of the British Prime Minister Clemente Attlee who ordered that it be crushed. Squadrons of the British navy surrounded the Bombay harbor. British heavy guns were trained on the Indian ships. Crack British army units were called out. Indian navy personnel in Karachi were fired upon killing and injuring dozens. British pilots of the Royal Indian Air Force flew in formation over the Bombay harbor in a show of force.

The stand of the Indian sailors attracted widespread support among the masses, seething with discontent with the apparent lack of progress towards independence by the major political parties. It caught the Indian leadership by surprise. Gandhi distanced himself from the uprising admonishing the sailors that they ought to address their grievances through established political leaderships. Jinnah urged the armed personnel to call off the strike. Nehru was equally unequivocal that the strike should be called off. Patel traveled to Bombay to ensure that the uprising ended peacefully. The apparent concern of the Congress and League leadership was that an uprising without a leader would lead to anarchy and would draw India into the whirlpool of cold war politics emerging after the Second World War. It might have invited intervention by the United States and the Soviet Union, as happened in the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam. The Communist Party of India, never far behind whenever there was an opportunity for anarchy, fully backed the uprising and their flag was hoisted along with those of the Congress and the League.

Bereft of political backing from the national leadership, the valiant stand of the sailors ended in failure and the mutiny was put down by the force of colonial bayonets. However, it demonstrated that as far as the Indian army was concerned the communal question did not exist. This was in February 1946, at a time when the Congress and the League were deadlocked in negotiations over the constitutional future of India. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs of the armed forces demonstrated that they were willing to stand up as one and challenge the British.

The British took the uprising more seriously than did Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and Patel. An exhausted Britain, licking its wounds from a near mortal bout with Hitler’s Germany, realized that the Indian armed forces which were the mainstay of the British Raj could not be counted on to put down a mass insurrection in the subcontinent. The mutiny of 1857 had started under similar circumstances, ostensibly over Sepoy discontent over cartridge wrappings. The British barely escaped a forcible exit from India in 1857 thanks to the support of the Sikhs, the Nizam and some of the nawabs and maharajahs. The situation in 1946 was different. India was now aware of itself. It was no longer willing to tolerate a foreign yoke under which it had toiled for over 150 years.

It was the uprising of Indian sailors, more than anything that Gandhi, Nehru or Jinnah did,  which convinced the British that it was time for them to quit. They could leave in one of two ways, either through negotiations or through armed conflict. Armed conflict would drag India into the whirlpool of the emerging cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union with unpredictable consequences for post war Asia. The larger issue was the shape of the post war world and continued western dominance in the new world order. The huge British investments in India would be safeguarded only through a negotiated settlement with trusted parties. The Indian National Congress and the Muslim League were led by British trained lawyers and in spite of their bitter disagreements on power sharing, could be counted on to safeguard British interests.

Negotiations were accelerated with the Congress and the League and India’s independence was placed on fast track. The British cabinet appointed a commission in March 1946 to visit India, consult with the major political parties and recommend a constitutional framework for independence. The commission was headed by Patrick Lawrence, then Secretary of State for India. It included Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and A.V. Alexander, Secretary of the navy. The commission held intense consultations with Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and Azad, the President of Congress, and in May 1946 presented the so-called Cabinet Mission Plan.

The Cabinet Mission Plan envisaged a united India with a federal government consisting of three groups. Group A was the bulk of British India which had a Hindu majority. The northwestern portions of the empire consisting of the Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and NW Frontier constituted Group B. Bengal and Assam were grouped under Group C. Groups B and C had nominal Muslim majorities. Defense, foreign affairs and communications would be handled by the Federal Government. The residual powers vested with the three groups. Each group was free to delegate any additional powers to the federal center.

Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan as he felt this was the best that could be achieved under the circumstances. He was assured by the British that the congress would accept it also. But Gandhi was adamantly opposed to the plan. He saw in it the genesis of a future Pakistan. He advised the chief minister of Assam, Gopinath Bordoloi, not to join Bengal in Zone C.

Despite Gandhi’s opposition, most of the senior leadership in Congress supported the Cabinet Mission Plan in the hope that India could be kept united. On July 7, 1946 the Congress did pass a resolution accepting the Plan. However, other fateful events intervened. On July 10, 1946, during a question and answer period following a news conference in Bombay, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stated that the Congress party was not bound by the stipulations of the Cabinet Mission Plan. Nehru was the newly elected President of the Congress and his statement was the bombshell that destroyed the Cabinet Mission Plan. Jinnah called a meeting of the League working committee to discuss the Congress rejection of the plan. Meanwhile, the Congress working committee met and issued a lengthy statement in which it said that even though they had reservations about the Plan, they would abide by its stipulations. Jinnah saw in this wavering attitude of the Congress a harbinger of things to come. If the Congress could go back on its promises even while the British were in India, he asked, how could the Muslims have faith in their promises after the departure of the British. The League working committee rescinded its earlier acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan.

The failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan was the single most important milestone on the road to partition. Up until August 1946 there was a possibility, however remote, that the Congress and the League would find a meeting ground to keep India united. That hope evaporated with the statement of Nehru and rescinding of the Plan by the League. The question before a student of history is: why did the leaders of the Congress and the League, in their collective wisdom, failed to foresee the consequences of their decisions?

Pakistan was conceived by Mohammed Iqbal as a Muslim majority region in northwestern British India. It would enjoy legislative autonomy within or outside the British Empire. Iqbal foresaw the future of Muslim civilization in a continuous evolution of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). Ijtihad, meaning a rigorous application of the Shariah, was for him a dynamic tool which man used in his unceasing struggle as the trustee of divine will to discover new vistas of fiqh. Postulating that Ijtihad could be exercised only by an elected legislative assembly of Muslims, he argued that a non-Muslim legislature could not discharge this function. Hence, he called for the establishing of an autonomous Muslim region in parts of British India wherein the Muslims could elect their own representatives and discharge the divine mission of Ijtihad.

While Iqbal was motivated by the vision of an Islamic civilization rejuvenated through Ijtihad of the masses, Jinnah, the architect of Pakistan, was motivated by a desire to avoid Hindu hegemony over Muslim majority areas which would bottle up Muslim aspirations for generations to come. Jinnah accepted the challenge of implementing Iqbal’s concept in the matrix of a Hindu majority India which was ruled at the time by Pax Brittania. He was a secular man, a nationalist who for most of his life sought Hindu-Muslim reconciliation but was frustrated in his efforts by Congress party which was unwilling to share power with the Muslim League. Unlike Gandhi, Jinnah was against using religious symbols in the struggle for independence and believed that negotiations and constitutional means offered the best guarantee for a peaceful transfer of power from British colonial power to India. Indeed, it was the use of religious symbols by Gandhi in the non-cooperation movement of 1921 and his alliance with the Muslim religious right during the Khilafat Movement that had prompted Jinnah to quit the Congress party.

It is possible to argue that Jinnah’s goal was not partition but parity between Hindus and Muslims in a united India. In support of this thesis, one may look at the commitment of Jinnah to Hindu-Muslim amity in his early career. Jinnah was a champion of minority rights but he advanced them within constitutional means avoiding mass agitation and anarchy. As late as 1928 when the Nehru Report was published, he sought to bridge the positions of the two communities. It was the Congress rejection of Jinnah’s 14 points that convinced him of the vulnerability of Muslims under Hindu majority rule.

The Lahore resolution of 1940 calling for the establishment of Pakistan was deliberately vague as to what Pakistan meant. Jinnah, a master tactician and a political master, knew that the moment the idea of Pakistan became concrete, it would be open to critical scrutiny and would lose some of its abstract appeal to the Muslim masses. A vaguely defined Pakistan meant different things to different people and was amorphous enough to provide at once a rallying point for Muslims and a negotiating platform for discussions with the British and the Congress party. It was Nehru’s rejection of the Cabinet Mission Plan that killed any hope of a united India. Events moved at a torrid pace thereafter. Jinnah, the constitutionalist turned Jinnah the mass leader. He called for “direct action” on August 16, 1946 which started an irrevocable slide towards partition. However, he did not foresee that the implementation of a Muslim majority Pakistan would necessarily mean the partition of the great provinces of the Punjab and Bengal. When partition did arrive, he had to accept a “moth eaten Pakistan” over no Pakistan at all.

The contribution of Gandhi to the partition of the subcontinent was more substantial than is commonly acknowledged. He was a complex man who touched India at multiple levels. First and foremost, he was a nationalist whose mission was to free India from British colonial rule. However, what set him apart from other nationalists who were equally passionate about India’s independence were his methods. He had perfected the art of satyagraha or passive non-resistance while fighting racial prejudice in South Africa . Upon his return to India in 1916 he set out to apply these methods to force the British to concede India’s independence.

It is a tribute to the genius of Gandhi that he understood correctly the basis of British imperialism and came up with an effective political strategy to undermine this basis. India as a colony supplied raw materials to British factories. The British controlled the means of production and the Indians were the coolies and consumers. The finished goods, marked up several fold, were brought back and sold in the vast Indian market at monopoly prices. Thus India provided both the push and the pull for British imperialism, supplying raw materials at the input end and markets for finished products at the output end. In the process Britain got richer and India was poorer by the day. Cotton provides a good example for this process. Indian cotton was shipped in bales to the factories in Lancashire where it was processed into cloth, brought back to India and sold to India’s peasants. The British East India Company had killed the weaving industry in Bengal as early as 1790 with exorbitant taxation and active discouragement of the weavers. The story was the same whether one looked at salt or sewing needles.

Gandhi built a mass movement on the basis of passive non cooperation. His strategy was simple and effective. Avoid British manufactured goods. Be self sufficient. He started to spin his own cloth and the spinning wheel became a symbol of Gandhian resistance. Khadi, or homemade cloth, became the hallmark of Congress workers. By refusing to feed Britain’s productive machine, he struck at the very roots of British imperialism. In 1930 he declared he would march to the ocean “to make salt”. The British first laughed at him. When they realized the political punch of his techniques, they arrested him. When they could no longer contain him, they negotiated with him.

The most enduring contribution of Gandhi was that he made India aware of itself. His use of Satyagraha (truth-force) was both a tactic and a moral weapon. Satyagraha had its foundation in the Buddhist doctrine of self-abnegation and self-control. The thrust of Satyagraha was at once to tap the inner reservoir of moral energy in its practitioner and to place its target on the moral defensive. However, it called for an extraordinary degree of self discipline and restraint which was in short supply among the masses. The non-cooperation movement based o Satyagraha often became disruptive and to the extent it was violent it was counter-productive.

However, it was Gandhi’s use of religious symbols that injected communalism into India’s freedom struggle. In 1921 Gandhi forged an alliance with the Muslim religious right in support of the Khilafat movement. In turn, the Muslim religious establishment backed Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement against the British. When the movement got out of hand and turned violent, Gandhi abandoned it but the seeds of religious separatism had been sown. It was soon thereafter that religious riots broke out in parts of the Punjab and UP. Savarkar composed his book on Hindutva in 1924. In 1928 the Congress made a volte-face on the issue of separate electoral representation for Muslims. The Muslim League upped the ante in its demands. When the decade ended in 1930, India was a divided land, locked in bitter communal Hindu-Muslim rhetoric. The divisions were there for all to see at the round table conference of 1931. Ironically, it was Jinnah, who had warned the Congress and Muslim League against the injection of religion into India’s freedom struggle. Neither side listened to him then. Jinnah was so disgusted with Indian politics that he retired and settled in London after 1931. It was only 1935, with the Muslims completely demoralized that he returned to take charge of the League at the insistence of the Mohammed Ali brothers and Allama Iqbal.

Gandhi was vehemently opposed to the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 and actively campaigned against it. His goal in life was independence of India but he was unwilling to share power with Jinnah to achieve it. Nehru’s statement at a news conference in July 1946 that Congress had agreed only to participate in a Constituent Assembly but not the grouping of states into zones A, B and C, effectively scuttled the Plan. Two months later, partition became a certainty. When it was time to make a decision and the Congress working committee considered the proposal for partition, Gandhi, who had steadfastly maintained that he would never agree to partition, recommended that the proposal be accepted. He would rather accept partition than a federal government under the Cabinet Mission Plan. This was the ultimate contradiction in Gandhi’s political career which historians will argue about for years to come.

Looking through the prism of historical hindsight one wonders where the principal actors on the stage of India’s history stood at this critical juncture. Was Gandhi as passionate about a united India as he is made out to be? If so, why did he not negotiate on the basis of the Cabinet Mission Plan? Was Nehru under so much pressure that he lost his cool at the press conference in July 1946 where he renounced the Cabinet Mission Plan? Was it a misspoken statement, or, was a reflection of Gandhi’s opinion? Was Nehru so enamored of a socialist India with a strong center that he was willing to sacrifice the unity of the subcontinent for his ideological convictions? Was Jinnah really for partition or was it a ploy to obtain the maximum concessions from an unwilling Congress? If he was determined to have an independent Pakistan, then why did he accept the Cabinet Mission Plan for a united India? Did he realize until the eleventh hour that the partition of British India would also mean a partition of the Punjab and Bengal? Was the Congress commitment to a united India so flimsy that they were willing to risk partition rather than share power? Did Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel consider the consequences of partition for the minorities on both sides of the border? As for the British, why were they in such hurry to pack up and leave while the Punjab was in flames? Was a divided India more in line with their long term strategic interests?

What is obvious in historical hindsight is that none of them, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Azad anticipated the holocaust that was to descend on northern India once the partition plan was announced. It left in its wake a million dead and fifteen million destitute refugees. Partition was their collective failure.

The Cabinet Mission Plan was the last hope for keeping India united, giving a chance to the two great religious communities to work together. With the failure of this plan, India took a tortuous and precipitous slide towards partition. The constituent assembly met but the League boycotted it. Weary of the mounting tensions in India and alarmed at the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy, the British cabinet sent a new viceroy, Mountbatten to Delhi to arrange for a transfer of power. Since the League was boycotting the constituent assembly, Mountbatten invited Nehru to form a cabinet. Jinnah was furious. He saw this as proof of the duplicity of the British and connivance of the Congress. He called for “Direct Action Day” on August 16, 1946.

Until the 16^th of August 1946, the leaders of the Congress and the League were in control of history. After that date it was history that was in control of them. The Direct Action day was conceived as a day of peaceful protests. But in the communally charged atmosphere of India any excuse was sufficient to start a riot. The day passed peacefully in most parts of India but Calcutta was the scene of horrific riots with 6,000 dead and more than 20,000 injured. Some chroniclers have put the number of injured at over 100,000. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs burned each other’s homes and stabbed innocent men, women and children. For five days, Calcutta burned. The army which was still under the control of the British did not intervene until it was too late. So ferocious were the riots that they destroyed whatever hope still lingered for a negotiated settlement of the Hindu-Muslim issue.

Some historians have blamed Suhrawardy who was the Muslim League chief minister of Bengal for the riots. However, the British, after a thorough investigation concluded that this assessment was incorrect. The viceroy Wavell wrote to the British Secretary of India Patrick Lawrence in August 1946: “Last weekend has seen dreadful riots in Calcutta . The estimates of casualties are 3,000 dead and 17,000 injured. The Bengal Congress is convinced that all the trouble was deliberately engineered by the Muslim League Ministry, but no satisfactory evidence to that effect has reached me yet. It is said that the decision to have a public holiday on 16th August was the cause of trouble, but I think this is very far-fetched. There was a public holiday in Sind and there was no trouble there. At any rate, whatever the causes of the outbreak, when it started, the Hindus and Sikhs were every bit as fierce as Muslims. The present estimate is that appreciably more Muslims were killed than the Hindus”.

Jinnah realized that staying out of the cabinet would be a tactical error as it would give the Congress a free reign over policies at a time when the British were seriously contemplating a transfer of power. A coalition interim government was formed in October 1946. Pandit Nehru served as the prime minister of the interim government, Sardar Patel was the home minister, while Liaqat Ali Khan became the finance minister.

So intense was the animosity between the League and the Congress that the interim government became an arena for political one-upmanship rather than a platform for efficient administration. There was daily acrimony between the two sides. The League and Congress ministers held separate meetings. Instead of a give and take required in a democratic set up, each side sought to curtail the activities of the other. Liaqat Ali used his position as the finance minister to subject the Congress ministries to intense scrutiny. Bitterness grew among the cabinet members. Patel in particular was so embittered that he was won over to the idea of partition.

Mountbatten was eager to finish the job of power transfer and return to London. He pushed the idea of partition, converted Nehru and Patel to his point of view and sold the project to the British cabinet. A divided India was more to the liking of Churchill who was now the opposition leader in the British parliament. Jinnah was still under the impression that partition would bring the provinces of Punjab and Bengal in their entirety into Pakistan. It came as a shock to him when the Congress advanced the position in March 1947 that partition of the subcontinent would also mean a partition of the great provinces of Punjab and Bengal. Only the Muslim majority districts would be included in Pakistan. East Punjab and West Bengal would stay in India. The 572 princely states were given the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan keeping in view their geography and the wishes of their people. Jinnah argued passionately to keep Punjab and Bengal united in Pakistan but failed to convince Mountbatten of his position. Reluctantly, he agreed to “a moth eaten Pakistan”.

Widespread riots broke out in Punjab in March 1947. Ethnic cleansing on a scale rarely witnessed in human history was practiced on both sides of the new proposed border. No one knows how many innocent Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs perished in the riots. Estimates range from half a million to two million. Entire villages were decimated. Towns went up in flames. Thousands of women and children were abducted and abused. Fifteen million refugees crossed the border. And the new nations of India and Pakistan came into existence immersed in flames of hatred and soaked in rivers of blood. They have fought three wars and a fourth war has been narrowly avoided. Of late, there is movement towards a détente. One hopes that the process continues, leading to lasting peace in the subcontinent and prosperity for its teaming millions.

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