1.1 Colonial history: British rule in India

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From the course by The University of Melbourne

Contemporary India

29 ratings

The University of Melbourne

Contemporary India

29 ratings

This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view. While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment. No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course. This course is taught in English. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb

From the lesson

Contemporary India's history

We begin this course by discussing the history of pre-partition India i.e. before 1947. We will trace the trajectory of British rule from its inception in India and discuss important events like the mutiny of 1857, the formation of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, the divide and rule policy of the British, the idea of separate electorates and how it paved the way for partition in the subcontinent. You will be able to appreciate the devastation that partition brought to the region with millions of people killed, displaced and made refugees overnight. We will try to impress upon the fact that such a momentous event in world history, which involved ethnic cleansing in huge numbers, has been almost forgotten or is not remembered often enough; nor are the lessons learnt. The week concludes by discussing how partition still continues to affect community relations, relations between states and the very foundational ideas of the two nations: India and Pakistan.

1.1 Colonial history: British rule in India12:10

1.2 Pre-partition history7:58

1.3 The tryst with destiny9:38

1.4 Partition and nation-states: a technology of modernity11:10

1.5 Partition and amnesia12:33

1.6 Ghosts of partition: contemporary India 18:32

1.7 Ghosts of partition: contemporary India 212:39

Meet the Instructors

Anthony D'Costa
Professor
School of Social and Political Sciences

Welcome to this lecture on the history of contemporary India.

I will be structuring this lecture in seven sections.

And these are the seven sections.

And this particular section is dealing with the first thing,

which is colonial history, or British rule in India.

And in that section I'll be looking at three particular points.

British rule in India, the freedom process,

the process towards independence, and the creation of the modern sub-continent, and

finally the idea of India with Nehru and

the tryst with destiny - Nehru and India - so that's the third point.

So firstly,

British rule in India started with the rule of the East India Company.

The East India Company actually controlled India for the first oh…

certainly until about 1857,

so more than 60 years.

British rule in India generally was about trade to begin with.

The East India company was a major joint stock trading company,

and about the extraction of resources from India, a variety of things.

But their actual control of territories, the justification for

that was the idea of the civilising mission.

You've all probably heard about Rudyard Kipling, a very famous poet from

Britain - was born in India actually and

had a very strong relationship with India but

he was very much part of the British ruling elites ideology.

And one of his famous poems is called the <i>White Man's Burden</i>, and

in this particular poem, and I quote, he says, ‘go send your sons to exile

to serve your captives need’, captives being the people in the colony, and

he calls these people in the colony, the Indians, in this context,

‘your new caught sullen peoples, half-devil, and half-child.’

So these are the people who have to be civilised,

who have to be made into adults and who have to be educated and so on.

And then finally he says, ‘take up the white man's burden and

reap his old rewards, the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.’

So, he says that you'll be

civilising them but they will hate you for it, and you can get

a certain echo of this in modern politics when there's a whole notion in

we're going to export democracy here, but they hate us for it.

So this idea that we will be doing good things for

them, but we'll have to put up with their hatred.

Part of the civilising mission was this notion of the woman

question and this is the way in which some scholars have put it,

because what the woman question really was…

So, the woman question was really about the political

encounter between a colonial state and the conquered people.

And if you look at the work of James Mill, who was the father of John Stuart Mill,

a very famous British philosopher, James Mill wrote <i>The History of British India</i>

where he actually said, and I quote, among rude people,

women are generally degraded among civilised people, they're exalted.

And Mill goes on to say that when societies become fully civilised,

then the women in that society become equivalent to the men.

So women have to be educated.

They have to be civilised.

They have to be emancipated and so on and

the degenerate and barbaric treatment of women in India are going from

widow burning or Sati. That's a picture of widow burning, which was a Hindu custom

of the widow immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband.

The widow burning, child marriage, veiling or pardah,

you'll having women in seclusion, all of these things were seen as degenerate and

barbaric, and attempts to transform native societies by transforming

the status of women was one of the major parts of the civilising mission.

And in fact Frantz Fanon talks about this in the context of Algeria,

where he says that the French

view is if you want to destroy the structure of Algerian society,

its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women.

We must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and

in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.

So, women have to be liberated, emancipated.

They are the reproducers of culture, they are the teachers of children.

They are the people who have to really be part of this this civilising mission.

They have to be the objects of this civilising mission.

A third thing was education as a part of modernity.

So to educate native subjects in English language,

in the education of the metropolis, the English language education.

Here is a picture of Calcutta University, which was established in 1857, and

the attitude to educating the natives is summed up in this rather infamous minute

on education written by Lord Macaulay, an aristocrat and historian, and novelist,

actually where in that minute, he says, and I quote, ‘a single shelf of a good

European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.

And he goes on to say that, and I quote, ‘we must at

present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and

the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and

colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.

So people who are mediators,

people who are the collaborating class, people who will rule for us so

that we we don't have to be there in force, these are people

whom we educate to be like us, to be shadows of us, to rule in our state.

So what happens after

1857, and we're just going to talk about that.

What happens after 1857, which is the first

Indian Rebellion… it is called Indian Rebellion by modern Indian historians.

The British called it the Sepoy Mutiny or the Mutiny of Soldiers.

In 1857 after this mutiny the British Crown takes over India.

So that is a big change so the British Crown,

then it becomes a fully fledged crown colony.

The Indian Rebellion was a widespread

movement of disaffection against the British and in a sense,

it's the first big sign of disaffection with the British.

I mean, there were others, obviously, but this is and

India only wins independence about 90 years into the future, in 1947.

But it's a big event.

It's a big sign of disaffection and it starts off because

a new rifle is introduced into the Bengal army and there's a rumour that goes around

saying that the cartridges are greased with a cow fat, which is taboo for

Muslims sorry, it is taboo for Hindus, and pig fat, which is taboo for Muslims.

But at the same time there were other reasons for the disaffection as well, and

one of them was annexation of various small kingdoms in India.

And the last one which was not such a small kingdom, was Awadh.

The province of Awadh was annexed in 1856 and and also the taxes were high.

Various land owners felt they were losing control of the land.

And when the soldiers, cantonment after cantonment of soldiers rebelled,

then a variety of other disaffected princes, aristocrats, village and

townspeople with grievances all rebelled as well and

the rebellion was crushed, as I said, the crown took over.

And the British began to

to try to consolidate their hold on the colony.

The hold on colony had

been a little bit precarious.

But after this, there was a real attempt for it of which I'll talk about

later, to placate the Muslims who were seen as particularly dangerous,

and all to the policy of divide and rule, separating the Muslims from the Hindus,

which is very much a precursor to the ideologies of partition.

And in 1885, also one of the oldest and

largest democratic organisations in the world, the Indian National Congress.

It was founded in 1885, and it produced some of the major leaders of India,

including Mohandas Gandhi, whom of course you would have heard of, and

the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru.

And they promoted the Swadeshi movement that is the purchase and

use of Indian-made products and boycott of foreign products, and mass protests.

And Mohandas Gandhi, who was actually educated as a barrister in England, and

then was politicised in South Africa,

where he saw the terrible oppression of people of colour by the white colonists.

He brought this politicisation to India, and

through very innovative methods of nonviolence and non-cooperation was

the major architect of, of Indian independence and

probably the greatest mass leader that India has ever seen.

And in a sense at this time we can actually say that by

the time that Mohandas Gandhi comes into power, and

by the time that the Indian National Congress becomes very active,

some of the ideas and ideologies of partition are already in place.

And that ideology is that Hindu and

Muslim world-views and destinies are so irreconcilable that

they could not peacefully live together in one country in any circumstances.

This is the rationale for

partition that we are going to explore in the next six sections.

The idea that people would live together for at least

almost 1,000 years, suddenly had world views and ideas and

ideologies and cultures that were completely at odds with each other.

So much at odds that they actually needed to live separately.

So here you have a picture of how the continent was divided.

You have West Pakistan, which is green, and East Pakistan, as you see, separated by India.

So in a sense like a nation in two bits separated by a hostile

other nation, is quite illogical.

And the orange bit is India.

And then the bit which is both orange and

green stripes was a disputed area of Kashmir.

So we're going to talk about this in

some of the lectures to come.

But in the next section we're going to talk about pre-partition history and

the history of Hindus and Muslims before partition, and

to see how that actually meshed with the ideology of partition.

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