British Raj

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The British Raj came into being on the 28th of June 1858, when Queen Victoria assumed direct authority over a territory stretching from the Himalayan mountains to the Thar Desert, from the fertile Indo-Gangetic Plain to a long and winding coastline. A single proclamation transferred control from the East India Company to the Crown, and in doing so set in motion nearly nine decades of rule that would reshape the politics, economy, and social fabric of the Indian subcontinent. The word "raj" itself comes from Hindustani, meaning simply "reign" or "rule" -- a plainly stated dominion over what was, by any measure, one of the most complex pieces of territory on earth.

  At its greatest extent, the Raj encompassed present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, plus a string of temporary holdings from British Somaliland to the Straits Settlements. It was home to hundreds of millions of people belonging to dozens of faiths and speaking hundreds of languages. It was a founding member of the League of Nations and participated in multiple Summer Olympics under the name British India. Its Famine Codes were eventually adopted by the United Nations worldwide.

  And yet the Raj was also the site of a massacre in an Amritsar garden, mass starvation on a scale that drew international condemnation, and a partition so traumatic that between 250,000 and 500,000 people died in the violence that followed independence. How a single governing structure could produce all of these outcomes -- reform and repression, railway networks and famines, cricket and curtailed civil liberties -- is the story this documentary sets out to tell. It begins not with pomp, but with the wreckage of a rebellion.

• 2. After the Rebellion

  ›

  The Indian Rebellion of 1857 shook British India but did not topple it. When British authorities took stock of what had gone wrong, they drew three lessons that would quietly govern policy for generations.

  The first was military. Units made up of Muslims and Brahmins from the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh -- identified as the core of the rebellion -- were disbanded. New regiments were formed from groups the British deemed reliable: Sikhs and Baluchis among them. The army's internal organisation, rebuilt on these lines, remained unchanged until 1947. The 1861 Census put the English population in India at 125,945. Of these, only around 41,862 were civilians; the remaining 84,083 were military officers and men.

  The second lesson was political. The princes and large landowners, who had not joined the rebellion, were described by Lord Canning as "breakwaters in a storm". Their loyalty was rewarded by folding them into the British-Indian political system and guaranteeing their territories. Peasants, who in many cases had fought for their former landlords rather than the British, were judged disloyal. As a direct result, no major land reforms were pursued for the next 90 years; Bengal and Bihar remained dominated by large landholdings.

  The third lesson touched religion and society. Before 1857, British officials had pursued social reform with enthusiasm -- Lord William Bentinck had banned the practice of sati. After the rebellion, that appetite evaporated. Queen Victoria's proclamation, issued immediately after the transfer of power, declared: "We disclaim alike our Right and Desire to impose Our Convictions on any of Our Subjects." Even the remarriage of Hindu child widows -- a cause British officials privately supported -- was left untouched. The British had decided that Indian traditions were too resilient to be changed by decree. What they had not yet decided was how to replace the urgency of reform with anything else.

• 3. Railways, Famines, and the Cost of Infrastructure

  ›

  By the middle of the 19th century, a vast network of railways, roads, canals, and telegraph lines was being laid across India at extraordinary speed. The stated purpose was to move raw materials -- cotton, food-grains, and more -- from India's interior to ports like Bombay, then onward to England. Finished British goods travelled the same routes in reverse.

  In Britain, the financial risks of such infrastructure projects were borne by private investors. In India, the burden fell on taxpayers -- primarily farmers and farm labourers. The total cost amounted to £50 million. Despite this investment, very few skilled jobs went to Indians. By 1920, with India possessing the fourth-largest railway network in the world and six decades of construction behind it, only ten per cent of "superior posts" in the Indian Railways were held by Indians.

  The same export-driven agricultural economy that the railways were built to serve began to destabilise local food supplies. By the last decade of the 19th century, large fractions of cotton and some food-grains were being shipped to distant markets. Small farmers, exposed to the swings of those markets, lost land, animals, and equipment to money-lenders. Famine was not new to the subcontinent, but the famines of the latter half of the 19th century were severe on a new scale -- tens of millions died, and critics on both sides of the colonial relationship blamed the sluggish colonial administrations.

  The Great Famine of 1876-1878 killed 5.25 million people. The government spent Rs. 80 million on reduced relief. In 1880, the Indian Famine Commission delivered its report, and the resulting Indian Famine Codes -- the earliest systematic famine-prevention scales and programmes in the world -- were put into place. In one form or another, they were adopted by the United Nations and the Food and Agricultural Organisation well into the 1970s. The railway network, for all the inequity of its construction, did provide critical famine relief and helped nascent Indian-owned industry take root. In the newly canalled Punjab, commercial cropping also increased food production for local consumption. Infrastructure, in short, was neither simply exploitation nor simply progress. It was both, at the same time.

• 4. The Rise of the Congress

  ›

  On the 28th of December 1885, seventy men gathered in Bombay and founded the Indian National Congress. Many had been educated at the new British-founded universities in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. They elected Womesh Chunder Bonerjee as the first president. The membership was a westernised elite, and no one at that founding session made any effort to broaden the base.

  The men who joined this organisation were simultaneously encouraged and frustrated by British rule. The encouragement came from several directions: success in British education and in the Indian Civil Service, the dominion status granted to Canada in 1867, and the work of Oriental scholars like Monier Monier-Williams and Max Muller, who were presenting ancient India as a great civilisation. The irritation came from racial discrimination in daily life, from the deployment of Indian troops in campaigns like the Second Anglo-Afghan War, and from laws like the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 that gave the government power to imprison journalists without trial.

  The trigger that turned frustration into organised politics was Viceroy Lord Ripon's partial reversal of the Ilbert Bill in 1883. The bill had proposed putting Indian judges in the Bengal Presidency on equal legal footing with British ones. When it was watered down, the educated middle class understood that even modest legal equality would be contested. The Congress spent its first two decades debating British economic policy, developing a nationalist argument that Britain drained India of wealth through unfair trade, restraint on Indian industry, and use of Indian taxes to pay high British civil-service salaries.

  By 1900, the Congress was not a single voice. Congress member Gopal Krishna Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society, lobbying for legislative reform and working among untouchable communities. By 1905, a sharp divide had opened between moderates, led by Gokhale, and "extremists" led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who tried to mobilise Indians through an explicitly Hindu political identity, exemplified in the annual public Ganapati festivals he inaugurated in western India. That fracture would widen for another decade before Gandhi found a way to span it.

• 5. Partition, Swadeshi, and the Muslim League

  ›

  Viceroy Lord Curzon, who held office from 1899 to 1905, was by any account the most energetic administrator the Raj had seen. His reform agenda ran to dozens of items -- gold currency reform, a Railway Board, irrigation overhaul, police reform, archaeological preservation, new agricultural banks. The problem was that his single most consequential act was not a reform but a partition.

  In 1905, Curzon divided Bengal Province -- the largest administrative subdivision in British India -- into a Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, and a Hindu-majority province of West Bengal. The division had been considered by colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck but never acted upon. Its communal charge was immense. The Hindu elite of Bengal, many of whom owned land in East Bengal leased to Muslim peasants, protested with force. Surendranath Banerjee, a two-time Congress president, led a Swadeshi campaign built on boycotting British goods. The boycott cut imports of British textiles by 25 per cent. Swadeshi cloth, more expensive and somewhat less comfortable than its Lancashire competitors, was worn across India as a mark of national pride.

  The rallying slogan was "Bande Mataram" -- a phrase drawn from the novel Anand Math, in which Hindus had battled Muslim oppressors. Its political use was not lost on Muslim leaders. In 1906, the Muslim elite met with the new viceroy, Lord Minto, and asked for separate electorates and proportional legislative representation. That December, the All-India Muslim League was founded in Dacca, hosted at the mansion of Dacca Nawab Khwaja Salimullah in Shahbag. The Muslim elite's position had been forming for three decades, beginning with the Census of British India in 1871, which first estimated Muslim-majority regions, and hardened through subsequent decades of intermittent public hostility from Hindu political groups like the Arya Samaj.

  The partition of Bengal was rescinded in 1911 and announced by King George V in person at the Delhi Durbar, where he also declared that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi. But the political consequences of the partition could not be rescinded so easily. The League and the Congress continued on parallel, sometimes converging, sometimes diverging tracks -- a tension that would not resolve until 1947, and then only through bloodshed.

• 6. Gandhi, Satyagraha, and the First Tests

  ›

  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India in 1915. He was already known for his civil liberties work in South Africa, where he had developed the technique he called Satyagraha -- Striving for Truth. His mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale advised him to spend his first year simply travelling and observing, and Gandhi complied.

  Satyagraha was not, in Gandhi's mind, a synonym for passive resistance, a technique he regarded as a practical strategy of the weak. Satyagraha was, for him, the "last resort of those strong enough in their commitment to truth to undergo suffering in its cause". Its non-violent underpinning, Ahimsa, formed one of two pillars of his outlook; Truth was the other. He had tested the approach during 1907-1914 in South Africa against unjust racial laws, and in his 1909 essay Hind Swaraj had set out three foundations for Indian self-rule: solidarity between Hindus and Muslims; the removal of untouchability; and swadeshi, the boycott of manufactured foreign goods paired with the revival of Indian cottage industry.

  Gandhi made his political debut on Indian soil in 1917 in Champaran district in Bihar, near the Nepal border, where tenant farmers had been forced to plant indigo on a portion of their land and sell it at below-market prices to the British planters who leased them the land. When local British authorities ordered Gandhi to leave, he refused on moral grounds, framing his refusal as individual Satyagraha. The Viceroy in Delhi, anxious to maintain domestic peace during wartime, pressured the provincial government to rescind the order. A young Congress leader from Bihar named Rajendra Prasad joined Gandhi in Champaran and became a loyal supporter; he would go on to play a prominent role in the independence movement.

  The following year, Gandhi launched two more Satyagrahas in Gujarat: one in rural Kaira, where farmers resisted increased land taxes, and one in Ahmedabad, where textile workers struck over low wages. In Ahmedabad, Gandhi fasted in solidarity, and a settlement was reached. In Kaira, the British did not back down immediately, but the agitation won Gandhi a lifelong lieutenant: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organised the farmers and who would later be a leader of the independence movement. These early tests showed both the power and the limits of non-violent pressure. They also established a pattern: Gandhi did not win every satyagraha outright, but each one extended his network of loyal collaborators.

• 7. War, Massacre, and Non-Cooperation

  ›

  Some 1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of the British Indian Army took part in the First World War, fighting primarily in Iraq and the Middle East. By the end of 1919, 1.5 million Indians had served in the armed services in combatant or non-combatant roles, and India had provided £146 million in revenue for the war effort. The wartime taxes, combined with trade disruption, roughly doubled the overall price index in India between 1914 and 1920. Returning veterans, especially in the Punjab, faced unemployment; food riots broke out in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal provinces.

  The government's response to post-war unrest was the Rowlatt Act, passed in early 1919 after every Indian member of the Imperial Legislative Council voted against it. The act extended emergency powers -- trial by a panel of three judges without a jury, detention without trial -- into peacetime. It aroused indignation across India and pushed Gandhi to the forefront of the nationalist movement.

  What happened next in Amritsar changed the Raj permanently. On the 13th of April 1919, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered fifty soldiers of the British Indian Army to open fire without warning on an unarmed crowd of thousands of men, women, and children gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden. The Government of India reported 379 dead and 1,100 wounded. The Indian National Congress estimated three times as many dead. Dyer was removed from command but became a celebrated figure in Britain among those with connections to the Raj. Historians have treated the episode as a decisive step toward the end of British rule.

  In 1920, after the British government refused to reverse course, Gandhi launched a campaign of non-cooperation. Indians returned British awards and honours, resigned from civil service positions, and boycotted British goods. Gandhi simultaneously reorganised the Congress, opening its membership to even the poorest Indians and transforming it from an elite debating society into a mass movement. He halted the campaign in 1922 after the violent incident at Chauri Chaura, but political pressure kept building. By the late 1920s, the Indian National Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru had issued a demand for Purna Swaraj -- complete independence -- drafted by a working committee that included Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. Gandhi's 1930 Salt Satyagraha, in which thousands marched to the sea to make their own salt and defy a colonial tax, brought the campaign to global attention. In 1931, Gandhi travelled to London to negotiate at the Round Table Conferences.

• 8. Partition and Independence

  ›

  By the time the Second World War ended, the British Raj was financially and politically exhausted. Over two million Indians had volunteered for military service in the British Army. The war effort generated heavy British spending on munitions produced in India, leading to rapid industrial expansion -- textiles up 16 per cent, steel up 18 per cent, chemicals up 30 per cent. London paid most of the cost of the Indian Army, which had the effect of erasing India's national debt; India ended the war with a surplus of £1,300 million. But the political credibility of British rule had not recovered from the Quit India Movement of 1942, when the Raj arrested all national, provincial, and local Congress leaders and held tens of thousands until 1945.

  In January 1946, mutinies broke out in the armed services, beginning with RAF servicemen frustrated by slow repatriation. The mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946 was followed by others in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi. The new Labour government in Britain sent the Cabinet Mission to India, led by Lord Pethick Lawrence and including Sir Stafford Cripps. New elections were called; the Congress won in eight of eleven provinces.

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed the 16th of August 1946 Direct Action Day, intending to highlight peacefully the demand for a Muslim homeland. The following day, Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and spread across British India. The violence in Punjab and Bengal continued unabated as independence approached. The new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power after determining that the British Army was unprepared for the scale of potential violence, allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan.

  On the 15th of August 1947, two nations came into being. The Dominion of Pakistan was constituted with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as governor-general; the Dominion of India with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister and Mountbatten as its first governor-general. Official ceremonies took place in Karachi on the 14th of August and in New Delhi on the 15th, arranged so that Mountbatten could attend both. In Punjab, where the new border cut the Sikh regions in half, the bloodshed was severe. In Bengal and Bihar, Gandhi's physical presence helped contain communal violence. Between 250,000 and 500,000 people died in the violence on both sides of the new borders. Millions more -- Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu -- crossed those borders and did not come back. The future Constitution of independent India was based substantially on the Government of India Act 1935, the last major legislative framework the Raj had produced: an uncomfortable reminder that even the architecture of independence was built, in part, from the structures of colonial rule.