Was the British Raj strong or fragile in 1905?

The short answer

• Conquest completed, confidence at its peak. By 1905 British officials could look back on half a century in which the conquest appeared settled. The Mutiny of 1857 had been crushed, Crown rule had begun in 1858, and the frontier against Russia had been fixed in the Great Game. Curzon called the Raj “the miracle of the world”; no serious challenge had yet been mounted. That confidence encouraged officials to discount Indian opinion just as it was organizing.
• The quilt, not the monolith. After 1857 Britain kept the princely states as loyal buffers, inexpensive to govern and a traditional barrier to nationalism. The tan areas on the map accounted for two-fifths of the land and a quarter of the people, outside British India proper. Their rulers had personal treaties with the Crown; there were no elections or Congress branches in the states. In 1947 the same legal separation would present a final crisis: 565 separate sovereignties to gather in ten weeks.
• An educated class with nowhere to rise. The universities Britain founded in 1857 produced more graduates than the Raj would employ. By 1905 the upper ranks of the ICS remained almost entirely white, while the “statutory Indian” faced examinations held only in London. English-speaking lawyers and editors from this blocked elite helped found Congress. They had learned the Raj's liberal language and wanted its promises applied to their own government. Refusal of that modest request radicalized a generation.
• Land revenue and the drain. Indian land tax funded the Raj, while a further “Home Charge” sent money to Britain for pensions, army costs and guaranteed railway dividends. Nationalist economists called this transfer the Drain. In Poverty and Un-British Rule (1901), Dadabhai Naoroji connected it to the famines of the 1890s, which killed millions. The economic critique came before the political one and outlasted it.

What it changed

Curzon overreaches within the year. Curzon's confidence carried into his partition of Bengal in 1905. He considered the administrative measure so rational that serious resistance seemed unlikely. Instead, it provoked Indian nationalism's first mass movement and cost him his office: within twenty-four months the certainty displayed at the durbar had met its nemesis.

The princes are bound to the Crown, not to India. Paramountcy tied the princes to the King-Emperor personally. When Britain left, lawyers could therefore argue that the states regained full sovereignty. A relationship that seemed settled in 1905 became a source of crisis in 1947, in Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir.

Consent becomes the battlefield. Because Indian cooperation kept the Raj working, nationalists could challenge it by withholding that cooperation: boycotting, resigning or sitting down. Campaigns from Swadeshi to Quit India developed this insight. The Raj could answer with force, but each such answer spent more of its legitimacy.