IB History: Indian Independence and Partition — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The Rebellion and the Crown

Dalhousie’s annexations and the Doctrine of Lapse. Between 1848 and 1856 Dalhousie added more territory to British India than any previous governor. Some came by conquest: Punjab in 1849 and Lower Burma in 1852. The Doctrine of Lapse provided another means. A dependent ruler without a natural son could adopt an heir, but the Company refused to recognize that succession and took Satara, Jhansi and Nagpur. Other rulers could see what might happen to their own states. Among those who lost a throne or pension were the Rani of Jhansi and Nana Sahib, who went on to lead the rising.

Awadh: an annexation that reached the barracks. The Company annexed Awadh in February 1856 on grounds of misgovernment and sent King Wajid Ali Shah into exile in Calcutta. Its new summary revenue settlement deprived the talukdars, the province's great landholders, of thousands of villages. The consequences reached the barracks because many Bengal Army sepoys came from Awadh. Soldiers, landholders and peasants thus had connected reasons to resist the new rule; in Awadh their participation made the rebellion a popular war.

An army that no longer trusted its masters. Pay and standing helped bind the Bengal Army to the Company. Both were under strain in the 1850s. Allowances for service in newly annexed provinces were cut, while the General Service Enlistment Act of July 1856 required new recruits to serve overseas. Many high-caste Hindus believed that crossing the sea would break caste. Missionary preaching and reforms, including the 1856 law permitting Hindu widows to remarry, encouraged fears that the Company intended forced conversion. Soldiers could therefore read a new order in the light of an existing distrust.

The cartridge: a rumour as trigger. The Enfield rifle issued in 1857 required a soldier to bite open a paper cartridge. Reports from Dum Dum and Barrackpore said its grease contained cow and pig fat, polluting to Hindus and Muslims alike. The army ordered ungreased cartridges and changed the drill, but the rumor persisted because it fitted fears already present in the ranks. At Barrackpore Mangal Pandey attacked his officers on 29 March. On 9 May at Meerut, 85 troopers who had refused the cartridges were shackled on parade; their comrades rose the following evening. A shared suspicion had become a shared act of defiance.

Chapter 2: Congress and the Raj

The Crown’s promise and its limits. In her proclamation of 1858 Victoria promised that Indians would be “freely and impartially admitted” to office. The conditions for entering the ICS made that promise difficult to realize. Candidates had to sit the examination in London; in 1876 the Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, reduced the upper age limit to nineteen, beginning with the 1878 examination. Indian graduates could scarcely compete, and only a handful entered before the century ended. Lawyers and teachers who had taken the promise seriously organized to bring practice closer to it.

The Ilbert Bill and the lesson of agitation. Viceroy Lord Ripon backed a bill in 1883 drafted by his law member, Courtenay Ilbert. It would have allowed senior Indian magistrates to try Europeans in rural courts. British planters, merchants and officials in Calcutta mounted an openly racial campaign against the measure. In the 1884 compromise, a European defendant could demand a jury at least half European. Educated Indians saw both the unequal result and the means by which it had been obtained: organized pressure had moved the government. Two years later they founded a body of their own, the Indian National Congress.

Railways, print and English made an all-India public. A movement claiming to speak across India needed people to meet and ideas to travel. Railways brought delegates from Madras, Lahore and Calcutta to the same city, allowing Congress to meet in a different place each December. Telegraphs and cheap newspapers carried arguments between provinces. English, used in the universities founded in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857, supplied Bengalis, Marathas and Tamils with a shared political language. Institutions and communications created under the Raj became resources for its critics.

Famine and the economic case against the Raj. Dadabhai Naoroji's income-per-head estimates, begun in the 1870s and collected in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), offered a way to connect colonial government to poverty. Pensions, army costs and interest sent a “drain” to Britain, he argued, leaving India poorer and less able to withstand drought. Romesh Chunder Dutt's Economic History of India (1902–04) placed direct blame for famine on heavy land revenue. The famines gave their arguments urgency: the question was not only who held office, but whether people could sustain their livelihoods.

Chapter 3: The Raj at High Noon

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.

A democracy that held. Elections had to become a habit before the first one could count as the beginning of a durable democracy. India held its second and third general elections on time in 1957 and 1962, and power passed peacefully to Lal Bahadur Shastri after Nehru’s death. Kerala tested another aspect of the system. In 1957 it elected a Communist government, among the first anywhere to take office through a free election. The centre accepted it until dismissing it in 1959, revealing the reach of Delhi’s constitutional powers. As many other newly decolonized states moved toward one-party or military rule, India’s democratic survival became its most cited achievement.

The unfinished revolution of caste and gender. The republic could change the law more quickly than it changed social relations. The constitution abolished untouchability, while the Hindu Code laws of 1955–56 gave Hindu women rights to divorce and inherit. Ambedkar had resigned from Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 when the Hindu Code Bill stalled. In October 1956 he left Hinduism and converted to Buddhism at Nagpur with several hundred thousand followers. His warning remained a challenge to the republic’s achievement: political democracy needed social democracy beneath it if it was to survive.

A planned economy and its limits. The planners gave India steel mills, dams and research institutes, and industry grew quickly from a low base. These were foundations for an industrial state, but they did not feed the country at the same pace. National income grew only about 3.5 to 4 per cent a year and farming lagged behind. By the early 1960s India depended on American wheat supplied under PL-480, a United States law selling surplus grain to poorer countries. The droughts of 1965–66 would make food an emergency for the next government. Most Indians lived in villages, where change was much slower than the growth of the industrial base.

Borders still in dispute. The internal reorganization left India with a more settled map inside the union than at its edges. China held Aksai Chin after the 1962 war, about 38,000 square kilometres claimed by India; the boundary has never been agreed. Kashmir remained divided along the 1949 ceasefire line, and India and Pakistan fought again little more than a year after Nehru’s death. The contrast with 1857 is striking: then the edges were secure while the interior was in revolt; the map Nehru left in 1964 had a settled interior and disputed frontiers.