The European presence in India dates to the sixteenth century, and it is in the very early part of the eighteenth century that the Mughal empire began to disintegrate, paving the way for regional states. In the contest for supremacy, the English emerged victors, their rule marked by the conquests at the battlefields of Plassey and Buxar. The Rebellion of 1857-58, which sought to restore Indian supremacy, was crushed; and with the subsequent crowning of Victoria as Empress of India, the incorporation of India into the empire was complete. By the early part of the twentieth century, a nationalist movement had emerged; and by 1919-20, Mohandas Karamchand ('Mahatma') Gandhi had emerged as, if not the virtually undisputed leader of this movement, certainly its most well-known and formidable architect. Successive campaigns had the effect of driving the British out of India in 1947, but not before they had partitioned it, and carved out the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan -- later itself dismembered into Pakistan and Bangladesh..
The first prime minister of independent India was Jawaharlal Nehru, who held office from 1947 until his death in 1964. Apart from a short period of two years from 1975-77, when an internal emergency was imposed by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and constitutional liberties were suspended, India has been a thriving parliamentary democracy. For a capsule political history of India in the post-1947 period, readers are invited to turn to the “Independent India” section of this site, where they will also find other specialized articles, as well as the “Current Affairs” section of MANAS, where readers will be able to find articles on selected political and social phenomena of recent years.
Kautilya and Arthashastra
Much of our knowledge about state policy under the Mauryas comes from the Arthashastra written by Kautilya (more popularly known as Chanakya), who was a Brahmin minister under Chandragupta Maurya. Though it was written at the end of the fourth century BC, it appears to have been rediscovered only in 1905, after centuries of oblivion. The treatise in its present form is most likely not the text written by Kautilya, though it is probably based on a text that was authored by Kautilya; and in no case can the text in its entirety be ascribed to Kautilya, on account of numerous stylistic and linguistic variations.
The book, written in Sanskrit, discusses theories and principles of governing a state. It is not an account of Mauryan administration. The title, Arthashastra, which means "the Science of Material Gain" or "Science of Polity", does not leave any doubts about its ends. According to Kautilya, the ruler should use any means to attain his goal and his actions required no moral sanction. The only problems discussed are of the most practical kind. Though the kings were allowed a free rein, the citizens were subject to a rigid set of rules. This double standard has been cited as an excuse for the obsolescence of the Arthashastra, though the real cause of its ultimate neglect, as the Indian historian Romila Thapar suggests, was the formation of a totally different society to which these methods no longer applied.
Arthashastra remains unique in all of Indian literature because of its total absence of specious reasoning, or its unabashed advocacy of realpolitik, and scholars continued to study it for its clear cut arguments and formal prose till the twelfth century. Espionage and the liberal use of provocative agents is recommended on a large scale. Murder and false accusations were to be used by a king's secret agents without any thoughts to morals or ethics. There are chapters for kings to help them keep in check the premature ambitions of their sons, and likewise chapters intended to help princes to thwart their fathers' domineering authority. However, Kautilya ruefully admits that it is just as difficult to detect an official's dishonesty as it is to discover how much water is drunk by the swimming fish.
Kautilya helped the young Chandragupta Maurya, who was a Vaishya, to ascend to the Nanda throne in 321 BC. Kautilya's counsel is particularly remarkable because the young Maurya's supporters were not as well armed as the Nandas. Kautilya continued to help Chandragupta Maurya in his campaigns and his influence was crucial in consolidating the great Mauryan empire. He has often been likened to Machiavelli by political theorists, and the name of Chanakya is still reminiscent of a vastly scheming and clever political adviser. In very recent years, Indian state television, or Doordarshan as it is known, commissioned and screened a television serial on the life and intrigues of Chanakya.Public Interest Litigation
Though the Constitution of India guarantees equal rights to all citizens, irrespective of race, gender, religion, and other considerations, and the "directive principles of state policy" as stated in the Constitution obligate the Government to provide to all citizens a minimum standard of living, the promise has not been fulfilled. The greater majority of the Indian people have no assurance of two nutritious meals a day, safety of employment, safe and clean housing, or such level of education as would make it possible for them to understand their constitutional rights and obligations. Indian newspapers abound in stories of the exploitation -- by landlords,factory owners, businessmen, and the state's own functionaries, such as police and revenue officials -- of children, women, villagers, the poor, and the working class.
Though India's higher courts and, in particular, the Supreme Court have often been sensitive to the grim social realities, and have on occasion given relief to the oppressed, the poor do not have the capacity to represent themselves, or to take advantage of progressive legislation. In 1982, the Supreme Court conceded that unusual measures were warranted to enable people the full realization of not merely their civil and political rights, but the enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights, and in its far- reaching decision in the case of PUDR [People's Union for Democratic Rights] vs. Union of India [1982 (2) S.C.C. 253], it recognized that a third party could directly petition, whether through a letter or other means, the Court and seek its intervention in a matter where another party's fundamental rights were being violated. In this case, adverting to the Constitutional prohibition on "begar", or forced labor and traffic in human beings, PUDR submitted that workers contracted to build the large sports complex at the Asian Game Village in Delhi were being exploited. PUDR asked the Court to recognize that "begar" was far more than compelling someone to work against his or her will, and that work under exploitative and grotesquely humiliating conditions, or work that was not even compensated by prescribed minimum wages, was violative of fundamental rights. As the Supreme Court noted,
The rule of law does not mean that the protection of the aw must be available only to a fortunate few or that the law should be allowed to be prostituted by the vested interests for protecting and upholding the status quo under the guise of enforcement of their civil and political rights. The poor too have civil and political rights and rule of law is meant for them also, though today it exists only on paper and not in reality. If the sugar barons and the alcohol kings have the fundamental right to carry on their business and to fatten their purses by exploiting the consuming public, have the chamars belonging to the lowest strata of society no fundamental right to earn an honest living through their sweat and toil?
Thus the court was willing to acknowledge that it had a mandate to advance the rights of the disadvantaged and poor, though this might be at the behest of individuals or groups who themselves claimed no disability. Such litigation, termed Public Interest Litigation or Social Action Litigation by its foremost advocate, Professor Upendra Baxi, has given the court "epistolary jurisdiction".
BRITISH INDIA
The British presence in India dates back to the early part of the seventeenth century. On 31 December 1600, Elizabeth, then the monarch of the United Kingdom, acceded to the demand of a large body of merchants that a royal charter be given to a new trading company, "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies." Between 1601-13, merchants of the East India Company took twelve voyages to India, and in 1609 William Hawkins arrived at the court of Jahangir to seek permission to establish a British presence in India. Hawkins was rebuffed by Jahangir, but Sir Thomas Roe, who presented himself before the Mughal Emperor in 1617, was rather more successful. Two years later, Roe gained Jahangir's permission to build a British factory in Surat, and in 1639, this was followed by the founding of Fort St. George (Madras). Despite some setbacks, such as the Company's utter humiliation at the hands of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, with whom the Company went to war between 1688-91, the Company never really looked back.
In 1757, on account of the British victory at Plassey, where a military force led by Robert Clive defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, the East India Company found itself transformed from an association of traders to rulers exercising political sovereignty over a largely unknown land and people. Less than ten years later, in 1765, the Company acquired the Diwani of Bengal, or the right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The consolidation of British rule after the initial military victories fell to Warren Hastings, who did much to dispense with the fiction that the Mughal Emperor was still the sovereign to whom the Company was responsible. Hastings also set about to make the British more acquainted with Indian history, culture, and social customs; but upon his return to England, he would be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. His numerous successors, though fired by the ambition to expand British territories in India, were also faced with the task of governance. British rule was justified, in part, by the claims that the Indians required to be civilized, and that British rule would introduce in place of Oriental despotism and anarchy a reliable system of justice, the rule of law, and the notion of 'fair play'. Certain Indian social or religious practices that the British found to be abhorrent were outlawed, such as sati in 1829, and an ethic of 'improvement' was said to dictate British social policies. In the 1840s and 1850s, under the governal-generalship of Dalhousie and then Canning, more territories were absorbed into British India, either on the grounds that the native rulers were corrupt, inept, and notoriously indifferent about the welfare of their subjects, or that since the native ruler had failed to produce a biological male heir to the throne, the territory was bound to "lapse" into British India upon the death of the ruler. Such was the fate of Sambalpur (1849), Baghat (1850), Jhansi (1853), Nagpur (1854), and -- most tragically -- Awadh (1856). The Nawab of Awadh [also spelled as Oudh], Wajid Ali Shah, was especially reviled by the British as the worst specimen of the Oriental Despot, more interested in nautch girls, frivolous amusements -- kite-flying, cock-fighting, and the like -- and sheer indolence than in the difficult task of governance. The British annexation of Awadh, and the character of the Nawab, were made the subjects of an extraordinary film by Satyajit Ray, entitled The Chess Players ("Shatranj ke Khilari").
Shortly after the annexation of Awadh, the Sepoy Mutiny, more appropriately described as the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, broke out. This was by far the greatest threat posed to the British since the beginnings of their acquisition of an empire in India in 1757, and within the space of a few weeks in May large swathes of territory in the Gangetic plains had fallen to the rebels. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and conventionally the rebellion is viewed as marking the moment when the British would always understand themselves as besieged by hostile natives, just as the Indians understood that they could not forever be held in submission. If in the early days of the Company's rule a legend was constructed around the Black Hole of Calcutta, so signifying the villainy of Indians, the Rebellion of 1857-58 gave rise to an elaborate mythography on both sides. Delhi was recaptured by British troops in late 1857, the Emperor Bahadur Shah, last of the Mughals, was put on trial for sedition and predictably convicted, and by mid-1858 the Rebellion had been entirely crushed. The East India Company was abolished, though John Stuart Mill, the Commissioner of Correspondence at India House, London, and the unacknowledged formulator of British policy with respect to the native states, furnished an elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful plea on behalf of the Company. India became a Crown colony, to be governed directly by Parliament, and henceforth responsibility for Indian affairs would fall upon a member of the British cabinet, the Secretary of State for India, while in India itself the man at the helm of affairs would continue to be the Governor-General, known otherwise in his capacity as the representative of the monarch as the Viceroy of India.
The proclamation of Queen Victoria, in which she promised that she and her officers would work for the welfare of their Indian subjects, ushered in the final phase of the British Raj. Among Indians, there were debates surrounding female education, widow remarriage, the age of consent for marriage, and more generally the status of women; and in the meanwhile, with increasing emphasis on English education, and the expansion of the government, larger numbers of Indians joined government service. There was, similarly, a considerable increase in both English-language and vernacular journalism, and in 1885 the Indian National Congress, at first an association comprised largely of lawyers and some other professionals, was founded in order that educated Indians might gain something of a voice in the governance of their own country. However, nationalist sentiments could not be confined within the parameters set by a gentlemanly organization such as the Congress, and both in Maharashtra, where the radicals were led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and in Bengal armed revolutionaries attempted to carry out a campaign of terror and assassination directed at British officials and institutions. In 1905, on the grounds that the governance of Bengal had become impossible owing to the large size of the presidency, the British partitioned Bengal, and so provoked the first major resistance to British rule and administrative policies in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857-58. It is during the Swadeshi movement that Indians deployed various strategies of non-violent resistance, boycott, strike and non-cooperation, and eventually the British had to agree to revoke the partition of Bengal. The partition itself had been attempted partly with a view to dividing the largely Muslim area of East Bengal from the western part of Bengal, which was predominantly Hindu, and the communalist designs of the British were clearly demonstrated as well in their encouragement of the Muslim League, a political formation that came into existence in 1907, on the supposition that the interests of the Muslims could not be served by the Indian National Congress. The capital of the country was shifted as well from Calcutta to Delhi, where a new set of official buildings designed to reflect imperial splendor led to the creation of New Delhi.
During World War I, when Britain declared that India was at war with Germany as well, large number of Indian troops served overseas, and the declaration by the Secretary of State Montagu in 1917 to the effect that it would be the intent of the Government of India to increase gradually Indian participation in the administration of the country was seen as an encouragement of Indian ambitions of eventual self-rule. But following the conclusion of the war, the British sought to introduce draconian legislation to contain the activity of people presumed to be political extremists, and the Punjab disturbances of 1919, including the notorious massacre by General Dyer of nearly 400 unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April, marked the emergence of a nation-wide movement against British rule. The events of 1919 also brought to the fore Mahatma Gandhi, who would henceforth be the uncrowned king of the Indian nationalist movement. Gandhi led the non-cooperation movement against the British in 1920-22, as well as a campaign of civil disobedience in 1930-31, and in 1942 he issued the call to the British to 'Quit India'. Negotiations for some degree of Indian independence, led by Gandhi, first took place in 1930 at the Round Table Conferences in London, but shortly thereafter the Congress decided to adopt a resolution calling for purna swaraj, or complete independence from British rule. Meanwhile, relations between the Hindus and Muslims had deteriorated, and during the latter years of World War II, when the leaders of the Congress, including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel were incarcerated, the Muslim League, which declared itself in support of the British war effort, had a free hand to spread the message of Muslim separatism. When, in the aftermath of the war, and the triumph of the Labor party, the British Prime Minister Clement Atlee declared that the British would grant India its independence, negotiations were commenced with all the major political parties and communities, including the Sikhs, the Congress, and the Muslim League. In launching Direct Action Day in 1946, which led to immense communal killings in Calcutta, the Muslim League sought to convey the idea that an undivided India was no longer a possibility; and the eventual attainment of independence from British rule on 15 August 1947 was accompanied not only by the creation of the new state of Pakistan, comprised of Muslim-majority areas in both the eastern and western parts of India, but by the unprecedented horrors of partition. At least 500,000 people are estimated to have been killed, and many women were abducted or raped; and it is estimated that no fewer than 11 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed borders, which to this day remains the single largest episode of migration in history.
Though the political narrative dominates in accounts of the history of British India, as in the preceding pages, the social and cultural histories of the British Raj are no less interesting. There are doubtless enduring, though not necessarily desirable, influences of British rule in contemporary India. The elites of the country write and converse largely in English, and are connected amongst themselves, and to the larger world outside, through the English language. The Constitution of India, howsoever noble a document, has been decisively shaped by the Government of India Act of 1935, which was scarcely designed to alleviate the distress of the predominantly underprivileged population of India, and not much thought seems to have been given to considering how appropriate a parliamentary system, with roughly the same number of seats in the lower (elected) house, the Lok Sabha, as in the House of Commons, might be for India when it is infinitely larger than Britain. The political and administrative institutions of independent India operate on the assumption that the country is still under colonial rule, and that the subjects are to have no voice in governance, unless they make an extreme fuss. The legal structure was handed down by the British, and the presumption remains that it does not exist to serve the common person, any more than does the vast apparatus of 'law and order': it is no accident that the police always arrive late in the popular Hindi film, when communities have already successfully taken the law into their own hands. The only innovations which have of been use in meeting forms of extreme oppression and injustice, such as Public Interest Litigation, are those which have effected a departure from the colonial model of justice.
India inherited from the British its present university system, and the origins of the summer migration of the middle class and elites to hill stations date back to the early nineteenth century. Social institutions such as clubs and gymkhanas, which persist down to the present day, were a critical part of British life, as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Orwell's Burmese Days, and the novels of John Masters and Paul Scott so amply suggest. Though the Indian languages were well developed before the arrival of the British in India, the standardization of these languages, and the creation of the first grammars and dictionaries, was achieved under British rule. The influential school of Kalighat painting emerged in late nineteenth century, and can scarcely be understood without a reference to the creation of a modern market, and similarly the printing press, which arrived in India in the sixteenth century, heralded the age of mechanical reproduction in India. In sports, the abiding passion remains cricket (once a preeminently colonial game), and the favorite drink of the Indian middle class male remains scotch and soda. One could point to a thousand different manifestations of the British presence in India, and slowly, one hopes, our histories will also alert us to the transformations wrought in British institutions and practices in post-independent India.
The Mughal Empire
The great grandson of Tamerlane, Babar, who on his mother's side was descended from the famous Genghiz Khan, came to India in 1526 at the request of an Indian governor who sought Babar's help in his fight against Ibrahim Lodi, the last head of the Delhi Sultanate. Babar defeated Lodi at Panipat, not far from Delhi, and so came to establish the Mughal Empire in India. Babar ruled until 1530, and was succeeded by his son Humayun, who gave the empire its first distinctive features. But it is Humayun's son, Akbar the Great, who is conventionally described as the glory of the empire. Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605, and extended his empire as far to the west as Afghanistan, and as far south as the Godavari river. Akbar, though a Muslim, is remembered as a tolerant ruler, and he even started a new faith, Din-i-Ilahi, which was an attempt to blend Islam with Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, and other faiths. He won over the Hindus by naming them to important military and civil positions, by conferring honors upon them, and by marrying a Hindu princess.
Akbar was succeeded by his son Salim, who took the title of Jahangir. In his reign (1605-1627), Jahangir consolidated the gains made by his father. The courtly culture of the Mughals flourished under his rule; like his great grand-father, Babar, he had an interest in gardens, and Mughal painting probably reached its zenith in Jahangir's time. Jahangir married Nur Jahan, "Light of the World", in 1611. Shortly after his death in October 1627, his son, Shah Jahan, succeeded to the throne. He inherited a vast and rich empire; and at mid-century this was perhaps the greatest empire in the world, exhibiting a degree of centralized control rarely matched before. Shah Jahan left behind an extraordinarily rich architectural legacy, which includes the Taj Mahal and the old city of Delhi, Shahjahanabad. As he apparently lay dying in 1658, a war of succession broke out between his four sons. The two principal claimants to the throne were Dara Shikoh, who was championed by the those nobles and officers who were committed to the eclectic policies of previous rulers, and Aurangzeb, who was favored by powerful men more inclined to turn the Mughal Empire into an Islamic state subject to the laws of the Sharia. It is Aurangzeb who triumphed, and though the Mughal Empire saw yet further expansion in the early years of his long reign (1658-1707), by the later part of the seventeenth century the empire was beginning to disintegrate.
Aurangzeb remains a highly controversial figure, and no monarch has been more subjected to the communalist reading of Indian history. He is admired by Muslim historians for enforcing the law of the Sharia and for disavowing the policies pursued by Akbar; among Hindus, laymen and historians alike, he is remembered as a Muslim fanatic and bigot. In the event, Aurangzeb's far-flung empire eventually eluded his grasp, and considerable disaffection appears to have been created among the peasantry. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, many of his vassals established themselves as sovereign rulers, and so began the period of what are called "successor states". The Mughal Empire survived until 1857, but its rulers were, after 1803, pensioners of the East India Company. The last emperor, the senile Bahadur Shah Zafar, was put on trial for allegedly leading the rebels of the 1857 mutiny and for fomenting sedition. He was convicted and transported to Rangoon, to spend the remainder of his life on alien soil.
No comments:
Post a Comment