THE HISTORY

OF INDIA

ADVISORY BOARD

John T. Alexander
Professor of History and Russian and European Studies,
University of Kansas
Robert A. Divine
George W. Littlefield Professor in American History Emeritus,
University of Texas at Austin
John V. Lombardi
Professor of History,
University of Florida

THE HISTORY
OF INDIA
Second Edition
John McLeod

The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations

Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling, Series Editors

Copyright 2015 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McLeod, John, 1963
The history of India / John McLeod. 2nd edition.
pages cm. (The Greenwood histories of the modern nations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9781610697651 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781610697668 (ebook)
1. IndiaHistory. 2. IndiaHistory1947 I. Title.
DS463.M224 2015
954dc23
2014032374
ISBN: 9781610697651
EISBN: 9781610697668
19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

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Contents
Series Foreword

vii

Preface

xi

Timeline of Historical Events

xv

The Settings

The Birth of India

13

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

35

The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty

55

A Century of Realignment

73

Indians and British Rule

91

The Struggle for Independence

111

Building the New India

139

Toward a New Dynasty

157

vi

Contents

10

India Transformed

179

11

Into the Twenty-First Century

199

Notable People in the History of India

213

Appendix: Mughal Emperors, British Governors General

and Viceroys, Prime Ministers of India

225

Glossary

229

Bibliographic Essay

241

Index

245

Series Foreword
The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series is intended to provide students and interested laypeople with up-to-date, concise, and
analytical histories of many of the nations of the contemporary world.
Not since the 1960s has there been a systematic attempt to publish a
series of national histories, and as series editors, we believe that this
series will prove to be a valuable contribution to our understanding
of other countries in our increasingly interdependent world.
Some 40 years ago, at the end of the 1960s, the Cold War was an
accepted reality of global politics. The process of decolonization was
still in progress, the idea of a unified Europe with a single currency
was unheard of, the United States was mired in a war in Vietnam,
and the economic boom in Asia was still years in the future. Richard
Nixon was president of the United States, Mao Tse-tung (not yet Mao
Zedong) ruled China, Leonid Brezhnev guided the Soviet Union, and
Harold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom. Authoritarian dictators still controlled most of Latin America, the Middle East
was reeling in the wake of the Six-Day War, and Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi was at the height of his power in Iran.
Since then, the Cold War has ended, the Soviet Union has vanished,
leaving 15 independent republics in its wake, the advent of the

viii

Series Foreword

computer age has radically transformed global communications, the

rising demand for oil makes the Middle East still a dangerous flashpoint, and the rise of new economic powers like the Peoples Republic
of China and India threatens to bring about a new world order. All of
these developments have had a dramatic impact on the recent history
of every nation of the world.
For this series, which was launched in 1998, we first selected nations
whose political, economic, and socio-cultural affairs marked them as
among the most important of our time. For each nation, we found an
author who was recognized as a specialist in the history of that nation.
These authors worked cooperatively with us and with Greenwood
Press to produce volumes that reflected current research on their
nations and that are interesting and informative to their readers. In
the first decade of the series, more than 40 volumes were published,
and as of 2008, some are moving into second editions.
The success of the series has encouraged us to broaden our scope to
include additional nations, whose histories have had significant
effects on their regions, if not on the entire world. In addition, geopolitical changes have elevated other nations into positions of greater
importance in world affairs and, so, we have chosen to include them
in this series as well. The importance of a series such as this cannot
be underestimated. As a superpower whose influence is felt all over
the world, the United States can claim a special relationship with
almost every other nation. Yet many Americans know very little about
the histories of nations with which the United States relates. How did
they get to be the way they are? What kind of political systems have
evolved there? What kind of influence do they have on their own
regions? What are the dominant political, religious, and cultural forces
that move their leaders? These and many other questions are
answered in the volumes of this series.
The authors who contribute to this series write comprehensive histories of their nations, dating back, in some instances, to prehistoric
times. Each of them, however, has devoted a significant portion of
their book to events of the past 40 years because the modern era has
contributed the most to contemporary issues that have an impact on
U.S. policy. Authors make every effort to be as up-to-date as possible
so that readers can benefit from discussion and analysis of recent
events.
In addition to the historical narrative, each volume contains an
introductory chapter giving an overview of that countrys geography,
political institutions, economic structure, and cultural attributes. This
is meant to give readers a snapshot of the nation as it exists in the

Series Foreword

ix

contemporary world. Each history also includes supplementary information following the narrative, which may include a timeline that represents a succinct chronology of the nations historical evolution,
biographical sketches of the nations most important historical figures,
and a glossary of important terms or concepts that are usually
expressed in a foreign language. Finally, each author prepares a comprehensive bibliography for readers who wish to pursue the subject
further.
Readers of these volumes will find them fascinating and well written. More importantly, they will come away with a better understanding of the contemporary world and the nations that comprise it. As
series editors, we hope that this series will contribute to a heightened
sense of global understanding as we move through the early years of
the twenty-first century.
Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling
Indiana University Southeast

Preface
In 2002, I opened the first edition of this book by observing that
more than many other countries, India is often described in cliches.
This remains true to this day. Foreigners may preserve old ideas of
the exotic East and regard India as a land of spirituality or of poverty;
or they may reflect the preoccupations of the Western media and see in
it a place of violence and disasters, both natural and man-made. Indians may think of their homeland as a modern industrial and military
power, as the worlds largest democracy, or as a country where an
ancient civilization thrives alongside the latest computer technology.
Like most cliches, all these images contain some truth and much
exaggeration, but none represents more than a small part of reality.
Cliches and reality alike are rooted in Indias long history, and this
book is intended to introduce that history. I hope it will tell general
readers and students something about India and its people, about
what the country has been in the past, and what it is today. If it helps
them understand where conventional representations of India come
from, and then move beyond them, it will have attained its goal. Given
its length, the book can offer no more than a taste of the history of
India, but I hope that this taste inspires readers to learn more about
the subject. The book begins with an introduction to the settings on

xii

Preface

which the history of India has been played outgeographical, political, human, and cultural. This is followed by 10 chapters recounting
that history, from the earliest permanent village settlements to the
twenty-first century. The title of each chapter suggests its theme. Most
of the time, political history is used as a framework for presenting
economic, social, cultural, and religious developments.
The book includes several features that are intended to help the
reader make sense of what can be a complicated story. The timeline
lists some of the principal events in the history of India, and the map
shows the states and major cities of modern India. In addition, there
are short biographical notes on 70 leading people who appear in the
book, and an appendix that lists the Mughal emperors, British governors general and viceroys, and prime ministers of India. The glossary
explains Indian terms, and the bibliographic essay points interested
readers toward other works on the history of India.
Historians do not simply collect facts; they also organize and analyze them. As they grasp for convincing interpretations, they inevitably argue with one another. In such controversies, I have adopted
the position that seems to me to accord best with the evidence. I know
that one day some of my interpretations will be proved wrong, and
new debates will arise over issues that now seem settled.
Indians write in the nine related Indic scripts and in the Perso-Arabic
and Roman alphabets. Each of these operates on different principles,
which makes transliteration complicated. Moreover, all Indian languages use sounds that are absent in English. For example, most have
two forms of each of a, i, u, t, and d, which are quite different to an Indians ear but can seem almost identical to foreigners. Scholarly transliterations use diacritical marks to keep them all straightfor example,
Mahatma Gandh. Because this book is aimed at nonspecialists, I have
dispensed with diacritics, while writing words and names in such a
way that they are recognizable to readers who know Indian languages.
To add to the confusion, the pronunciation of the same letter may vary
in different parts of India, and the Indian forms of Arabic words and
names often diverge from the original. I have normally written PersoArabic words in accordance with Indian pronunciation, but have given
Arabic words directly connected with the Muslim religion in their Arabic
forms. An example is dhimmi: Arabs pronounce dh as the English th in
this, whereas Indians make it z or j. As this word is used in connection
with Islam, I have written it as dhimmi rather than zimmi or jimmi.
Since the nineteenth century, many Indians have adopted English
spellings for their names. I have followed their lead, even though they
do not always follow the system of transliteration used in this book:

Preface

xiii

thus, Rammohun Roy, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, the forms preferred by the bearers of those names, rather
than the scientific Rammohan Ray, Sayyid Ahmad, and Vajpeyi.
Along the same lines, I have kept the traditional nonscholarly English
spellings of some place-namesBengal, Deccan, and Punjab, which (if
I were being consistent) would appear as Bangal, Dakhan, and Panjab.
I have written the highest-ranking caste in Hinduism as Brahmin, as
without diacritics the more correct Brahman would be indistinguishable from the name of the substance from which (according to
Hindu philosophy) all things in the universe emerged.
Unfortunately, all this makes it impossible for the layperson to
know how to pronounce Indian words correctly. It is probably safest
(though wrong as often as not) to treat all vowels as long, which
means pronouncing them as if they were Italian or Spanish. Most consonants may be pronounced as in English, with th and ph having their
sounds in pothole and uphill; in gh, dh, and bh, the g, d, or b is followed so closely by an h that the two consonants almost become one
sound. (This points to yet another complication: scholars use dh to represent completely different sounds in Arabic and in Indian languages. The same is true of gh, which in Perso-Arabic words is
pronounced rather like a French r.)
Without diacritics, it is also impossible to know where the stress lies
in Indian words, why in Upanishads it is on the first syllable,
whereas in Debendranath it is on the last. The reader is therefore
advised to give a more or less equal stress to each syllable.
In place of the more familiar Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini
(AD), I have employed Before the Common Era (BCE) and Common
Era (CE). This is only right in a book about a country where the great
majority of the people do not regard Jesus of Nazareth as either their
Messiah (Christ) or their Lord (Dominus).
I have accumulated many debts in writing this book, although any
errors of fact or interpretation are entirely my own. The bibliographic
essay names some of the authors whose work has been particularly
influential in molding my thought. Over the years, my teachers, colleagues, and students have stimulated my studies of India. In the first
edition of this book, I acknowledged my profound debt to two of
my teachers, Professor N. K. Wagle and Shastriji J. C. Sharda. Now,
I shall also express my gratitude to His late Highness Maharana Sriraj
Meghrajji III, Maharaja Sriraj of Dhrangadhra, who for more than a
quarter of a century was a valued mentor, a cherished friend, and a
generous host. He has a walk-on role in this history. When I presented
him with a copy of the first edition, he read it in a single sitting.

xiv

Preface

As I have worked on this revised edition, it has been a pleasure for

me to work with the editors of this series, Professors Frank W. Thackeray
and John E. Findling, and the editorial and production specialists who
have provided invaluable assistance, particularly Bridget AustiguyPreschel, Cathleen Casey, Anthony Chiffolo, Kaitlin Ciarmiello, and Erin
Ryan of ABC-CLIO, and Magendra Varman of Lumina Datamatics.
Finally, Dr. Mary Hora remains (in the words of the author of the first
book that she gave me) the most severe of critics, buta perfect Wife !

Timeline of Historical Events

BCE
c. 7000

First permanent village settlements in Balochistan

c. 4300

First use of copper

c. 3200

First village settlements in Indus and Sarasvati

valleys

c. 26002500

First use of bronze

c. 25002000

Harappan urban civilization

c. 20001600

Collapse of Harappan urban civilization

c. 20001000

Spread of Aryan ways eastward to the Ganges

(including Brahminical religion, Vedic language);
composition of Rig Veda

c. 1300

Disappearance of the Sarasvati

c. 1000

First use of iron

xvi

Timeline of Historical Events

c. 1000550

Spread of Aryan world across North India; formation of oligarchies and kingdoms; composition
of Brahmanas

c. 700500

First wave of religious speculation; composition

of Aranyakas and Upanishads

c. 550

Emergence of Gangetic urban civilization

c. 550350

Second wave of religious speculation; emergence

of Buddhism and Jainism; rise of Magadha

c. 325185

Mauryan dynasty (Magadha)

c. 272235

Reign of Ashoka Maurya

3rd century
BCE3rd

century CE Foreign kings in Northwest (including Kanishka)

1st century
BCE3rd

century CE Satavahana or Andhra dynasty

(Deccan)

CE
1st3rd centuries

Probable composition of Shangam literature

1st millennium

Completion of Mahabharata and Ramayana; consolidation of Hinduism

c. 320550

Gupta dynasty (North India)

c. 375415

Reign of Chandra Gupta II

6th11th centuries Pallava dynasty (Tamil country)

6th century1310

Pandya dynasty (Tamil country)

606647

Reign of Harshavardhana (North India)

636 or 644

Muslim Arab attack on pirates near Mumbai

644

Arab conquest of Balochistan

711713

Arab conquest of Sindh

743974

Rashtrakuta dynasty (Deccan)

c. 7501161

Pala dynasty (Bengal)

9th century1019

Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty (North India)

Timeline of Historical Events

xvii

9th century1310

Chola dynasty (Tamil country)

9621186

Ghaznawid dynasty (Afghanistan)

9971030

Reign of Mahmud the Ghaznawid; raids into India

11th century1194 Gaharwar dynasty (North India)

c. 10971223

Sena dynasty (Bengal)

12th century
1215/16

Ghauri dynasty (Afghanistan)

11921206

Ghauri conquest of North India

12101526

Sultanate of Delhi

12231224

First Mongol invasion of South Asia

12961324

Ala ud-Din Khalji and Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq of

Delhi subjugate most of India

1330s1340s

Sultanate of Delhi loses Bengal and south India

(Vijayanagara, Bahmani sultanate)

1398

Sack of Delhi by Temur; collapse of sultanate of

Delhi

14511526

Reunification of North India by Lodi sultans of

Delhi

14691539

Lifetime of Nanak

15261857

Mughal dynasty

15561605

Reign of Akbar

1565

Defeat and collapse of Vijayanagara

1600

Foundation of English East India Company

16281658

Reign of Shah Jahan; conquest of Ahmadnagar;

construction of Taj Mahal and Shahjahanabad
(Old Delhi)

16581707

Reign of Aurangzeb; war with Marathas; conquest of South India

1699

Foundation of Khalsa

17191748

Reign of Muhammad Shah; disintegration of

Mughal empire; Marathas become dominant
power in South Asia

xviii

Timeline of Historical Events

1739

Sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah

1750s

Rise of Mysore

1757

Siraj ud-Daula of Bengal defeated by British East

India Company at Battle of Plassey

1761

Marathas defeated by Afghans at Battle of

Panipat

1765

British East India Company appointed diwan of

Bengal and Bihar

17981846

British East India Company establishes

supremacy over almost all of India

17991839

Ranjit Singh ruler of Sikh empire

1856

First steam-powered cotton mill in India

1857

Great revolt against British rule

1858

Transfer of control from East India Company to

British Crown

1885

Foundation of Indian National Congress

1905

Partition of Bengal

1906

Foundation of All-India Muslim League

19091910

Morley-Minto Reforms

1912

Capital moved from Kolkata to New Delhi

19141918

World War I

1916

Lucknow Pact

1919

Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms; Rowlatt Acts;

Amritsar Massacre; beginning of Khilafat movement

1920

Mahatma Gandhi enters politics; starts noncooperation satyagraha; becomes leader of Indian
National Congress

1922

End of noncooperation satyagraha

19271928

Simon Commission

19291931

Collapse of Indian agricultural prices

Timeline of Historical Events

xix

19301932

Round Table Conferences

19301933

Salt Tax satyagraha

1935

Government of India Act passed

1937

First elections under the 1935 Act

19391945

World War II

1940

Muslim League endorses creation of Muslim

states (Pakistan)

19421943

Quit India rebellion

1947

Partition and independence; Jawaharlal Nehru

prime minister

19471948

First Indo-Pakistani war

19481949

Merger of kingdoms of Indian India

1948

Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

1950

Constitution in effect; beginning of creation of

Nehruvian economy

1952

First Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority

1957

Second Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority

1962

Third Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority; war with China

1964

Death of Jawaharlal Nehru; Lal Bahadur Shastri

becomes prime minister

1965

Second Indo-Pakistani war; beginning of Green

Revolution

1966

Death of Lal Bahadur Shastri; Indira Gandhi

becomes prime minister

1967

Fourth Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority

1969

Split of Indian National Congress

1971

Fifth Lok Sabha election; Congress (R) wins

majority; third Indo-Pakistani war

1974

Successful tests of nuclear explosives

19751977

The Emergency

xx

Timeline of Historical Events

1977

Sixth Lok Sabha election; Janata Party wins

majority

1980

Seventh Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins

majority; Indira Gandhi returns as prime minister

19831993

Militants campaign in Punjab

1984

Army attacks Golden Temple complex; assassination of Indira Gandhi; Rajiv Gandhi becomes
prime minister; eighth Lok Sabha election;
Congress (I) wins majority

19871991

Indian intervention in Sri Lanka

1988-2003

Militants campaign in Bodoland

1989

Ninth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins plurality, but National Front forms government;
beginning of militants campaign in Kashmir

19901992

Militants campaign in Assam

1991

Economic crisis; assassination of Rajiv Gandhi;

tenth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins plurality; P. V. Narasimha Rao becomes prime minister; beginning of economic liberalization

1992

Destruction of Babri Masjid, followed by bloody

communal rioting

1996

Widespread complaints of corruption in Narasimha Raos government; eleventh Lok Sabha

election; BJP wins plurality, but United Front
forms government with support from Congress
(I) (with H. D. Deve Gowda and then I. K. Gujral
as prime ministers)

1998

Twelfth Lok Sabha election; BJP wins plurality

and forms a government with other parties of
the National Democratic Alliance; Atal Bihari
Vajpayee becomes prime minister; Sonia Gandhi
becomes president of Congress (I); successful
tests of nuclear weapons

1999

Expulsion of infiltrators in Kargil district of Kashmir; thirteenth Lok Sabha election; BJP wins plurality and Vajpayee remains as prime minister

Timeline of Historical Events

xxi

2001

India pledges support to the War on Terror; Narendra Modi becomes chief minister of Gujarat

20012006

Terrorist attacks in New Delhi, Gandhinagar, and

Mumbai

2002

Bloody communal riots in Gujarat

2004

Fourteenth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins

plurality and forms a government with other parties of the United Progressive Alliance; when
Sonia Gandhi proves to be unacceptable to many
Indians (on account of her foreign birth), Manmohan Singh becomes prime minister

2005

In response to activist campaigns against bride

burning, Parliament passes legislation to protect
women from domestic violence

2006

India and the United States sign an agreement on

nuclear energy

2007

Rahul Gandhi becomes general secretary of

Congress (I) (his title was changed to vicepresident 2013)

2008

Terrorist attacks in Mumbai; Indian economy

begins to feel effects of worldwide downturn

2009

Fifteenth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins

plurality and Manmohan Singh remains as prime
minister

2011

Public anger over corruption leads to Anna

Hazares satyagraha in support of the creation of
an effective Lokpal (anticorruption ombudsman)

2012

The rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi

leads to widespread demonstrations in support
of stronger laws to prevent crimes against
women; BJP selects Narendra Modi as its candidate for prime minister

2014

Sixteenth Lok Sabha election; BJP wins majority;

Narendra Modi becomes prime minister

In 2007, Uttaranchal was renamed Uttarakhand. In 2011, the official English

spelling of the name of the state of Orissa was changed to Odisha. In 2014, the
northwestern part of Andhra Pradesh became a separate new state under the
name of Telangana.

1
The Settings
THE GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING
South Asia. The Indian subcontinent. India. Like many geographical
terms, these are imprecise. South Asia logically refers to Malaysia,
the southernmost country of mainland Asia. By convention, however,
Malaysia is placed in Southeast Asia, and South Asia is applied to
an area that lies considerably to the west. In its widest sense, South
Asia embraces India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka,
Maldives, and Afghanistan, which form the South Asian Association
for Regional Co-operation, or SAARC.
The term Indian subcontinent is sometimes used to suggest that
although the region is a part of the Asian continent, it is in many ways
self-contained. This designation may cover the SAARC countries
other than Afghanistan, or it may exclude the two island states, Sri
Lanka and Maldives. India is the name of the Republic of India, the
subcontinents largest country; historically, it also covers Pakistan
and Bangladesh, which before 1947 were parts of India.
This book is a history of the Republic of India, including Pakistan
and Bangladesh until they became separate states. When referring to
events that occurred before the middle of the twentieth century, the

The History of India

book applies the designations South Asia, Indian subcontinent,

and India interchangeably to the area now occupied by all three
countries.
Geologists say that the subcontinent was once an island, and that it
has been driven into the rest of Asia by plate tectonics. As a result, it is
shaped rather like a diamond, bounded on two sides by arms of the
Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea on the west and the Bay of Bengal on
the east), and on the other two by mountain ranges that were thrown
up by the collision with Asia. The diamond measures roughly
2,000 miles from both north to south and east to west. The Republic
of India has an area of 1,222,243 square miles, which makes it the
seventh largest country in world. It is in the same league as Argentina
or Kazakhstan, and considerably under half the size of Brazil or
Australia. Pakistan and Bangladesh add another 364,351 square miles.
Even then, however, the subcontinent would easily fit twice over into
the United States.
Nevertheless, this area is large enough to allow for great diversity in
terrain. South Asia is separated from its neighbors to the north by the
Himalayas and their offshoots the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush,
which include some of the highest mountains in the world. Lower
but still impressive ranges of mountains mark much of the boundary
with Afghanistan and Iran in the west; in the east, India extends
toward the hills of Burma. Inside of these highlands come the basins
of two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges, huge flat expanses of
land separated from each other by the Thar or Great Indian Desert
and a range of low hills. This crescent-shaped region is often called
the Indo-Gangetic plain. Many of the great rivers of North India
deposit silt in mountain valleys, on the plains, and at their mouths.
As a result, much of the Indo-Gangetic plain is quite fertile. The Indus
rises in Tibet. It flows through India and Pakistan, where it is joined by
many tributaries that give Punjab (five waters) its name, and empties into the Arabian Sea. (Since 1947, Punjab has been divided
between India and Pakistan.) The Ganges and its tributary the
Yamuna originate in Himalayan glaciers and, after running through
North India, flow into the Bay of Bengal through a huge delta, two
thirds of which now lies in Bangladesh.
South of the Gangetic plain the land rises slowly into the Vindhya
mountains, the traditional boundary between northern and southern
India. Then comes peninsular India or the Deccan, most of which is a
dry, hilly plateau. To the west, the plateau ends in a range of mountains called the Western Ghats, below which a narrow strip of land
runs along the Arabian Sea. The rather lower Eastern Ghats separate

The Settings

the plateau from the coastal plain on the Bay of Bengal. The Narmada,
immediately south of the Vindhyas, is the main west-flowing river of
the Deccan. Most of the peninsulas other rivers (which include the
Godavari and the Krishna) begin in the Western Ghats and run eastward into the Bay of Bengal. The Deccan rivers are fed by rain. This
means that they become torrents if the rains are heavy and virtually
dry up if the rains fail. They leave little silt in inland valleys, although
several of them break into large fertile deltas in the coastal plains.
Finally, most of the Tamil country, the southern tip of India, is a dry
plain.
India includes tropical rain forests and deserts, rocky hills and savannas, dry forests and farmland; in 2005, 19 percent of its land area
was forested, and 52 percent was used for agriculture. There is great
regional variation in climate. The Tamil country of the deep south is
hot for 12 months of the year, the Deccan plateau similar but with
somewhat lower temperatures. The Indo-Gangetic plain has the hottest weather in all India in June, and warm days with cool nights in
January. The mountainous areas of the north see harsh, snowy winters, and pleasant summers.
Despite this diversity, most of the subcontinent shares a climate of
three seasons. During the hot season, which typically runs from March
to June, the temperature rises steadily, exceeding 110F in the northern
plains. This makes it difficult to work during the day, and people try to
confine their activities to night and early morning. Then comes the
southwest monsoon, moisture-bearing winds that blow off the Indian
Ocean in two branches: one heads eastward from the Arabian Sea, the
other northward from the Bay of Bengal, until they merge over the
Gangetic plain. The monsoon reaches South India in June, Gujarat on
the west coast in early or mid-July, and Punjab in the north a week or
two later. Its winds bring rainstorms that may last a few minutes or
several hours each day. The rain reduces temperatures and waters
the fields. It also ruins roads and may cause flooding, though if it fails,
India faces disaster. The final season of the year is the cold weather,
from November to March, when cool dry air from central Asia blows
across the subcontinent.
Terrain and climate make India home to a great range of wildlife.
The national bird is the peacock. Even in big cities, the visitor will
see monkeys and parrots, and the country is known around the world
for elephants and snakes (including the king cobra, which can be up to
12 feet long). Over half of the worlds 2,000 to 3,000 wild tigers live in
India. Their number is steadily declining, however, thanks to poaching and the destruction of their habitat; and Project Tiger, a program

The History of India

established to rebuild Indias tiger population, has not met the high
hopes that surrounded its creation in 1973. (This is only one symptom
of the effects on wildlife of the spread of human settlement over the
last century, despite the efforts of a long-established conservation
movement.) Other fauna include cats and dogs, foxes and jackals,
rhinoceroses, mongooses, deer, birds ranging from flamingos to
pheasants, and freshwater and sea fish. Among domesticated animals
are humpbacked oxen, water buffaloes, horses, and camels, as well as
sheep, goats, and pigs.

THE POLITICAL SETTING

Indians pride themselves on the fact that their country is the worlds
largest democracy. Almost alone in the developing world, India
has been a democracy since its independence from colonial rule. The
only break occurred between 1975 and 1977, when Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi established a temporary dictatorship after declaring a
state of emergency. It is unlikely that any future leader will repeat
Mrs. Gandhis experiment: over the last 40 years, democratic practices
have become so firmly entrenched in India that no dictatorial regime
could find the public support it would need to survive. A military
coup is also highly unlikely, which sets India apart from most of its
neighbors. (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma have all been under
military rule.) Control over the Indian armed forces has always
remained in civilian hands. Despite the use of troops in political
situationsfor example, against antigovernment demonstrations
the armed forces have not been politicized, in the sense that they do
not take sides in politics.
Like the United States, India has a federal political system. The central government is led by the prime minister, whose equivalent in each
of the countrys 29 states is a chief minister. Elections to the lower
house of the federal parliament and the state legislatures are held
regularly. They are generally free and fair, although often accompanied by violence, and voter turnout in India is comparable to what it
is in most developed countries. Parliament and state legislatures meet
regularly, and use their power to decide who will or will not be prime
minister or chief minister. Political leaders who lose elections or legislative majorities peacefully hand over power to successors from
opposition parties. The judiciary is often called a pillar of democracy,
and the Supreme Court of India has generally remained free of political interference (although in recent years it has faced some accusations
of corruption). The same is true of many of the state supreme courts,

The Settings

which are called high courts. Admittedly, the effectiveness of the judicial system is reduced by the fact that India has far too few judges.
This has produced a backlog of 30 million cases, including over
65,000 pending before the Supreme Court.
A further sign of Indian democracy is the existence of numerous
political parties to serve different ideological, social, or regional constituencies. Indians, unlike Americans, face no real difficulties if they
want to start viable new parties. Nevertheless, it looks as if (for the
time being) federal politics in India have settled down to a two-party
system, based on the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and the Indian
National Congress (Indira), or Congress (I). With smaller affiliated
parties, the BJP and Congress (I) both have support across much of
the country, and they may alternate in power for some time to come.
The current leader of the BJP is the prime minister of India, Narendra
Modi; Congress (I) is headed by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow
of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

THE HUMAN SETTING

With 1.2 billion people, India is the second most populous country
on earth, and it is expected to supersede China in first place by 2030.
The population is young: in 2011, almost exactly half of all Indians
were under age 24. Another 25 million Indian expatriates and people
of Indian ancestry live in other countriesbusinessmen and workers
in the Arab states of the Middle East; the descendants of Indian
plantation laborers in the former British colonies of Fiji, Mauritius,
Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana; and emigrants who since the nineteenth century have settled in the United Kingdom, the United States,
Canada, and Australia. In recent years, Indians formed the fastest
growing community in the United States. Their numbers have more
than tripled since 1990, and Americans of Indian origin now number
almost 3 million. Today they are found in every line of work in the
United States, from cooking fast foods to serving as the governors of
Louisiana (Piyush Bobby Jindal) and South Carolina (Nimrata
Nikki Randhawa Haley).
To many Westerners, India is first and foremost a land of religion.
Whether Indians really are more religious than other people is
open to debate, but their country is the home of several major faiths.
Hinduism and Islam together account for 94 percent of the population,
and Indias other religions include Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism,
and Jainism. There are also small (and declining) numbers of Jews and
Zoroastrians.

The History of India

Over thousands of years, the mixture of different peoples, indigenous and foreign, has created what can only be described as an Indian
ethnicity. But even though many Indians share such biological traits as
blood group, they vary greatly in physical appearance. In the northwest, people are often relatively fair in color; northeasterners and the
inhabitants of the Himalayan regions may resemble the Burmese and
the Tibetans; many South Indians are quite dark. Since the nineteenth
century, this has led some Indians and foreigners to conclude that
North Indians have some European blood, whereas southerners are
either the aboriginal inhabitants of the country or immigrants from
Africa. There is, however, no real evidence to support such views.
Most of the principal languages of India belong to two families,
the Indo-European and the Dravidian, although three languages
of the Sino-Tibetan family have official status in the northeastern
part of the country. English, Italian, Russian, and Persian are also
Indo-European tongues, although there is not necessarily any blood
relationship among their speakers. The Dravidian languages are
unique to the Indian subcontinent. Most of them are found in the
south, but the existence of scattered pockets in central India and
western Pakistan suggests that they were once spoken over a much
larger area than at present.
Hindi, an Indo-European tongue, is the most widely spoken
language in South Asia. It is the first language of some 500 million
Indians, and is spoken by perhaps another 300 million alongside their
native tongues. These figures are somewhat misleading, however, as
the name Hindi is used in two senses. On the one hand, it is applied
to many numerous dialects spoken across North India, some of them
mutually unintelligible. On the other, it refers to a literary language
created in the nineteenth century from the Delhi dialect. The same dialect gave rise to Urdu, typically associated with Muslims, which is the
official language of the Muslim country of Pakistan and is also spoken
by 60 million Indians. Colloquial standard Hindi and Urdu are identical, or nearly so. The forms of the two languages taught in schools and
used in government are quite different, however, for Hindi draws new
vocabulary from the ancient Sanskrit language, which also supplies its
script, whereas Urdu uses Persian and Arabic for both new words and
its alphabet.
Among the other major languages of India are Bengali (just under
100 million speakers in India) and Marathi (84 million), both from
the Indo-European family, and the Dravidian languages Telugu
(86 million) and Tamil (71 million). Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam,
Odia, Punjabi, and Assamese are each the mother tongue of millions

The Settings

of people. Furthermore, perhaps 350 million Indians speak English as

a second language. For much of the upper middle class in large cities,
English is the usual language of daily communication. Rohinton
Mistry, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie, who were all born in
India, rank among the most highly acclaimed novelists writing in English at the beginning of the twenty-first century. (The British author
Sir V.S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in literature, is of
Indian descent, but he was born in Trinidad.)
Farming is by far the largest single occupation in India, and in 2011,
69 percent of the population was rural. Indias country people live in
villages, which may have thousands of inhabitants and to a Westerner
look more like small towns; they are defined as villages because their
peoplepetty landowners or rich farmers, poorer peasants, laborers,
craftsmenare either agriculturalists or in some way connected with
agriculture.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and gaining speed in the
1950s, a large modern industrial sector has grown up in India. The
country now meets many of its own industrial needs, and exports
such diverse products as fossil fuels, gemstones, trucks and cars, iron
and steel, and clothes. Industrialization has contributed to urbanization, and almost a third of all Indians live in cities. These include
Delhi, of which the capital New Delhi is a part, with 11 million people
in 2011; the ports of Greater Mumbai (12.5 million), Kolkata (4.5 million),
and Chennai (8.4 million) (in English, these three cities were traditionally called Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras; in India and abroad, both
forms are in common use); the high technology centers of Bangalore
(5.6 million) and Hyderabad (6.8 million); and the industrial city of
Ahmedabad (4.7 million). The urban population includes many poor
people from the countryside. They often live in the slums that contain
a fifth of Indias city dwellers, and work as laborers or in services (it is
said that over 3 million people make biris, or cheap cigarettes). But India
also has a huge urban middle classbusinessmen, professionals, senior
bureaucrats, and the like. Many of its members come from families that
formed the rural elite two or three generations ago.
When they travel long distances to see friends, go on vacation, or
visit ancestral villages, most Indians do so by train. India has
40,000 miles of railroad, as well as almost 3 million miles of roads. Just
under half of this length is paved, and the roads are used heavily by
trucks, cars, motorcycles, and scooters, not to mention oxcarts and
camel carts.
Many say that the persistence of poverty represents modern Indias
greatest failure: 22 percent of the countrys population falls below the

The History of India

Indian governments poverty line, and half of its children are malnourished. In rural areas, the poor are typically landless laborers, or
peasants without enough land to support themselves. Many of the
urban poor are unskilled or semiskilled workers, who in so populous
a country may have little hope of receiving sufficient wages to live on.
Poverty is greater for some regions and people than for others. It is
worst in the states of Odisha on the east coast and Bihar and Uttar
Pradesh in north; all three have high populations that are growing
fast, and inadequate resources for development and social welfare.
From the 1950s until the 1990s, the governments sometimes helped
poor states by building factories in places of high unemployment.
Now India has adopted a free market economy, however, and industrialists look for access to markets, skilled and literate workforces,
and good infrastructure. The poor states are weak in all these areas,
and are therefore falling even further behind the richer ones.
Over half the population of India belongs to three disadvantaged
groups. There are 199 million members of Scheduled Castes, who
often refer to themselves as Dalits (oppressed) but are commonly
called Untouchables in the West, and who historically formed the lowest division of Hindu society. Then come 103 million Indians belonging to Scheduled Tribesuntil recently these people, known as
Tribals, lived in forests and remote areas, as hunters and gatherers or
shifting cultivators. Finally, depending on how they are defined, anywhere between 280 million and 620 million Hindus are included in
the Other Backward Classes, which traditionally ranked immediately
above Untouchables.
By and large, social and economic conditions for SCs, STs, and OBCs
(as they are called) lag behind those of the communities that make up
the bulk of the rural elite and urban middle class. In villages, SCs often
live in a segregated neighborhood, with houses of poor quality.
Although the law bans discrimination against them, their children
may be excluded from schools, or ignored by teachers. This leaves
most SCs without the skills required to take up the places that the
Indian constitution reserves for them in legislatures, government
employment, and universities.
Although India has a vigorous womens movement, and it is
50 years since the countrys first female prime minister took office,
women form another disadvantaged group. Many Indianseven
educated womenprefer sons to daughters, as a son will carry on
the family and care for elderly parents (whereas on marriage, a daughter becomes part of someone elses family). Technology that determines the sex of a fetus has led to increasing abortion of female

The Settings

Suva Lal repairs shoes at his makeshift stand in New Delhi on July 15, 1997. Suva
Lal and the other members of his cobbler caste are Dalits, formerly known as
Untouchables, belonging to the lowest division of Hindu society. (AP Photo/John
Moore)

fetuses by parents determined to have a son. The poor concentrate food,

health care, and whatever other resources they have on sons. They may
also be more reluctant to send their daughters to school than their sons.
This is often because they do not want them to be taught by men, and
women teachers are scarce. This in turn becomes self-perpetuating:
because they lack education, few women can become teachers; poor
girls therefore continue to stay away from school and are unable to
advance when they reach adulthood.
Deadly adult diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis are rampant
among the poor. A strain of tuberculosis that is immune to all known
drugs has developed in India, which also has the worlds third largest
number of people with the human immunodeficiency virus. Nevertheless, rich or poor, Indians are living longer than they were 60 or
70 years ago. A baby born in 1947 had a life expectancy of 32 years; a
boy born in 2013 could look forward to living 67 years, and a girl
64 years. The main reason is a great reduction in death rates among
infants and children, thanks to free immunization against major childhood diseases, and government-funded health care centers across
the country. For example, India once had half of the worlds cases of

10

The History of India

poliomyelitis. In 1995, however, the government launched a campaign

to vaccinate all children against the disease. It was successful, and in
2014 the World Health Organization declared that polio had been
eradicated from India.

THE CULTURAL SETTING

India spends less on education than many other countries in Asia
and Africa. One out of every 10 villages has no school, and India has
the largest illiterate population in the world. Besides their worries
about male teachers, many rural parents do not send their children
to school because they believe that education brings no financial
returns. Low levels of education have certainly held back the countrys
economic growth.
In 2002, the Indian Parliament passed a constitutional amendment
declaring primary education to be a fundamental right. It remains to
be seen whether measures will be implemented to ensure that all children can avail themselves of this right, and Indias overall literacy rate
of 74 percent is below the global average of 84 percent. Nevertheless,
the country has made enormous progress in the field of education. In
1961, 34 percent of Indian males were literate, and 13 percent of
females. Fifty years later, in 2011, the figures had reached 82 percent
for males and 66 percent for females.
Literate or not, for millennia Indians have enjoyed poetry, drama,
architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and dance; and the development of Indian culture is one of the themes of this book. Today, the arts
are diffused through many media. India is one of the worlds greatest
centers of book publishing. Its daily newspapers have a circulation of
tens of millions of readers, and it has 57 million personal computers
(up from under 10,000 in 1989).
Television broadcasting started in India in 1959, and from the beginning was a government monopoly. (Radio had been taken over by the
government in 1930, three years after the first broadcasts.) In the
1980s, more and more Indians began to buy television sets, first in
the middle class and then across society. In the 1990s, private television was legalized. Satellite and cable channels proliferated, and in
1997 the federal government transferred control of the state-owned
radio and television to an autonomous organization. All this greatly
increased the quantity, and many said the quality, of the programming
available to Indians. At latest count there were 116 million televisions
in India (one for every other household), and TV had become as
central to popular entertainment as film.

The Settings

11

The history of Indian film goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The country has produced several great filmmakers, of
whom the director Satyajit Ray (winner of an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1992) is the most celebrated. On a more popular
level, there is the Mumbai-based Bollywood Hindi film industry,
which along with films in other Indian languages makes India the largest producer of movies in the world. (Bollywood is an amalgam of the
citys traditional English name, Bombay, with Hollywood.) The country
turns out 800 motion pictures every year. Besides watching television
and films, the people of India play many sports. Kabaddi, a sort of tag,
is popular among children. Indians may be the worlds best field
hockey players, and their mens field hockey team has won eight
gold medals at the Olympics. If India has a national sport, however, it
is cricket. All Indians seem to follow international cricket matches,
and emigrants play the game wherever they go.
The short period since the beginning of the twenty-first century has
seen phenomenal changes in India: in its population, which has grown
from just over 1 billion to 1.2 billion; in the physical appearance of
major cities, with new buildings sprouting up everywhere, and far
more people and fewer animals in sight; in the number of tourists
who visit, which has almost tripled to just under 7 million a year; in
activism, with popular movements emerging in opposition to corruption and violence against women.
Yet, despite all the changes, modern India remains firmly rooted in
its past. In 2012, the countrys longest six-lane express highway was
inaugurated. It links the cities of Delhi and Agra, which four centuries
ago were capitals of the Mughal empire. In 2013, the Indian Space
Research Organization launched a spacecraft that will orbit the planet
Mars. It is known as Mangalayana, which means Mars vehicle in the
ancient Sanskrit language that was spoken in northern India
3,000 years ago. In 2014, Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party
to victory in Indias parliamentary elections. His partys manifesto
included a promise to provide appropriate resources for the maintenance and restoration of all national heritage sites, and to prevent their
vandalisation in any form.1 All this suggests that understanding
India today requires some knowledge of its history. That history goes
back many millennia.

NOTE
1. Bharatiya Janata Party election manifesto 2014, p. 41, available at bjp
electionmanifesto.com/pdf/manifesto2014.pdf.

2
The Birth of India
THE HARAPPANS
For thousands of years, the only humans in India lived in small bands
that wandered about in quest of food. Then, around 7000 BCE, some of
these hunters and gatherers learned to domesticate animals and grow
crops, and settled down in permanent villages in what is now the
province of Balochistan in western Pakistan. The herdsmen and peasants were gradually joined by craftsmen, including potters, weavers,
and jewelers. The most important craftsmen of all were toolmakers,
who after 4300 BCE began to make tools out of copper, alongside the
stone that had been used since the arrival of humans in the subcontinent. As villagers exchanged their goods with one another and with
the people who lived around them, a barter economy developed.
The inhabitants of some remote tracts (called Tribals in modern
India) continued to live as hunters and gatherers until the twentieth
century, supplementing their diet through shifting cultivation. Village
settlements gradually spread across South Asia, however. Sometimes,
hunters and gatherers adopted agriculture or herding. Other times,
people from existing village communities colonized forested or uninhabited regions. About 3200 BCE, village settlements began to appear

14

The History of India

in the valleys of the Indus and of another river that, like the Indus,
flowed through western South Asia from the Himalayas to the
Arabian Sea. As will be seen, this second river later disappeared.
Many scholars believe that it is the great river that is mentioned in
the Rig Veda, the earliest surviving Indian literary work, where it is
called the Sarasvati. For that reason, it will be called the Sarasvati in
this book, although an equally strong case can be made for saying that
the Rig Vedas Sarasvati is actually the Afghan river that is now
known as the Helmand.
Between 2600 and 2500 BCE, craftsmen in the Indus and Sarasvati
valleys began to work bronze, which is a harder metal than copper.
People learned how to write, although it is unknown whether they
invented writing on their own or acquired it from elsewhere. And
citieslarge settlements where most people were neither peasants
nor herdsmencame into being. It is not clear whether these developments were connected, or why they happened. However, they mark
the birth of the first urban civilization of South Asia. We do not know
what the people of this civilization called themselves. Today, they are
often called the Harappans, from Harappa, the modern name of one
of their principal cities.
The Harappan urban civilization lasted from about 2500 to
2000 BCE. It centered on the Indus and the Sarasvati, in the modern
Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab, but it covered most of what
is now Pakistan and much of northwestern India. We know less about
it than about any other great civilization of the ancient world. This is
mainly because no one has been able to decipher the Harappan writing. Our knowledge of the Harappans therefore depends almost
entirely on archeological finds. Unfortunately, many of the theories
that have been based on these finds are mere guesses, and they sometimes contradict each other. For example, some scholars say that the
Harappans lived under a centralized government of priests who lived
at the cities of Harappa in the north and Mohenjo Daro in the south;
others believe that each of the half dozen major Harappan cities was
independent and run by merchants.
However, archeology does tell us that the Harappans houses were
built of bricks (in standard sizes) and connected to underground sewers that carried away waste. Though they varied in size, the houses
followed an identical floor plan. Unlike other ancient peoples, the
Harappans did not construct ornate palaces or temples, although large
buildings that were presumably used for governmental or religious
purposes stood on a walled earthen mound beside each city. Nor do
they seem to have had large statues, though they did make small

The Birth of India

15

A brick-lined drainage system constructed by the people of the Harappan civilization (also known as the Indus Valley civilization). The Harappan civilization arose
about 2500 BCE in what is today northwest India and Pakistan. (Stock.xchng)

human and animal figurines and models of objects such as wagons.

The figurines may provide a clue about Harappan religion, as the discovery of numerous female figures and phallic symbols could mean
that the Harappans worshipped fertility deities.
We also know that trade and manufacturing were central to the lives
of the Harappans. They mass-produced tools and jewelry at factory
towns, each specializing in a particular line of goods. In fact, it has
been suggested that the Harappan economy was based on the distribution of these tools and jewelry. This theory may explain how three
of the features that mark the beginnings of Harappan urbanization
are connected: the introduction of bronze made it possible to manufacture better tools than before; by letting them send orders and invoices,
writing allowed merchants to ship goods over a wide area; and perhaps the cities were built in locations that gave access to raw materials,
because all of them were either near mines or at the end of trade
routes.
The best known Harappan relics are small square seals made of a
stone called steatite, which depict animals, religious scenes, and
inscriptions. The seals were apparently used by merchants to identify

16

The History of India

their goods. Harappan objects, including seals, have been found in the
countries of the Persian Gulf. This shows that the Harappans traded
with the Near East, although it is unknown how significant this
commerce was to their economy. Of course, not all Harappans were
merchants or craftsmen. Outside of the cities, peasants and herdsmen
continued to live much as they always had, except that they could
now acquire the new manufactured goods.
Then, about 2000 BCE, the urban features of the Harappan civilization began to disappear. Within four centuries they were gone. Buildings and sewers fell into disrepair; cities were abandoned; trade
collapsed; the mass production of metal tools and jewelry ended;
and people apparently stopped using inscribed seals and writing.
The Harappans thereafter lived in small farming communities. There
was little contact among these settlements, and cultural practices
increasingly diverged within what had been a unified civilization.
The Harappans must have been hit by a disaster, but scholars cannot agree on what happened. Proposed explanations include a
buildup of salt in the soil, foreign invasion, and epidemics. Whatever
the nature of the crisis, it was apparently compounded by environmental changes in the Harappan heartland. It has been suggested that
the land along the lower Indus became waterlogged; and something
perhaps shifts in the earths crust, sedimentation, or a change in the
pattern of monsoon windsdiverted the headwaters of the Sarasvati
to other rivers between 2500 and 1700 BCE. The once-mighty Sarasvati
shrank, shifted its course, and dried up about 1300 BCE. All of this
meant that the Indus and Sarasvati regions could no longer support
large populations. As a result, after abandoning their cities, the
Harappans also more or less deserted their heartland. Between about
1700 and 1600 BCE they resettled in the east, in the modern Indian
states of Punjab and Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh.

THE ARYANS
In the wake of the collapse of urban civilization, a new culture
became dominant in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.
The economic, social, and religious practices associated with this culture seem to have been quite different from those of the Harappans.
Indians who followed these practices referred to themselves as
Aryans, or ones to be respected.
For a century and a half, scholars have debated the question of just
who the Aryans were. Their language, which is sometimes called Vedic
(from their word for knowledge, which appears in the titles of the

The Birth of India

17

earliest Aryan works of literature), belongs to the Indo-European family

of languages. Unless the painstaking work of generations of historical
linguists is completely wrong, there is no room to doubt that the
Indo-European languages originated on the steppes of modern Ukraine,
Russia, and Kazakhstan.
On the basis of these facts, earlier historians built a theory that a
cohesive group of people, speaking what became the Vedic language,
gradually made their way across central Asia and then, perhaps in
the second millennium BCE, invaded the Indian subcontinent. From
the 1920s, when archeologists excavated the sites of Harappa and
Mohenjo Daro, many have assumed that the Harappan urban civilization was destroyed by this Aryan invasion. Probably reflecting the
preoccupations of some Europeans and Americans in the twentieth
century, it was further postulated that the Aryans were fair skinned,
and that the Harappans, whom they supposedly conquered, were
dark-skinned.
In fact, there is no evidence that the Aryans and the Harappans had
different skin colors or that the Aryans conquered the Harappans.
There is also no conclusive evidence that the people who called themselves Aryans (as opposed to speakers of earlier forms of the Vedic
language) ever lived anywhere except the Indian subcontinent or
neighboring areas of Afghanistan, and archeology provides no indication that a foreign population appeared in South Asia in the second
millennium BCE.
There have been many attempts to explain all of these seemingly
contradictory pieces of evidence. Perhaps the most straightforward
theory holds that the term Aryan referred to culture, rather than to
ethnicity or race: an Aryan was any Indian who, in the wake of the collapse of the Harappan urban civilization, adopted the Vedic language
and certain religious and social practices. One explanation of the
way this came about is that, during (or even before) the days of the
Harappan urban civilization, speakers of an early form of the Vedic
language made their way to South Asia. These people may themselves
have emigrated from the steppe regions where the ancestor of the
Indo-European languages was first spoken, or they may have originated elsewhere and learned their language from another group
which had come from the steppes.
Because we do not know what the language of the Harappans was,
it is possible that some or all of them spoke Vedic during the urban
phase of their civilization. However, it is more likely that these
Vedic-speakers remained on the fringes of the Harappan world until
urban civilization broke down. Then, they either settled in Harappan

18

The History of India

territory or made themselves rulers of some Harappan villages. Over

the next few centuries, more and more other Harappans apparently
adopted Aryan practices and, if they did not already speak it, they also
learned the Vedic language. This is suggested by the presence of
words of non-Indo-European origin in the earliest recorded form of
Vedic.
This raises another question: assuming the theory is correct, why
did Harappans refashion themselves as Aryans by adopting new
practices and (apparently) a new language? One answer is that the
end of urban civilization must have been traumatic for the Harappans,
whose way of doing things no longer worked, and it has been suggested that this explains why they seem to have taken to the culture
of the Aryans.
At any rate, whoever they may have been or where they came from,
the Aryans dominated northwestern India after the end of the Harappan urban civilizations. Our knowledge of both the Vedic language
and Aryan culture comes from the Rig Veda, a collection of 1,028
hymns, ballads, and songs that were apparently composed over many
centuries between 2000 and 1000 BCE. Three other works are grouped
with the Rig Veda to form the Samhitas, or collections: the Sama Veda,
poems from the Rig Veda in a different order; the Yajur Veda, instructions for priests; and the Atharva Veda, magic spells. The Samhitas
were very holy to the Aryans. Priests had to memorize them perfectly,
and passed them on by word of mouth (writing apparently vanished
from South Asia with the end of the Harappan urban civilization).
The Rig Veda tells us that the Aryans were grouped into independent tribes. Some tribes were ruled by councils, which may have consisted of elders. Others were headed by a chief, who was chosen by the
tribe or its elders for his prowess in war and his generosity in distributing plunder. Owning cattle was the most prestigious occupation
among the Aryans, and cows formed the basis of their wealth. Within
each tribe, the Rajanyas (later called Kshatriyas), or warriors and
cattle-owners, dominated the more numerous Vaishyas (peasants)
and craftsmen; the latter included bronzesmiths, who made tools
and weapons, and the makers of the warriors chariots.
The Aryan tribes lived in villages, but frequently abandoned them
to find new pastures. They often battled with each other, mainly to
acquire cattle. They also fought people who did not follow their social
and religious practices, whom they called Dasas, Dasyus, and Panis.
The Rig Veda describes the Dasas as black, which some scholars
believe means they were darker in complexion than the Aryans.
A few have gone further and connected this with the notion

The Birth of India

19

(mentioned above) that the Harappans were dark skinned. On this basis
they have posited that the Dasas were identical to the Harappans.
Others point out that the difference between the Dasas and Aryans
seems to have been cultural rather than racial, and that the Vedic word
for black often merely suggests that something is bad. Captured Dasas
were incorporated into Aryan tribes under the name of Shudras and
were compelled to do menial work.
The main gods of the Aryans were male. They included Indra, god
of war and weather, who led the Aryans in battle. Like an ideal Aryan
chief, he was brave and fun loving. Agni was god of fire, and Varuna
an all-knowing father who oversaw Rita, the law that keeps order in
the universe. To ensure that the gods remained well disposed, the
Aryan tribes held sacrifices. As tribesmen watched and prayed, their
Brahmins or priests made elaborate preparations and then slaughtered animals. The priests were so central to the ritual life of the tribes
that we often use the word Brahminical to describe the Aryan
religion.
By 1000 BCE, the eastward migration of Aryan tribes, and the adoption of Aryan ways by the earlier inhabitants of North India, had
brought the Aryan world to the Ganges river. It then spread eastward,
across the Gangetic plain; southward into Madhya Pradesh; and probably northward into the upper Indus Valley and Nepal. Nevertheless,
not everyone in North India became an Aryan. Especially in hills and
forests, many people continued to live as hunters and gatherers or as
nomads.
By about 550 BCE, the central Gangetic plain had become the center
of the Aryan world. The plain could not sustain large cattle herds, but
it was agriculturally productive. Land therefore replaced cattle as the
basis of wealth among the Aryans. Already, about 1000 BCE, Indian
smiths had learned to work iron. Some scholars believe that iron tools
were crucial to the Aryan movement across the Gangetic plain, arguing that such tools made it possible to clear the plains forests and to
cultivate its heavy black soil.
Meanwhile, for reasons that are unclear, the Aryan tribes gave
way to oligarchies and kingdoms, which were often associated with
a particular territory rather than with a mobile group of people. In
oligarchies, the dominant men elected a ruler. In kingdoms, the chief
became a king; he inherited his position and was consecrated by
Brahmins in a ritual that had not existed at the time of the Rig Veda.
The consecration signified that the king had the approval of the gods,
which made it hard to challenge his position. During this period,
Brahmins developed many new sacrifices, often to reinforce the kings

20

The History of India

power. Some Brahmins specialized in particular sacrifices. For example, the ancestors of a former prime minister of India, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, were Brahmins who performed the Vajapeya, a sacrifice that
rejuvenated an old king. In the sixth century BCE, the Aryan world
was divided into 16 states. The kings of Magadha, in what is now the
Indian state of Bihar, were particularly powerful thanks to their control of trade on the Ganges and of iron deposits. By the fourth century
BCE, they had conquered most of the other Aryan oligarchies and
kingdoms.

THE SECOND URBANIZATION

About 550 BCE, urban civilization returned to South Asia with the
reemergence of cities and the revival of long-distance trade. The reasons for this second urbanization are just as disputed as those for the
disappearance of the Harappan urban civilization a thousand years
earlier. The new cities were concentrated in the central Gangetic plain.
Trade was made easier when coins were introduced in South Asia
around 400 BCE. By this time, merchants had acquired another useful
tool with the revival of writing, which was well established by the
middle of the fifth century BCE. The most widely used script, Brahmi,
may have been borrowed from the Near East, or it may have developed in India (there are doubtful suggestions that it is derived from
the Harappan script). Over the previous millennium, the Vedic language had changed greatly, both with the passage of time and as it
was learned by people who originally spoke other tongues. The changes
took different forms in different places and eventually produced several
distinct new languages, called Prakrits (natural).
The Vedic language remained in use in the Brahminical religion,
however, and was learned by Brahmins. It was now called Sanskrit
(refined). Sanskrit was apparently never written at this stage of Indian
history, and the new scripts were used exclusively to write Prakrits.
However, the Brahmins continued to compose sacred literature in
Sanskrit, which they passed on orally. The principal Brahmin works
of this period are the Brahmanas, textbooks explaining sacrifices.
But the Brahminical religion was not static. In the Rig Veda, souls of
good people spend eternity in the World of the Fathers, and souls of
bad people in the House of Clay. After 1000 BCE, the belief spread that
souls only stay temporarily in heaven before being reborn on earth.
Our deeds (karma) in life determine the nature of the rebirth. Those
who were good may return as fortunate humans, whereas those who
were bad will become birds or insects. When these beings die, the

The Birth of India

21

whole process is repeated. The notions of karma and reincarnation

have been central to many Indian religions ever since.
However, many people found the prospect of endless rebirth to be
boring. There was a consensus that with special understanding, one
might escape the cycle. This understanding is explained in two Sanskrit works, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, completed between
700 and 500 BCE. The Upanishads say that everythingspace, gods,
living beingsemerged from a substance called Brahman (not to be
confused with the Brahmins), which continues to exist in all of them.
He who wishes to escape rebirth must meditate on this concept until
he understands that both the universe and his own soul are Brahman
and therefore identical. He will then lose consciousness of everything
except Brahman and reach a new level of existence where he is free.
Some scholars have suggested that these doctrines were popular
because they relieved anxiety caused by the end of Aryan tribal
society. Another theory connects the new teachings with economic
change: newly wealthy merchants resented the wastefulness of
Brahminical sacrifices and sought alternative means of salvation. In
any case, the belief in rebirth and escape became so widespread that
the Brahmins accepted the Aranyakas and the Upanishads alongside
the Samhitas and the Brahmanas as part of their scriptures, which
are collectively called the Vedas. (The term Vedas is sometimes more
specifically applied to the Samhitas.)
The authors of the Aranyakas and Upanishads represent a first
wave of religious speculation in the Aryan world. They were followed
by a second wave between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, with
teachings so different from those of the Brahmins that they developed
into separate religions entirely. The best known teacher of this second
wave was Siddhartha Gautama, called the Buddha (the Enlightened
One), who founded Buddhism. The Buddhist scriptures contain stories about the life and teachings of the Buddha, but in most cases their
authenticity is doubtful. It is not even certain when the Buddha lived;
Buddhist sources place his death around 483 BCE, but many scholars
now believe that a date between 378 and 358 BCE is nearer the truth.
Similarly, it is unclear what the Buddha actually taught. There are
suggestions that it was quite different from what appears in the
Buddhist scriptures, but the latter provide the only surviving explanations of early Buddhist doctrine. They assert that the heart of
Buddhism is the teaching that there are four Noble Truths: life is full
of unpleasantnesses (sometimes translated as suffering); the
unpleasantness is caused by our thirst (or craving) to satisfy ourselves; we can end the unpleasantness by stopping the thirst; and we

22

The History of India

can stop the thirst with the Noble Eightfold Path, or a life of moderation. This thirst arises because we think that we are individuals.
Actually, according to Buddhism, the universe and everything in it
are ever-changing compounds of elements. The only stable thing
is Nirvana, which is similar to the state that followers of the Upanishads reach when they realize that everything is Brahman. Nirvana
is attained by ethical conduct, such as performing good works and
abstaining from killing. The Buddhas most dedicated followers
formed an order of monks and nuns, who gave all or part of their lives
to preaching and to monastic devotion. By the third century BCE,
India was covered with Buddhist monasteries.
Another great religious teacher was Vardhamana, called Mahavira
(Great Hero), the founder of the Jain religion. The life and teachings
of Mahavira are as uncertain as those of the Buddha. According to
the Jain scriptures, Mahavira was a contemporary of the Buddha. He
is said to have taught that the universe contains an infinite number
of living entities or souls. These are found in everything, including
plants and stones. For this reason, nonviolence or ahimsa is central to
Jain notions of righteousness, and Jain monks must refrain from
killing even insects.

THE MAURYAS
In 330 BCE, Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, defeated and
killed Darius III of Iran. Alexander and his army then headed east
through Iran to northwestern India, which had been conquered by
the Iranians almost 200 years earlier. Alexander reached what is now
Indian Punjab, but when his army threatened mutiny, he withdrew.
A man named Chandragupta Maurya, helped by his Brahmin adviser
who is variously called Kautilya, Chanakya, or Vishnugupta, apparently took advantage of the disorder that followed the Macedonian
withdrawal to seize territory in Punjab. From this base, Chandragupta
and Kautilya moved eastward, and, about 325 or 321 BCE, defeated
the king of Magadha. Chandragupta ascended the throne of Magadha
and founded the Mauryan dynasty. He must have ruled all, or almost
all, of the Aryan world. In 305 BCE, he seems to have defeated
Seleucus Nicator, a Greek general who had made himself king of Syria
and Iran after Alexanders death, and added parts of Afghanistan to
his dominions.
Chandragupta ruled Magadha until about 297 BCE, when his son
Bindusara became king. Bindusara probably conquered territory in
the vast Deccan plateau of peninsular India (the modern states of

The Birth of India

23

Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh). He died

about 272 BCE. The next king was his son Ashoka, one of greatest
monarchs in the history of India. Thanks to the conquests of previous
kings of Magadha, Ashoka ruled a huge empire, extending from
Afghanistan to Karnataka, and from Gujarat to Kalinga on the Bay of
Bengal, even if he did not (as is sometimes said) rule the whole subcontinent. Kalinga played a pivotal role in Ashokas life, as, eight
years after he became king, he subjugated the region in a bloody war.
Ashoka claimed to have been transformed by his remorse over the loss
of life in Kalinga. Whether he really was or not, he apparently became
a Buddhist and adopted a new ethical system in his administration.
Ashoka was the first ruler in South Asia known to have set up
inscriptions, texts carved in stone and publicly displayed. His inscriptions, which are found all over India, include a pillar at Sarnath, where
the Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon. The pillar s
capital bears sculpted lions, which have been adopted as a symbol of
modern India. Thanks to his inscriptions, we know more about
Ashoka than any previous Indian king. The inscriptions suggest that
Ashoka was a devout Buddhist. But despite what has sometimes been
said, Ashokas personal Buddhist beliefs seem to have been distinct
from the ethical policy that he adopted after the Kalinga war. He used
the Prakrit word dhamma for this policy, which called on his people to
make kindness to other living things the guiding principle of their
lives. He led the way by providing medical care for humans and animals, planting fruit trees along the sides of roads to give shade and
food, and becoming a partial vegetarian. It is likely that the policy of
dhamma agreed with Ashokas own beliefs, but it was also politically
useful: the king probably hoped it would bridge the many divisions
(religious, linguistic, economic, cultural) among his subjects with an
ideology that almost everyone could accept, all under his leadership.
Besides Ashokas inscriptions, we have two major sources of
information about Mauryan India. One is the fragments of a book by
Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador to Chandraguptas court. The other
source is a Sanskrit book called Arthashastra, which is said to have
been written by Chandraguptas adviser Kautilya. The existing
version of Arthashastra was edited 500 years after Kautilyas time, but
many scholars believe it includes passages that really were composed
by Kautilya, along with later additions. Kautilya supposedly wrote
Arthashastra to show Chandragupta how to rule Magadha. The book
contains information on Mauryan government, although it is unclear
how much of it is what Kautilya (or later authors) wanted and how
far it reflects the way things actually were. In any case, Arthashastra

24

The History of India

describes a centralized administration, under the personal control of

the king. It recommends that the king have secret agents all over the
country, both to detect dissent and to keep in touch with the people.
Whether this was actually done or not, we know that Ashoka ruled
through a large body of paid bureaucrats.
The majority of the population of Mauryan India was rural. As they
do today, peasants lived in villages near their fields. Their main food
crops were wheat and barley in the north, rice in the Gangetic plain,
and millet in dryer areas (such as the Deccan). From before the time
of the Mauryas, the principal tax in India was the land revenue, which
was collected at a rate of between one sixth and one third the value of
the crop.
By the time of Chandragupta, cities definitely existed in the
old Aryan world of North India, and probably also in the Deccan.
Elsewhere, the Mauryas may have established new cities, for by the
end of the dynasty, urban settlements existed in all parts of India
except the extreme south. Nevertheless, outside of the Gangetic plain,
Mauryan cities fall into distinct clusters. These were apparently separated from one another by regions inhabited by Tribals, where the
Mauryas may have only controlled the roads linking the urbanized
areas.
Cities were centers for administration, manufacturing, and commerce. Mauryan India had an extensive trade with the Mediterranean
world. Its significance is shown by the fact that Indians called all foreign merchants Yavanas, meaning Greeks. Merchants had used writing
for several centuries before the accession of Ashoka, and it was now
employed by the government as well. The language of administration
was Magadhi, the Prakrit spoken in Magadha. There is little evidence
that Sanskrit was written before Mauryan times, but Arthashastra is in
Sanskrit, and it is difficult to believe that it was handed down orally.
This suggests that Brahmins like Kautilya now wrote in Sanskrit, most
likely in the Brahmi script that was already used for Prakrits.
The greatest Mauryan city was the capital, Pataliputra, in the
modern state of Bihar. In Pataliputra, archeologists have found a pillared hall, apparently built by Chandragupta, which is the oldest
known stone building in India. In keeping with his Buddhist leanings,
Ashoka built at Buddhist holy places. The Mauryan period seems to
mark the beginning of Buddhist construction in permanent materials.
Ashoka died about 235 BCE. The Mauryan empire began to disintegrate almost immediately, showing that dhamma was insufficient
to hold together so vast a territory. The decline has been attributed to
economic decay, poor communications, problems in managing the

The Birth of India

25

bureaucracy, or war. About 185 BCE, the last Mauryan king of

Magadha was overthrown, but the Mauryas had played a key role in
the development of South Asia. By bringing Gangetic civilization to
more of India than ever before, they created lasting cultural and economic ties over much of the country, particularly among the urban
areas. India was politically divided after the death of Ashoka, but
cities and the Gangetic civilization (which from this point onward
can be called Classical Indian civilization) continued to spread, and
trade grew steadily.

INDIA AFTER THE MAURYAS

After the Mauryas, the social and economic center of India shifted
from the Gangetic plain to the northwest and the south. The northwest
was repeatedly conquered by foreigners who adopted Indian culture
and religious beliefsGreeks from Afghanistan, Parthians from Iran,
and Shakas and Kushanas from Central Asia. The greatest Kushana
king, Kanishka, ruled much of Central Asia, and northern India at
least to the eastern frontiers of Uttar Pradesh, if not beyond. The
wealth of the Kushanas was based on trade. By this time, there was a
flourishing commerce between India and China, mainly in luxury
goods. Thanks to their control of Central Asia, the Kushanas were able
to tax traders on the Silk Road, the overland trade route from China to
the Roman Empire, which was then at the peak of its importance.
Kanishka was a patron of Buddhism, which about this time spread
along the trade routes from India into Central Asia.
North Indian sculptors and architects played a major part in the
development of Indian artistic traditions. Their work was almost
always religious in natureBuddhist, Jain, or Brahminical. The sculptures and buildings of the Gandhara school in the northwest showed
the influence of the Greeks and the Romans and molded later Buddhist art. At the end of the first century BCE, sculptors at Mathura in
the upper Gangetic plain borrowed Greco-Roman and other elements
from the northwest and apparently produced the first statues of the
Buddha (until then, depicting him had been regarded as sacrilege).
The Mathura school developed into Classical North Indian sculpture
and then into Hindu sculpture.
Gangetic civilization spread in the Deccan during and particularly
after the Mauryan period. The process was encouraged by local kings,
who sought power and legitimation by associating themselves with
the prestigious culture of the north. To this day, the Deccan marks
the southern limit of languages derived from Sanskrit: The inhabitants

26

The History of India

of Maharashtra adopted Prakrit languages (which became modern

Marathi), whereas those of neighboring Andhra Pradesh, Telangana,
and Karnataka did not. Although culturally part of the Gangetic world,
they retained their own languages, which belong to the Dravidian family.
The greatest post-Mauryan dynasty of the Deccan was that of the
Satavahanas or Andhras, from the first century BCE to the mid-third
century CE or later. The Satavahanas were apparently of Tribal origin,
but they adopted Gangetic culture. They fostered the Brahminical religion and the Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. After the Satavahanas,
the Deccan was divided into smaller kingdoms. These were centers
of rock-cut architecture, sacred buildings carved into the living rock.
The best known of these creations are the Buddhist and Jain remains
at Ajanta and Ellora in Maharashtra.
Like the northwest, the Deccan was part of a network of internal
and international trade, which may have been the source of the wealth
of the builders of Ajanta and Ellora. It is possible that by this time,
Indian sailors were already visiting Southeast Asia and China, but
most of the Deccans seaborne trade between the first and third centuries CE was with the Roman Empire, which bought Indian luxury
goods (such as spices and fine textiles) in return for gold.
Meanwhile, by the mid-first millennium BCE, pottery and iron were
used in the land of the Tamils, the extreme south of India (modern
Tamil Nadu and Kerala; the people of Kerala were not regarded as
separate from Tamils until the eleventh century CE). The Tamil country was not ruled by Ashoka, but it had friendly relations with him,
and by Mauryan times Buddhist and Jain ascetics traveled in the area.
The main source of our knowledge of early Tamil history is the
Shangam (or Sangam) literature, a collection of heroic poems that
were probably composed orally between the first and third centuries
CE. The poems suggest a region in different stages of development,
with hunters and gatherers in some places and peasant villagers in
others. The older clan-based political structure seems to have been
giving way to kingdoms, which may reflect the spread of ideas and
institutions from the north. At this point, the only cities in the Tamil
country were apparently ports that traded with the Roman Empire
and were dominated by foreign merchants.

THE END OF ANCIENT INDIA

After the Kushanas, North India seems to have broken into small
kingdoms and oligarchies. In the fourth century CE, it was reunited by
the Gupta kings, the greatest of whom, Chandra Gupta II (c. 375415),

The Birth of India

27

also dominated much of the Deccan. In the fifth century, however, North
India again fragmented following attacks by a people called the Hunas,
who were presumably identical with the Huns of European history. It
was temporarily reunited by a king named Harshavardhana (606647),
whose death in 647 may be regarded as marking the end of ancient India.
Meanwhile, the Tamil world of the Shangam age gave way to a society that resembled that of the rest of India, with an economy based on
peasant agriculture, a religion dominated by Brahmins, and governments headed by divinely sanctioned kings. By the sixth century, there
were two major Tamil dynasties, the Pallavas and the Pandyas. The
Deccan and the Tamil country were wealthy thanks to a flourishing
trade with Southeast Asia and China, which replaced the now defunct
Roman Empire as Indias main overseas markets.
By Gupta times, the Prakrits were evolving into the modern languages of northern and central India, while the Dravidian tongues of
the south were becoming modern Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and
Malayalam. However, the most striking linguistic development in
India after the Mauryas was the revival of Sanskrit. It had always been
learned by Brahminical priests, no matter what their first language,
but was now also used for nonreligious purposes. By Gupta times,
educated men learned Sanskrit as a matter of course, and the ancient
language had replaced Prakrits on inscriptions. Several reasons have
been suggested for the increasing use of Sanskrit. Perhaps the foreign
kings of the northwest fostered the most prestigious Indian language
to show that, despite their ancestry, they were Indian. Or perhaps
the languages spoken in different parts of India had become so diverse
that communication was impossible, and Sanskrit (already known by
priests) provided a solution.
In any case, the widespread use of Sanskrit made possible the development of a rich Sanskrit literature. Its most famous examples are two
epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which were revised
and added to over many centuries until they reached their present
forms in the first millennium CE. The Mahabharata is the longest single
poem in the world, and tells the story of a war between two families of
cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The Ramayana is the story of
Rama, king of Kosala, and his faithful wife Sita.
Literature was not the only interest of the educated classes of
ancient India. They made advances in the sciences, and the world is
indebted to the Indian mathematicians who invented the decimal system, with a symbol for zero. This notation was later borrowed by the
Arabs, who passed it on to Europe, where the Indian numerals were
called Arabic numerals.

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The History of India

BUDDHISM AND HINDUISM

Probably thanks to Ashoka, Buddhism spread across India after the
Mauryas. This was accompanied by a change in Buddhist theology.
A belief arose that rather than reach Nirvana, someone who lived an
exemplary life would be reborn as a Bodhisattva (one whose essence
is perfect knowledge) with the power to answer the prayers of ordinary mortals for salvation. It has been suggested that this doctrine
was borrowed from Christianity.
Buddhists who believed this teaching called it the Mahayana, or
Great Vehicle to Nirvana, and they referred to traditional Buddhism
as the Hinayana, or Lesser Vehicle. Indian monks carried Mahayana
Buddhism to China, from where it reached Japan. By the time of the
Guptas, Mahayana had replaced Hinayana as the dominant form of
Buddhism in India. Hinayana survived in Sri Lanka, and from there
it was taken to Southeast Asia. In the eighth century CE, a third form
of Buddhism appeared, Vajrayana, the Vehicle of the Thunderbolt.
Vajrayana Buddhists used a kind of magic, called the thunderbolt, to
maintain the goodwill of a pantheon of goddesses. In the eleventh century, Vajrayana Buddhism was adopted in Tibet, where it developed
into modern Tibetan Buddhism.
It is sometimes said that during the first millennium CE, the old
Brahminical religion won back the allegiance of Indians whose ancestors had lapsed into other faiths. It would be more correct to say that in
this period the Brahminical religion merged with folk beliefs, regional
traditions, and elements of Buddhism, Jainism, and other religions to
form a new faith. The term Hindu was not used in India until long
after this period, but it is convenient to refer to this new faith as
Hinduism. Hinduism is now the religion of 81 percent of the population of India, or 972 million people, and another 15 million in Pakistan
and Bangladesh.
Hinduism has no religious leadership with authority over all
believers, and no single set of beliefs. In some respects, it cannot properly be described using Western definitions of the word religion.
Nevertheless, most of the many varieties of Hinduism share certain
tenets. Chief among them is the notion of karma, which entered the
Brahminical religion at the time of the Upanishads: every deed that
we perform determines what sort of body our souls will be reborn
in after our current life ends. Most modern Hindus adhere to the
Upanishadic doctrine that one may escape rebirth by recognizing the
identity of the human soul with the universal essence of Brahman.
This, however, is difficult to achieve, and Hindus therefore usually

The Birth of India

29

try to live their lives as best they can, so as to be born in a better situation in their next incarnation. One of the main elements of a good life
is devotion to God. Devotional practices existed among some North
Indian followers of the Brahminical religion by 100 BCE. Modern
Hindu devotionalism, however, owes more to teachings that developed in the Tamil country, and gradually spread across India. It is
based on the idea that God loves us and will save us if we repent our
sins. We too can love God, and show it through worship and hymns,
rather than with Aryan-style sacrifices.
As the use of the singular form God suggests, there was a tendency toward monotheism among Hindus. Most educated Hindus
came to regard one of two deities as the basic form of God, with the
other divine beings as manifestations that He assumes for special
circumstances. These two deities are Vishnu, a minor god in the
Rig Veda, and Shiva, a fertility god whom Hindus identify with the
Rig Vedic god Rudra. Since Gupta times, there have been efforts
to bring together the worshippers of Vishnu and Shiva with the concept of the Trinity. This presents these deities as aspects of the same
divinity: God has three forms, Brahma who created everything,
Vishnu who preserves, and Shiva who destroys. Most Hindus continue to concentrate on either Vishnu or Shiva, however, and there
are very few temples dedicated to Brahma in India today (one count
says there are just two of them). Devotees of Vishnu often worship
him in one of the forms that he is said to have taken to come down
to earth, notably Krishna (a character in the Mahabharata) and
Rama (the hero of the Ramayana). Some Hindus do not believe in any
God, and look instead to Rita, the Rig Vedic law of the universe.
The worship of the Mother Goddess is strong in some parts of India,
particularly the state of West Bengal. Other Hindus venerate holy
men, such as Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1917. The many sacred
rivers and places of Hinduism include the Ganges river, and holy places that were destinations for pilgrims by Gupta times. These include
the shrines of Vishnu (in his form of a deity called Jagannath) at Puri
in Odisha; of Minakshi the Mother Goddess at Madurai in Tamil
Nadu; and of Shiva at Amarnath in Kashmir. Certain animals and
plants are also holy, especially the cow. By the first century CE, even
nonvegetarians agreed that the cow was so sacred it should not be
killed. The reasons for this are debated; Hindus often say it is because
the cow represents the Mother of all of us. And every village in India
has its own guardian deity.
Hindus worship both at home and at a temple. Brahmins, the
descendants of the old Aryan priests, may perform or lead the

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The History of India

worship, which involves veneration of the deitys statue, picture, or

symbol. The Brahminical religion does not seem to have used temples
before the second century BCE, but by Gupta times, India was covered
with Hindu temples, each usually dedicated to a particular deity.
The basic structure of temples has been unchanged since the sixth century CE, although there are differences between north and south
Indian styles of architecture.
A good Hindu may not escape rebirth, but his or her soul will spend
many years in heaven and then be reborn in a happy new life. Righteous conduct is outlined in what can be called the Hindu Scriptures.
These include the ancient Vedas, from the Rig Veda to the Upanishads,
but most Hindus believe that the main message of the Scriptures is the
one outlined by Vishnu in his guise as Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, a
section of the Mahabharata. This is that we should each fill our assigned
role in this world, not because it will benefit us but because it is what
God wants us to do; and we should love God, who loves us.
Implicit in this is the belief that God has given different functions to
different people. The main factor in determining ones function is
caste. A caste is a group of people who marry each other, eat with each
other, and follow specific occupations. Castes are ranked, and the
higher the caste, the purer it is in religious terms. This means that contact with members of lower castes may pollute higher ones. Each caste
has its own rules, so that one must act in the way appropriate for a
member of ones caste. Many Hindus believe that a persons caste in
this life is determined by his or her conduct in a preceding one.
It is often said that the caste system came into being to maintain the
supremacy of the Aryans over other Indians, with the Aryans
assigning themselves to the higher castes and everyone else to the
lower. Those who believe that the Aryans were the light-skinned conquerors of a darker people have even tried to explain the caste system
as an early manifestation of twentieth-century segregation of people
with different skin colors. All of this assumes that the Aryans were a
distinct ethnic group, and it has been seen that this assumption is
questionable (since many of the first Aryans seem to have been indigenous Indians who adopted Aryan ways and the Vedic language).
It also confuses caste with varna. The varnas were the four categories
of ancient Aryan societyBrahmins, or priests; Kshatriyas, or warriors; Vaishyas, or peasants; and Shudras, or people who had not willingly become Aryans. If a community decided to adopt the Aryan
ways and language, its people fitted themselves into these categories.
It is not known exactly how varna functioned among the Aryans.
It involved some sort of ranking and some connection to occupation,

The Birth of India

31

but it may have been used only at religious ceremonies and not during
daily life. Moreover, at least for Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas,
peoples varnas could change if they took up new occupations. All of
this makes varna very different from caste.
Between 1000 and 550 BCE, the varna system was apparently modified: As trade increased, Vaishyas came to be associated with merchants, and peasants and craftsmen (even if originally Vaishyas)
were regarded as Shudras. By this time, the Aryans were apparently
divided into both varnas (perhaps only on religious occasions) and
jatis (from the Sanskrit word for birth), or groups of people who
were related by blood. It seems that gradually, varna and jati merged
to form the caste system, and in modern India caste is called jati.
Perhaps sometimes, occupational groups became more and more
exclusive until they were castes; and as Aryan culture spread across
India, Tribals and others were incorporated as new castes. The concept
of varna contributed both the idea that caste has a religious basis, and
that the castes are ranked. The formation of the caste system was a
very gradual process. It began in the north and slowly spread. For
many centuries the system remained flexible: one could change caste,
marry outside of caste, and eat with people from other castes. The
caste system apparently did not reach its classic form until the thirteenth century CE or later, and it has continuously evolved since then.
There are now over 3,000 Hindu castes. The highest-ranking castes are
Brahmins. They trace their ancestry to the Aryan priesthood, although
the majority of them pursue nonreligious jobs. By several centuries
BCE, there was a new group of castes at the bottom of society, the
Untouchables, who were considered so polluting that they could not
draw water from communal wells, enter temples, and so forth. Often,
Untouchables were originally people whose work was regarded as
very degrading. (Today, many Untouchables prefer to call themselves
Dalits, which means oppressed in Sanskrit. The nationalist leader
Mahatma Gandhi referred to them as Harijans, which he translated
as children of God, but many Dalits regard this term as patronizing
and offensive. In this book, the traditional English term Untouchable is used in discussions of events up to the middle of the twentieth
century, after which the Indian governments official designation of
Scheduled Caste or SC is employed.)
For a Hindu, breaking caste rules is a sin against dharma, the
Sanskrit form of the name of Ashokas policy dhamma. In Hinduism,
dharma refers both to the Hindu religion itself and to the laws that
tell humans how to act. Brahmin theologians said every man should
live by his own varnashramadharma (law of caste and stage of life).

32

The History of India

The idea of Stages of Life (ashramas) teaches that a mans life should be
divided into four parts, with different responsibilities at each: after
initiation into the Hindu community, he is a student (studying the
Vedas, and perhaps other subjects too); after marriage, he is a householder; when his grandchildren are born, he retires to the forest to
meditate and perform penance; and when he no longer wants any
material things, he gives up all and wanders till he dies. The householder stage is the most important part of life (few men go through
the hermit or wanderer stages). Marriage is expected of a Hindu
man, and the householder should enjoy sexual relations during this
part of his life, and father children. Until 1955, Hindu men in India
were permitted to marry more than one wife, although few ever did.
The typical Hindu family is a joint family: the household is headed
by a senior male; he administers the property, but it is owned in
common by the other adult males (his brothers, sons, and so forth),
who often all live in the same house with their wives and children.
Aryan women of the three higher varnas originally studied the Vedas,
which made them full participants in religious life. By about the
beginning of the common era, this was no longer the case. A womans
function was held to be marriage and caring for her family. Daughters
came to be regarded as less desirable than sons: they cannot help their
parents or perpetuate the family, as on marriage they become part of
the husbands family; they need a dowry; they cannot perform their
fathers funeral rites. Still, women in traditional Hindu society did
have some rights: they could own some personal property, and
women from the higher classes were educated.
Devotional Hinduism spread through India during the first millennium CE, probably because it offered a spiritual comfort missing from
Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism began to decline in the fourth century
CE, and today there are fewer than 5 million Jains in India. It will be
seen in the next chapter that Buddhism eventually disappeared
altogether from its homeland. Meanwhile, foreign merchants brought
other religions to India. Whatever the truth of a legend that the
Apostle Thomas preached in India, we know that by the sixth century
there were Christians in Kerala on the southwest coast. A thousand
years later, the Portuguese converted many Hindus on the west coast
(especially in Goa) to Roman Catholicism, and in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries Protestant missionaries made further converts,
especially in northeastern India. Today, there are 28 million Christians
in India, forming 2.3 percent of the population.
Merchants were probably also responsible for introducing Judaism
and Zoroastrianism to the west coast of India. Most Indian Jews have

The Birth of India

33

now emigrated to Israel. During the period of British colonial rule in

India, Indian Zoroastrians (called Parsis, Persians) rose to great
heights in business and in politics. One of them, Dadabhai Naoroji,
was a founding figure of the Indian nationalist movement. Over the
last 60 years, however, Indias Parsi population has been steadily
declining due to a combination of emigration and a low birth rate.
While individual Indian Jews and Parsis have played prominent parts
in Indian history, their communities have never been numerous
to exert a significant collective influence. In the seventh century,
however, India had its first encounters with a faith that had a profound impact on the whole subsequent history of the subcontinent.
This was Islam.

3
Religion, Trade, and Conquest
ISLAM
In the last chapter, it was suggested that the death of King Harshavardhana in 647 may be taken as the end of the ancient period of
Indian history. Any classification of history as ancient, medieval,
and modern is arbitrary, and to some degree it may reflect the
experience of western Europe more than of other parts of the world.
Nevertheless, during the first half of the seventh century, a chain of
events began that had momentous effects on Indiaso momentous
that, in retrospect, Harshavardhanas reign does seem to constitute a
turning point.
Harshavardhana may not even have been aware of these events,
which began at Mecca in western Arabia, 2,500 miles from his kingdom. In 610, four years after Harshavardhana came to the throne, a
Meccan trader named Muhammad began to receive what his followers believe were visits from the archangel Gabriel. According to
Gabriel, God had sent a succession of prophets to reveal His message
to humanity, but mortals had always lost or distorted that message.
Muhammad had been chosen as the last prophet, and he was to
ensure that the word of God was preserved correctly. The heart of

36

The History of India

the divine message, which Muhammads followers recorded in the

book called the Quran, is that humans must worship God alone and
surrender themselves to Him. The religion that was revealed to
Muhammad was therefore called Islam, submission, and those
who followed it Muslims, those who submit.
Muhammad preached Gods message and acquired a growing
number of followers. He instructed Muslims to carry out a constant
struggle (jihad) to please God and spread His word, promising them
the rewards of heaven if they did so. In 622, Muhammad moved from
Mecca to the town of Medina, where he built the first mosque, or
Muslim place of worship. He also organized a government and an
army, and in 630 he returned to Mecca and captured it from its nonMuslim rulers. Two years later, he died. Most Muslims accepted a
man named Abu Bakr as their new religious leader and secular ruler,
and Abu Bakr became the first khalifa, or successor, of Muhammad.
Half a century later, the khalifa Muawiya named his own son as his
heir. This transformed the khalifa into the hereditary ruler of what had
become an immense Muslim empire. Islam first spread rapidly among
the polytheistic, Jewish, and Christian Arabs. Then, between 632 and
732, the now Muslim Arabs destroyed the Sasanian empire of Iran,
conquered the Near Eastern possessions of the Byzantine empire,
and expanded westward as far as Spain and Portugal and eastward
into Central Asia.

EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA

By this time, there were four broad political and cultural regions in
South Asia: the East, comprising Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and
Odisha; the North, the upper and central Gangetic plain; the peninsular Deccan; and the Tamil country of the far south. Each of these
regions was subdivided into several kingdoms, whose rulers normally
recognized the overlordship of the most powerful of their number.
This structure created stability within each region. There was, however,
frequent warfare between the overlords of different regions, who
wanted one anothers territory, wealth, and markets. Occasionally, an
overlord such as Harshavardhana extended his power outside of his
own region, but such supremacy was never more than temporary.
The kings of early medieval India derived much of their authority
from the fact that they were regarded as earthly representatives of
the patron deities of their families. Religious rituals that emphasized
this aspect of kingshipwhether Hindu, Jain, or Buddhistplayed a
prominent role in most kingdoms. Kings distributed gifts to nobles,

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

37

Brahmin priests, and temples in return for their participation in these

rituals and their loyalty. The gifts included land, apparently usually
meaning the right to collect and keep the land revenue (the tax on agricultural production) from a given area. All this created a decentralized
political hierarchy in most of the subcontinent, although the precise
structures differed from place to place. At the top, there was a great
king, often a regional overlord. Then came lesser kings who accepted
his supremacy, the recipients of land grants from both great and lesser
kings, and the local chieftains, rulers of miniature kingdoms comprising groups of neighboring villages, who kept order in their territories
and passed on the land revenue to their superiors. At the very bottom
were the headmen of each village.
Indian notions of kingship, social organization, and religious practice continued to spread into Tribal areas, and Tribals were absorbed
into Indian society. Sometimes, Hindu settlements were founded in
Tribal areas. Other times, Tribal leaders refashioned themselves as
Hindu kings, as chieftains in the south had done during and after the
time of the Mauryas.
Of the four regions of South Asia, the East (centering on Bengal) had
been the easternmost province of the Mauryas and the Guptas. It had a
large Tribal population. Like other Indian monarchs, kings in Bengal
granted land to Brahmins. Much of this land was in Tribal areas,
where the Brahmins introduced labor-intensive rice cultivation to people who until then had practiced hunting, fishing, and gathering or
shifting cultivation. As they became rice-growing peasants, the Tribals
adopted the language that became modern Bengali, and their beliefs
were assimilated to Hinduism or Buddhism. The Pala kings of Bengal
(c. 7501161) were generous patrons of Buddhism, and the greatest of
them, Dharmapala (c. 770810), dominated East and North India.
Dharmapalas principal rivals were the Gurjara-Pratiharas, the leading dynasty of the early medieval north, who originated in Rajasthan
and were the strongest kings in India in the early and mid-ninth century. Perhaps as early as the days of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, or perhaps
not until the fifteenth century, the incorporation of Tribal areas into the
greater Indian world led to the formation of a new caste in North
India. Its members, the Rajputs, were apparently descended from the
founders of Hindu colonies in Tribal areas. Over several centuries,
Rajputs of disparate origins came to regard themselves as a caste.
They ranged from true kings, especially in Rajasthan and Gujarat,
through local chieftains, down to village headmen. Till the twentieth
century, the Rajputs dominated much of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the
central and upper Gangetic plain.

38

The History of India

The Deccan and the Tamil country were henceforth as important as

the North in Indian history. To strengthen their authority, kings in the
south granted land in Tribal areas to Brahmins and temples, with
much the same effects as in Bengal. The Rashtrakuta kings of the
Deccan (743974) campaigned in the Tamil country and the North, and
in the ninth century succeeded the Gurjara-Pratiharas as the principal
Indian dynasts. They were patrons of sculpture and rock-cut architecture. In the Tamil country, a dynasty called the Cholas subjugated the
Pallava and Pandya kings in the late ninth century. A hundred years
later, the Cholas became the leading monarchs of the subcontinent.
The Cholas presided over the flowering of classical Tamil culture. Perhaps their greatest monument is the temple of Shiva at Thanjavur. They
declined in the late eleventh century and ended in the thirteenth.
Trade was a major source of wealth for all the great kingdoms of
India. To produce exports such as spices and textiles, many kings fostered agriculture by encouraging cultivation in Tribal areas, and, particularly in the arid parts of the south, by building irrigation works.
After falling off with the decline of the Roman Empire, trade to the
west picked up as the Sasanian and Byzantine empires were consolidated (before these fell to the rising power of Islam). Meanwhile,
Indias trade with Southeast Asia and China grew steadily. Indian cultural and religious practices spread in Southeast Asia, probably as
indigenous kings adopted Indian culture. One result of this was the
construction of the great Hindu temples at Angkor in Cambodia.
Trade brought colonies of foreign merchants to all the ports of India.
In some areas, Hindus increasingly left sea travel to foreigners, and by
the twelfth century there was a widespread belief among many Hindus that foreign travel brought religious impurity. This idea lasted till
the twentieth century.
Indias trade to the east and west traveled by both caravan and ship.
By the seventh century, a great network of seaborne commerce linked
the economies of countries all along the shores of the Indian Ocean.
The Arab conquests of the seventh century united this Indian Ocean
trading world with that of the Mediterranean, making Indias overseas
trade part of a huge new economy under Muslim Arab domination.
It has been suggested that the inflow of wealth from trade determined
the strongest dynasty in India. Thus, for several centuries, the largest
share of Indias foreign trade traveled westward, up the Persian Gulf
and into the Arab empire. The Rashtrakutas controlled the west coast
of India, and their participation in the Gulf trade made them wealthy
and powerful. Then, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Indias trade
with the west shrank, thanks to Turkish incursions in the Arab world.

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

39

At the same time, trade with Southeast Asia grew, and preeminence
passed from the Rashtrakutas to the Cholas of southeastern India.

THE COMING OF ISLAM

It was trade that gave India its first contact with Islam. This came in
either 636 or 644, when an Arab force attacked a nest of pirates near
Mumbai. In 644, during their conquest of Sasanian Iran, the Arabs
took over Balochistan, now the westernmost province of Pakistan.
In the seventh century, Arab merchants in the Indian ports joined their
compatriots elsewhere in converting to Islam. The Mappila Muslims
of South India claim descent from these Arab traders and their Indian
wives. Some Indians also converted to Islam, and Hindu kings in
South India from the Cholas onward often hired Muslim mercenaries.
In 711713, the Arabs moved eastward from Balochistan to conquer
Sindh. Sindh was on the sea route from the Indian west coast to the
Persian Gulf. It was ruled by a Brahmin king, and its people included
both Hindus and Buddhists. The Arabs justified the conquest on the
grounds that Sindhi pirates had captured Muslim women, but the real
reasons may have been to safeguard sea trade, or to round out the
frontiers of the Arab empire.
According to the Quran, Muslims may forcibly convert adherents of
polytheistic religions to Islam. The first conquered peoples of the Arab
empire, however, were mostly Jews and Christians. Islam teaches that
Judaism and Christianity were founded by authentic prophets and are
therefore legitimate faiths, even if their followers have distorted Gods
word. Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were accorded the
status of dhimmis, nonbelievers who were allowed to practice
their religions. They could not be compelled to serve in the army as
Muslims were. In return for this exemption, they were required to
pay a tax called the jizya.
The official religion of the Sasanian empire of Iran was Zoroastrianism. After the Arab conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians were added to the
list of dhimmis. Muslim theologians justified this on the grounds that,
although Islam does not recognize Zoroaster as a Prophet, his followers are like Jews and Christians in that they are monotheistic and
have a holy book. With the conquest of Sindh, large numbers of
Hindus and Buddhists came under Muslim rule, and the category of
dhimmi was further enlarged to accommodate them. This was probably
more for pragmatic than theological reasons, in that the Sindhis were
simply too numerous to convert forcibly. Nevertheless, though Muslims
were prepared to tolerate nonbelievers as dhimmis, Muhammad had

40

The History of India

declared the worship of images to be a grave sin. The Arabs accordingly

often destroyed the statues in Hindu temples in Sindh, and they occasionally demolished Hindu and Buddhist holy places altogether, particularly if they had been built after the establishment of Muslim rule.
Between the eighth and tenth centuries, the Muslim Arab empire
disintegrated as provincial governors transformed themselves into independent rulers, regarding the khalifa as a purely religious leader
with no political authority. In Iran, the new monarchs were called sultans. The sultans replaced Arab culture in their courts with a blend of
Islamic and Iranian traditions, projecting themselves as semidivine
monarchs in the old Iranian style and sponsoring Persian literature
and art.
Sultans in Iran often used slaves as advisers and military officers, on
the assumption that a master could count on the loyalty of his slaves.
Most of the slaves were shamanistic Turks from Central Asia, who
were converted to Islam by their masters. They were not always as
loyal as expected, and in the ninth and tenth centuries many Iranian
sultans were overthrown by their Turkish slave officers. At the same
time, free Turkish nomads entered Iran, became Muslims, and
founded dynasties of their own. The result was that most of the
eastern Islamic world came under the rule of Turkish sultans, who
continued to use fellow Turks as slaves.
In 962, a Turkish slave founded the Ghaznawid sultanate in eastern
Afghanistan. Sultan Mahmud (9971030) expanded the Ghaznawid
territories to the west and east. He conquered the Hindu kingdom of
Kabul (which comprised northeastern Afghanistan and the northern
half of Pakistan) and northern Sindh. Like the Arabs in Sindh, the
Ghaznawid sultans recognized the Hindus under their rule as dhimmis. Mahmud made 17 raids into India. Like many later Muslim warrior kings, Mahmud claimed to be acting in the spirit of jihad,
although his real goal was to acquire plunder. The raids destabilized
the North and East, and the Gurjara-Pratiharas ended after Mahmud
sacked their capital Kanauj in 1019. Among the new dynasties that
arose from the wreckage were the Gaharwars in Kanauj and the Senas
in Bengal (c. 10971223).
The Ghaznawids were eventually conquered by the Ghauris, a people from central Afghanistan who had been converted to Islam by
Mahmud. In the twelfth century, the Ghauris made themselves the rulers of all Afghanistan. The Ghauri ruler Muizz ud-Din Muhammad
(11731206) subjugated modern Pakistan. Desiring plunder, he
decided to move on into India. At this time, three Hindu kings were
warring for supremacy in North India: Prithviraj Chauhan, Jaychand

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

41

Gaharwar, and Parmal Chandel. In 1192, Muizz ud-Din and his

mounted Turkish slave archers defeated Prithviraj. They followed this
up with further campaigns in India. By 1206, a chain of Ghauri forts
extended from the Afghan border to northwestern Bengal and
ensured the submission of the Hindu kings of North India to their
new overlord Muizz ud-Din.

THE DELHI SULTANATE

In 1206, Muizz ud-Din was assassinated. His Turkish slave generals
divided up his territories, and many of the Hindu monarchs who
had accepted his supremacy regained their independence. One of
the slaves, Qutb ud-Din Aybeg, made himself ruler of Lahore, now
the largest city of northern Pakistan. From here, he controlled much
of Pakistan and North India. Aybeg died in 1210, when his own slave
Shams ud-Din Iltutmish established himself at the city of Delhi. Delhi,
which had been part of the kingdom of Prithviraj Chauhan, was an
economic and administrative center but had never before been the
capital of a major state. Iltutmish apparently chose it as his seat
because it was a central point in North India. Delhi has been one of
the principal cities of India ever since.
Iltutmish defeated other Muslim rulers in Pakistan, North India,
and Bengal, and forced many Hindu kings into submission. He was
the first ruler of the Delhi sultanate, which for 200 years was the
leadingand often the onlyMuslim-ruled state in India. Iltutmishs
Shamsid dynasty (12101266) set a pattern for the Delhi sultanate.
Each royal family produced one or two capable rulers. Their reigns
were followed by turmoil as their relatives and nobles struggled for
control until a new dynasty came to power. Iltutmish died in 1236.
Over the next 10 years, his nobles installed and then overthrew four
Shamsids. The most noteworthy of them was Iltutmishs daughter
Raziyya (12361240). Raziyya was a capable ruler but was deposed
by the nobles after only four years.
The main external threat to the sultanate came from the Mongols.
In 1206, the Mongol ruler Genghis (Chinggis in Mongolian) Khan
began a campaign to subjugate the entire world. He invaded what is
now Pakistan in 12231224. He did not, however, attack Iltutmish,
who may have forestalled him by recognizing Mongol supremacy.
godei conquered Afghanistan,
In the late 1230s, Genghis Khans son O
acquiring a frontier with the Delhi sultanate. He captured Lahore, and
the Mongols soon seized most of Pakistan. By the mid-1240s, whatever

42

The History of India

arrangements Iltutmish had made had broken down, and there were
annual Mongol incursions into North India.
The Shamsids were succeeded by the Ghiyasids (12661290).
The first monarch of the new dynasty, Iltutmishs slave Baha ud-Din
Balaban, restored order in the Delhi sultanate. The Mongol attacks continued, however, and in 1285, Balabans eldest son Muhammad was
killed in battle against the Mongols. Balaban himself died two years
later. Family quarrels ensued until a noble named Jalal ud-Din became
sultan. Jalal ud-Din came from the Khalaj people of Afghanistan, and
founded the Khalji dynasty (12901320). He dispatched his nephew
Ala ud-Din on a great raid through South India. The campaign served
both to obtain wealth to defend the sultanate from Mongol attacks and
to keep the army in training. Ala ud-Din returned to Delhi victorious,
murdered his uncle, and became sultan (12961316).
As ruler, Ala ud-Din both repelled Mongol invasions and continued
his campaigns within India. Between 1299 and 1305, he secured the
submission of Hindu kings in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Central India,
and he apparently tightened the sultans control in the region east of
Delhi, where petty monarchs had hitherto enjoyed considerable
autonomy. In 1307, his general Malik Kafur, a Hindu convert to Islam,
launched a second great expedition to the south, which ended in the
defeat of all the major kings of the Deccan and the Tamil country.
Sultans, in India and elsewhere, often paid their civil and military
officials with iqtas, the right to taxes from a given region. This resembled
the system by which Hindu kings made over land revenue to their subordinates. As in pre-Muslim times, the revenue was normally remitted
by local chieftains, often of Hindu warrior castes, who remained dominant at the lowest level of the administration. Muqtas, or recipients of
iqtas, were often also responsible for governing the area included in
their grants, which required them to establish good relations with the
chieftains. Ala ud-Din feared that his muqtas might use their holdings
as territorial bases from which to challenge his authority. He created a
network of spies to watch for discontent, and confiscated iqtas and
began to pay officers with cash rather than land grants. If he was to keep
his army content with cash wages, however, Ala ud-Din had to ensure
that the cost of living remained low. He therefore set maximum prices
for essential commodities and instituted harsh punishments for merchants who broke the price law or cheated customers. He also prohibited
the production of wine and narcotics, perhaps partly to boost grain cultivation as a further means of keeping prices down.
Ala ud-Dins son Qutb ud-Din Mubarak Shah (13161320) abolished
the network of spies, abandoned the price controls, and raised

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

43

military wages. If he hoped that this would secure his throne, however, he was wrong. The Delhi sultanate was torn by unrest until Ala
ud-Dins Mongol or Turco-Mongol officer Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq
made himself sultan and founded the Tughluq dynasty (13201414).
Tughluq too campaigned in the south, and apparently conquered
the whole of the Deccan and Tamil country except for the southernmost parts of India, which for the time being remained independent
under the Pandya dynasty. He also recovered Bengal, which had been
independent of Delhi since the death of Balaban. Tughluq was now the
overlord of Hindu and Muslim kings in all four regions of the subcontinent, and controlled more of South Asia than any previous monarch.
In 1324, he was killed in the collapse of a new building. It was widely
believed that the accident was engineered by Tughluqs son Muhammad, who now became sultan (13241351).
Muhammads reign started well. He drove out a Mongol army that
had reached the regions east of Delhi, and he strengthened his authority over the local kings who had submitted to his predecessors. In
some places, he deposed Hindu monarchs and replaced them with
Muslim governors. About 1326/1327, he established a new capital at
Daulatabad in the Deccan. He sent the leading Muslim residents of
Delhi to live in Daulatabad and transformed the old capital into a base
for a huge army with which he intended to drive the Mongols from
Khurasan (northern Afghanistan).
Now, things began to go wrong. To clear a route to Khurasan,
Muhammad sent a large force through passes in the Himalayas, where
his men were wiped out by mountaineers. Meanwhile, the sultanate
was reeling, as military costs and the expense of ruling the newly conquered south apparently worsened an economic slump that had hit all
of Muslim Asia. Because he was now the overlord of most of India,
Muhammad no longer had independent neighbors whom he could
plunder to replenish his treasury. He experimented with several alternatives: reinstituting the use of iqtas as salaries; paying his troops with
coins made of bronze rather than precious metals, which provoked
inflation and may have caused trade to shift out of the sultanate; and
collecting taxes at unprecedentedly high rates. This in turn led to a
revolt by peasants on the royal estates near Delhi, which was met with
heavy punishment. The resulting disruption of agriculture joined with
a drought to produce famine in Delhi and elsewhere in North India.
Peasants were not the only source of trouble. Muslim nobles
resented the sultans infringements on their prerogatives and his
seeming preference for high-ranking Hindus. At the same time, nobles
born in India disliked the favoritism shown to Turks, Mongols, and

44

The History of India

A mosque inside the hill-fortress of Devagiri at Daulatabad, India. Daulatabad was

established as the capital of the Delhi sultanate in 1326/1327. (Shutterstock.com)

other foreign Muslims. The revolts in the North apparently spurred

uprisings across the sultanate. Unfortunately, the Himalayan disaster
and epidemics of disease had weakened the army, which could not
be rebuilt because of the economic difficulties. As a result, Muhammad was unable to suppress discontent. In the 1330s, Muslim nobles
in the Tamil country and in Bengal broke away to become independent sultans, and in 1336 the whole southern half of the Deccan
seceded as the Hindu-ruled kingdom of Vijayanagara.
As territory was lost, tax demands increased on what remained,
causing further revolts by Hindu kings and Muslim governors. About
1335/1336, Muhammad apparently tried to regroup. He allowed all
who so wished to leave Daulatabad to return to Delhi. But the 1340s
saw risings in the Deccan and Gujarat, and the governor of what
remained of the Deccan declared his independence. Muhammad campaigned in Gujarat and Sindh, where he died in 1351. By then, he had
lost most of what he had inherited, and his dominions were confined
to the North and its dependencies in Central and Western India.
The new sultan, Muhammads cousin Firuz Shah (13511388), tried
to win support through openhanded generosity to Muslim religious
leaders, nobles, and army officers. Despite fierce campaigning at
the beginning of his reign, however, he was unable to regain the lost
territories, and he could not stop the continuing Mongol attacks.

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

45

When Firuz Shah fell seriously ill in 1384, his family and nobles began
the familiar struggle for power. The sultan died in 1388. Infighting
continued for 10 years, until India was invaded by one of the great
conquerors of the Middle Ages, the Turco-Mongol Temu r, called
Tamerlane in English.
Temu r had already made himself master of Central Asia and
Afghanistan, South Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, and Iran.
He claimed that he was motivated by the desire to spread Islam, but
scholars agree that in actuality he wanted either to win plunder or to
reestablish the Mongol empire of Genghis Khan. Temur crossed the
Indus in September 1398 and advanced on Delhi. On December 16,
he defeated Firuz Shahs grandson sultan Mahmud Shah, who fled.
For three days, Temurs troops looted Delhi, massacring both Hindus
and Muslims. Then, the invaders circled through the districts east of
the Yamuna river before returning across the Indus.
In the wake of Temurs incursion, the Delhi sultanate quickly broke
up. The governors of Gujarat, Malwa (western Madhya Pradesh), and
other provinces raised themselves to the rank of sultans, and Hindu
kings in Rajasthan and elsewhere regained their independence. Delhi
itself was dominated by a succession of nobles, until one of them, the
Pashtun Khizr Khan, made himself sultan and founded the Sayyid
dynasty (14141452). For 30 years, the Sayyids recognized the overlordship of Temurs descendants in Afghanistan and Central Asia. In
1448, the last Sayyid sultan left Delhi for the town of Badaun. Three
years later, Bahlul Lodi, another Pashtun noble, seized the capital.
He inaugurated the Lodi dynasty (14511526), which gradually
restored Delhis supremacy over the Muslim and Hindu kings of
North India.
Bahluls son Sikandar (14891517) moved the capital down the
Yamuna river from Delhi to Agra, so that he could better watch his
outlying dependencies. The next sultan, Ibrahim (15171526), antagonized his nobles by trying to curb their power. Daulat Khan Lodi, the
governor of Punjab and a member of the sultans own tribe, rebelled
and sought the assistance of Babur, the ruler of Kabul. Babur, who
was a direct descendant of both Temu r and Genghis Khan, had
already invaded India three times in an effort to reestablish his familys supremacy there. He welcomed Daulat Khans invitation, captured Lahore in 1524, and two years later advanced on Delhi.
The armies of Babur and Ibrahim met at Panipat north of Delhi on
April 20, 1526. The sultan had the larger army, but Baburs combination of artillery and mounted archers won the day, and Ibrahim was
killed in battle. Babur and his successors became the most powerful

46

The History of India

dynasty in Indian history, the Mughal emperors. Before we turn to

them, however, we must examine several aspects of religious interaction during the period of the sultans of Delhi.

MUSLIM RULE IN INDIA

Although the sultans of Delhi were Muslims of foreign origin, the
state that they ruled was similar in structure to the dominions of
regional overlords in India before the conquests of Muizz ud-Din
Muhammad Ghauri. Only the district around the capital, and a few
major fortresses elsewhere, were under the direct rule of the sultan.
Outlying areas were administered either by Muslim governors
appointed from Delhi or by Hindu kings who recognized the sultans
supremacy. Across most of the sultanate, local power remained in
the hands of petty Hindu chieftains. In return for paying the land revenue to muqtas, subject kings, provincial governors, or sultans, the
chieftains were allowed to rule their tiny kingdoms more or less as
they pleased. Governors and kings alike assumed independence
whenever the sultanate was too weak to keep them in check. This happened during the decay of almost every dynasty at Delhi, under
Muhammad Tughluq, and after Temurs invasion.
At least in the eyes of Muslims, formal recognition by the khalifa
was a great asset for a sultan who wanted to ensure the loyalty of his
subordinates. In 1258, however, Genghis Khans grandson captured
and put to death the khalifa of the day, who lived at Baghdad in Iraq.
For several generations, the sultans of Delhi continued to recognize
the executed man as their nominal master. Then, in 1317/1318, Ala
ud-Din Khaljis son Qutb ud-Din Mubarak Shah proclaimed himself
khalifa. He may have hoped to enhance his authority by adding spiritual legitimacy to his temporal power, but he seems merely to have
scandalized many Muslims. His claims were abandoned by the
Tughluqs. The latter recognized the primacy of a line of khalifas who
had lived in Egypt since the Mongol invasions. In the fifteenth century,
the office of khalifa seems to have declined in importance for Indian
Muslims, although it will be seen that it regained its significance for
a time in the twentieth century.
Association with a class of Muslim holy men called Sufis also
enhanced the authority of sultans. Orthodox Muslims regard the
study of the Quran and obedience to Islam as the keys to salvation,
but Sufis believe that with meditation, trances, and other techniques,
it is possible for their souls to enter the presence of God Himself.
Many Indian Muslims believed that God had conferred both religious

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

47

and secular government on the Sufi shaikhs, or holy men, who were
closer to Him than other mortals. The shaikhs, however, might delegate their temporal jurisdiction to sultans. Many sultans of Delhi
therefore sought the goodwill of shaikhs, and Muslim chroniclers
often blamed disasters on sultans who treated Sufis badly.
The Delhi sultanate, and the Muslim states that seceded from it, had
a Muslim religious elite comprising Sufi shaikhs, the ulama or interpreters of Islamic law, Islamic judges, and preachers. There was also
a Muslim secular nobility of top administrators and army generals.
In the time of Iltutmish, it included slave and free Turks, Arabs,
Khalaj, Ghauris, and Iranians. These were later supplemented with
Mongols, Africans, and Pashtuns, and a growing number of Indianborn Muslims. By the fourteenth century, the nobility also included
Hindus, mostly local chieftains by background. Except during and
immediately after the reign of Ala ud-Din Khalji, nobles were usually
paid with iqtas. Iqtas and administrative offices were originally held
for a stated term, sometimes as little as two or four years, but under
Firuz Shah Tughluq, hereditary tenure became the norm. This paved
the way for governors and muqtas to transform themselves into
independent rulers after Temurs invasion.
Without the support of the nobility, no sultan could hope to hold the
throne for long. At least from the accession of Raziyya in 1236, new
monarchs sought to assure themselves of that support by exacting a
pledge of allegiance from the nobles and leading men of Delhi,
although Raziyya herself found the limits to loyalty when she was
deposed by her nobles. After taking power, both Balaban and Ala
ud-Din replaced the existing nobility with trusted supporters, but
most sultans promoted their own men alongside the older aristocracy
rather than eliminating it.
It was noted previously that the creation of the Muslim Arab empire
joined the economies of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Beginning with Mahmud the Ghaznawid, Muslim rulers used the plundered
silver of Hindu kings and temples to mint coins that circulated throughout the Muslim trading world. As Turkish and Mongol invasions disrupted the Middle East, and Europeans gained commercial supremacy
in much of the Mediterranean, India became increasingly central to the
Indian Ocean economy. Meanwhile, the conquests of Muizz ud-Din
Muhammad Ghauri gave the trade of North India access to the great
Eurasian empires. These were dominated by first the Turks and then
the Mongols, and linked the expanding economies of Europe and China.
All the while, Muslim rule in India fostered urbanization, as centers of
trade and administrationDelhi among themgrew into cities.

48

The History of India

HINDUISM, BUDDHISM, AND ISLAM IN INDIA

When Muizz ud-Din first invaded North India, most of the people
of South Asia were Hindus, Buddhists, or followers of Tribal beliefs.
Over the succeeding centuries, Buddhism almost completely disappeared from its homeland. Hinduism, however, flourished and continued to absorb Tribal religions. At the same time, large numbers of
Indians became Muslims, and since then, Hinduism and Islam have
been the two main religions of South Asia.
Its historical importance may give an exaggerated picture of how
well rooted Buddhism actually was in Indian society. For 1,500 years,
many Indians were undoubtedly influenced by Buddhist teachings,
but most of them also worshipped the local deities of their own communities. Along with many other folk beliefs, their practices gradually
merged into Hinduism. The process was helped by the fact that Indian
Buddhism had no rituals or priests, and Buddhist laymen often relied
on Brahmins to perform marriages and funerals. Purer forms of
Buddhism depended on the patronage of kings and merchants. Early
medieval kings increasingly sought legitimation through Hindu rituals, however, and it has been suggested that the growing foreign
domination of Indias long-distance trade eroded the number of wealthy Indian Buddhist laymen.
By the time of Muizz ud-Din Muhammad Ghauri, Indian Buddhism
was largely confined to an ever-shrinking number of monasteries in
North India. Hinduism was vibrant enough not to be seriously
affected by the occasional demolition of temples by iconoclastic
Muslim conquerors, but the destruction of Buddhist monasteries
apparently brought about a rapidand almost totaldisappearance
of Buddhism from North India. Seven centuries later, in 1954, many
Untouchable Hindus converted to Buddhism. They believed that the
Buddha opposed the caste system, although in fact caste (as opposed
to varna) may not even have existed in any recognizable form in the
Buddhas time. Buddhists in India today total only 10 million, or less
than 1 percent of the total population.
In Delhi and the sultanates that broke away from it, sultans and the
highest nobles were almost invariably Muslim. So too was a large part
of the urban population. In much of South Asia, however, the rural
people were overwhelmingly Hindu. They were often governed by
their own kings and chiefs, and except perhaps in wartime had little
contact with their Muslim overlords. It has been seen that the Arab
rulers of Sindh recognized Hindus as dhimmis. Most sultans in India
followed this principle, but they never consistently collected the jizya

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

49

tax required of dhimmis. This could be justified under Islamic law on

the grounds that the jizya was ostensibly a payment in lieu of military
service, and Hindus (unlike Jews or Christians) could and did serve in
the army. Perhaps more importantly, at least outside of cities, it was difficult to exact the jizya from a population composed largely of nonMuslims, many of whom were under the immediate administration of
fellow Hindus.
It appears that sultans often determined their treatment of Hindus
according to the political needs of the moment. For example, Ala udDin Khalji was firmly in control for much his reign. He therefore did
not need the backing of Muslim theologians, so he could safely disregard the Islamic law banning the construction and repair of dhimmi
places of worship. Muhammad Tughluq, however, was in constant
fear of his Indian-born Muslim nobles. He sought to counter them
by securing the support of both Hindus and foreign-born Muslims.
This explains such seemingly contradictory actions as his alleged participation in Holi, the Hindu spring festival, and a call that he made
for Muslim theologians from Central Asia to settle in Delhi. His successor Firuz Shah looked on orthodox Muslims as a source of strength,
and accordingly collected the jizya, destroyed Hindu temples that had
been built since the time of Muizz ud-Din, and suppressed heretical
Muslim sects.
Nevertheless, Hindus always predominated in the armies, the
building crews, and the lower administration of the sultanates of
India. Hindu castes with traditions of bureaucratic service adapted
themselves by learning Persian, the language of government in most
sultanates, and it has been noted that Hindu chieftains retained power
at the local level. Despite the occasional insistence of orthodox Islamic
theologians that no non-Muslim should be admitted to the ruling
class, an increasing number of Hindus entered the ranks of the nobility in Delhi and the other sultanates. At least in part, this was because
there were never enough Muslims in India for any sultan to be able to
dispense with Hindu assistance, for while much of North India was
under Muslim rule for 600 years, and the Deccan for 400 years, the
majority of the people of South Asia remained Hindu.
This is not to say that Hinduism was unaffected by Muslim rule.
Such Hindu regional overlords as the Gurjara-Pratiharas and the
Senas had often been generous patrons of Hindu temples. This royal
patronage ended with the establishment of Muslim domination, and
few great temples were built in the North and the East after the time
of Muizz ud-Din Muhammad Ghauri. Monumental temple construction was henceforth largely confined to the Deccan and the Tamil

50

The History of India

country. It has been suggested that in some areas, the end of independent Hindu kingship helped strengthen the ever-changing caste system, as individual castes assumed what had been the kings duty of
keeping society in order.
Devotional Hinduism, or bhakti, originated long before the Muslim
conquest but became more popular than ever in the sultanates of
medieval India. With their use of vernacular languages rather than
Sanskrit, and their acceptance of worshippers of all castes, bhakti
movements appealed particularly to the common people. Their
followers felt an overpowering love for God, which they often saw in
the light of the love between men and women. For example, the
Bengali Brahmin Chaitanya (14861533) founded a sect devoted to
the worship of God in the form of Vishnus earthly incarnation of
Krishna. He compared the love of humans for God with the love of
the milkmaid Radha for Krishna.
With few exceptions (the most notable being Firuz Shah Tughluq),
sultans made no sustained efforts at converting Hindus to Islam.
Nevertheless, 162,166,000 Indians are now Muslims, 13 percent of the
total population. If Pakistan and Bangladesh are added, 31 percent of
the people of South Asia practice Islam, and Pakistan, India, and
Bangladesh have, respectively, the second, third, and fourth largest
Muslim populations in the world. Whatever official policy may have
been, many Indians clearly adopted the religion of their Muslim rulers. A clue as to how this came about lies in the fact that the majority
of Muslims in South Asia fall into several concentrations. Of these,
by far the largest are in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Before becoming
Muslims, most of the inhabitants of Bangladesh apparently practiced
Tribal religions. In what is now Pakistan, many people once regarded
themselves as Hindus or Buddhists, but they did not follow the
orthodox forms of those religions. For example, Sindhi Hindus did
not regard the cow as sacred. It is therefore simplistic to say that most
South Asian Muslims are descended from Hindus and Buddhists who
adopted the Muslim religion.
Islam spread very gradually in India. Most Sindhis were apparently
not yet Muslims in the eleventh century, 300 years after the Arab conquest. Even more striking is the case of Bangladesh, the eastern half of
the historic region of Bengal. By the time it was conquered by the
Mughal successors of the sultans of Delhi in 1574, West Bengal was
more or less part of the Indian cultural world, its people largely
Hindus and peasants. Most of East Bengal or Bangladesh, however,
was still covered in dense forests and inhabited by Tribals who
followed their own religions.

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

51

In the seventeenth century, the Mughals instituted a policy of clearing

the forests of Bangladesh, and transforming Tribals into peasants. A pioneer, often from the lower levels of the secular or religious nobility of
Bengal, would settle on a tract of forest land, and either bring in peasants
or teach the neighboring Tribals how to cultivate rice. Once his men had
cleared the land, the pioneer would go to the authorities, and obtain title
to his settlement. The process cemented the loyalty of petty nobles who
now held productive parcels of land by royal grant, and through the pioneers brought the former Tribal areas under effective Mughal control.
The pioneers included Hindus, but a majority of them were
Muslims. Many were, or said they were, holy men, especially Sufis.
It was useful to be a holy man for two reasons. First, if he claimed
the need to support a mosque or shrine, the pioneer could secure for
himself the land revenue of his tract rather than having to forward it
to the authorities. Pioneers therefore often either made sure they
were already custodians of a holy place or built one on their new
lands. Second, the Tribals seem to have been prone to accepting the
leadership of men who claimed personal knowledge of God and
professed a faith based on immutable written Scriptures such as the
Quran. Without abandoning their own beliefs, they listened to the
preaching of their new leader and turned to him to perform marriages,
funerals, and other ceremonies. They soon inducted the holy mans
God, angels, saints, and prophets of Islam into their pantheon, praying
to the new divinities alongside their old ones.
Such a pairing of Islamic and Tribal beliefs offended the holy men, or
at least those among them who knew something of Islamic theology.
Muslim teachers tried to persuade their followers to worship only those
superhuman beings found in the Quran. After several generations, the
effort succeeded, but only at the cost of a compromise: the former Tribals
now prayed to divinities who bore Quranic names but had all the characteristics of their non-Islamic predecessors. Finally, in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, reformers taught the beliefs and practices of
orthodox Islam. Rural Bengali Muslims henceforth prayed exclusively
to God rather than to saints and angels. They also adopted such customs
as the seclusion of women that many theologians regarded as integral to
true Islam. Bangladesh had completed its long journey from Tribal to
Islamic beliefs, and 89 percent of its population is now Muslim.

OTHER SULTANATES AND KINGDOMS

South Asia therefore became a land of two principal religions,
Hinduism and Islam. This was reflected in the politics of the Delhi

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The History of India

sultanate and its neighbors. The latter included Kashmir, which

for centuries was ruled by Hindu kings. Kashmir lay on a major
trade route, and its people actively traded with the Islamic world. In
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many Muslims settled in
Kashmir, and in 1339 a Muslim immigrant, Shah Mir, seized the throne
and made himself the first sultan of Kashmir. This was followed by
the spread of Islam in Kashmir, which now has a largely Muslim
population.
It has already been seen that in the 1330s, sultans in Bengal established their independence from Tughluq Delhi. Eighty years later, a
Bengali Hindu named Raja Ganesh rose to power. Raja Ganesh knew
that as a non-Muslim, he would never be accepted as sultan by the
Bengali Muslim nobility. In 1415, however, he had his son Jadu converted to Islam, and installed the boy as sultan under the name of Jalal
ud-Din Muhammad. Jalal ud-Din secured noble support with displays of his Islamic credentials. He built mosques, financed a college
in Mecca, and even proclaimed himself khalifa. At the same time, he
did not forget his fathers coreligionists. Many of his coins, for example, depict a lion, symbol of the Hindu deity Shivas wife Durga.
Bengal was subsequently ruled by a succession of Turkish, African,
and Arab sultans. All were Muslims, but some of them openly funded
Hindu preachers and scholars.
Ala ud-Din Khalji and Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq conquered the
Deccan and the Tamil country, but South India broke away from the
control of Delhi during the troubled reign of Muhammad Tughluq. It
did not, however, revert to the political structure that had been disrupted by the Muslim invasions of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Rather, two entirely new states arose: the Hindu
kingdom of Vijayanagara in the Tamil country and the southern
Deccan, and the Muslim Bahmani sultanate in the northern Deccan.
The city and kingdom of Vijayanagara were established in 1336.
Their monarchs claimed sovereignty over all India south of the
Krishna river, and for 200 years compelled many of the kings within
that area to recognize their overlordship. The early sovereigns of
Vijayanagara were not of royal blood. They accordingly sought to
legitimize their rule by declaring themselves the protectors of Hindu
and Jain shrines against Muslim desecration, instituting the rituals
connected with traditional Hindu kingship, and generously patronizing temples. Frequent wars with the Muslim rulers to the north suggest that the Vijayanagara kings really were defenders of Hinduism
against the menace of Islam. Their true goal, however, was political
supremacy. To obtain it, they fought Hindus as well as Muslims, and

Religion, Trade, and Conquest

53

if it served their purposes, they allied themselves with Muslims

against other Hindus. From the mid-fifteenth century onward, the
Vijayanagara armies included many Muslim soldiers, particularly
artillerymen, who were allowed to build their own mosque in the
capital of the kingdom.
Eleven years after the foundation of Vijayanagara, Ala ud-Din
Bahman Shah, Muhammad Tughluqs governor of the Deccan, broke
away and founded the Bahmani sultanate. His successors dominated
the northern half of the Deccan, often ruling from coast to coast. The
Bahmanis claimed to be the guardians of Islam in South India and
depicted their frequent conflicts with Vijayanagara as attempts to
spread the true faith. In reality, they were no more motivated by religion than their southern neighbors were, and the wars between the
Bahmanis and Vijayanagara in some ways merely continued the old
rivalry between the overlords of the Deccan and the Tamil country.
Muslims formed a tiny minority among the subjects of the Bahmanis,
who depended on the support of Hindu officers, bureaucrats (usually
Brahmins), headmen, and local chieftains. Indeed, some sultans
sought to check the rivalry between immigrant and Indian-born
Muslims by promoting Hindus to high office.
In 1498, a new era in maritime history began when the Portuguese
navigator Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa and established direct
sea contact between Europe and India. This greatly eased the interchange of products, technology, and ideas. In 1509, a Portuguese force
defeated the combined fleets of the sultans of Egypt and Gujarat,
which secured Portuguese control of the Indian Ocean. For the next
century, Portugal dominated the trade in spices and other goods
between Asia and Europe, and controlled local traffic in the Indian
Ocean. From 1510, the Portuguese headquarters in Asia were at Goa
on the west coast of India.
Meanwhile, the Bahmani kingdom had begun to fragment, and by
1512 its territory was divided into five sultanates. Of these, the most
powerful were Ahmadnagar in northwestern Maharashtra, Bijapur
in southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, and Golkonda in
Telangana (until 2014 in northern Andhra Pradesh). These Deccan sultanates regularly warred with one another. Often, two of them joined
forces against a third, and one side or the other made and broke alliances with Vijayanagara and the Portuguese. If anything, Hindus
enjoyed greater prominence in the successor sultanates than under
the original Bahmani sultans. The Ahmadnagar dynasty was of Hindu
ancestry, andas in the Delhi sultanatethe bureaucracy and the
local administration in all the sultanates were largely in the hands of

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The History of India

Hindus. In Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, the Hindu village headmen,

local chieftains, and petty kings coalesced into a caste called the
Marathas, who corresponded to the Rajputs of North India; in
Golkonda, as in Vijayanagara, local power was monopolized by
Telugu-speaking Hindu warriors belonging to a number of castes.
In 1564, the sultans of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and Golkonda formed
a rare triple alliance. Their goal was to curb Ramaraya, the regent of
Vijayanagara, who in his machinations to uphold his power had
recently fomented revolt in several sultanates. In January 1565, the
allies met Ramarayas army on the banks of the Krishna. The battle
ended in a crushing defeat for Vijayanagara. Ramaraya was killed.
The victorious sultans looted Vijayanagara city, and the Vijayanagara
dynasty never returned to its old capital. Ramarayas successors
styled themselves kings until 1650, but they had little real power in
what was now a fragmented kingdom. Since the mid-fifteenth century,
the Vijayanagara monarchs had rewarded their generals with land
grants that resembled the iqtas of the Delhi sultanate. These grantees
enjoyed considerable autonomy, and after 1565 the greatest of them
assumed complete independence.
The Deccan sultans soon resumed their wars with one another.
Bijapur and Golkonda expanded southward into the former Vijayanagara
territories. Their dynasties were eventually extinguished by the
Mughals who had established themselves at Delhi in 1526.

4
The Rise and Fall
of the Mughal Dynasty
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MUGHAL DYNASTY
As a descendant of both Temur and Genghis Khan, Babur was called a
Mughal, the Persian word for Mongol. The dynasty that he founded
on conquering the sultanate of Delhi in 1526 is also called Mughal.
When Babur died four years later, his son Humayun inherited an
empire that extended from Central Asia in the west to Bihar in the
east. The Pashtun nobles who had plagued Ibrahim Lodi remained
restive, however, and one of them, Shir Khan Sur, rebelled. In 1539
he defeated Humayun and made himself sultan of Delhi under the
name of Shir Shah.
Shir Shah made administrative and financial reforms, among them
establishing the rupee as the basis of the Indian currency. But his successors were weak, and in 1555 Humayun returned from exile in Iran
and restored the Mughal empire. He survived only six months before
dying in January 1556. The new emperor, his 13-year-old son Akbar,
became the greatest of the Mughals. Like many of his family, Akbar
was a military genius. Between the 1560s and the 1590s, he subdued

Akbar (15421605), Mughal emperor during the second half of the sixteenth century. Manohar (end of the 16th century). India, Mughal school. Found in the collection of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. (Fine Art Images/Heritage
Images/Getty Images)

The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty

57

the Tribal region of Gondwana in Central India and the Rajput kings
of Rajasthan, conquered Gujarat and Bengal, and established Mughal
rule over much of Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir, the tribes of the
present Afghan-Pakistani border, and Sindh. In 1595, the Iranian governor of the city of Qandahar defected to Akbar, who thus acquired
control of southern Afghanistan. South of the Mughal dominions,
in the Deccan, were the sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and
Golkonda. They invited conquest, both to round out Mughal rule in
India and as a source of wealth. Akbar conquered much of Ahmadnagar, and by the time of his death in 1605, he ruled one of the great
empires of the Muslim world.
Akbar began his reign as a devout Muslim. He credited his victories
to a long-dead Sufi holy man named Khwaja Muin ud-Din Chishti,
and made an annual pilgrimage to the saints tomb. He became a devotee of another Sufi, Shaikh Salim Chishti, who belonged to the same
religious brotherhood as Muin ud-Din and who lived at Sikri near
Agra. When Shaikh Salim died in 1571, Akbar honored him by moving his capital from the Lodi city of Agra to Sikri, which he renamed
Fatahpur (Town of Victory) Sikri. Akbars Fatahpur Sikri centered on
a huge mosque and the tomb of Shaikh Salim, which showed the
world that he was a good Muslim king and thus entitled to the throne.
All this was to change. An interest in his own religion led Akbar to
organize debates on Islamic theology. Then, he brought Jain, Hindu,
and Zoroastrian teachers into the discussions, and finally Jesuit missionaries. As he listened to their arguments, Akbar concluded that
Islam did not have a monopoly on the truth. At the same time, he
was clashing with the Muslim religious elite. For centuries, Muslim
rulers in India had supported Islamic holy men with hereditary grants
of land. Akbar, however, confiscated all grants where title could not be
proved. This angered the ulama, the interpreters of Islamic law, who
were further alienated byAkbars distribution of land to leaders of
other religions and by his refusal to suppress unorthodox Muslims.
They were particularly incensed at Akbars removal of long-standing
restrictions on non-Muslims, culminating in 1579 with the abolition
of the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims. Although the jizya had never
been consistently collected in India, its existence had always been
regarded as a mainstay of an Islamic state.
The same year, 1579, Akbar more or less rendered the ulama superfluous when he assumed their function of deciding how Islamic law
would be applied. Unfazed by an unsuccessful revolt by orthodox
Muslim officers, the emperor next removed Islamic motifs from coins,
stopped worshipping Sufi holy men, and apparently ended his

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The History of India

weekly appearance at the mosque. By the early 1580s, he had instituted his own form of worship, centering on fire, sun, and light.
In 1585, Akbar left Fatahpur Sikri to campaign in the northwest. When
he returned 13 years later, it was to Agra, not Fatahpur Sikri. There
were strategic reasons, for the massive fortifications of Agra were easier to defend than Fatahpur Sikri. But Akbar probably also went to
Agra because Fatahpur Sikri symbolized the now-departed days
when he had exemplified Muslim kingship. In place of Islam, Akbar
now sought to legitimize his rulership with what has been called a
Mughal dynastic ideology. This held that the emperor, his ancestors,
and his descendants were particularly close to God, who had both
given them special knowledge of religious truth and chosen them to
govern.
To reinforce the dynastic ideology, the emperor was glorified as
never before. Akbar spent lavishly on architects, poets, dancers, and
musicians, including the Hindu singer-musician Tansen, who created
classical North Indian music. Ignoring the orthodox Muslim view that
portraiture is a sinful attempt to imitate Gods creativity, Akbar sponsored Iranian and Indian painters. In their pictures, he and his successors were painted with haloes, probably a borrowing from European
art. Dynastic ideology merged with Akbar s own beliefs when he
initiated most of his nobles into his fire worship. This ensured their
loyalty by transforming them into disciples who recognized the
emperor as an intermediary between themselves and God. And every
morning at dawn, Akbar appeared on the balcony of the palace, where
(like a Hindu deity) he gave divine grace to all who glimpsed him.
Under Babur and Humayun, the majority of high-ranking Mughal
nobles were Central Asian Muslims of Turkish and Mongol blood, like
the emperors themselves. In 1564 the Central Asians rebelled. Akbar
defeated them and decided to dilute their strength with men from
other backgrounds. Most of these newly minted nobles were Iranian
Muslims, but Akbar introduced another new element into the upper
Mughal nobility. Early in Akbars reign, Raja Bharamall Kachhawaha,
a Rajput king from Rajasthan, had obtained the emperors help in
resolving difficulties with a local Mughal official. He showed his gratitude by giving Akbar his daughter in marriage, and in return was
enrolled as a noble. This opened a century and a half of warm relations
between the Mughals and the Rajputs. Most Mughal emperors
took Rajput wives, and Rajputs reached the highest levels of the nobility. Never before had a Hindu community been so closely tied to a
Muslim dynasty. This secured for the Mughals the loyalty of the
Rajput kings and chiefs who dominated much of northern and

The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty

59

western India, and let the imperial government draw on their military
and administrative skills.
At the same time, Akbar reorganized the nobility with a system of
ranks (mansabs) that had originated under the Mongols. He assigned
a rank to every noble, or mansabdar, reserving for himself the right to
create, promote, or demote as he saw fit. In return, each mansabdar
was to maintain a standing body of troops, trained and equipped to
imperial standards. The number of men varied according to the rank
of the mansabdar. So did salary, although Akbar reinforced the loyalty
of his nobles by paying all of them generously. Mansabdars filled the
higher positions in both the army and the administration. To ensure
that they could not build up power bases, they were frequently transferred to new appointments, and Indian-born nobles were kept away
from their home regions.
Efforts to block the emergence of rivals also underlay Akbar s
administrative reforms. He abolished the powerful office of prime
minister in favor of four senior ministers, equal in authority and each
in charge of a separate branch of the imperial government (such as
finance or war). The system was replicated in the provinces into which
Akbar divided his dominions, where a governor oversaw law and
order, a diwan collected taxes, and so on. This ensured that, for example, the governor could not amass the finances to revolt, and the
diwan would lack the soldiers. The whole edifice was firmly under
the control of Akbar, who daily received and acted upon reports from
all over the empire.
All this was underpinned by the efficient system of taxation established by Akbar and his talented finance ministers, notably the Hindu
Raja Todar Mall. The land revenue remained the principal tax in India,
as it had been for centuries. Between one quarter and one third of the
taxes collected each year was retained by the emperor for his household, his soldiers, his clerks, and the like. Most of the rest was used
to pay the salaries of the mansabdars. A Mughal nobles pay was usually in the form of a jagir. Like the iqta of the Delhi sultanate, a jagir
was the right to the revenue from a specified parcel of land, although
it did not carry with it the administrative responsibilities in the tract
that were normally conferred on recipients of iqtas. Frequent confiscation and redistribution of jagirs gave Akbar yet another means of
maintaining control over his mansabdars.
Building on a base laid by Shir Shah, Akbar and his financial advisers remodeled the system of revenue collection. Todar Malls agents
surveyed yields and prices across the empire. Then, taking a 10-year
average as their base, they prepared tables for groups of neighboring

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villages, showing how much tax every possible crop should pay.
Depending on the crop, the rate ranged from one fifth to one third of
the value. Every year, local chieftains and village headmen ascertained
the acreage devoted to each crop and used the tables to calculate the
land revenue. The rates were periodically revised with information
supplied by village accountants. This rationalized what had been a
haphazard system, in which tax collectors had had to negotiate with
chieftains or headmen to decide how much land revenue each village
would pay. And to simplify the transmission of land revenue to the
treasury, peasants were now required to pay their taxes in cash. This
forced them to sell their produce, and so channeled agricultural
wealth into the general economy.

JAHANGIR AND SHAH JAHAN

The greatest blot on Akbars generally successful reign was probably his son Salim, named for the Sufi shaikh. While the emperor
was campaigning in Ahmadnagar, Salim unsuccessfully tried to seize
the throne. This set a pattern for the Mughal Empire: from then on,
almost every emperor was challenged by a son who wanted to hurry
his own ascension to power. The next installment came in 1605, when
Akbar lay dying. This time, it was Salims 17-year-old son Khusrau
who attempted a coup. He too failed. Akbar effected a deathbed reconciliation with Salim, who became the fourth Mughal emperor under
the name of Jahangir.
Unlike his father, Jahangir remained a devotee of Sufi saints, and he
was willing to suppress religious leaders who were likely to provoke
unrest. At the same time, his mother was the daughter of the Rajput
Raja Bharamall Kachhawaha, and he celebrated the major Hindu festivals and occasionally visited a Hindu holy man. He also maintained
the imperial cult, with himself as the master and his nobles as disciples. Jahangir, however, is best remembered for the artistic patronage
that he exercised with his favorite wife, Nur Jahan. The imperial couple were particular connoisseurs of painting. They encouraged artists
to experiment, and they oversaw the creation of a unique Mughal
style. This is one of the great classical schools of art, and its models
a blend of Iranian, Hindu, and European traditionswere followed
in India through the nineteenth century.
Jahangirs principal military concern originated in his fathers campaigns in Ahmadnagar, where Malik Ambar, a sometime officer in the
Ahmadnagar army, fought the Mughals with the tactics of guerrilla
warfare. Malik Ambar represents a factor in Indian history that is

The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty

61

often forgotten: African-Indians. For many centuries, there was a small

but steady influx of Africans into South Asia, often either as free merchants or as slaves. Some of the latter were household slaves; others
were soldiers who filled the same role Turkic slaves had in the early
days of Muslim rule in North India. Occasionally, African soldiers rose
to political power. From 1487 to 1493, the then-independent sultanate
of Bengal was ruled by the so-called Abyssinian dynasty, comprising
African ex-slaves who had been in the service of the previous dynasty;
and from the early seventeenth century down to 1948, the island of
Janjira off the west coast of India was ruled by a line of African princes.
Malik Ambar was perhaps the most successful of all AfricanIndians. A native of what is now Ethiopia, he was taken captive,
enslaved, converted to Islam, and given military training. By the time
of Akbars incursion into Ahmadnagar, he was a free man and in command of a body of troops. With these he gained control of what
remained of Ahmadnagar after the Mughal invasion, and fought
against Jahangir. In 1608, a Mughal army defeated Malik Ambar. The
former slave submitted, but revolted as soon as the imperial force
had moved on. This scenario was regularly repeated until Malik
Ambar died 18 years later. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Mughal
realm, the Iranians recaptured the frontier town of Qandahar in 1622.
Jahangir, by now addicted to a mixture of opium and wine, never
recovered from the shock. He died in October 1627, touching off a
struggle for succession that ended when his third son Shah Jahan
became emperor in January 1628.
Shah Jahan moved the Mughal empire away from Akbars religious
eclecticism. He restored the canonical ban on the construction or
repair of non-Muslim places of worship, and ended the imperial cult
as un-Islamic. He sought to strengthen the support of his mansabdars
through a sense of hereditary noble loyalty to the dynasty, rather than
discipleship. But he was by no means illiberal. Hindus, particularly
Rajputs, remained prominent in the nobility, and with his favorite wife
Mumtaz Mahall, Shah Jahan presided over a flowering of arts and
literature.
The emperors principal interest was architecture, and two of his
projects illustrate the union of his Muslim faith with his keen aesthetic
sense. After Mumtaz Mahall died in childbirth in 1631, the grieving
Shah Jahan commemorated her with the Taj Mahal at Agra, regarded
by many as the most beautiful building in the world. The Taj is set in
a walled complex, and it has been suggested that the whole allegorically represents God sitting in judgment over humanity. While the
Taj was being built, Shah Jahan decided to leave Agra and return the

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capital to Delhi. Grief may have played a part, but the move also had a
religious significance, for Delhi was the old seat of Muslim rule in
India and was surrounded by the tombs of Islamic holy men. Between
1639 and 1648, Shah Jahan oversaw the construction of Shahjahanabad, now called Old Delhi, the Mughal seat till the dynasty ended in
1857. Its centerpieces are the Red Fort, a great walled palace on the
Yamuna river, and the Jami Masjid, the largest mosque in India.
Shah Jahan was as keen on conquest as he was on building.
He failed in his attempts to recapture lost ancestral territories in Central Asia and Qandahar, but enjoyed success in the Deccan. He went
to war against the remnants of Ahmadnagar, whose defenders came
under the command of a Hindu noble named Shahji Bhonsle. Shahji
belonged to the Maratha caste, which for generations had served the
sultans of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur as administrators and soldiers.
In 1636, however, Shahji surrendered, and all of Ahmadnagar was
annexed to the Mughal empire. For most of the next 50 years, a shaky
peace subsisted between the Mughals and the remaining Deccan sultanates, Bijapur and Golkonda. This allowed the sultans to expand
southward into Carnatic, the eastern Deccan coast that once formed
part of Vijayanagara. At the same time, the Mughals tried to destabilize their southern neighbors by fomenting discontent among their
subjects. Bijapur was badly undermined, as Mughal intrigue sapped
the ties of loyalty between the Maratha chieftains and their sultans.

AURANGZEB
The most capable of the four sons of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz
Mahall were Dara Shikoh, the eldest and his fathers favorite, and
Aurangzeb, the third son. These two brothers were not only rivals
for the throne but also opposites in temperament and religion. The
lazy and arrogant Dara Shikoh had a gift for alienating others. Like
his great-grandfather Akbar, he enjoyed theological discussions with
Hindus and Jesuits, and believed that all religions contained an identical truth. Aurangzeb was hardworking and a devout Muslim. When
Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in September 1657, the four princes began
to maneuver for the throne. As they assembled their armies, Shah
Jahan unexpectedly recovered, but preparations had reached the point
of no return and the brothers went to war.
Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shikoh in May 1658, took Agra, and
announced the deposition of Shah Jahan. He went on to Delhi, where
he was crowned emperor under the name of Alamgir. When Dara
Shikoh fell into his hands a few months later, Aurangzeb decided that

The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty

63

he must die. The unorthodox Mughal prince was tried for apostasy
and idolatry, convicted, and executed. Another brother, Murad
Bakhsh, was later executed on charges of murder; the remaining
brother, Muhammad Shuja, fled to what is now Burma and met his
death there. Shah Jahan lived out his days in captivity in the Agra fort.
Aurangzeb resolved to complete Shah Jahans transformation of
Akbars empire into a Muslim state. He eliminated the surviving vestiges of the imperial cult, ending his daily public appearances and
patronage of secular artistic projects. Nobles and members of the
imperial family continued to sponsor the arts, but the withdrawal of
the emperors lavish support closed the great age of Mughal culture.
The ulama regained the power that they had lost in the 1580s, and
Aurangzeb reiterated his father s orders for the destruction of all
newly built or repaired non-Muslim places of worship. The process culminated in 1679, when the jizya was restored. None of these measures
was thoroughly enforced, but the mere fact that imperial policy now
treated non-Muslims as second-class citizens provoked resentment.
But there was more to Aurangzeb than philistinism and religious
bigotry. He supported architects and intellectuals whose work was
compatible with Islamfor example, the builders of the Pearl Mosque
at Delhi and the Imperial Mosque at Lahore, or the philosopher
Danishmand Khan who was equally familiar with Hindu thought
and the works of Rene Descartes. Political considerations probably
outweighed the emperors unquestionably sincere faith in such incidents as the execution of Dara Shikoh. Aurangzebs troubled relations
with the Sikh religion show the same mixture of religious and secular
causes. Sikhism was founded by Nanak (14691539), a Punjabi Hindu
belonging to a merchant caste. In a long quest for religious truth,
Nanak probably talked with Hindus and Muslims, and traveled to
holy places inside and outside India. He was strongly influenced
by the teachings of Kabir, a weaver who asserted that neither the
Hindu Vedas nor the Muslim Quran was true. Kabir dismissed image
worship, fasts, and pilgrimages as irrelevant to salvation, and instead
advised worshipers to build their love for God until they lost themselves in Him.
Nanak eventually developed his own theology and preached it to a
growing circle of disciples or Sikhs. It centers on a loving God with the
power to intervene and save us from the rebirth that, as Sikhs agree
with Hindus, is our natural fate. In return, we must love and fear
God at all times, and live honestly and charitably. God reveals Himself
to us when we envelope ourselves in His Word and His Name, which
are embodied in the sacred verses composed by such teachers (gurus)

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as Kabir and Nanak. Our ultimate goal must be to overcome our

blinding self-centeredness so that we can recognize the handiwork of
God in everything in the universe, whether natural forces, inanimate
objects, living beings, or emotions. As a corollary to this, we must
not treat people differently according to their caste, sex, or nationality,
for all are created equal.
When Nanak died, his chosen successor Angad became the second
guru of the Sikhs (15391552). He was followed by Amar Das (1552
1574), Ram Das (15741581), and Arjan (15811606). Their tenures
saw the spread of Sikhism among Punjabis of all religions and classes.
The faith now has 23 million adherents in India, most of them in
Punjab, forming 1.9 percent of the total population of the country.
Meanwhile, a distinct Sikh identity emerged. One of its pillars was
Amritsar, the essence of the nectar of immortality, a sacred pool
built by Ram Das. The Golden Temple, the spiritual center of Sikhism,
was afterward built in the pool, and the city of Amritsar grew up
around it. Another pillar was the Adi Granth (First Book) or Granth
Sahib (Honored Book), the Sikh scriptures, compiled in 1604 from the
writings of Kabir, the Sikh gurus, and other holy men.
Arjan had good relations with Akbar, who met him in 1598. But the
gurus were not without enemies. Some of these were schismatic Sikhs,
who followed such gurus of their own as Arjans brother Prithi Chand.
Others were Mughal officials who were jealous or fearful of the wealth
and power of the gurus. In 1606, Arjan was arrested and executed by
Jahangir. This was supposedly because the guru had blessed the
emperors rebellious son Khusrau, although it has been suggested that
Jahangir was actually influenced by slanders against Arjan, or that he
disliked the Sikhs because of their active proselytization.
The gurus Hargobind (16061644), Har Ray (16441661), and
Har Krishan (16611664) generally avoided confrontation with the
secular authorities by living in the Hindu kingdoms of Himachal Pradesh, which paid tribute to the Mughals but enjoyed considerable
autonomy. After the death of Har Krishan, political and religious
quarrels took relations between Sikhs and emperor to a new low.
Aurangzeb, who was now emperor, wanted to see his friend Ram
Ray (who was Har Krishans brother) as the new guru, but the position instead went to Tegh Bahadur (16641675), son of the earlier guru
Hargobind. The bad feelings between Aurangzeb and Tegh Bahadur
were worsened by the emperor s religious policy, which among
other things led to the demolition of at least one Sikh temple. In the
end, Tegh Bahadur decided to uphold his faith through martyrdom.
After naming his son Gobind Das as his successor, he allowed himself

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65

to be arrested in 1675, and through his defiance of both the emperor

and Islam ensured his own execution at Delhi.

SHIVAJI
After Shah Jahans conquest of Ahmadnagar in 1636, Shahji the
Maratha entered the army of the sultan of Bijapur, whom he served
in the campaigns in Carnatic. He made over his lands in the Pune area
of northern Bijapur to his young son Shivaji. Shivaji afterward took advantage of the long illness of the sultan, and the effects of destabilization by the Mughals, to acquire suzerainty over hilltop fortresses and
rural Maratha chieftains on both sides of the border, between Bijapur
and the old Ahmadnagar sultanate. He adopted the administrative
forms of the sultans who had ruled before him, and like them governed through a bureaucracy composed largely of Brahmins.
Shivajis expansionism led to war with the Mughals in 1659. Four
years later, after the Marathas raided the principal imperial military
camp in the Deccan and sacked the great port of Surat in Gujarat,
Aurangzeb sent a huge army into Maharashtra. The Marathas and
Mughals were fighting different wars, for Shivaji relied on guerrilla
tactics and Aurangzeb on sieges and battles, and this meant that neither side could win. Eventually, Shivaji agreed to enter Aurangzebs
service and surrender the majority of his forts in return for recognition
of his title to his remaining possessions. In 1666, in his new capacity as
a Mughal noble, the Maratha was summoned to the imperial court.
The visit went badly. Aurangzeb regarded his guest as an upstart
chieftain, not the regional overlord he had become, and after a few
months an angry Shivaji returned home. After consolidating his
power, he reopened the war. He recaptured his ceded forts, sacked
Surat again, and raided Mughal territory, and in 1674 had himself
crowned king in a Hindu ceremony. This represented a formal declaration of independence from the Mughals and Bijapur, and also
ensured the legitimacy of his authority in the eyes of his Brahmin
officials and Maratha chieftains.
On Shivajis death in 1680, his son Sambhaji assumed the Maratha
throne. The new king soon acquired an unexpected ally. The previous
year, several Rajput clans in Rajasthan had revolted against Aurangzeb.
As Hindus, the Rajputs were unhappy with the new Islamic policy
(although Rajput mansabdars were exempted from the reimposed jizya),
but they were more concerned over infringements of their privileges: a
sharp fall in the proportion of Rajputs in the high nobility, a reduction
in their lucrative jagir incomes, and the emperors interference in a

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succession dispute in the Rajput kingdom of Jodhpur. Aurangzeb

dispatched his youngest son Muhammad Akbar to quell the uprising.
The prince, however, first joined the revolt, then fled to Sambhaji in
Maharashtra.
For the next 20 years, skirmishes continued between Mughal troops
and Rajput warriors. To Aurangzeb, however, a greater danger lay in
the possibility that Muhammad Akbar might forge an alliance of the
Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Bijapur and Golkonda sultanates. To forestall it, he decided to subdue the Marathas and the sultanates and to
bring the south under Mughal rule. He therefore assumed personal
command of his army in the Deccan, and led it to victory after victory.
He conquered Bijapur in 1686 and Golkonda in 1687. Then, Muhammad
Akbar fled to Iran, and in 1689 Aurangzeb captured and executed Sambhaji. The old Mughal now ruled the greatest empire in Indian history,
covering the whole of the subcontinent except its southernmost tip.

THE ECONOMY OF MUGHAL INDIA

In the late seventeenth century, the Mughal empire had between
100 million and 150 million people. The relative peace and security that
followed the establishment of Mughal rule in most of India, the reduction of taxes on internal trade, and government encouragement of the
cultivation of waste and forested lands, all had contributed to a vigorous
commercial and agricultural economy across much of the subcontinent.
Foreign trade also flourished. During the reign of Jahangir, the Portuguese were driven from their 100-year-old command of the Indian
Ocean by two merchant firms, the English and the Dutch East India
Companies, founded in 1600 and 1602 respectively. In 1664, they were
joined by a French East India Company. On the coasts and inland, the
European companies built trading posts, or factories, where their
agents purchased export goods to ship to Europe, the Far East, and
America. Indias exports ranged from indigo to saltpeter, but they were
dominated by cotton cloths. These had long been sent to Indonesia,
and they became phenomenally popular in Europe after their introduction there by the English and Dutch companies near the beginning of
the seventeenth century. The Europeans paid for most of their purchases
with silver, much of it from the Spanish colonies in the New World.

THE DECLINE OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRE

The execution of Sambhaji marked the beginning of the end of the
Mughal empire. For the next six decades, much of India was torn by

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67

warfare, and the central Mughal administrative system collapsed.

Despite year after year of campaigning in the Deccan, Aurangzeb was
unable to capture the new Maratha king, Sambhajis brother Rajaram,
whose men carried on a guerrilla war. After Rajarams death, the struggle was continued by his widow Tarabai. All the while, local chieftains
in Maharashtra continually changed sides in search of favorable terms,
until neither the imperial nor the Maratha government could exercise
authority over large parts of the countryside. The spiraling anarchy,
and the efforts of the two administrations to collect taxes and military
supplies, severely disrupted trade and agriculture. Trade through Surat
virtually dried up, and Mumbai, an old Portuguese station that now
belonged to the English East India Company, gradually replaced Surat
as the principal port on the west coast. Maratha warrior bands took advantage of their newfound freedom to raid further and further afield
for plunder. During the first decade of the eighteenth century, they
poured out of Maharashtra into Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Madhya
Pradesh, and Gujarat.
Meanwhile, from 1685 the area around Agra was torn by a rebellion
among the Jats, members of a large cultivating community of North
India, who disrupted the main road linking Delhi to the Deccan.
In the following decade, the guru Gobind Das (16751708) showed
the strength of the Sikhs when his men helped defeat Mughal troops
who had been sent to collect tribute from refractory kings in Himachal
Pradesh. Gobind Das also sought to make good his claim to be the
only true living guru in the face of rival claimants, and in 1699 he
united his military and religious endeavors. Before a great body of
Sikhs who had gathered to celebrate the spring festival of Baisakhi,
Gobind Das established his Khalsa or Pure Ones, a body of Sikh men
who underwent an initiation of his own devising. The guru and his
initiates took the name of Singh (lion), Gobind Das becoming
Gobind Singh. Members of the Khalsa were required to bear arms
and were forbidden to cut their hair. They were unquestionably loyal
to the guruship of Gobind Singh, who insisted that they were the only
authentic Sikhs. Himachal Pradesh kings, fearful of the growing
power of the guru in their midst, persuaded Aurangzeb to send an
army against Gobind Singh. This touched off a war between the
Mughals and the Khalsa.
By now, wars, bad harvests, and a reluctance of local chieftains to
cooperate with a government that could no longer maintain order
had made the collection of the land revenue increasingly uncertain.
This hit at the salaries of the mansabdars, whose consequent demoralization was increased when Aurangzeb sought to secure the adherence

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of Muslim and Maratha nobles from the Deccan by promoting them

over the heads of North Indians who belonged to families that had
served the Mughals for generations. Inevitably, the mansabdars
loyalty to the emperor began to fray.
Aurangzeb died in the Deccan in 1707. The usual war of succession
among his three surviving sons was won by Bahadur Shah, who tried
to restore order. He released Sambhajis son Shahu, who had lived at
the Mughal court since 1689 but now returned to Maharashtra to claim
his fathers throne. This split the Marathas between the supporters of
Shahu and of his sister-in-law Tarabai. Bahadur Shah also ended
his fathers quarrel with Gobind Singh. But peace was short lived.
In 1708, Gobind Singh was murdered. He had indicated that the scriptural Granth Sahib and the will of the Khalsa could jointly lead the
Sikhs, rendering a living guru unnecessary. The human guruship
therefore now fell vacant. Meanwhile, despite the truce between
Gobind Singh and Bahadur Shah, Mughal officials in Punjab had continued to persecute the Sikhs. Not long before his death, the guru told
a Sikh named Banda Bahadur to lead the Khalsa against their oppressors. Banda Bahadur launched a revolt that ended Mughal control
over much of eastern Punjab and northern Haryana. A desperate
Bahadur Shah led his army to Punjab, where he died in 1712. Yet
another war of succession ended in the accession of Bahadur Shahs
son Jahandar Shah. The new emperor was drunken and frivolous,
and left the administration to Zul-Fiqar Khan, a mansabdar who
had helped him defeat his brothers. Zul-Fiqar Khan desperately tried
to win support for his regime: he abolished the jizya; showered titles
and lands on Rajput kings; even appointed Sambhaji II, Tarabais candidate for the Maratha kingship, as a mansabdar.
Within months, however, Jahandar Shahs nephew Farrukhsiyar laid
claim to the throne. He obtained the support of the brothers Sayyid
Husain Ali and Sayyid Abdallah Khan, members of an old noble Indian
Muslim family. With an army supplied by the Sayyids, Farrukhsiyar
seized power and executed Jahandar Shah and Zul-Fiqar Khan. The following years saw several victories for Mughal arms and diplomacy.
In1715, Banda Bahadur and 700 of his fellow Khalsa warriors were captured and executed, and in 1718 Sayyid Husain Ali ended the Mughals
war with the Marathas by concluding a treaty with Shahu. The agreement recognized Shahu as ruler of the Maratha conquests in the Deccan
and granted him a share of the imperial revenues that had been claimed
by the Maratha kings since Shivaji (amounting to 35 percent of the revenues in the Deccan, and 25 percent in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat).

The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty

69

In return, Shahu agreed to supply the Sayyid brothers with tribute and
soldiers.
Meanwhile, Farrukhsiyar lived in constant terror that the Sayyids
would turn on him, and devoted himself to intriguing against them
rather than to ruling his empire. In 1719, the standoff ended when
the combined armies of Husain Ali and Shahu the Maratha overthrew
Farrukhsiyar. The Sayyids installed three grandsons of Bahadur Shah
as puppet emperors in rapid succession, Rafi ud-Darjat, Rafi udDaula, and Muhammad Shah. But Husain Ali and Abdallah Khan
were unpopular among many mansabdars of Iranian and Central
Asian background on account of their Indian origins and the proHindu tendencies that the alliance with Shahu seemed to demonstrate. In 1720, the Central Asian Nizam ul-Mulk defeated the Sayyid
and Maratha armies. The new emperor Muhammad Shah quickly
transferred his support to Nizam ul-Mulk, and the two Sayyids were
murdered.

MUHAMMAD SHAH
Under Muhammad Shah, the Mughal empire disintegrated. Like
Farrukhsiyar, he spent more time plotting against his nobles than governing. Left to their own devices, Mughal governors and mansabdars
drifted into independence. Murshid Quli Khan was a textbook case.
A Brahmin slave who had converted to Islam, under Aurangzeb he
rose to the office of diwan (head of the revenue collection) for Bengal,
Bihar, and Odisha. In the time of Farrukhsiyar, he acquired the additional position of governor, violating Mughal practice that had always
kept the two functions separate. Now, Murshid Quli Khan could
apply the revenues of his provinces directly to his own administration,
although he continued to send his surplus funds to Delhi, where they
formed a bulwark of the imperial finances.
Muhammad Shahs lack of interest in his eastern provinces allowed
Murshid Quli Khan to consolidate his position. He reduced the power
of local chieftains and filled the administration with his dependents
(often his own relatives or Bengali Hindus). He maintained stability,
so that trade flourished, and conducted the first reassessment of the
land revenue since Raja Todar Malls survey. On his death, it seemed
natural for the government of Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha to pass to
his son-in-law Shuja ud-Din Muhammad Khan (17271739). Shuja
ud-Din still sent funds to Delhi, but by the time he died, he was effectively an independent monarch paying tribute rather than a governor

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remitting the revenue. Finally, Allahwardi Khan (17401756) began to

retain all the revenues of Bengal and Bihar for himself, severing the
last real bond between Delhi and eastern India. It was much the same
story in the province of Awadh in Uttar Pradesh, under the governorships of Saadat Khan (17221739) and his nephew Safdar Jang (1739
1754), of whom the latter extended his control over the neighboring
province of Allahabad.
Nizam ul-Mulk, the Central Asian nobleman who had overthrown
the Sayyid brothers, found that he could not dominate the government
at Delhi. He retired south to the old Golkonda capital of Hyderabad,
from where he ruled much of the Deccan until his death in 1748. At
first, peninsular India was a patchwork of territories controlled by
Nizam ul-Mulk and the Marathas. The situation gradually solidified,
so that Nizam ul-Mulk dominated the eastern Deccan, and the Marathas the western. Nearer to Delhi, the Rajput kings asserted their
autonomy in Rajasthan, and seized Mughal districts that bordered on
their lands. The Pashtun clans of the Ruhela and Bangash took control
of the region between Delhi and Awadh, and the Jats established
themselves as masters of much of Agra province. Punjab headed
toward independence under the governor Abd us-Samad Khan and
his family. They were challenged by a hard core of the Khalsa that
went into outlawry after the execution of Banda Bahadur, plundering
and killing anyone associated with the Mughal government. By 1748,
the Khalsa ruled much of East Punjab, including Amritsar.
By the time that Farrukhsiyar came to the throne, Maharashtra was
torn by civil war between the rival members of Shivajis family, Shahu
and Tarabai. Bands of Maratha peasants and soldiers turned to banditry and indiscriminately raided the lands of the two claimants and
the Mughals. Order was gradually restored by Balaji Vishvanath Bhat,
a member of the Chitpavan subcaste of Brahmins. Beginning as a
clerk, Balaji rose to become Shahus peshwa or prime minister in
1713. He won over many of Tarabais supporters, defeated several
Mughal armies, and in 1718 negotiated the treaty with Sayyid Husain
Ali that recognized Maratha rule in the Deccan. Balaji filled his
bureaucracy with fellow Chitpavans and other Brahmins, whose
hereditary experience of administration went back to the days of the
Deccan sultans. He also established good relations with the great
Brahmin banking families of Maharashtra, and from them borrowed
sufficient money to create an effective administration. Balaji died in
1720. By then, anarchy had given way to a functioning Maratha
government in much of Maharashtra. Shahu named Balajis son
Bajirav to be the new peshwa. Bajirav made the peshwa the real head

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71

of the Maratha kingdom, which for the next century was ruled by his
family; Shahu and his successors were reduced to symbolic kings.
During the 1720s, Bajirav incorporated the independent bands of
part-time Maratha warriors into a professional army, commanded by
men of unimpeachable loyalty. He turned this force on the Mughal
provinces to the north, and by his death in 1740, the Marathas had
replaced the Mughals as the rulers of much of Madhya Pradesh and
almost all of Gujarat. Expansion came at the price of increasing decentralization, however. In 1731, Bajirav ended the Maratha civil war by
recognizing Tarabais candidate Sambhaji II as ruler of the Kolhapur
area in southern Maharashtra. Looking to this precedent, Maratha
commanders in Gujarat and Malwa demanded a share of the conquests. Bajirav agreed to divide the new provinces, keeping some districts for himself and allocating others to his commanders in return for
their continued allegiance to his government.
Under Bajiravs son Nana Saheb or Balvantrav (17401761), the
Marathas ranged even further afield. In the 1740s they began incursions into Rajasthan, often at the invitation of Rajput princes who gave
them lands and tribute in return for help in seizing the throne. To the
east, a Maratha warrior named Raghuji Bhonsle first acquired mastery
over the Gond (Tribal) kingdom of Nagpur, and then began to raid the
territories of Allahwardi Khan of Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha. In 1751,
he compelled Allahwardi Khan to transfer Odisha to Maratha rule.
Meanwhile, in 1736, the emperor of Iran was overthrown by an officer named Nadir Shah. The new monarch moved on to conquer what
is now Afghanistan, including the Mughal province of Kabul, then
invaded India, and in February 1739 defeated a Mughal army outside
Delhi. When some of his soldiers were killed after entering the capital
in search of loot, Nadir Shah ordered a general massacre. Twenty
thousand Delhiites were slain. The Mughal emperor Muhammad
Shah was compelled to pay an indemnity of 20 million rupees and to
cede all his territories west of the Indus. Carrying a fortune in gold, silver, and jewels, Nadir Shah returned to Iran in May 1739, after vividly
demonstrating the utter impotence of the Mughal empire. Muhammad Shah died nine years later, in 1748. By then, imperial authority
was confined to Delhi and the surrounding territories to a distance of
50 miles.

5
A Century of Realignment
MUGHALS AND MARATHAS
Under Muhammad Shahs son Ahmad Shah (17481754), the Mughal
empire no longer existed. Nevertheless, the governors who had made
themselves independent in Bengal, Awadh, and elsewhere continued
to recognize the nominal supremacy of the emperor. Most called themselves not king but nawab, the plural of the Arabic word naib or
deputy. Across India, new dynasts maintained Mughal forms of
government and issued Mughal-style coins. Even the Marathas and
Sikhs looked to the phantom emperor for recognition of their titles
and conquests. The Mughals also enjoyed spiritual authority over
many Indian Muslims, particularly after Muhammad Shah resumed
the function (renounced by Aurangzeb) of interpreting Islamic law.
Yet whatever their attitude to his office, the regional rulers had little
respect for the person of the emperor. Ahmad Shah was dominated by
nawab Safdar Jang of Awadh, until Imad ul-Mulk (a grandson of
Nizam ul-Mulk) and a Maratha army replaced him with Alamgir II
(17541759). After Imad ul-Mulk murdered Alamgir II, the latters
son Shah Alam II (17591806) lived in Awadh under the protection of
Safdar Jangs successor Shuja ud-Daula. In 1771, the Maratha warlord

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Mahadji Scindia took Delhi, and the following year Shah Alam
returned to the capital as his puppet. These powerless emperors
sought to boost their self-respect by taking the names of their more
illustrious ancestors: Alamgir I had been Aurangzeb, and Shah Alam
I was Bahadur Shah.
Meanwhile, the nawabs, peshwas, and other inheritors of Mughal
power were establishing orderly states. By the mid-eighteenth century, the near anarchy that parts of India had seen since the time of
Aurangzeb was over. This allowed the economy to grow rapidly,
which both enriched the new states and drew the European East India
Companies deeper into Indian trade.
In the 1750s, the most powerful ruler in India was the Maratha
peshwa Nana Saheb. His empire extended across the western Deccan,
Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Punjab. He might
have become master of all India, but this was prevented by a series
of events that began with the assassination of Nadir Shah of Iran in
1747. What is now Afghanistan was seized by an officer named
Ahmad Shah Durrani, who raided India several times and in 1756
1757 imitated Nadir Shah by sacking Delhi. In 17591760 Durrani
drove the Marathas from Punjab, and then moved into Haryana.
Skirmishing between the Afghan and Maratha armies culminated in
1761 in a battle at Panipat, the place near Delhi where Babur had
defeated sultan Ibrahim Lodi almost 250 years earlier. Durrani won a
crushing victory, and he and his men took whatever they could carry
back to Afghanistan.
The 50,000 dead at Panipat included several Maratha leaders, and
Nana Saheb died soon after the battle. Maratha power in North India
evaporated. The Marathas were further weakened by struggles
between the new peshwa, Nana Sahebs son Madhavrav I, and his
uncle Raghunathrav. Maratha warlords used the situation to make independent states of the provinces that they had shared with the
peshwa since the 1730s. Madhavrav died in 1772. The next year, his
heir Narayanrav was killed by partisans of Raghunathrav, who challenged Narayanravs son Madhavrav II. This touched off a civil war,
which pitted Madhavravs guardian Nana Phadnis against Raghunathrav. Nana Phadnis secured the support of the warlords. Raghunathrav obtained troops from the British East India Company in return
for territory and money (British rather than English, because since
1707 England had been joined with Scotland in the kingdom of Great
Britain). In 1779, however, Nana Phadnis and the warlord Mahadji
Scindia defeated Raghunathrav. Phadnis and Scindia then vied for
control of the Marathas until Scindias death in 1794.

A Century of Realignment

75

In the wake of the Maratha defeat at Panipat, Sikh warriors overran

Punjab and northern Haryana. By the 1770s the region was divided
into over 60 principalities, most of them ruled by Khalsa Sikhs. These
chieftains employed non-Khalsa and even non-Sikh administrators
and soldiers, and gave their patronage to religious persons and institutions of all religions. Nevertheless, the late eighteenth century saw
the steady absorption of schismatic Sikhs into the Khalsa.
Meanwhile, in the 1750s, a Muslim army officer named Haidar Ali
had risen to power in the Hindu kingdom of Mysore, an offshoot of
Vijayanagara in South India. After Panipat, he extended his sway over
all Karnataka. In 1782 he was succeeded by his son Tipu Sultan, who
conquered Kerala. Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan were among the greatest Indian rulers of the eighteenth century. They boosted their collection of land revenue, often eliminating local chieftains and dealing
directly with peasants, and controlled the trade of southwestern India.
With their wealth, they created a modern army, with European training and tactics, which they used to good effect against the British.
In 17901792, however, the British, now allied with the nizam (ruler)
of Hyderabad (the heir of Nizam ul-Mulk) and the Marathas, defeated
Tipu Sultan. The victorious allies annexed half of Mysores territory.

THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY

In the eighteenth century, the ships of the British East India
Company and the British Royal Navy dominated the Indian Ocean,
and the governors of the Companys three main factories at Chennai,
Kolkata, and Mumbai presided over a flourishing trade. The six
months voyage to Britain made them virtually independent of their
directors in London. After 1750, Company agents in India profited
by this autonomy to acquire territory.
They began in the Deccan. The French and British Companies were
bitter rivals in the dominions of Nizam ul-Mulk, the ruler of Hyderabad.
In 1744, war broke out between Britain and France (this conflict was part
of the War of the Austrian Succession). The French captured the British
post at Chennai. They returned it after the coming of peace in 1748, but
now the Companies competed by entering local power struggles.
For several years, two families had been dueling for the post of nawab
of Carnatic, the Hyderabad governor on the southeast coast. Then, the
death of Nizam ul-Mulk in 1748 touched off a succession dispute in
Hyderabad itself.
Joseph Dupleix, governor of the French factory at Pondicherry, used
Indian mercenaries, trained in European tactics, to install on the

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The History of India

thrones of Carnatic and Hyderabad rulers who were friendly to

French interests. Robert Clive of the British Company now imitated
Dupleix, using Indian troops to support pro-British claimants in
Carnatic and Hyderabad. Both Dupleix and Clive adopted the Indian
practice of subsidiary alliance with their new friends: the pro-French
or pro-British rulers agreed to pay tribute (called a subsidy) in
return for military protection. The French and British used the subsidies to build up powerful armies, which they employed against each
other during the Seven Years War of 17561763. The British won the
war all across the globe, and virtually ended French activity in India.
Meanwhile, trade with the British, French, and Dutch Companies
helped make Bengal and Bihar wealthy. This invited attacks by the
Marathas, the Pashtuns, and the nawab of Awadh. To meet the danger,
nawab Allahwardi Khan of Bengal and Bihar pressed nobles, bankers,
zamindars, and the Companies for money. (Zamindars, literally possessors of the land, collected the land revenue from cultivators or local
chieftains, and passed it on to the government. They usually also
administered justice and maintained order, and were the descendants
of Hindu petty rulers or Muslim officials appointed by the Mughals
and nawabs.)
In 1756, Allahwardi Khan was succeeded by his great-nephew (or
grandson) Siraj ud-Daula. The new nawab dismissed most of his predecessors civilian and military officials, including a general named Mir
Jafar. This lost him much support among the nobility. Then, Siraj udDaulas demands for money alienated the powerful banking firm of
Jagat Seth (Banker of the World), the zamindars, and the European
Companies. When the British rejected his demands, Siraj ud-Daula
seized their factory at Kolkata. It has been suggested that the nawab
engineered the episode so that he could destroy Kolkatas new fortifications: though these were directed primarily against the French, they
might one day allow the Company to defy the nawabs authority.
At Chennai, Clive had assembled British and Indian soldiers to use
against the French in the Seven Years War. He took them to Bengal
instead and recaptured Kolkata. There, he learned that the firm of
Jagat Seth was plotting to replace Siraj ud-Daula with Mir Jafar. Clive
joined the conspiracy and agreed to supply troops. On June 23, 1757,
the armies of the Company and Siraj ud-Daula met at Plassey.
The nawab was captured and killed, and Mir Jafar was installed
on the throne. He rewarded the British Company with money and
privileges (including immunity from customs payments in his
territories), and abolished the trading rights of the French Company.
Almost immediately, however, he found that he could pay neither

A Century of Realignment

77

the promised rewards nor the expenses of a Company army that

protected him. His impotence was made obvious when Company
soldiersnot his owndefeated invasions of Bengal by the emperor
Shah Alam and the Marathas. A resentful Mir Jafar began to plot, until
in 1760 the British deposed him in favor of his son-in-law Mir Qasim.
Mir Qasim wanted to leave coastal Bengal to the British and exclude
them from the rest of his territories, but this was impossible. The Company let its employees (and other Britons) trade within Asia for their
own benefit, so long as they did not infringe on the Companys
monopoly of commerce with Britain. After 1757, British traders spread
through Bengal and Bihar and applied Mir Jafars concession of freedom from customs to their own as well as the Companys business.
Meanwhile, the Company continually demanded more money from
the nawab. Conflict was inevitable. The Company won, deposed Mir
Qasim, and restored Mir Jafar. Mir Qasim fled, and in 1764 he joined
with nawab Shuja ud-Daula of Awadh and the nominal Mughal
emperor Shah Alam to invade Bihar. They were defeated by the
Companys army. Mir Jafar died soon afterward, and the British chose
his successor.
In 1765, Robert Clive became the Companys governor at Kolkata.
To ensure sufficient revenues, he secured from Shah Alam the Companys appointment to the old Mughal post of diwan of Bengal and
Bihar. This made the Company responsible for collecting the revenues
of the two provinces. In return, Clive undertook to pay tribute to
Shah Alam, although remittances ceased after the emperor came
under Maratha domination on his return to Delhi seven years later.
As in Mughal times, the offices of governor and diwan of Bengal and
Bihar were separate, after having been united in the person of the
nawab since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the
nawab, now reduced to the single post of governor, was compelled
to hand over his remaining duties to a deputy, chosen by the Company,
which gradually assumed his functions. By 1790, when the position of
deputy nawab was abolished, Bengal and Bihar were fully under
British rule; and Kolkata had replaced the nawabs seat of Murshidabad
as the capital.
The Company moved into government to increase its revenues and
allegedly because of a feeling on the part of many Britons that Indian
officials were inherently oppressive. Company employees, however,
were no better. After 1765, Clive began to restrain extortion by his subordinates, but their mismanagement and corruption helped ensure a
constant shortfall in revenues. The return to Britain of once-penniless
men with fortunes from India seemed to confirm that misrule was

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The History of India

rampant in the Companys territories. When the Company requested

a loan to cover its expenses, the British prime minister, Lord North,
saw an opportunity for rectifying matters. His price was governmental control over the Company, instituted by Parliament in 1773
through the Regulating Act and strengthened with the India Act of
1784 and the Charter Act of 1793.
To consolidate the channels of communication between London and
India, the 1773 act gave the Companys governor at Kolkata the title of
governor general and put the foreign relations of his counterparts at
Chennai and Mumbai under his supervision. The autonomy of
Chennai and Mumbai was later further curtailed. The first governor
general was a Company employee, Warren Hastings, but (in an effort
to ensure impartiality) his successors were usually British aristocrats
with no experience of India. The 1784 act placed the Company directors in London under the supervision of a Board of Control, composed
of British politicians, which made the British government the ultimate
master of the Company.
Britons almost universally agreed that the primary purpose of the
Company was to make money and that Bengal and Bihar could be
used to this end. Profits required law and order, which allowed trade
to flourish and taxes to be collected. The Company therefore built up
its Bengal army. Indian troops were supplemented with British soldiers of the Company and the regular British armies. At the same time,
the Company disbanded the potentially rival armies of the nawab,
zamindars, and chieftains.
Even before 1757, the Company occasionally bypassed Indian
middlemen and bought export goods directly from producers. This
practice now increased. Political power let the Company control production. For example, peasants were compelled to grow such crops
as indigo and to accept low prices for them. After Plassey, the French
and Dutch Companies stopped trading in Bengal, but the British had
no objection to individual private foreign traders in their new dominions, and American, Danish, Portuguese, and French merchants
testified to the vitality of Indian commerce.
The acquisition of the office of diwan changed trade between India
and Britain. Unlike previous diwans, the Company did not spend its
revenues solely on the administration. It began to use local taxes
rather than the imported silver used before 1765to buy exports in
Bengal, and then applied profits from the sale of Indian goods in
London toward its expenses in Britain. These expenses ranged from
supplies to shareholders dividends. The result was that the new
diwan was constantly in need of money. Some of the need was filled

A Century of Realignment

79

through government monopolies over salt and opium, which were

widely consumed in India. Much of the opium was also exported, to
Britain and especially China and Southeast Asia, and in the 1820s
opium sales provided 10 percent of the revenues of the Bengal
government.
The land revenue remained the principal tax, however. The Company initially contracted collection to Indian entrepreneurs. The yield
was never satisfactory, though, and in the 1780s it fell precipitously.
For reasons that are unclear, there was a crisis in the rural economy
of Bengal and Bihar. Some have pointed to a famine that killed
between one fifth and one third of the population of Bengal in 1769
1770, others to a breakdown in law and order after the establishment
of British rule, still others to a general economic decline that affected
the Middle East and South Asia in the mid-eighteenth century.
Lord Cornwallis, governor general from 1786 to 1793, sought to
solve the revenue crisis. He believed that corruption among the Companys Indian and British employees was partly to blame. In his mind,
Indians were irremediably dishonest, and he banned them from
higher posts in the Companys administration and trade. Indeed,
Cornwallis exemplified a new racist climate of opinion that soon virtually ended the once-close business and social ties between Company
employees and Indians, and curtailed sexual relationships between
British men and Indian women. To replace the supposedly corrupt
Indians and Britons, Cornwallis recruited educated men from good
families in Britain, selected by patronage and later by competitive
examination. In return for generous salaries, they were barred from
private trade. They formed a corps of elite administrators, eventually
known as the Indian Civil Service or ICS, and oversaw a huge body
of Indian and British subordinates.
In 1793, Cornwallis appointed a British collector in each of the
districts into which Bengal and Bihar were divided. As the designation implies, the collector received revenues, but he also headed the
district administration, which was now firmly in British hands.
The same year, the governor general implemented the Permanent Settlement, so called because it set the land revenue assessment forever.
Henceforth, each zamindar in Bengal and Bihar was to remit the
annual land revenue at the level collected in 17891790. If he paid,
he owned the land outright. Otherwise, it was confiscated and sold.
As a corollary, cultivators were now regarded as tenants of the zamindar, and the payments they made were treated as rent.
For many years, supporters had argued that a Permanent Settlement
would encourage zamindars to promote agricultural improvement

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The History of India

among their cultivators: by setting the land revenue in perpetuity, it

would make the zamindars want to maximize productivity, because
they (rather than the government) would pocket its fruits. And recognizing zamindars as owners of the land, rather than merely of the right to
receive and remit its revenue, would make land a salable commodity,
whose value its new owners would want to increase. The ensuing rural
prosperity would ensure that the Company never received less than the
assessed revenue. This, and the creation of an aristocracy that owed its
position to British rule and would presumably support its continuation,
were held to be sufficient compensation for the fact that the land revenue would never increase.
The first result of the Permanent Settlement, however, was the
breakup and sale of virtually all the large estates in Bengal and Bihar,
as the great zamindars defaulted on their payments. This was largely
because the nawabs and the British had undermined the power that
zamindars required to collect revenue from thousands of peasants,
especially by abolishing private armies. Some land was bought by
wealthy Indian merchants or Company employees from Kolkata.
Most of the purchasers, however, were zamindars of existing smaller
estates, who already had to be efficient at collecting, or employees of
great zamindars.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, inflation raised the value
of agricultural produce. Zamindars who had survived thus far could
now enhance rents without needing to encourage improvement, and
the peasants of Bengal and Bihar were increasingly exploited. This,
however, was due not so much to the Permanent Settlement as to population, which had always governed the relationship between cultivators and the recipients of their dues. When peasants were scarce, a
zamindar attracted them with favorable terms. In case of a population
surplus, he offered bad terms (such as high rent), which peasants had
to accept if they wanted land. In the nineteenth century, the population of Bengal and Bihar grew fast, thanks to the absence of great famines or floods, and this let zamindars increase rents without any fear of
losing tenants.

LORD WELLESLEY
In 1798, Lord Mornington (who the next year received the additional title of Lord Wellesley) was appointed governor general. Wellesley was the elder brother of the future Duke of Wellington, whose
victory over Napoleon at Waterloo was foreshadowed by campaigns

A Century of Realignment

81

in India during Wellesleys administration. As governor general, Wellesley launched a half century of expansion, which ended in Company
supremacy over the entire Indian subcontinent. Wellesley desired
glory and was also convinced that Indians were better off under the
rule of the British than that of their compatriots. The war between Britain and Revolutionary France, which had begun in 1793, aroused his
fears of French officers who served in the Maratha and Hyderabad
armies, and of Tipu Sultan of Mysore who had sought an alliance with
France. Moreover, Wellesley realized that Indian resources could serve
British interests worldwide.
Wellesley first went to war with Tipu Sultan, who was defeated and
killed in 1799. Part of his kingdom was restored to its old Hindu royal
family, now under British supremacy. The remainder was divided
between the Company and Hyderabad. Then came the subsidiary
allies, by now Carnatic, Hyderabad, and Awadh. Subsidiary alliances
invariably undermined Indian rulers. To pay the subsidy, they either
squeezed their subjects for revenue or borrowed money. In the latter
case, repayment again necessitated extortion. Either way, the result
was oppression, revolt, and administrative collapse. Wellesley
annexed Carnatic, and then forced the rulers of Hyderabad and
Awadh to accept tighter British control and to cede much of their
territory.
Meanwhile, Maratha power was collapsing. In 1795, the peshwa
Madhavrav committed suicide. This touched off a Maratha civil war,
in which the new peshwa, Bajirav II, and the warlords constantly
switched sides. Wellesley used the conflict to bring the Marathas
under British control. The first Maratha state to fall was that of the
Gaekwad family, in Gujarat. In 1802, the Company helped the ruling
Gaekwad against a rival, at the price of a subsidiary alliance. The same
year, Bajirav II signed a treaty that placed all the Maratha territories
under British supremacy, in return for military support. The warlords
Holkar, Scindia, and Bhonsle refused to recognize the agreement and
went to war with the Company. In 1803, the British defeated Scindia
and Bhonsle, who entered subsidiary alliances and ceded territory.
The Companys acquisitions included Delhi from Scindia, and Odisha
from Bhonsle. The war continued, however, draining Company revenues. When Wellesley refused to make peace, the directors dismissed
him in 1805.
The Maratha war ended the following year, but its effects were felt
for another decade. War debts cut deeply into the Companys revenues. The defeated Maratha rulers also experienced shortfalls.

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The History of India

Gurkha soldiers with their British officer during the Great Revolt (18571858) in
India, ca. 1858. (SSPL/Getty Images)

The peshwa responded by oppressing peasants, and Scindia and Holkar by plundering other states. Pindaris, former cavalrymen in the
Maratha armies, lived by raiding Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The Company felt threatened by the consequent instability on its borders. The governor general Lord Hastings (18131823) (not related to
Warren Hastings) sought to solve these problems by resuming expansion. A war with Nepal ended in 1816 with British rule over Uttarakhand and much of Himachal Pradesh. In return, the Company
recognized the independence of Nepal and allowed Nepalese soldiers
to enlist in its well-paid army. Even today, Britain and India maintain
regiments of Nepalese Gurkhas. Hastings also suppressed the Pindaris, and brought the kingdoms of Rajasthan under British supremacy.
In order to strengthen British control, Hastings ordered the peshwa
to renounce what remained of his overlordship over the Marathas.
This so angered the peshwa and Bhonsle that they rebelled. They were
defeated in 1818. Bhonsles state of Nagpur was given to a new ruler
under British domination, and the peshwas territories were annexed
by the Company. Hastingss successor, Lord Amherst (18231828),
rounded out British rule with a victory over Burma, which ceded to
the Company the modern states of Assam, Meghalaya, and Manipur,
and territory on the east coast of the Bay of Bengal.

A Century of Realignment

83

THE COMPANY STATE

When the Company took over Delhi from Scindia in 1803, it became
the guardian of the Mughal emperor. Many Indian rulers recognized
the nominal suzerainty of Shah Alam, his son Akbar II (18061837),
and his grandson Bahadur Shah II (18371857), although in 1827 the
Company gave up the pretense of subordination to the Mughal
throne. Long before this, however, the Companys governor general
in Kolkata had become the real ruler of India. He was assisted by an
executive council. Its members met collectively with the governor general to set policy, and later were individually placed in charge of
government departments.
The territories that were annexed by the Company formed what
was called British India. This was divided into provinces. The original
provincesBengal, Madras, and Bombaycame into being as the
Company placed newly acquired areas under the administration of
the governors of its principal factories. (Although the cities of Madras
and Bombay are now officially called Chennai and Mumbai in English, this change never affected the provinces, later states, that were
named for their respective capitals; the state of Madras was renamed
Tamil Nadu in 1969, and Bombay state ceased to exist when it was divided into Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960.) From 1834, new provinces were created. Madras, Bombay, and later the other provinces
had their own governors and executive councils. Provinces were divided into districts, on the model of Bengal and Bihar. Governors,
councillors, district collectors, and other senior officials often
belonged to Cornwalliss creation, the Indian Civil Service. In 1833,
the British Parliament banned discrimination against Indians in
government employment. Nevertheless, there were no Indians in the
ICS till the 1860s, and governors and executive councillors were all
British until the twentieth century.
Much of the subcontinent, however, was not annexed to British
India, and formed what was known as Indian India or the Indian
states. These areas retained their own monarchs, under indirect British
rule. The first Indian states were the territories of rulers in subsidiary
alliance with the Company. Local kings who had been subordinate to
the Marathas or Nepal were later put in the same category. In some
areas, the British recognized hundreds of petty chieftains as rulers of
their own tiny states. The monarchs of Indian India, styled princes or
chiefs by the British, headed their state governments but were
required to follow the orders of a British representative (often called
a resident).

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The History of India

Company domination affected Indias economy as well as its

administration. By the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution meant that British factories could turn out endless quantities of
cheap cotton cloth. Manufacturers secured the domestic market by
getting the British government to impose prohibitive duties on
imported textiles, which quickly wiped out sales of Indian cottons in
Britain. Then, between the 1820s and the 1840s, as its price fell with
the expansion of production, British cloth drove Indian textiles from
the Americas, Portugal, and East Asia, and in the 1840s it began to take
over in India too. All this created unprecedented unemployment
among Indian cotton spinners and weavers and eliminated what had
been the focal point of Company trade for 200 years.
Ever since its establishment, the Company had enjoyed a monopoly
on trade from South and East Asia to Britain. In 1813, however,
Parliament gave in to the demands of British merchants and opened
trade between India and Britain to all. In 1824, the Company stopped
importing goods into India, and nine years later Parliament barred it
from trade altogether. Its sole function was henceforth ruling India,
which required substantial revenues. The army was particularly
costly, absorbing 42.5 percent of the Indian governments expenditure
under Lord Wellesley, and about a third from the 1820s onward.
Indian troops did not merely establish and maintain British rule in
their homeland. In 1811, they helped conquer Java from the Dutch,
marking the first use of the Indian army for British interests outside
of India. Indians fought in British campaigns in Asia, Africa, and
Europe until World War II.
The land revenue remained the Companys principal source of
income. The Permanent Settlement was never implemented outside
of Bengal and Bihar, which meant that revenue assessments could be
raised. In some areas, local chieftains were made landowners along
the lines of the Bengali zamindars. This was not possible everywhere
for example, in Mysore, where Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan had eliminated most of the chieftains. The British followed this lead and collected
the land revenue directly from headmen or peasants in much of the
south and west.

THE ECONOMY OF THE COMPANY STATE

The Indian economy unquestionably changed during the first half
of the nineteenth century, although the nature and extent of the transformation are debated. Some Indians saw their status decline. Village
elites were often undermined. This might be unconnected with British

A Century of Realignment

85

rule, as when the division of lands among the heirs of deceased headmen left properties so small that owners could not hire labor and had
to cultivate the land themselves. Just as often, however, the Company
was responsible. For example, rural notables often traditionally supplemented their incomes through part-time military service. This
became impossible with the abolition of all armies in British India
except the Companys force of professional soldiers. Similarly, with
the end of the rule of the nawabs, the Muslim administrative elite that
had dominated urban life in Bengal and Carnatic disappeared. It was
replaced by a new class of Hindus who owed their position to participation in the Companys commercial and bureaucratic activities.
A long-standing trend that continued through the nineteenth century was the incorporation of Tribals and nomads into settled society.
Peasants might escape heavy land revenue assessments by founding
agricultural colonies among the inhabitants of forests and grazing
lands. Company rule also played a partfor example, by introducing
the commercial logging of such woods as teak. The consequent
destruction of forests made the Tribal way of life impossible. This
opened lands to settled farming, either by peasants from elsewhere
or by Tribals themselves. Partly because of this, a greater proportion
of Indians than ever before were peasants. The destruction of Tribal
and nomadic communities, however, eliminated sources of food and
goods that many peasants had relied on after bad harvests or in times
of unrest.
After the loss of overseas textile markets, Indias exports shifted
from manufacture to agricultural raw materials. The result was
increasing cultivation of such crops as sugar, tea and coffee, and jute
(which was used to make sacking). This particularly benefited
wealthier peasants, who held enough land to devote some acreage to
nonfood crops and had the assets to borrow start-up money on favorable terms.
British merchants dominated the long-distance trade of Company
India. Nevertheless, many Indians enjoyed success in commerce and
banking. Moreover, export trade was always dwarfed by local trade,
which remained in Indian hands. The Companys centers grew as they
evolved from commercial cities to administrative capitals. Chennai and
Kolkata were probably the largest cities in India in 1800. The end of the
Company monopoly on trade was followed by the rapid growth of the
European population of the major cities as private merchants flooded
into India; in 1837, there were over 3,000 Europeans in Kolkata.
Many individual Europeans made fortunes through business in
India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite what is

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sometimes said, however, Indian wealth played only a minor role in

financing the British Industrial Revolution. Indian cash and raw materials always formed a relatively small proportion of total imports into
Britain. Moreover, until 1813, during the crucial years of Britains
economic transformation, the Company controlled the India trade,
and it used its profits to pay its home expenses, not to invest in British
industry.

THE SIKH EMPIRE

While Wellesley and Hastings were creating the Company state, a
Sikh chieftain named Ranjit Singh was carving out an empire in the
northwest. Ranjit Singh fought Afghan invasions of Punjab in the
1790s, and in 1799 took the old Mughal city of Lahore and made it
his capital. Between then and 1836, he conquered the modern Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan),
Pakistani Punjab, Kashmir, and parts of Indian Punjab and Himachal
Pradesh. He owed his success to his army. To keep his troops up to
date, he recruited deserters from Company regiments, and from the
1820s engaged European officers. Partly because of Sikh military
strength, mutual respect subsisted between Ranjit Singh and the
British.
Ranjit Singhs 12 million subjects included 1.5 million Sikhs.
Although there were Hindus and Muslims in the ruling class, Sikhs
were dominant, and the army was probably over half Sikh. Ranjit
Singh was a member of the Khalsa, but he did not discriminate against
Sikhs who followed their own gurus.
Ranjit Singh rewarded agricultural productivity, gave loans to
support the digging of wells, and generally encouraged cultivation.
He fostered commerce, making trade routes secure and imposing low
taxes on trade. He also supported industry, including the weaving of
Kashmiri shawls. The Sikh empire was peaceful and prosperous,
andlike the great Mughal emperorsRanjit Singh sponsored architecture, painting, and Persian and Punjabi literature.

CRISIS AND REFORM

The Companys successive annexations of territory were intended
to provide security and revenues. Conquest was expensive, however,
and paying for it necessitated the collection of heavy taxes from the
people of British India and tribute from the Indian states. This often
created a vicious circle: increased revenue demands provoked revolts,

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87

which (if British rule was to continue) had to be suppressed at further

expense. Moreover, taxation and the consequent unrest limited the
growth of the Indian economy. For various reasons, including the
destruction of the textile industry, the economic situation became even
worse in the 1830s and 1840s.
To this was added military disaster. In 1835, Shah Shuja, the ruler of
Afghanistan, was overthrown. To prevent Iranian or Russian expansion into Afghanistan, a Company army accompanied the deposed
monarch to Kabul and restored him as a British puppet. In 1841, however, the Afghans revolted, killed Shah Shuja, wiped out the Company
force, and regained their independence.
Meanwhile, Ranjit Singh had died in 1839. Soon afterward, a power
struggle broke out between two of his Hindu nobles, the brothers
Raja Dhyan Singh and Raja Gulab Singh. In 1841, Raja Dhyan Singh
triumphed when he helped Ranjit Singhs son Sher Singh seize the
throne.
The unrest in the Sikh empire caused instability across the northwest. The chieftains of Sindh had submitted to the Company before
the Afghan campaign, but now they rebelled. This led to war and the
British annexation of Sindh in 1843, at further expense to the Company. The same year, Sher Singh and Raja Dhyan Singh were murdered. Ranjit Singhs youngest son Dalip Singh was installed on the
Sikh throne at the age of 5. His mother, Maharani Jindan Kaur, feared
the Sikh army, which she could not control, and asked for British help.
The Company obliged: it invaded, and defeated the army in 1846. Raja
Gulab Singh, who had helped the conquerors, was made maharaja or
king of Jammu and Kashmir. The remainder of the Sikh empire was
divided between the British and Dalip Singh, who held his portion
as an Indian state under British domination.
Besides conquest and crises, the Company state was characterized
by reform, a term that covers many kinds of change that occurred as
a result of British rule in India. The best known reforms were enacted
by the governor general Lord William Bentinck (18281835). He suppressed the thags, gangs who robbed and murdered travelers, and
made a criminal offense of sati, a custom by which Hindu widows
burned themselves to death on their husbands funeral pyres. Though
dramatic, however, these reforms affected few Indians. For example, sati
had never been practiced outside of some upper-caste communities.
More far-reaching changes were often the unintended results of
British policy. For example, Hindus were traditionally governed by
custom, which varied according to region and caste. When the Company assumed control of justice in British India, however, its jurists

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consulted classical legal texts and Brahmin scholars, and applied their
findings to all Hindus in the belief that this was authentic Hindu law.
Moreover, Muslim and Hindu law were interpreted by Company
judges in accordance with British principles. This created a new legal
system, followed across British India and blending Indian and British
justice.
Another set of changes occurred in the field of education. In the late
eighteenth century, Company employees began to take a scholarly
interest in Indian culture. They established the Asiatic Society to study
Indian literature and antiquities, and the Company government later
founded Muslim and Sanskrit colleges at Kolkata. In 1813, Parliament
ordered the Company to promote education among its subjects. Meanwhile, elite Indians in Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai had begun to
learn English to further careers in business and administration. In
1817, Indian merchants in Kolkata founded the Hindu College for
their sons, who studied literature, politics, and sciences in English.
The Company long barred Christian missionaries from its territories, on the grounds that they brought instability. From the 1790s,
however, missionaries defied the ban or settled just outside British
India (for example, at Serampore near Kolkata, which was under
Danish rule until 1845), and in 1813 Parliament forced the Company
to admit them. The missionaries made few converts, but like the
Kolkata merchants, they founded English schools for Indian children.
From 1823, the Company government supported English-language
private schools, and in 1835 it began directly providing English education. This was accompanied by the substitution of English for Persian
in official correspondence and the higher law courts. English thereafter became essential for Indians who sought work in the professions
and the bureaucracy, and in 1857 three English-language universities
were founded. Nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth century, the
number of Indians affected by Western education was tiny.

LORD DALHOUSIE (18481856)

Lord Dalhousie, who became governor general in 1848, devoted
himself to remedying the problems of the Company state. To obtain
revenues and security, he enlarged British India at the expense of the
Indian states. With his Doctrine of Lapse, he annexed seven states after
their rulers had died without sons. A revolt by two provincial governors gave him the excuse to annex what remained of the Sikh empire
in 1849. Three years later, a fresh Anglo-Burmese war ended in the
acquisition of Lower Burma. And in 1856, Dalhousie annexed Awadh,

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89

claiming misgovernment by its ruler. When Dalhousie left India the

same year, the Company state encompassed virtually all of modern
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. His policies had unquestionably
boosted the revenues. The annexation of Awadh alone added 5 million
British pounds to the revenues, and further money was saved by ending the pensions paid to royal families that had been dispossessed by
Wellesley and Hastings. For example, when the last peshwa, Bajirav
II, died in 1853, Dalhousie refused to continue his allowance to his
adopted son Nana Saheb.
By now, the Indian economy had begun to grow, thanks partly to
government policy. Except in Bengal and Bihar (where the Permanent
Settlement held sway), the land revenue was recalculated after 1845.
The assessment was fixed for a long term, typically 30 years, and often
reduced. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 was followed by a revenue
settlement that bypassed the rural landowners, or taalluqedars, and collected the agricultural tax directly from the peasants. Indias prosperity was further enhanced by the introduction of railroads in 1853 and
the electric telegraph the following year. The consequent improvements in transportation and knowledge of markets boosted the grain
trade within India, and allowed cultivators to take full advantage of
the increasing demand for Indian exports abroad, particularly raw
cotton.

6
Indians and British Rule
THE GREAT REVOLT
Indians responded to British rule in many ways. One was armed
opposition. The nineteenth century saw frequent local uprisings, some
by landowners protesting land revenue assessments, others by
nomads trying to drive out the peasants who were encroaching on
their lands. Occasionally, the East India Companys Indian troops
mutinied; in 1806, soldiers at Vellore in Tamil Nadu rebelled, apparently because they felt that the British were infringing on the practice
of their religion.
In 1857, a great revolt broke out against British rule. It began with a
mutiny in the Bengal Army (the Companys forces were divided into
three armies based in the original British centers). The soldiers grievances were economicfor example, a recent decision to deny them
foreign service allowances when they were stationed in distant parts
of the subcontinent; they were religious, particularly postings to
Burma and other places outside of India, which challenged highcaste Hindu soldiers to whom leaving India was religiously polluting;
and they were political, especially for the third of the troops who came

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from Awadh and felt their honor and wealth threatened when that
kingdom was annexed to British India in 1856.
The final spark was a new rifle introduced in 1857. To load it, soldiers had to bite off the end of a cardboard cartridge. A rumor spread
that the cartridges waterproofing grease was beef or pork fat. If true,
this made it a sin for Hindus and Muslims to use the rifles, because
the former regard the cow as sacred, and the latter consider the pig
unclean. Faced with an uproar, the authorities allowed the soldiers to
make their own waterproofing and break the cartridges by hand. The
damage was done, however. The fact that some British officers
preached Christianity to their men had awakened fears among the soldiers that their religions were under attack, and the rumors about the
grease only seemed to confirm them.
In May 1857, 85 soldiers at the army camp at Meerut near Delhi
refused to use the new rifles. They were disciplined, which touched
off a rising among their comrades, who, after taking control of the
camp, marched to Delhi and seized the city. Bahadur Shah II, the 81year-old heir to the title of Mughal emperor, accepted their request to
become their nominal leader. This induced Mughal nobles and other
soldiers to join the rising, quickly followed by much of the population
of Delhi. A military mutiny had become a rebellion against British
rule. In June and July 1857, outbreaks followed across Haryana, Uttar
Pradesh, and parts of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, and British rule
collapsed in many areas.
Attempts have been made to explain the whole revolt as a reaction
to British interference in religion, an attempt to restore the Mughal
empire or deposed chieftains, or an organized Indian war of independence. Actually, Indians rebelled for different reasons, which varied
from place to place. Some undoubtedly wanted to end the rule of the
foreign conquerors; others felt that they were being taxed too heavily
in comparison with their neighbors; still others looked for revenge
on old rivals who had profited by establishing good relations with
the British. A bandwagon effect played a part, too: many rebels waited
until the rising seemed to be succeeding and then joined in to secure
their position in the future. Most risings were led by landholders,
chieftains, and members of royal families who had lost their kingdoms
to the East India Company. These included Nana Saheb, the adopted
son of the last peshwa Bajirav II, and Lakshmibai, the widowed queen
of Jhansi, which had fallen to Dalhousies Doctrine of Lapse; her bravery in battle against the British has made her a national heroine of
India. In general, the deciding factor was whether or not such leaders

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93

felt that their interests and those of the people under their command
would be best served by ending British rule.
Nevertheless, the revolt was largely confined to the Gangetic
plain. The commercial and educated classes of Kolkata, Mumbai, and
Chennai had prospered under Company dominance, and held back.
The same was true of the Bengal zamindars. In the eight years since
the annexation of the old Sikh Empire, the people of Punjab had been
reconciled to foreign rule by recruitment into the well-paid Company
army, low land revenue assessments, and other conciliatory policies.
And the men of the Bombay and Madras provincial armies did not
share the disgruntlement of their colleagues in the north. Among other
reasons, few of them came from the high castes that were particularly
sensitive to religious concerns, and none was Awadhi.
Because their leaders had revolted for their own individual reasons,
the rebel forces lacked both ideological unity and a coherent strategy.
This allowed British troops and their Indian allies to defeat them individually. The British had regained control of most of North India by
the spring of 1858, and suppressed the last rebels at the end of the year.

INDIA AFTER THE GREAT REVOLT

The immediate casualties of the British victory included the two
institutions that had dominated India for three centuries. The Mughal
dynasty had lost all power but was still highly regarded by many
Indians. Now, to punish him for accepting leadership of the revolt,
the British exiled Bahadur Shah II to Burma and abolished the very
title of Mughal sovereign. And rightly or wrongly, many Britons
blamed the uprising on the policies of the East India Company. The
British parliament therefore transferred control of the subcontinent
from the Company to the Crown, the British government, through
a newly appointed member of the British cabinet called the Secretary
of State for India. The Secretary of State lived in London, where he
headed a government department called the India Office. Like all
cabinet ministers, he was chosen by the prime minister, and answerable to parliament. In India, the governor general assumed the additional title of viceroy (vice-king), to show that he represented the
British monarch. He too was chosen by the prime minister, and
reported to the Secretary of State. As in Company days, the capital of
British India was Kolkata.
These measures showed that the British intended to keep India.
They wanted to do so for many reasons. The former Company armies,

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now called the Indian Army, included half of all the troops in the
British Empire in the late nineteenth century. It was paid for by Indian
taxpayers, as were the salaries of Britons who found jobs in the
administration and military in India. Up to the 1930s, more than one
fourth of all the taxes collected in India flowed into Britain in the form
of Home Charges, which paid for military supplies, pensions for
British retirees from Indian services, the expenses of the India Office,
and interest on money that the Indian administration had borrowed
in London. India was the worlds largest market for British exports,
and supplied raw materials, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods in
return. Indian laborers worked for minimal wages on British plantations around the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, and on railroad
construction in British East Africa.
Nevertheless, the British did not want India simply for economic
reasons. The subcontinent would probably have imported just as
many British goods if it had been independent. Nor did Britain
monopolize Indias exports; in the 1870s, central Europe bought more
Indian cotton than Britain did. Psychological considerations were
probably as important to the British as economic ones. India symbolized Britains status as a great power, and provided a large population
of backward people who, many Britons believed, could absorb
superior Western habits from their foreign rulers. By the end of the
nineteenth century, many people in Europe and the United States
believed that inculcating such habits in other parts of the world was
a moral duty for Westerners.
If the British were to enjoy the various benefits of ruling India, they
had to guard it against external and internal enemies. They were preoccupied with fears that the Russians would spread from Central Asia
to India. This was probably militarily impossible in the nineteenth
century. Nevertheless, it underlay the establishment of British control
over the frontier areas of Pakistan between the 1870s and 1890s, and
a fresh unsuccessful attempt to bring Afghanistan under British rule
in 18781881. In 1886, the eastern border of British India was extended
with the annexation of what remained of Burma, which was administered as part of India till 1937.
Internal security required the British to prevent a repetition of the
revolt of 1857. The Indian Army stopped recruiting soldiers from communities that had mutinied, and turned instead to Punjabi Muslims,
Sikhs, and other groups that had sided with the British. As it was
thought that even these men might one day rebel, the number of
British troops stationed in India was increased, and British soldiers
were given exclusive control of the artillery.

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95

Fears engendered by the revolt led the British to execute tens of

thousands of real or suspected rebels in 1858, heightened racial prejudice on the part of many Britons, and furthered their tendency to segregate themselves from Indians. Nevertheless, the British knew that
their dominance was only secure so long as most Indians at least passively accepted it. A strong police force, soldiers who could be stationed in troubled areas, and controls on the press were all employed
to damp down discontent, but the priority was making Indian community leaders, bureaucrats, and the army feel that their interests
were served by British rule.
The princes and chiefs of Indian India accordingly received land,
titles, and a guarantee that their states would never be annexed to British India. This ensured that for the next 90 years, one third of the subcontinents area and one quarter of its population were included in
Indian states rather than British provinces. The elites of British India
were also courted. Rural chieftains and notables were recognized as
landowners, on the model of the zamindars of Bengal, and received
judicial powers over the inhabitants of their estates. In Awadh, peasants were put back under the control of the taalluqedars, whose
authority had been curtailed on the British annexation. The merchants
and educated classes of the cities were made magistrates and knights,
and rural and urban leaders alike were allowed to enhance their local
standing by using connections with the British to help families and
neighbors. This may not have made Indian leaders unquestioning
devotees of colonial rule in their country, but it did give enough of
them a stake in the system that they would want to think very carefully before trying to eject the British.

THE ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, 18581914

Between the revolt of 1857 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914,
the economy and society of India were affected by both British rule
and changes that had begun centuries earlier. The introduction of the
steamship and the opening (in 1869) of the Suez Canal reduced the
journey between Britain and India to three weeks, which tightened
the bonds between South Asia and the West. Within India, the railroad, the telegraph, and a cheap postal service enabled even the relatively poor to travel around the subcontinent and correspond with
faraway friends and relatives. The effects of improved communications were mixed, however. For example, rail lines were laid to move
troops and civilian passengers, to send food to famine-prone areas,
and to carry exports and imports to and from seaports, but not for

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the benefit of internal trade. As a result, although they enriched

import merchants and producers of export commodities, they did
little to unify the subcontinents economy.
The period saw gradual economic growth, helped by a low rate of
population increase. By 1914, India showed some features of a developed Western economy, such as technological modernization and
capital accumulation. Other features were absent, however, notably
increased productivity and more equitable distribution of wealth.
Thus, although landowners, the rich peasants who grew cash crops,
businessmen, and professionals all became wealthier, the poor experienced little change. This has contributed to a debate as to whether British rule on the whole impoverished India or enriched it. A simple
answer is impossible, although it is safe to say that the incomplete
development of India owes much to both British and Indian
practices and decisions.
Agriculture remained at the heart of the Indian economy, employing over 70 percent of the population at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Many cultivators could do no more than feed themselves and
pay the land revenue, but those who could grow export crops might
profit handsomely. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a
decline in exports of indigo and opium, but this was balanced by a
phenomenal expansion in overseas sales of raw cotton, jute, and grain
(between 1902 and 1913, India met almost one fifth of Britains
demand for wheat). India also exported tea, and at the beginning of
the twentieth century supplied 59 percent of the tea drunk in Britain.
Unlike other export crops (which were grown by Indian peasants),
tea was raised mainly on British-owned plantations.
Mechanized industry first appeared in India among the Indian cotton merchants of Mumbai. Since the eighteenth century, they had
bought raw cotton from cultivators and exported it to Europe and
the Far East, where it was spun into yarn and woven into cloth.
In 1856, Asias first steam-powered cotton mill opened at Mumbai,
but the industry did not really get off the ground till the 1870s. By
then, improvements in transportation around the world had allowed
other suppliers of raw cotton to edge Indian exporters out of markets
in Europe and the Far East. The Mumbai merchants responded by
shifting their emphasis away from unprocessed cotton. They built
mills to spin yarn themselves for the Indian and East Asian markets.
British-made yarn had dominated in China and Japan since the
1840s, but it was now driven out by Indian competition. By 1900,
Indian mills supplied 68 percent of all the yarn sold in India, and
had destroyed much of whatever domestic hand-spinning had

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97

survived the coming of the British. Mechanized weaving grew more

slowly than spinning, but from the 1890s more and more power looms
were installed in the mills. In 1913, the textile factories in Mumbai and
elsewhere in western and southern India constituted the subcontinents most important manufacturing industry.
The principal mechanized industry of eastern India was jute
processing. The first steam-powered jute mill was opened at Kolkata
in 1855, and by 1928, jute mills had almost as many workers as the cotton factories. In the east more than in the west and south, business was
dominated by British firms, but there was a substantial Indian presence. In 1907 an Indian merchant family, the Tatas, opened an iron
and steel plant at Jamshedpur in Jharkhand. It was so successful that
the population of Jamshedpur grew from nothing in 1907 to 218,000
in 1951. Still, the textile and jute mills and the Tata plant notwithstanding, handicraft production dominated Indian manufacturing, and in
1901 fewer than one manufacturing worker in twenty was employed
in a modern factory.

SOCIORELIGIOUS REFORM MOVEMENTS

From 1854, the British supported primary and secondary education
in Indian languages, which helped slowly to raise the literacy rate. English higher education, however, had a more obvious impact, because
it created an English-speaking elite. Its members were concentrated in
Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai, and belonged mainly to high-ranking
Hindu castes with traditions of literacy and government service. They
used their skills to obtain lucrative and prestigious employment in the
administration, or in such professions as law and teaching.
Knowledge of English united educated Indians, and their exposure
to Western culture and institutions led them to seek changes in Indian
customs or British policy. To that end, they formed voluntary reformist
associations on British lines, with paid memberships, bylaws, regular
meetings, and fund-raising drives. These associations proliferated in
the second half of the nineteenth century, and it is sometimes said that
after 1858 they replaced armed resistance as the primary Indian
response to British dominance. This is not entirely accurate, as armed
revolts were endemic until the end of British rule in India, and the
activities of voluntary associations began in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is true that reformist organizations became ever
more prominent as the century wore on.
Movements to reform society and religion inherited a tradition that
went back millennia in India. Typically, their goal was to eliminate

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wrong beliefs and practices. This ironed out many of the regional
and caste variations that had existed within Hinduism, Islam, and
Sikhism. For example, in the early nineteenth century, Sahajananda
Swami founded the Swami Narayana Sampradaya, or Community of
Lord Vishnu. He and his missionaries traveled around Gujarat, calling
on Hindus to stop eating meat and drinking alcohol, to abandon the
obscene songs that featured in their religious gatherings, and to
become devotees of Vishnu (in his incarnation of Krishna) rather
than the female power that they then worshipped. In what is now
Bangladesh, Sahajanandas contemporary Hajji Shariat Ullah led the
Faraizi movement, which persuaded Bengali Muslim peasants and
artisans to erase the Hindu and Tribal beliefs that had survived the
adoption of Islam.
Improved communications helped the reformers spread their message, but also brought them into conflict with one another. They often
disagreed as to which practices and beliefs were excrescences and
which were the essentials of their religions. This became apparent in
the 1820s, when Western education, and criticisms leveled at Hindu
society and religion by Christian missionaries, provoked debate
among the English-educated elite of Kolkata. One faction founded
the Hindu Dharma Sabha, the Association of the Hindu Religion, to
defend such existing practices as sati. Opposed to the Hindu Dharma
Sabha were the followers of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a Kolkata
college teacher of mixed Indian and European ancestry. A rationalist,
Derozio felt that his beloved Indian homeland had been held back by
religion, and his student disciples epitomized their rejection of Hindu
mores by eating beef.
Rammohun Roy, the best known member of this generation of
reformers, lay between the Hindu Dharma Sabha and Derozio.
Although a devout Hindu, Roy was convinced that Brahmin priests
had corrupted the true religion that he found in the Upanishads. Roys
Hinduism had one loving God, Brahma (the name of the Hindu
creator), and no place for polytheism, image worship, or the subordination of women. Roy believed that if his coreligionists returned to
this faith, no Hindu would be tempted to convert to the Christianity
of the missionaries. He acquired a growing band of followers, and in
1828 organized them into the Brahmo Sabha (Association of Brahma).
Two years later, he went to England to give evidence against attempts
by orthodox Hindus to overturn the criminalization of sati, speak in
Parliamentary hearings on the East India Company, and represent
the Mughal emperor in negotiations with the Company. He died in
England in 1833, and the Brahmo Sabha soon faded.

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The Hindu Dharma Sabha, Derozio, and Roy had little influence
except among educated Hindus of Kolkata. Perhaps out of necessity,
Muslim reform movements had a wider impact, as they sought both
to explain how Islam had ceased to be the religion of the subcontinents masters and to remedy the consequent fall in status of Indian
Muslims. Shah Wali Ullah, who lived in Delhi during the decline of
the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century, blamed the political
and moral decay of Muslim India on the ulama, arguing that they
had let incorrect beliefs and practices creep into Islam. He insisted
that nothing outside of the Quran and the Hadith (stories about
Muhammad that illustrate his teachings) was Islamic, and that the
principles contained in those works should be ascertained by the
use of reasoning rather than the current interpretations put forth by
the ulama.
In the nineteenth century, Shah Wali Ullahs spiritual heirs split.
One group tried to reestablish Muslim rule by force of arms, warring
against both the Sikh empire and the British. Others sought a new type
of ulama, with the skills to interpret Islam correctly. In 1867, some of
them founded the Deoband School to train theologians. Unlike other
Muslim seminaries, it followed Western models, with a full-time
teaching staff, fixed curriculum, and regular examinations. Students
at Deoband received a thorough grounding in scripture, which they
were trained to apply to modern life.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan agreed that the ulama had misinterpreted
Islam. Rather than wanting a reformed ulama, however, he believed
that the future of Indian Muslims lay in regaining political power.
He knew that the British would not leave, and so members of old
noble Muslim families like himself had to join them in ruling India.
To secure British agreement to this, he tried to build friendly relations
between Muslims and their rulers. To qualify young Muslims for their
new position, he encouraged them to acquire Western learning, especially science and technology. When the ulama asserted that this was
un-Islamic, Sir Syed retorted that God Himself had created the natural
laws underpinning science. In 1875, he founded the Mohammedan
Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh (now Aligarh Muslim University)
to teach Western learning in an Islamic environment.
The Deoband School, Sir Syed, and Muslims who accepted the thencurrent practices of Indian Islam agreed that Muhammad was Gods
last prophet, and that his teachings (however interpreted) embodied
truth. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad, a Punjabi lawyer, said that he had received divine messages
to supplement the revelations given to Muhammad. Ghulam

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denounced many Indian Muslim customs, such as worship at the

tombs of holy men, and urged an acceptance of British rule. He and
his missionaries made many converts to what became known as the
Ahmadi movement, both in Punjab and in the West. Ahmadis and
other Muslims denounced one another as purveyors of falsehood.
Ahmadis insisted that it was incumbent on all Muslims to accept
Ghulams completion of Muhammads work, and other Muslims held
that as Muhammad was the last prophet, Ghulam must be a fraud.
By this time, a growing number of Indian Muslims considered
themselves part of a worldwide Islamic community. Early Muslims
had regarded the khalifa, or successor of Muhammad, as their spiritual leader, but the importance of the khalifa in India had long since
declined. In the sixteenth century, the sultan of Turkey had assumed
the title of khalifa, and now many Indian Muslims emphasized his primacy as a link among all Muslims. This focus on a leader who lived
outside India, and whom they shared with their non-Indian coreligionists, furthered their distance from Hindus. Coupled with this
was an apparent threat from Hinduism, symptomized by a movement
that began in the 1880s to replace Urdu (associated with Muslims)
with Hindi (associated with Hindus) as the language of the local
administration and courts in what is now Uttar Pradesh.
This was connected with the activities of Hindu reformers.
The Brahmo Sabha was revived by Debendranath Tagore, a member
of a family of Bengali zamindars, who in 1841 renamed Roys organization the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma) and wrote a statement
of its beliefs. He sent out missionaries who made many converts to
his teachings in rural Bengal. For some time, Tagores closest associate
was an English-educated bank employee named Keshub Chunder
Sen. However, Tagores main interest was the modernization of theology and rituals, whereas Sen wanted to concentrate on abolishing
what he regarded as social evils, such as the caste system, drinking,
and inequality between men and women.
In 1865 the Brahmo Samaj split. Tagore and his followers took the
name of Adi (original) Brahmo Samaj. Sen founded the Brahmo Samaj
of India and preached his reformist message all over the subcontinent.
In 1872, he persuaded the government to recognize Brahmo marriages
that were performed without Hindu rituals. As this amounted to an
exemption from Hindu law, it implied that Brahmos were not Hindus.
Then, in the late 1870s, Sen lost interest in social reform. By this time,
he claimed to be receiving divine messages that contradicted Brahmo
teachings, and when he obeyed one command and married his
13-year-old daughter to a Hindu prince, many of his followers had

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had enough. They formed the Sadharan (General) Brahmo Samaj,

which to this day runs hospitals, orphanages, and girls schools. Sen
became more and more mystical. In 1881 he founded a cult with himself as leader, called the Nava Vidhan (New Dispensation), but he
died three years later.
Sens Bengali contemporary Sri Ramakrishna taught that all religions were true. This included Hinduism in its current forms, which
meant there was no need for reform. On his deathbed in 1886,
Ramakrishna chose as his heir Narendranath Datta, later called Swami
Vivekananda (joyful conscience). In 1893, Vivekananda left India to
attend a gathering in Chicago called the World Parliament of
Religions. He spent four years in North America and Europe. On his
return home in 1897, he founded the Ramakrishna Mission to propagate his ideas, which combined social service (such as helping the
poor or organizing relief after earthquakes) with teaching the
Upanishads and running spiritual retreats. The Ramakrishna Mission
was active in India and the United States from the time of Swami
Vivekananda, and later spread to other countries.
Another reformer, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, believed that he had
found true Hinduism in the Vedas. He called on middle-class Hindus in
Mumbai to renounce post-Vedic accretions (such as image worship, the
intercession of priests, and pilgrimages) and to worship his one allknowing and merciful God. In 1875, Dayananda founded the Mumbai
Arya Samaj (Society of Aryans) to spread his ideas. Two years later
he moved to Lahore in Punjab, where he established a new Arya Samaj.
By the time of Dayanandas death in 1883, local Arya Samajas existed
across northern and western India. They commemorated their founder
with the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic College, a high school and college at
Lahore that taught English literature, science, and social studies alongside Sanskrit and Hindi. (The Arya Samaj encouraged Hindus to speak
Hindi, leading many of its members to join the campaign against Urdu
in the administration and the courts.)
The Arya Samaj had great influence, especially in Punjab, and by
1947 there were between 1.5 and 2 million Aryas. From 1893, they
were split into two groups. One devoted itself to education and social
service, the other to a Hindu equivalent of the Christian missions. The
latter represented a response to the fact that the British conducted a
decennial census as part of their effort to understand India and thus
foresee potential trouble. By the late nineteenth century, the census
showed a sharp increase in the number of Christians and Sikhs in
Punjab, and the goal of the Arya missionaries was to win back to the
Hindu fold those who had converted to other religions.

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By now, there was a growing interest in Indian religions among

Europeans and Americans. In 1875, the Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the American Henry Steel Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York. Theosophy, or the Wisdom of God, began as
an offshoot of Western occultism, but Blavatsky and Olcott became
increasingly interested in Hinduism. They corresponded with
Dayananda Saraswati, declared the Theosophical Society to be a
branch of the Arya Samaj, and moved to India. The alliance with Dayananda did not last, mainly because Theosophists rejected Arya criticisms of modern Hindu practices. In 1882, Blavatsky and Olcott
withdrew from the Arya Samaj and settled near Chennai. By now,
Theosophy taught the existence of a universal soul, like Brahman in
the Upanishads, which our individual souls left to come down into
the world. The secret of how we can return to the universal soul is
guarded by spirits called Mahatmas (Sanskrit for great souls), who
communicated it to mortals through their medium, Blavatsky.
In 1884, Blavatsky left India following accusations that her seances
with the Mahatmas were rigged, and Olcott became leader of the
Theosophists. He traveled around India and made many converts,
including Britons and Hindus. In 1907 he was succeeded by an Irishwoman named Annie Besant. Besant focused on social work, such as
education and the elimination of child marriage. The movement flourished under her leadership, but eventually declined after an Indian
named Krishnamurti renounced the role of Messiah that Theosophy
had accorded him. Nevertheless, by attracting Westerners to beliefs
that drew on Hindu motifs, Theosophy gave many Hindus a renewed
confidence in their culture.
The line between Hinduism and Sikhism had always been ill
defined. Many Sikhs considered themselves to be followers of a Hindu
sect rather than a distinct religion, and united the teachings of their
gurus with polytheism, image worship, and a reliance on Brahmin
priests to perform their rituals. Partly in response to the claims of
Hindu reformers that Sikhism was simply one more corrupt form of
Hinduism, some nineteenth-century Sikh teachers sought to harden
religious boundaries by purging their faith of Hindu elements. In
1873, a group of prominent Sikhs in Amritsar founded the Amritsar
Singh Sabha. Its goals were to teach their people about their religion,
to win back Sikhs who had converted to Christianity and Islam, and
to provide Sikh children with Western education. From 1879, Singh
Sabhas were founded in other cities.
The Singh Sabhas insisted that all Sikhs accept the teachings of
the last human guru, Gobind Singh. This was successful, and the

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percentage of Sikhs who identified themselves as members of Gobind

Singhs Khalsa rose from 70 in 1881 to 90 in 1931. The Singh Sabhas
also published historical and literary works that emphasized the distinctiveness of Sikhism, and campaigned against practices that were
not sanctioned by the Sikh scriptures. In 1905, reformers took over
the chief Sikh temple, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, and expelled the
Brahmin priests, removed the images of Hindu gods, and stopped
the use of Hindu rituals. The census reveals a measure of their success
in separating Sikhism from Hinduism: in 1881, 54 percent of Punjabi
Jats (the main peasant caste of Punjab) identified themselves as Sikhs,
and most of the rest as Hindus. In 1931, however, 80 percent of Jats
called themselves Sikhs. This was not because they formally converted
from Hinduism to Sikhism, but because the reformers convinced them
that the two faiths were mutually exclusive.
This points to a major effect of Indian socioreligious reform
movements: they sharpened religious divisions. At the popular level,
Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism had often shaded into one another.
Nineteenth-century Jats were not alone in being vague about their religious affiliation; Hindus and Muslims in Eastern Bengal often shared
more customs and beliefs with one another than they did with their
nominal coreligionists elsewhere. Thanks to the Faraizis, the Arya
Samaj, the Singh Sabhas, and other likeminded groups, however,
Indians increasingly identified themselves as Hindus, Muslims, or
Sikhs, different from people of other religions (even near neighbors),
while having something in common with all members of their own religion. This consolidated communal identities, the idea that no matter
where they live, the followers of a religion form a distinct community.

CASTE AND NATION

Caste was another identity that changed under British rule. With
few exceptions, Hindus traditionally saw their own castes in relation
to the communities that they lived among rather than as part of a
wider group. By the late nineteenth century, however, improved communications and other factors often produced a feeling of fellowship
with people elsewhere who had similar caste names or occupations.
Many castes established voluntary associations, which encouraged a
sense of solidarity among their members. The lowest castes across
India began to consider themselves part of a wider Untouchable
community.
Caste associations increasingly lobbied the government in pursuit
of their interests. For example, the Non-Brahmin Movement in

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southern and western India fought the supposed overrepresentation

of Brahmins in higher education and government employment. This
blending of identities with politics became particularly important
with the emergence of identities embracing all India. For centuries,
Hinduism had given a sense of unity to some Indians. So too did the
shared experiences of Mughal and British rule, and the nineteenthcentury improvements in communications. These bases of unity were
now joined by Indian nationalism.
Nationalism is based on the idea that individuals are part of a group
called a nation, united by a common history, language, or culture. It
originated among eighteenth-century European intellectuals, who
argued that the ideal country (called the nation-state) was built
around a nation rather than a dynasty or a church. In the following
century, nationalism spread across Europe, where it led to the unification of Italy and Germany and to calls to dismantle the multinational
Austrian and Russian empires. Familiarity with Western political
thought introduced nationalism to English-educated Indians. Some
saw separate nations in speakers of each Indian language and wanted
political boundaries to reflect this. For example, Odia nationalists
demanded a homeland for speakers of their language, who were
spread across three provinces. The British granted this request when
they established the province of Odisha in 1936. Many speakers of
Dravidian languages in South India came to see themselves as a
nation, oppressed by the Hindu religion of the North and its Brahmin
agents.
Subcontinental nationalism had a problem in that India lacks the
common language or culture that defined nationhood in Europe.
Some nationalists sought to bind the Indian people with a shared commitment to political liberalism, which they believed could only be
instilled by continued British rule. Others looked to the very diversity
of India as the basis for the nation and found among their compatriots
a unique tolerance that allowed different cultures to coexist and to
enrich one another in a composite Indian civilization. For example,
Jana Gana Mana (the minds of all people), now the national anthem
of India, was written by modern Indias greatest poet, Rabindranath
Tagore. Rabindranath, the son of Debendranath Tagore of the Brahmo
Samaj, was the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. Jana Gana
Mana celebrates the common Indian-ness of the whole subcontinent:
Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, the South, Odisha, Bengal;
The Vindhyas, the Himalayas, the Yamuna, the Ganges;
The waves of the Indian Ocean.

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Opposing these secular nationalisms, Hindu nationalists asserted

that Hinduism was a foundation for not merely the cultural unity of
the subcontinent but also a modern Indian nation. The differences
among all these strains of nationalists are illustrated in their attitudes
to the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji. To non-Brahmins,
Shivaji was a valiant enemy of upper-caste privileges. To Maharashtrian regionalists, he fought for the independence of Maharashtra.
Secular nationalists saw him as an Indian patriot, and Hindu nationalists as the founder of a Hindu state.
With its assumption that a country is tied together by its inhabitants,
nationalism implies that the people have a shared interest in the country and are therefore entitled to a say in its government. In the 1860s,
Indians were admitted to the formal structures of government in
British India with the establishment of local boards. These had the
power to impose taxes, and to spend them on schools, drains, and
other local purposes. Their members were mostly Indians, initially
named by the government but from the 1870s elected by men wealthy
enough to pay the property tax. The boards served as a safety valve,
giving Indians real power but at a level where they could not threaten
British interests.
English-educated Indians, including many nationalists, wanted
more than control of local boards. One of their concerns surrounded
the highest level of government employment, the Indian Civil Service,
or ICS. ICS officers enjoyed good salaries and considerable prestige.
The British parliament had banned discrimination against Indians in
government appointments in 1833, but there were practical barriers.
Since 1855, the ICS had recruited officers with an examination that
was offered only in London. A greater hurdle came when the maximum age for taking the examination was lowered to 23 in 1858 and
to 19 in 1876. This was intended to let successful candidates attend a
British university before going on to India. However, the examination
was based on the English school curriculum, and anyone who had not
spent several years at school in England found it difficult to pass. The
lower the age, the harder it was for Indians to obtain the necessary
prior education.
The educated also wanted a part in lawmaking in British India.
By the early 1860s, the viceroy and provincial governors each had
legislative councils to discuss proposed new laws. All their members
were chosen by the viceroy or governor. Most were British government officials, but there were also a few private citizens, or unofficial
members. These included Indian princes, landowners, and urban
community leaders. Many educated Indians felt that nominated

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unofficial members did not represent them. They wanted unofficials

to be elected, and to enjoy the right to initiate legislation as well as
discuss it.
The power to reform the councils and the ICS lay with the central
government in Kolkata and the British parliament in London. In India,
such bodies as the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha, or Association of All the
People of the city of Pune, petitioned the government on the ICS, the
councils, and other issues. In 1866, a group of Indians in Britain
founded the East India Association to discuss Indian affairs and bring
their grievances before the British authorities. Starting two decades
later, individual Indians sought election to the British House of
Commons, so that they could voice their concerns there. As India
was not represented in parliament, such men had to run in British
constituencies, seeking the support of electors who were largely of
European origin. There was at least one Indian candidate in all but
one of the British general elections between 1885 and 1931, and three
Indians were elected to Parliament: the nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji,
who sat as a member of the Liberal party from 1892 to 1895; Sir
Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree, a Conservative member of
Parliament from 1895 to 1906; and Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, a Communist who held a seat in 19221923 and 19241929. All three men
belonged to the tiny Parsi or Zoroastrian community, and despite their
political differences, they were on good terms with one another.
(During the period of British rule in India, two other Indians sat in
the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British parliament:
Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, who was created a peer in 1919, and his
son Arun Kumar Sinha who, after a considerable struggle, was
allowed to inherit his fathers peerage and the accompanying seat in
the Lords.)

THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS

In 1883, the government of India unveiled the Ilbert Bill, a proposal
to rescind the right that Europeans in rural Bengal enjoyed not to be
tried by an Indian judge if they landed in court. Bengals British
businessmen and planters were outraged, claiming that Indian judges
did not share Western conceptions of right and wrong. They launched
a campaign of petitions, speeches, and lobbying, until the government
watered down the Ilbert Bill to their satisfaction. The episode showed
Indians the power of public opinion, if it was channeled properly.
In 1885, members of the educated elite from all over India gathered
in Mumbai to discuss means of bringing the pressure of public

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opinion to bear on the government. They called themselves the Indian

National Congress, or Congress for short, and from then on they met
in a different city each year during the Christmas vacation. (It must
be made clear that in India, Congress is the name of an organization,
which became a political party, and not a law-making branch of
government like the United States Congress.) The principal organizers
of Congress included Allan Octavian Hume, a British Theosophist and
retired officer of the ICS, who supported the demands of educated
Indians; Pherozeshah Mehta, a Mumbai lawyer; and Surendranath
Banerjea, a Bengali and one of the first Indians to pass the ICS examination. Mehta and Banerjea were disciples of Dadabhai Naoroji, a
London-based businessman and intellectual from Mumbai whose
books and articles are some of the clearest expositions of nineteenthcentury Indian nationalism and who, as was noted earlier, was the
first Indian elected to the British parliament.
Congress set itself two tasks: to raise money with which to publicize
its grievances in Britain, and to drum up Indian support for reforms.
Its weapons included passing resolutions at the annual meetings,
because a successful vote would show the British that the issue in
question had widespread support among educated Indians. In their
effort to retain the loyalty of leading Indians, the British went some
way toward meeting Congress demands. In 1892, the age limit for
the ICS examination was raised to 23, and in 18921893 indirect election to the legislative councils was introduced: local boards, universities, and other bodies chose unofficial Indian members of the
provincial governors councils, which in turn picked representatives
on the viceroys council. Nevertheless, British officials still formed
the majority on all councils.
The early Congress came to life only during its annual meetings.
To many members, nationalist concerns were less important than
establishing friendships that would help them in local or provincial
politics. Most meetings attracted fewer than a thousand delegates,
and the largest number of them were Brahmin lawyers from the big
cities of the Bengal, Bombay, and Madras provinces, classic members
of the English-educated elite but hardly typical of Indians in general.

THE PARTITION OF BENGAL

In 1903, the viceroy Lord Curzon announced that to simplify the
administration and aid economic development, the huge province of
Bengal would be divided in two. English-educated Bengali Hindus
were enraged at the move, which many believed was punishment for

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their support of Congress. They foresaw a decline in opportunities for

advancement, as they would constitute minorities in both new provinces: Eastern Bengal (modern Bangladesh and northeastern India)
would be inhabited mainly by Assamese and by Muslim Bengalis;
most of the people of the western province (West Bengal, Bihar,
Jharkhand, and most of Odisha) would be Biharis and Odias.
The Kolkata elite fought partition with meetings and petitions, but
the British were undaunted, and Bengal was divided in 1905. The
same year, the protestors launched a drive to replace British-made
cloth with Indian-made, or swadeshi (of ones own country). In the
hopes of forcing the British to listen by hurting them economically,
they burned imported fabric and picketed shops that sold it. They
drummed up wider support for swadeshi with newspapers, pamphlets, and traveling theatrical troupes, and sent volunteer speakers
(especially students) into the Bengal countryside. The movement was
phenomenally successful and led to a boom in sales of Indian cloth.
At the 1906 session of Congress, a dissident faction under Bal Gangadhar Tilak saw a chance to hijack Congress from its leaders Surendranath Banerjea and Gopal Krishna Gokhale (Pherozeshah Mehtas
successor). Tilak moved for an endorsement of not only swadeshi but
also a campaign for India to obtain internal self-government while
remaining part of the British Empire. Thanks to the excitement over
the situation in Bengal, Tilaks resolutions passed. This split Congress.
The Moderates under Banerjea and Gokhale opposed the partition of
Bengal, but saw good relations with the British as the key to resolving
Indian grievances. They feared that a premature demand for selfgovernment would jeopardize those relations. Tilak, on the other
hand, insisted that only a mainly Indian administration could resolve
Indian concerns, and took his Extremists in an increasingly confrontational direction. He first called on Indians to make British rule impossible by refusing to work in the army or the government, or pay taxes,
and then penned articles that seemed to endorse a terrorist movement
that had launched bomb attacks in Bengal. This, however, was overplaying his hand. Tilak and many of his followers were arrested; other
Extremists realized the futility of his methods, and returned to the
Moderate fold. Gokhale consolidated his position as the dominant
politician in India.

THE ALL-INDIA MUSLIM LEAGUE

For various reasons, Congress had never attracted many Muslims.
Muslims were poorly represented among the English-educated

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classes of the Bengal, Bombay, and Madras provinces from which

Congress drew much of its support, and were further alienated by
the fact that Hindu supporters of Congress were prominent in the
movement to replace Urdu with Hindi. Many shared Sir Syed Ahmed
Khans belief that participation in Congress would earn Muslims
nothing but British hostility.
In 1906, the viceroy Lord Minto met a group of prominent Muslims
to discuss the Indian policy of a newly elected government in Britain.
Minto promised that any governmental reforms in India would take
account of Muslim interests. According to some, this was a ploy to
secure Muslim support against the agitation in Bengal, while according to others it was not. Soon afterward, the Muslims who had met
the viceroy formed an organization called the All-India Muslim
League, which they modeled on Congress. Their main goal was separate electorates for Muslims. This meant that Muslims would vote separately from other Indians, and for their own candidates, as a means of
guaranteeing representation even in areas where they were a minority.
Separate electorates already existed in elections for some local boards,
and the League wanted them made general.

THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS

Electoral questions were important because Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India in the new British government, was planning the
most far-reaching constitutional changes that India had seen since
1858. The resulting Morley-Minto Reforms link his name with that of
the viceroy, but the Congress leader Gokhale seems to have influenced
the Secretary of States decisions more than Minto did. Probably
thanks to Gokhale, Morley went far to meet the demands of the Moderates, to show India that there was no need to adopt Tilaks Extremist
methods. In 19091910, Indians were appointed to advise the viceroy
and governors on the central and provincial executive councils. The
provincial legislative councils were also reformed. A majority of their
members would now be Indians, most of them elected by such interest
groups as landowners and Muslims (who obtained their separate electorates). The viceroys legislative council would still have a majority of
British officials, but its unofficial membership was increased. The
unofficial members of the legislative councils also gained the right to
introduce legislation.
Besides the Moderates, Morley and Minto courted the princes and
chiefs, the rulers of the third of the subcontinent that formed Indian
India. The assumption was that if these monarchs were content under

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British rule, their subjects would follow suit. Since the 1860s, the
British had often pressured princes to reform their administrations
along Western lines, or to abolish social practices that were considered
backward. The princes saw this as an abridgement of their power as
sovereigns. In 1909, Minto eliminated this source of friction when he
informed the princes that they would henceforth be allowed to rule
their states more or less as they saw fit.
Finally, in 1912 the British reunited the Bengali-speaking region.
This abolished the mainly Muslim province of East Bengal. To compensate the subcontinents Muslims, the capital of India was moved
from Kolkata to the old Muslim center of Delhi, where a planned city
of New Delhi was built. This did not satisfy the Muslim League, but
the policy of Morley and Minto showed that in British eyes, the two
principal forces in Indian public life were Congress and the princes.
Efforts to balance British interests with their demands were the main
feature of Indian politics for the next 30 years.

7
The Struggle for Independence
WORLD WAR I
Britains declaration of war on Germany in 1914 brought the whole
British empire into World War I. Indian princes and politicians gave
their support to the Allied war effort, to which India supplied money
(146 million) and men (1.5 million Indians served as soldiers and
laborers against Germany and its ally Turkey in Europe, Africa, and
the Middle East). Indian industry expanded to fill shortfalls in everything from cloth to steel, as British production was diverted to military
needs. At the same time, the war led to increased taxes, and shortages
and high prices of basic goods. By 1918, this had produced riots and
strikes.
Many Indian politicians felt that, with improved access to the ICS
and councils already achieved through the Morley-Minto reforms,
their wartime sacrifices should be rewarded with self-government or
home rule. This did not mean they wanted independence, but rather
what Canada, Australia, and other British dominions enjoyed: internal affairs run by a ministry answerable (or responsible) to an
elected parliament, while Britain handled foreign affairs. The Muslim
League had already declared itself in favor of self-government

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The History of India

Indian troops marching through France in 1914. (Bettmann/Corbis)

in 1913. Its members were angry over the reunification of Bengal

(which eliminated the mainly Muslim province of Eastern Bengal)
and Britains refusal to help Turkey against attacks by Italy and the
Balkan states shortly before the outbreak of World War I. In 1915,
Congress too approved a call for self-government.
The same year, Pherozeshah Mehta and Gopal Krishna Gokhale,
two principal leaders of Congress since its establishment in 1885, both
died. The rising stars of the new Indian freedom movement were
Annie Besant, leader of Theosophists, who believed that selfgovernment would restore the Hindu India that so influenced her religion; and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gokhales old Extremist opponent,
who had been released from prison in 1914. In 1916, Besant and Tilak
both founded Home Rule Leagues. They planned to use these to build
so much popular support for self-government that the British could
not refuse their demand. Thanks to Besants Theosophical links and
Tilaks popularity among former Extremists, the two Leagues grew

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113

rapidly. They attracted people who had not hitherto been involved in
nationalist politicsnon-Brahmins, petty merchants, rich farmers,
studentsand also drew them into Congress, to which Besant and
Tilak both belonged.
The war increased British fears of subversion. In 1915, the
government of India supplemented its powers of repression with the
Defense of India Act, which allowed it to ban books deemed seditious,
control newspapers, and intern critics of the government. Among
those interned were Annie Besant, and Mohamed Ali and Shaukat
Ali, two brothers who were among the leading Muslim politicians in
India. The deaths of Mehta and Gokhale, and the influx of supporters
from his Home Rule League, allowed Tilak to take center stage when
Congress held its annual meeting in 1916. The gathering was in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, where (by prior arrangement) the Muslim
League was meeting simultaneously. Under an agreement called the
Lucknow Pact, the two parties presented joint demands to the British:
an increase in the number of voters; refashioned legislative councils,
with four fifths of the members to be elected rather than appointed,
and executive councils on which half the members were responsible
to the legislative councils; equality between Indians and other inhabitants of the British Empire, particularly the right to live anywhere in
the empire (including the dominions that excluded them) and to
receive military commissions on equal terms with Britons.
Both parties gained by the Pact. The alliance with the League
allowed Congress to claim to represent Muslims, and so enhanced its
right to negotiate with the British on behalf of all Indians. The League
secured Congress recognition that Muslims were different from other
Indians, as in the Pact Congress accepted separate electorates and
weighted representation. The latter meant that in the legislatures
at the center and in most provinces, where Hindus formed the majority, Muslims would have more seats than their population warranted;
in Punjab and Bengal, with their slight Muslim majorities, Hindus
would be overrepresented.
Lord Chelmsford, the British viceroy of India, and the Secretary of
State in London were meanwhile trying to defuse the demand for
home rule with concessions to Indian opinion. In 1917, Congress and
the princes of Indian India, the two principal forces in Indian public
life, were included in a meeting of the British and dominion prime
ministers in London, in the persons of Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, a
former president of Congress, and Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner,
a leading prince. On August 20, 1917, after consulting Sinha, Bikaner,
and his colleagues in the British cabinet, the Secretary of State, Edwin

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The History of India

Montagu, announced that Indian participation in the administration

would gradually increase, until the government of India was fully
responsible to an elected legislature.
Montagu and Chelmsford now toured India to hear the opinions of
Indians and Europeans, and then drafted a scheme to set the country
on the path to responsible government. Their Montagu-Chelmsford
Reforms were enacted by the British parliament in 1919. They remodeled both the central and provincial governments. At the center, the
legislative council was replaced with a bicameral legislature, where
elected nonofficials outnumbered government officials. The viceroys
executive council remained independent of the legislature, whose
functions were to discuss and advise rather than set policy; but the
number of Indians on the executive council was increased, giving
Indians a real voice on foreign affairs, communications, and other
matters judged to be of All-India importance.
Other powers of government were devolved to the provinces,
which were allocated the land revenue so that they could finance their
new responsibilities (the center kept the income tax for itself). Provincial governors and their appointed executive councillors undertook
the administration of law and order, justice, and the like. India acquired
its first experience of responsible government with the transfer of such
subjects as agriculture, public works, and education to Indian ministers
who answered to mainly elected provincial legislatures.
This met many (though not all) of the demands of the Lucknow
Pact. The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms also accorded with the Pact
by increasing Indian representation in the military and the ICS, and
by extending the right to vote. For men, the right to vote was now
based on property ownership and education, which allowed 1 in 10
adult males to vote in provincial elections (the proportion was smaller
in elections to the central legislature). Provincial legislatures set their
own qualifications for female voters, although most enfranchised only
minuscule numbers of women. The new voters included many illiterates. To allow them to identify candidates, ballots were printed with
symbols beside each name. This is still done in India, where every
party has an emblem that appears on ballotsfor example, a lotus
flower or a hand. Muslims kept the separate electorates that had been
granted in 1909 and approved by Congress in 1916.
The princes also obtained concessions. Following discussions
between the viceroy and leading princes, the British further limited
their own power to infringe on princely sovereignty. In 1921, in
accordance with a suggestion made by Montagu and Chelmsford, a
Chamber of Princes was established, in which the princes met

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115

periodically both to discuss matters of common concern and to advise

their British overlords.
In an effort to maintain Indian support for British control, the
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms gave unprecedented power to Indian
politicians and accorded the princes greater autonomy than at any
time since the early nineteenth century. In December 1919, the members of Congress approved the reforms and voted to participate in
the next years legislative elections. Over the following 12 months,
however, Indian politics were transformed.

MAHATMA GANDHI
Unlike the men who dominated Congress during its first 30 years,
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a product of Indian India, born
in 1869 in a small kingdom in Gujarat. He qualified as a lawyer in
England, but after returning home, he was unable to establish a practice. In 1893 he moved to South Africa. The South African Indian community had been founded by plantation laborers, who were later
joined by merchants and professionals. All Indians were subject to discrimination at the hands of the ruling white population. Gandhi
became his compatriots spokesman in their struggle for rights, organizing public meetings, petitions, and press campaigns, and lobbying
governments.
In 1907, however, these lawful methods proved ineffective against
new regulations that required Indians to carry identity cards and
restricted their movements. Gandhi turned to breaking the laws, leading Indians in burning their cards and taking them into areas from
which they were prohibited. He and his followers quietly tolerated
harassment, arrest, and imprisonment.
Gandhi called this resistance to unjust laws satyagraha, or insistence on truth. It was part of a philosophy rooted in his belief that an
ultimate truth underlies everything in the universe. To Gandhis mind,
our goal is to search for this truth, dedicating ourselves to a life based
on self-control, or swaraj. We should work hard and become selfsufficient (Gandhi called on his followers to spin yarn to make their
own clothes); limit our wants for both material goods and such physical pleasures as sexual relations; and welcome people of both sexes
and all religions, races, and castes.
Gandhi made it his mission to persuade others to devote themselves
to swaraj. He felt that such self-control was impossible in modern
industrial society, which he held to be inherently selfish. He believed,
however, that a new world might grow out of the traditional Indian

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village, whose inhabitants (he claimed) have few wants and work
together. In South Africa, he founded a community, an ashram (refuge), where he and his followers searched for truth.
No one has yet found the whole truth, though. Disagreements are
therefore inevitable, which presents a problem: disputes normally
end with the stronger party forcing its views on the weaker. Satyagraha was Gandhis method of resolving conflict without violence. If
ones opponents are perpetrating a wrong, one first tries peacefully
to dissuade them. If this fails, one must be prepared to sufferfor
example, accepting punishment for breaking an unjust law. The opponents will then realize that they have unfairly caused another being to
suffer. This pricks their consciences, which helps them see the truth.
Meanwhile, the person who practices satyagraha preserves his or her
integrity and emerges with renewed dedication to the quest for truth.
Giving in to injustice, on the other hand, is accepting untruth.
The strength of character that he showed in South Africa earned
Gandhi the name of Mahatma, or great soul (the term was also used
by Theosophists to refer to their supernatural beings). By the time he
returned to India in 1915, Gandhi was experienced in organizing
satyagrahas and dealing with governments. Although he associated
with Congress, however, he took little interest in politics. Instead, he
concentrated on uniting Indians in the search for truth through swaraj.
He founded a new ashram and led several satyagrahas against socioeconomic injustice. These campaignson behalf of indigo cultivators,
cotton-growing peasants, and millhandsearned Gandhi recognition
across India. They also brought him into contact with local politicians
who joined his satyagrahas. This gave him networks of supporters
that stood him in good stead when he entered politics.
Gandhi had always trusted in the benevolence of British rule in
India. He did, however, call for satyagraha to protest the internment
of Annie Besant and the Ali brothers. This was partly because he saw
the internments as an injustice, but he had another objective. To him,
the unity of all Indians was a prerequisite to swaraj. Gandhi was a
Hindu, but he hoped that his public support for the Alis, the two
best-known Muslims in India, would help bring together his countrys
two main religious communities.
In 1919, Gandhis political thought was transformed. Worried by the
disturbances provoked by economic discontent, the viceroys legislative
council passed the Rowlatt Acts. These continued for three more years
some of the repressive powers of the wartime Defense of India Act.
They were opposed by every Indian member of the legislative council,

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117

and only went through because with the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms

not yet in effect, officials still formed a majority of councillors.
Gandhi was one of many Indians who denounced the Rowlatt Acts
as an unjustified infringement of the rights of Indians. He suggested
resisting the laws with satyagraha, through a national strike, or hartal
(lock market). In Punjab, a tense climate arising from economic troubles and communal hostility resulted both in widespread observance
of the hartal and in rioting. On April 13, 1919, after disturbances in
the city of Amritsar, a British officer ordered his troops to fire on an
unarmed gathering; 379 people were killed and a thousand or more
wounded.
The Mahatma called off his hartal, and the government of India and
Congress both launched inquiries into what had been quickly named
the Amritsar Massacre. Gandhi served on the Congress inquiry. His
experiences there and his conviction that the government report on
the massacre was a whitewash changed his mind about British rule,
which he now believed was unjust. This meant that seekers of truth
must oppose it. In April 1920 he formally entered politics when he
took over leadership of Annie Besants Home Rule League, and in
June he suggested that satyagraha could bring self-government to
India. Conveniently, the Hindi for self-government is swaraj, the same
word that Gandhi used for self-control.

THE NONCOOPERATION CAMPAIGN

With its defeat in World War I, Turkey lost the Muslim holy cities of
Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Muslims who regarded the sultan of
Turkey as their khalifa felt that this endangered the holy places, and
in 1919 the Ali brothers (who had been freed from internment when
the war ended) became the leaders of an Indian Khilafat Movement
to lobby on behalf of Turkey. (The khilafat is the office of khalifa.) The
following year, Gandhi announced his support for the movement. He
both wanted to further Hindu-Muslim unity and saw the treatment
of Turkey as an injustice. The Ali brothers agreed to a combined selfgovernment and khilafat satyagraha, and in August 1920 they and
Gandhi began promoting their campaign.
Gandhi and the Alis decided that this satyagraha would take
the form of noncooperation with the British: they told Indians to withdraw their children from government schools, refrain from taking
disputes to the courts, resign public office, and boycott elections.
They would also give up titles and medals received for public service,

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withhold taxes, and practice swadeshi, the use of homemade cloth.

Because it required self-discipline, noncooperation would bring Indians closer to Gandhis swaraj. At the same time, it would undercut
the Indian acquiescence on which British rule depended.
By the end of 1920, Congress had endorsed noncooperation, thereby
signaling its acceptance of Gandhis leadership. The Mahatma was
helped by a lack of rivals. (Tilak died the day that Gandhi and the Alis
began publicizing their satyagraha, and Annie Besants increasing
eccentricity had eroded her support.) Moreover, Gandhi managed to
pack two Congress meetings with his followers, among them veterans
of the indigo and mill satyagrahas, and Muslims who appreciated his
efforts in the khilafat movement. The deciding factor, however, was
probably political calculation. National leaders of Congress hoped
that Gandhis khilafat connections would cement the Muslim support
that they had pursued since the Lucknow Pact. Provincial politicians
expected rewards for handing the Mahatma control of Congress.
Many saw in noncooperation solutions to their own dilemmasfor
example, candidates who wanted an excuse not to run in elections that
they might lose.
Gandhi took advantage of his newfound dominance to improve
Congresss efficiency by creating a full-time party executive or Working Committee. He also tried to make the organization more
representative by establishing local Congress branches across India
and recruiting members from outside the English-educated urban
classes that still predominated at the annual meetings.
Most members of Congress did boycott the 1920 elections, and attendance at schools and colleges fell. During 1921, the popularity of
swadeshi combined with economic problems to cut into sales of
imported cloth. Nevertheless, satyagraha enjoyed only mixed success.
Noncooperation was opposed by Liberals (political heirs of Gokhale,
men who had left Congress when Tilak rose to power); the remaining
Congress Moderates, who wanted to work with the MontaguChelmsford Reforms; and Hindu communalists, who disliked the commitment to the khilafat. Few Indians renounced titles (one of those
who did was the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who gave up the knighthood that his writings had earned him several years earlier). Nor did
they boycott the courts or resign from the bureaucracy, and students
soon returned to their classes. After a time, many Congress politicians
wanted to end noncooperation and participate in electoral politics, the
only access to power in an India that remained firmly under British rule.
By early 1922, Gandhi was looking for a face-saving excuse to
call off a campaign that had grown unpopular and clearly was

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not working. It came when a mob of noncooperators in Uttar Pradesh

burned down a police station, killing 22 constables inside. Gandhi
announced that the satyagraha was over, and soon after was
imprisoned. The noncooperation campaign had not brought selfgovernment to India, a change in British policy toward Turkey, or
any indication that Indians were closer to the Mahatmas swaraj. But
it had enrolled more people than ever before into a movement
directed by Congress, leaving no room to doubt that the organization
had widespread if not universal support. And it had cemented
the position of Gandhi, the man who mobilized this power, as both
the best-known man in India and the most important member of
Congress.

POLITICS IN THE 1920s

In 1923, legislative elections showed that Congress was strong in
much of India. In some places, however, the party was hurt by the
enlarged franchise of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. For example,
Muslims formed a majority of the population of Bengal. Poverty and
low levels of education had hitherto left provincial politics in the
hands of urban Bengali Hindus, a powerful force in Congress since
its creation. Now, new Muslim voters dominated the electorate of Bengal and excluded Congress from power. Similarly, in Madras province
(Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh), the non-Brahmins Justice Party
left the local Brahmin-dominated Congress far behind and won every
election between 1920 and 1934. And in Punjab, Muslim, Hindu, and
Sikh landowners always ensured that their Unionist Party enjoyed
sufficient support in rural areas to defeat the mainly urban Congress.
Indeed, Congress languished after 1922. Following his release from
prison, Gandhi pursued swaraj through social work rather than politics. For example, one of the principal obstacles to his dream of Indian
unity was Untouchability, discrimination against Untouchables by
Hindus of higher castes. The Mahatma joined a satyagraha to win
Untouchables the right to walk on a road that passed a Hindu temple.
But without his political leadership, Congresss membership and
funds dropped, and many local branches ceased functioning. Most of
the party ignored Gandhis ideas about reconstructing society, which
threatened the interests of both the small landholders and rich peasants who joined Congress after 1920, and the Indian industrialists
who bankrolled their activities. (Fortunately, Gandhi said that the rich
should use their wealth to help the poor, but he opposed taking it from
them against their wishes.) Congress members of the legislatures

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instead devoted themselves to nurturing power bases, which had to

be considerably larger than in the days when electoral politics were
confined to local boards. They made concessions to fellow legislators
in return for support, and (especially during elections) pandered to
voters. By the end of the decade, adepts at this form of politics had
established themselves as Congress provincial leaders.
Climatic changes, improved transportation that helped the distribution of food in famine areas, a decline in epidemics consequent on the
development of natural immunities, increasing opportunities for poor
peasants to enter secure if low-paying nonagricultural workall this
was lowering death rates and leading to a rapid rise in the population
of the subcontinent. The annual rate of increase was over 1 percent a
year from 1921 to 1951, and thereafter exceeded 2 percent. This
strained the available food, jobs, and housing and created a pool of
discontent from which politicians could draw support. Frustration
extended to the educated classes. Thanks partly to school reforms
enacted by the new Indian education ministers, rates of literacy in English and in Indian languages rose through the 1920s. White-collar
jobs did not keep pace, however, and the number of unemployed or
underemployed educated young men grew. The decade also saw the
continued expansion of roads, railroads, and the press, and the beginnings of radio broadcasting. Improved communications strengthened
class, religious, and national identities and spread both discontent
and political movements more rapidly than ever before.
New political movements that entered India after World War I
included democratic socialism (modeled on the British Labour Party)
and fascism. The success of the Russian Revolution drew educated
young people to communism, which also won adherents among factory
workers and peasants with its appeal to class identities. Such movements often sanctioned violence to end British rule; Bhagat Singh, an
atheist and a militant socialist, sought to free India through bombing
and assassination until he was captured and executed in 1931.
The membership of socialist, fascist, and communist organizations in
the 1920s was, however, dwarfed by the number of Indians who took
part in communal politics. The tendency for people to identify themselves on the basis of religion seemed legitimized when the MorleyMinto Reforms, the Lucknow Pact, and the Montagu-Chelmsford
Reforms all accepted separate electorates for Muslims. The enlargement
of the electorate extended trends that had appeared with the introduction of elected local boards: voters looked to elected leaders to protect
their religious interests, politicians sought support by appealing to the

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religious sentiments of the majority of voters, and followers of minority

religions became fearful.
Meanwhile, many people saw the activities of Arya Samajists,
Ahmadis, and other missionaries as attacks on the community being
targeted for conversion. All this meant that long-standing causes of
religious tension, such as cow killing by Muslims, or noisy parades
near mosques by Hindus, now often led to riot and murder.
The principal Hindu communal party, the All-India Hindu
Mahasabha (Great Council), was founded in 1915 to coordinate Hindu
organizations in North India and was reorganized as a political party
in 1922. Three years later Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, one of the Mahasabhas leading intellectuals, founded the paramilitary Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteers Association to
defend Hindus and Hinduism. Hindu communalists were particularly active in British Indian provinces where Hindus were the minority (notably Punjab), and in areas of Indian India with Muslim rulers.
For some years the Arya Samaj focused its attentions on Hyderabad,
where Hindus formed most of the population in a Muslim-ruled state.
In 1924, the Turkish government abolished the post of khalifa. This
ended the alliance between Congress and the Muslim League, which
had never found common ground beyond the question of the khilafat.
The same year, the League voted in favor of a federal form of government for the India of the future, with most powers exercised by the
provinces, and continued separate electorates. The first provision
would assure Muslims control of provinces where they were the
majority, and the second would guarantee them representation in
mainly Hindu provinces.
But in the 1920s, the League did not speak for all Muslims. A few
nationalist Muslims stayed in Congress, where they were prized as
a sign that the party represented all Indians. Most politically aware
Muslims supported regional parties such as the Unionists in Punjab.
Even within the League, there were disagreements. Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, of whom more will be said later, argued that separate provincial electorates were of less value than a guaranteed number of seats
in the federal legislature, and the creation of more Muslim-majority
provinces. (The British acceded to the latter demand in the 1930s, with
the establishment of the Northwest Frontier Province, now Khyber
Pakhtunkhwahitherto administered directly from Delhiand
of Sindh.)
The Shiromani Akali Dal, the Supreme Army of the Immortals,
which is still the principal Sikh communal party in India, originated

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in a struggle for control over gurdwaras (Sikh temples). In 1920, Sikh

reformers established the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee
(Supreme Gurdwara Managing Committee) to take over gurdwaras
from the Sikh aristocrats and Hinduized custodians who managed
them. The Shiromani Akali Dal was the reformers instrument. It coordinated the activities of Akali Jathas, or Immortal Bands, volunteers who
braved violence and imprisonment to stage satyagrahas at gurdwaras.
All the gurdwaras in Punjab eventually came under their control, and
in 1925 the British recognized the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak
Committee as manager of the gurdwaras.

THE ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE AND THE SALT

SATYAGRAHA
In 19271928, the British parliament sent the Simon Commission
to India to prepare a further installment of constitutional reform. Two
Indians then sat in parliament and were thus eligible to belong to the
commission, but one of them (Lord Sinha) was old and sick, the other
(S. D. Saklatvala) a Communist and therefore distrusted. As a result, all
seven commissioners were British. Many Indians were outraged at
being excluded from a say in their countrys future. Congress, Hindu
communal parties, and a section of the Muslim League met to discuss
their reaction. They agreed not to cooperate with the commission and
appointed a committee to draft their own constitutional proposals.
This Indian committee was headed by Motilal Nehru, a leading
member of Congress. Its Nehru Report demanded immediate dominion
status. The meaning of this term had changed since World War I. From
British dependencies with internal self-government, the dominions had
become independent countries, linked to Britain only in that they shared
the same king. In other words, for the first time, mainstream Indian
nationalists were now committed to independence.
But the Nehru Report did not please all Indians. Most Muslim politicians objected to its omission of the safeguards that they supported
strong provincial governments, separate electorates, guaranteed seats.
Within Congress, a group of radicals led by Subhas Chandra Bose and
Motilal Nehrus son Jawaharlal opposed even sharing a monarch with
Britain. This raised the possibility that Congress might split, under
circumstances that would be personally painful for the president of its
meeting in 1928, Motilal Nehru. To avert this danger, he persuaded
Mahatma Gandhi to return to politics, after an absence of almost seven
years.

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By now, Britains interests in India had been substantially reduced.

Indian revenues still poured into Britain in the form of the Home
Charges, and the subcontinent retained its psychological importance
as a sign of British power. But India was no longer a source of free
manpower (Britain now paid for Indian troops who served abroad,
and recruitment of Indian indentured labor for British plantations
had stopped in 1917). Indianization of the officer corps and the
administration (including the ICS) had reduced the scope for young
Britons to obtain employment in India. From 1923, Britain allowed
India to impose protective duties on imports that competed with
Indian industry. India remained the largest market for British manufacturers till the late 1930s, but mainly for the declining textile industry rather than such growing sectors of the British economy as
chemicals and electrical goods. The paradoxical result was that to
keep whatever control they could, the British were more willing than
before to make concessions to Indian opinion, because they had fewer
vital interests in India to safeguard.
In an effort to win back the cooperation of Indian leaders, Lord
Irwin, the viceroy, persuaded the British government to confirm that
India would indeed become a dominion one day, to shelve the Simon
report, and to invite the Indian political parties and princes to a Round
Table Conference in London. This worsened the danger of a split in
Congress: within the party, there was disagreement over whether to
join the talks in London, and whether to work with whatever reforms
emerged from the conference. Gandhi decided on a new satyagraha to
unite Congress and ensure his dominance. Assuming that he could
secure the public support that noncooperation had attracted 10 years
earlier, this would also remind the British that Congress could mobilize
more people than any other organization in the country. After a satyagraha, Gandhi could brush aside the radical Congress opponents of
dominion status and the Round Table Conference, go to London, and
use his mass support in India to extract a maximum of concessions.
Because the new satyagraha was intended to strengthen Gandhis
hand at the Round Table Conference, there was no need for it to
challenge British rule in India. (An unattainable goal of immediate
self-government had been one of the flaws of the campaign of 1920
1922.) But it did need a focus that would draw in as many participants
as possible. The Mahatma found what he wanted in the salt tax. Salt
was a monopoly of the Indian government, which collected a small
tax on sales. Gandhi called on all Indians to make their own salt from
seawater. This was a brilliant move. Breaking the salt monopoly was

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a crime, but not violent. A tax on an essential like salt was easy to
present as unjust, and thus a suitable target for civil disobedience.
And all Indians who made salt would demonstrate that their first loyalty was to the Mahatma rather than to the British who enforced the
salt laws.
In March 1930, Gandhi opened the satyagraha by walking to the sea
and making salt. Two months later, he was arrested for encouraging
lawbreaking. Other Congress leaders organized the next stage of civil
disobedience, which included boycotting both imported goods (especially cloth) and the 1930 legislative elections. More and more people
joined the satyagraha, which achieved its greatest successes in
western India. They included many women, who for the first time
played a large part in a political campaign. As in 1920, participants
were often motivated by grievances of their own, frequently economic, but the important thing was that they supported a movement directed by Congress. Membership in Congress grew rapidly.
Many of the new adherents were local politicians or community leaders, who realized that they could only keep their position by joining
the party that had persuaded their dependents to engage in civil
disobedience.
Meanwhile, the Round Table Conference had brought together
members of the British parliament (led by the prime minister, Ramsay
MacDonald), the leaders of the political parties of British India
with the exception of Congress, and representatives of the princes.
By now, the princes greatest fear was that British authority over them
would one day pass to Indian politicians, who were more likely than
the British to attack princely sovereignty as a rival to their own power.
To forestall this, the princes called for a federation of the British Indian
provinces with their states. A federal constitution would demarcate
the powers of the different levels of government, leaving the princes
secure in whatever it left to them. It would also give the princes a voice
in the central legislature and executive of India, which under the
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms represented only British India.
A federation proved equally popular with Muslim leaders, who
looked forward to the same autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces
that the princes wanted for their states. The other British Indian parties at the conference saw federation as a small price for the support
of the princes and the Muslims in constitutional reform. Many British
politicians hoped that a federal system would dilute the power of
Congress in the central legislature, as the main party of British India
as yet had little support in the princes Indian India. With federation
agreed to, the next step was writing a suitable constitution. Irwin

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and MacDonald had expected the Round Table Conference to discuss

general principles, which did not require the participation of
Congress. But the federation would not work unless Congress
accepted it, and this would only happen if the party were part of
the constitutional discussions. Early in 1931, the viceroy therefore
approached Gandhi about ending civil disobedience and joining the
conference.
The British had jailed thousands of Indians under new laws enacted
to repress the satyagraha, and the campaign was running out of steam
after nine months. The Mahatma was as keen on negotiations as Irwin.
In March 1931, the viceroy withdrew the repressive regulations, legalized the picketing of shops that sold imported goods, and allowed
Indians to make untaxed salt for their own use. In return, Gandhi
ended the satyagraha, retracted Congresss demand for immediate
dominion status, and agreed to attend the constitutional discussions.
Congress and Gandhi enjoyed the support of many Indians, but
as the 1930s showednot all. When the Round Table Conference
reopened, the parties representing communal minorities (including
Muslims, Sikhs, and Untouchables) made it clear that the Mahatma
did not speak for them. Then, on his return home in December 1931,
Gandhi found that many members of Congress were ignoring his pact
with Irwin and continuing the satyagraha. This left him with a choice
between disowning those who persisted in civil disobedience and
thus splitting Congress, or officially resuming the satyagraha so as to
reincorporate the dissidents in the party. He chose the latter course,
but failed to generate the support seen in 1930. In any case, the
Mahatma was arrested only a few days into the campaign. An evershrinking core of activists continued civil disobedience for two years,
but to little effect.

THE NEW CONSTITUTION

By the end of 1932, the Round Table Conference had hammered out
the framework of the new constitution, which now went to the British
parliament. After lengthy delays (many of them caused by rightwingers who opposed any loosening of ties between Britain and
India), the reforms were implemented after parliament passed the
Government of India Act in 1935. To retain anything in India, the
British needed the acquiescence of its elites. This they could obtain
only by surrendering the provinces of British India to the elected politicians whom so many Indians now accepted as their rightful leaders,
while retaining a measure of British dominance at the center.

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The constitution accordingly divided the powers of government

between the federal and provincial governments. The latter were
now entirely controlled by wholly elected legislatures. Each province
had a prime minister, drawn from whichever party could assemble a
majority in the legislature. He appointed the executive council from
among his legislative colleagues.
The property and educational qualifications for the franchise were
lowered so that the electorate included one sixth of the adult population. Sikhs, Indian Christians, and a number of other communities
were granted separate electorates alongside Muslims. MacDonald
had also offered separate electorates to the Untouchables. Gandhi
opposed this, arguing that it would further divide Untouchables from
other Hindus and reduce the incentive for the latter to improve their
treatment of Untouchables. The Mahatma went on a hunger strike,
until the Untouchable leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar turned down
the offer of separate electorates. The two men agreed instead that in
constituencies with large populations of Untouchables, the latter
would provide all the candidates for elections. This scheme was
incorporated in the constitution.
The divided authority that had existed in the provinces under the
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms was now implemented at the federal
level: Indias internal affairs would be transferred to ministers responsible to a federal legislature, while the viceroy and his appointed executive councillors retained responsibility for defense and external
affairs. It has already been noted that the federal government was to
have authority over, and include representatives of, the states of
Indian India as well as the provinces of British India. In 1929, however,
the British had agreed to the princes contention that supremacy over
the states rested with the British monarch, not the government of
India. This meant that New Delhi could not unilaterally include the
states in the federation. The Government of India Act therefore provided that each prince would negotiate the terms of his accession to
the federation. The federal legislature and executive would only come
into operation when enough princes had acceded; until then, the
central government would operate under the Montagu-Chelmsford
system.
While the constitutional negotiations were underway, the economy
of India was in turmoil. During the first three decades of the twentieth
century, domestic and foreign prices for Indian agricultural produce
rose steadily. Then, in 1929, demand suddenly collapsed, and with it
prices. The Great Depression was partly responsible, as it compelled
millions all over the globe to cut back purchases. Other factors

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included worldwide overproduction of raw cotton and jute, the principal Indian agricultural exports, and a sudden constriction of the
credit networks that had given poorer Indians the wherewithal to
buy food. Between 1929 and 1931, the domestic price of Indian crops
fell by 44 percent. The burden fell mainly on poor peasants. Not only
did their agricultural incomes fall; many of them also lost the opportunity to supplement their earnings with part-time labor for wealthier
peasants or landholders, who needed fewer workers with the declining profitability of agriculture. The rural poor had no option but to
go ever more deeply into debt, often to rich peasants.
The same rich peasants were the backbone of Congress in rural
areas, and among the beneficiaries of the widened electoral franchise
of 1935. Many of them were wealthier than ever. During the 1920s
and 1930s, protective tariffs were imposed on agricultural imports that
could be grown in India, such as sugar. This assured a market to
Indian producers of those commodities. Rich peasants who did not
enjoy such security might plow their profits into industry rather than
the less certain agricultural expansion.
Indian manufacturing enjoyed mixed success between the World
Wars. The total percentage of the workforce employed in industry
remained unchanged at 12 percent throughout the first half of the
twentieth century. The proportion of those in large-scale factories
increased, but never exceeded 2 percent of the labor force. From its
inception, modern industry in India was hampered by low levels of
education and poor training. This partly explains why productivity
only grew slowly; in the 1930s, Indian workers produced less per head
than their counterparts in Mexico and Egypt. In 1918, an Industrial
Commission recommended that the central government encourage
technical education and private investment in industry. The
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, however, transferred industrial policy
to the provinces, which lacked the resources to do much by way of
training or planning.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Indian textiles lost markets at home
and abroad to Japanese competitors. The other major export industry,
jute processing, was hit hard by the combined effects of the Great
Depression and the development of new kinds of packaging in the
1930s. But the picture was not entirely bleak. Industry benefited by
the institution of protective tariffs from 1923, and the governments
post-Montagu-Chelmsford policy of buying railroad and other supplies in India wherever possible. New industries were established to
meet growing domestic demand, from automobiles to chemical engineering, and by the mid-1940s India was the worlds 10th largest

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producer of manufactured goods. Some new firms were subsidiaries

of Western companies, but many were owned by Indians.
Indeed, during the 1930s and 1940s, manufacturing increasingly
came under Indian ownership, as the Depression and the political climate forced British firms to sell out. In 1944, Indian-owned firms
employed over 80 percent of the workers in large-scale industry.
Indian businessmen diversified their interests. The Tatas, who began
as traders, went into textiles and then into iron and steel, and in the
1940s inaugurated commercial domestic airline service in India. The
Birlas, a merchant family of eastern India, added jute processing in
the 1920s and chemical industries in the 1930s. The Tatas and Birlas
were among the many Indian businessmen who gave financial
support to Congress, while at the same time managing to retain the
goodwill of the British.

CONGRESS IN THE LATE 1930s

The first provincial elections under the new constitution were held
in 1937. Congress selected candidates whose caste or social status
were electoral assets in their constituencies, sent out its best speakers
to campaign, and started a Mass Contact program to drum up popular
support. Most other parties lacked the resources to reach the millions
of newly enfranchised voters and lost heavily at the polls. In the end,
Congress dominated the new legislatures of eight of the eleven provinces of British India. Some members argued that the party should
not legitimize British rule by assuming office, but they were outvoted
by those who wanted to take advantage of the unprecedented power
that the new constitution gave to elected politicians. By the end of
1938, Congress prime ministers ruled all the provinces except Bengal,
Punjab, and Sindh, which were controlled by regional parties.
There were many reasons for the popularity of Congress, which
during the late 1930s enrolled more members than ever before. For
over 50 years, Congress had called itself the representative of
the Indian people, many of whom had come to accept this claim.
The partys record in securing Indian political rights was unimpeachable, and in Gandhi it had the best-known man in all India. Ambitious
men joined Congress because it offered the surest route to power and
influence, and the eclipse of other parties in 1937 brought new support
from politicians and voters. This was a two-way street, however. The
rich peasants and urban professionals who joined Congress to secure
their own position made themselves indispensable to the party, as
legislators and as intermediaries with the mass of the voting and

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129

nonvoting population. The provincial prime ministers and national

leaders could not afford to alienate these local bosses, who made
sure that Congress refrained from interfering with their interests.
This was partly responsible for the most serious threat to face
Congress in the 1930s. Subhas Chandra Bose led a radical faction that
wanted to commit Congress to a socialist redistribution of wealth to
the poor after the end of British rule. This was a threat to the bosses.
For several years, Gandhi avoided a split by postponing any party
decision on the question. Meanwhile, Boses popularity grew among
the Congress rank and file, who chose him as party president for
1938. Gandhi made it clear that he would tolerate Bose as president
for only one year. When Bose ran for reelection and won, the Mahatma
took action to keep the essential support of the conservative bosses.
Gandhis supporters dominated the Congress Working Committee,
the party executive, which on his instructions refused to work with
Bose. In mid-1939, Bose gave up trying to run Congress on his own
and resigned the presidency.

THE MUSLIM LEAGUE IN THE LATE 1930s

Meanwhile, the Muslim League was being transformed by
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a lawyer who was born probably in 1876. Jinnah began his career as one of the comparatively few Muslim members of Congress, and by the time he was elected to the central
Legislative Council in 1910 he was the right-hand man of the Congress
leader Gokhale. Three years later he joined the Muslim League in
order to bring the two parties together, and as a member of both
Congress and the League he played a central role in negotiating the
Lucknow Pact. An old-style Moderate, Jinnah believed in working
with the system, and he drifted away from Congress after it approved
the noncooperation campaign in 1920. Over the next few years he
became increasingly worried by what he saw as a Hindu communal
streak in Congress. To him, this was symbolized when the party
endorsed the Nehru Report, which rejected constitutional safeguards
for Muslims in an independent India.
In 1935, the impending transfer of provincial power to prime ministers who would inevitably mostly belong to Congress induced Jinnah
to accept an invitation to assume leadership of the Muslim League.
He believed that a strong League was his communitys best defense
against discrimination. The party did poorly in the 1937 elections,
though, failing to win control of even one of the four Muslim-majority
provinces. Fortunately, Jinnah managed to persuade the new prime

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ministers of Bengal and Punjab (both Muslims from regional parties) to

join the League. He could now claim to control the two largest Muslim
provinces, although this was more apparent than real. The two prime
ministers continued to head their own parties within their provinces,
and only identified themselves as Leaguers when they were in other
parts of India. The alliance with Jinnah gave them links to a nationwide
party, but did not require them to accept its dictation.
The elections did, however, show that most Muslim voters shared
Jinnahs suspicions of Congress, which fared poorly in Muslim constituencies. By this time, Mahatma Gandhi was nearly 70 years old.
He had no formal office in Congress, and relied heavily on his
acknowledged political heir, Motilal Nehrus son Jawaharlal. This
probably helped ensure that Jawaharlal did not follow his old
comrade Bose in challenging the Mahatma, and made him an important figure in Congresss national leadership. The younger Nehru
was thoroughly secular in his outlook, and could not understand people who saw religion as the dominant force in their lives. This made
him dismiss the fears of Indian Muslims about being a permanent
minority in a democratic country, which in turn increased their feeling
that Congress could never represent them.
Other Congress leaders were either insensitive to Muslim concerns
or open Hindu communalists. Some of the new provincial governments promoted the Hindi language at the expense of Urdu. Most
treated Bande Mataram as an unofficial national anthem (this is a patriotic hymn that speaks to the homeland in terms commonly used for
Hindu divinities). Congresss reverence for Gandhi alienated many
Muslims, who regarded the Mahatma as a typical Hindu holy man.
And in 1937, bosses who wanted the party to remain Hindu in complexion helped scuttle a drive to recruit Muslims to Congress. All this
gave Jinnah ammunition with which to persuade Muslims that they
were under attack, and that only the League could save them. Thanks
partly to this, more and more Muslims came to share Jinnahs conviction that their community would need iron-clad safeguards against
discrimination when the British left.

THE FAILURE OF FEDERATION

Meanwhile, the British were negotiating with the princes to secure
their accession to the federation. The princes, as ever watchful for
their sovereignty, were now afraid that the new constitution did not
adequately protect their states against interference by the federal
government. Moreover, the constitution had transferred to the provinces

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131

of British India a number of lucrative taxes. The central government

faced a shortfall in its revenues, without a corresponding reduction in
expenditure. To resolve this problem, the government of India
demanded that acceding princes surrender much of their tax revenue
to the federation.
In 19371938, for reasons that are unclear, local political leaders in
the Indian states who wanted power for themselves unleashed a wave
of agitation against many princes. Until now, Congress had confined
its activities to British India. Bose and other dissidents realized that if
they joined the agitators in Indian India, they might build power bases
from which to take over Congress. Gandhi and the Congress leadership defused this danger by formally extending support to the state
movements. To prevent Congress from gaining a foothold in the
states, the British decided to remove any cause for complaint among
the princes subjects. With this in mind, they began forcing the princes
to carry out administrative reforms. Not unnaturally, this increased
the princes fears for their sovereignty. In 1939, it became likely that
not enough states would ever accede for the federal government to
become operational, and the viceroy suspended negotiations with
the princes.

WORLD WAR II
After 1937, Congress provincial ministers and legislators established good relations with their British governors and the Britishcontrolled central government. Other members of the party, including
some national leaders, did not understand that this was necessary if
Congress was to enjoy the fruits of its electoral victories. They wanted
to obstruct British rule so as to obtain freedom for India as quickly as
possible. By mid-1939, Congress was again facing a split.
In September 1939, World War II began when Britain declared
war on Germany. The viceroy Lord Linlithgow announced that, as in
1914, India was automatically a belligerent. At the orders of their
national leaders, who wanted a breathing space to resolve internal
party tensions, the eight Congress provincial governments resigned.
Their pretext was that Linlithgow should have consulted Indian
politicians before making his announcement.
In August 1940, to secure support for the war effort from the politicians whom so many Indians now regarded as their leaders, Linlithgow offered to appoint representatives of Congress, the League,
and other parties to his executive council. This provoked debate in
Congress over whether to accept this opportunity for power in Delhi,

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or hold out for independence as the price of cooperation. Gandhi

resorted to his usual method of combatting dissent, a satyagraha. This
time, Indians would court arrest through nonviolent resistance to the
war effort, demonstrating the mass support that would give Congress
leverage in future talks with the viceroy.
This satyagraha accomplished little beyond the imprisonment of
the principal leaders of Congress, however. The Muslim League, the
Shiromani Akali Dal, and other parties supported the war effort.
Linlithgow ignored Congress and appointed new members to the
executive council until it was almost entirely Indian in composition.
The viceroys August Offer also promised that India would not be
handed over to any body that was opposed by a large part of the subcontinents population. The meaning was obvious: the British would
not transfer power to a purely Congress government, as such a course
of action would assuredly be rejected by most Muslims. This was
because Linlithgow wanted to ensure the loyalty of the Muslims who
made up a large part of the Indian Army, particularly in light of a
new policy that the Muslim League had recently endorsed. At a party
meeting at Lahore in March 1940, Jinnah secured approval of a resolution stating that when India became free, its Muslims must have states
where they were not under Hindu control. This echoed a call made
10 years earlier by the then-president of the League, the poetphilosopher Mohammad Iqbal. Iqbal had urged the creation of a state
in northwestern India where Muslims could rule themselves in accordance with Islamic principles. Jinnahs motivation was different. He
knew little of theology and had no interest in an Islamic government.
Instead, he argued that the Muslims of India formed a nation of their
own, which like any nation was entitled to a territorial base.
Neither Iqbal in 1930 nor Jinnah in 1940 made it clear whether their
states were to be independent or members of an Indian federation,
although it seems that both men inclined to the latter. Jinnah said
states in the plural, adding the northeast (Bengal and Assam, the
latter having a Muslim population of about 25 percent) alongside
Iqbals northwestern state (Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).
This was soon forgotten, as Jinnah and his followers began to speak
of the northeast and northwest as a single Muslim state. Their dream
was called Pakistan, a punning term coined by Muslim students in
England in 1933 (it means pure land, and also combines letters from
the names of the Muslim areas of the northwest: Punjab, the Afghan
frontier, Kashmir, and so on).
It has been suggested that Jinnahs real goal was a maximum of constitutional safeguards for his coreligionists, and that Pakistan was a

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133

bargaining counter that could be given up in return for special protection. But the idea of a state where they were masters would appeal to
Muslims who considered themselves victims of discrimination at the
hands of Hindus. It was also vague enough to draw in people who
conceived of a Muslim state in very different ways. Support for the
idea would mean the growth of the League, the only party committed
to Pakistan. A strong League would strengthen Jinnahs hand in any
negotiations on the constitution of a free India. At the same time,
Jinnahs declaration that Indian Muslims were a nation of their own
denied Congress any right to speak for them, because Congresss
claim to represent Muslims assumed that they were part of the Indian
nation whose interests the party advocated.
In December 1941, Japan entered the war on the side of Germany.
Japanese troops defeated the British in Malaya and Burma, and
reached the frontier of India in the spring of 1942. Winston Churchill,
the prime minister of Britain, loathed Indian nationalism (he had been
one of the principal right-wing obstructionists as the 1935 constitution
was going through parliament). Nevertheless, he and his cabinet
agreed that the danger of a Japanese invasion made Indian support
essential. Sir Stafford Cripps, a cabinet minister and an old friend of
Nehru, was dispatched to India to make terms with its politicians
(the Congress leaders had been freed from prison). Apparently on
his own initiative, Cripps promised that in return for support of the
war, India would become an independent dominion after hostilities
had ended. With the Lahore Resolution in mind, he also said that no
area would be included in independent India without the approval
of its inhabitants.
Possibly overestimating British desperation, Congress rejected the
offer, and demanded immediate independence without the provision
for any part of India to opt out. This Churchill and Linlithgow
would not grant. Congress, already torn over its reaction should the
Japanese invade and now in danger of breaking up over the Cripps
Offer, called for satyagraha to force the British to leave. Gandhi,
Nehru, and their colleagues were arrested and lost control of their
Quit India movement, which slipped into the hands of local bosses
and militants. These drew on the discontent of a population of rural
poor who were facing famine on a scale not seen for 40 years, thanks
to wartime inflation, disrupted communications that interfered with
the distribution of food, and poor harvests.
The situation was worst in Bengal, where the loss of Burmese rice
fields and grain hoarding by merchants contributed to a million starvation deaths in 1943 (another 2 million Bengalis died from the effects

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of famine by 1946). All across India, hungry peasants attacked symbols of British power, such as police stations, post offices, and rail
facilities. The Quit India satyagraha became the subcontinents greatest rebellion since 1857, and in some areas, government collapsed.
The British used all the force at their disposal against the uprising,
which was suppressed by mid-1943.
Meanwhile, Jinnah had been building support for the Muslim
League. The party had always been strongest in the mainly Hindu
provinces, where Muslims were particularly fearful about discrimination. If Pakistan was to exist, however, Jinnah needed to extend his
authority to the Muslim-majority provinces, which would constitute
his new state. Congress inadvertently helped him, as the resignations
of the Congress prime ministers and legislators in 1939 let League governments take office in Assam and the Northwest Frontier Province
(Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).
During the war, Muslim aristocrats and religious leaders in Sindh
and Punjab switched their support from regional parties to the
League, which they felt would best protect them against a Hindu central government in independent India. In Bengal, the League was
helped by the economic crisis, as Muslim peasants looked for its help
against Hindu landowners and moneylenders. By now, the League
was undergoing the same sort of growth that Congress had seen in
the 1930s, with politicians and local leaders flocking to a party that
clearly had a future. In 19421943, Jinnah had sufficient support in
the legislatures of Sindh and Bengal to install members of the League
as provincial prime ministers. Because the prime minister of Punjab
was also affiliated with the League, the League now controlled the five
provinces that Jinnah demanded for Pakistan.
Support for the League almost inevitably meant support for
Pakistan, however that term might be interpreted. To boost both,
Jinnah skillfully played on the differences that set Muslims apart from
other Indians. These had often been negligible before the reform
movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Jinnah used
them to drive home the point that Indian Muslims were a nation.
Because the nation is a state of mind, Muslims who accepted Jinnahs
thesis really did become a separate nation rather than the minority
community that they had considered themselves to be a few years earlier. By the time the war ended in 1945, the Muslim League was a mass
party. Jinnah was the acknowledged leader of most Muslims, who
looked to him to create Pakistan as a homeland for their nation.

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135

TOWARD INDEPENDENCE
Even if Cripps had not committed them to leaving India, the British
in 1945 had fewer reasons for staying than at any time since the eighteenth century. The Home Charges, one of the tangible benefits of
imperial rule to survive the reforms of 1920s and 1930s, ceased to exist
during World War II. This was because Britain agreed to reimburse
much of the expense that India had incurred as a source of men,
money, and supplies, and as a base for operations in the Middle East
and Southeast Asia. The sums were deducted from the Home
Charges, until all of Indias debt to Britain was discharged. Britain
then issued credits, called the Sterling Balances, and in 1945 it was
Britain that owed money to India, rather than vice versa.
By now, too, ordinary Britons were concentrating on making ends
meet in the face of postwar economic hardship, and had little interest
in holding India. Businessmen felt that their economic interests would
fare better in a friendly independent India than a hostile dependency;
and intellectuals who a generation earlier would have regarded
British rule as an instrument of progress declared their support
for colonial nationalism. These sentiments extended to Clement
Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, who in July 1945 replaced the
Conservative Churchill as prime minister.
Determination aside, the British probably lacked the ability to hold
India for much longer. By 1946, units of both the police and the navy
had mutinied. During the war, there had been a warning that the army
might turn. In 1941, former Congress president Bose had made his
way through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Germany. He met
Hitler andout of either sympathy with their aims or a desire for
whatever help he could get against the Britishdeclared his support
for the Axis. He then went to Southeast Asia, where the Japanese
allowed him to recruit captured Indian soldiers into an Indian
National Army. Not all the Indian prisoners of war joined this INA,
but Bose found enough men to assemble three divisions that joined
an unsuccessful Japanese invasion of India.
Bose apparently died in an airplane crash in 1945, but the creation of
the INA had made it clear that the British could not count on the loyalty of Indian soldiers. The Quit India rebellion was also a warning.
It failed because the imprisonment of the Congress leaders left it uncoordinated, and because during the war the British had the will and the
manpower to suppress the disturbances. It was unlikely that these
circumstances would recur in another rising.

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The History of India

All this meant that after 1945 the principal task of Lord Wavell, who
had become viceroy two years earlier, was to make India independent.
However much he might have wished to pull out immediately, he
could not take a step that might provoke chaos and so tarnish both
Britains name and its remaining interests in India. Rather, Wavell
had to find a formula for independence that was acceptable not only
to Congress, the most popular party in India, but also to the Muslim
League, which represented the Muslims who, thanks to Crippss
promise, were entitled to opt out of any plan they did not like.
Congress now needed someone who could negotiate the terms of
independence. This cemented the dominance of Jawaharlal Nehru,
who had almost 30 years of experience at the top levels of the party
and was the Mahatmas political heir. As an English-educated
patrician, Nehru shared the schooling and values of the British upper
classes and got along well with Wavell.
In 1945, the viceroy made a start by offering to let the Indian leaders
choose his executive council. If they accepted, Indian politicians
would gain experience in the central government so that there would
be no disruption when independence came. Jinnah vetoed Nehrus
plan to name a Muslim member to the council, on the grounds that
this was mere tokenism directed against the Leagues claim to speak
for all Muslims. Nehru would not budge, and Wavells proposal therefore came to nothing. Elections in the winter of 19451946 proved that
most Muslims now agreed with Jinnah: the League won every Muslim
seat in the central legislature and 439 of the 494 provincial Muslim
seats. Congress, meanwhile, garnered massive support among nonMuslim voters, who gave it 91 percent of the non-Muslim seats at the
center and returned it to power in eight provinces. The communal
polarization of India was almost complete.
In 1946, Cripps returned to India with two fellow British cabinet
ministers. This Cabinet Mission proposed to devolve most powers of
government to the provinces. If they wished, neighboring provinces
could establish federations, called groups, which would belong to a
federal India. This permitted the creation of a self-governing Pakistan,
though not an independent one, in the northwestern and northeastern
groups. Nehru objected that these two groups included large areas
where Hindus formed most of the population. He also pointed out
that when India became independent, its people would be free to
adopt any form of government they pleased. Because the majority of
Indians supported Congress, and Congress opposed grouping, this
meant that a Pakistan based on the Cabinet Mission proposals would
not outlive British rule.

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137

Jinnah therefore rejected the scheme. He now explicitly spoke of a

Pakistan that would be completely independent, rather than a federal
state within India, and in August 1946 called on Muslims to do whatever was necessary to obtain it. In Kolkata, this sparked street battles
between Hindus and Muslims, and 4,000 people (mostly Muslim)
died in the ensuing Great Kolkata Killing. Economic deprivation and
rabble-rousing by local political leaders helped spread communal violence across North India. It was particularly severe in East Bengal
(where Muslims were the majority) and Bihar (where they were the
minority). In early 1947, the center of violence shifted to Punjab, which
drifted into civil war between Muslims on one side and Hindus and
Sikhs on the other. In response, most Sikhs gave up the idea (mooted
by Master Tara Singh of the Shiromani Akali Dal) of a Sikh state alongside Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, and the Akali Dal allied itself
with Congress.
If Jinnah saw Pakistan as a bargaining counter, he was now overplaying his hand. In September 1946, he refused Wavells invitation
to join the executive council. Nehru and other members of Congress
accepted. Jinnah had to backtrack, and his nominees joined Nehru
and his colleagues on the council. But the Congress and League councillors could not work together, and the central government slid
toward paralysis. In February 1947, Attlee made a fresh start by dismissing Wavell as viceroy. He replaced him with Lord Mountbatten.
The new viceroy was a man of great charm and a cousin of the British
king, and had been Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia
during the war.
Congress was now prepared to call Jinnahs bluff, if it was a bluff. In
January 1947, the party executive agreed that no province should be
forced to stay part of India against the wishes of its people. This was
partly because most of the Congress leaders were prepared to do anything to stop the communal violence. Some, like Nehru, knew that
Jinnahs price for staying would be a federal government so weak that
it would be unable to rebuild free India. Others, among them the
conservative party strongman Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, were probably happy to give up Muslim-majority areas as a way of reducing
the size of a community that detracted from their vision of an essentially Hindu India.
In April 1947, Nehru informed Mountbatten that Congress would
accept an independent Pakistan, so long as it did not include territories with non-Muslim majorities. At least for the time being, Nehru
also agreed to independence in the form of dominion status, with a
free India sharing Britains monarch. The viceroy still hoped to revive

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the Cabinet Mission plan, but this was impossible. On June 3 he

announced that the British would leave India as soon as they could,
and divide the provinces of British India between two independent
dominions, India and Pakistan. Lawmakers in Bengal and Punjab
agreed to the division of their provinces along religious lines, and the
electors of the Northwest Frontier Province and the Muslim portions of
Assam (both ruled by Congress governments since the last elections)
voted in favor of inclusion in a Pakistan that would comprise two wings,
separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. The Muslims of the
Hindu-majority provinces, who had always been the Leagues strongest
supporters, were left in India.
There remained the question of the states of Indian India. The
Cabinet Mission had declared that all ties between Britain and the
princes would lapse with independence. Among other things, this
meant that the new dominions would not inherit British supremacy
over the states. Some of the leading princes signified their interest in
including their territories in independent India by sending representatives to the constituent assembly, which was charged with writing
a constitution for independent India. This body consisted mainly of
delegates chosen by the provincial legislatures of British India,
although the Muslim League refused to participate. Nevertheless, as
of June 1947, no ruler had committed himself to joining either India
or Pakistan. The following month, Nehru established a Ministry of
States, headed by Sardar Patel. Patel promised that if the princes gave
the Indian government jurisdiction over their defense, foreign affairs,
and communications, they would retain the rest of their sovereign
powers. Almost all the major states within the boundaries of the
dominion of India accepted these terms by the date of independence.
Independence took effect August 14, 1947, for Pakistan, and August 15
for India. The leaders of India were faced with the enormous task of
building a new country on age-old foundations.

8
Building the New India
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA
In 1947, Jawaharlal Nehrus role in negotiating independence won
him the post of Indias first prime minister. But he had to share the
government with his deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel,
Congresss principal organizer, whose control over the partys pyramid of committees running from Delhi to the villages gave him a solid
power base. Nehru led the left wing of Congress, committed to a
modern, secular society; Patel represented the conservatives, who
wanted to rebuild India on its Hindu foundations. The two had usually managed to suppress their differences during the struggle against
the British. Now, they dueled to dominate the government and their
party, each knowing that victory would determine the countrys
future.
In the weeks before independence, Patel scored a success when
he persuaded the princes of most major states to accede to India.
The state of Kashmir (officially, Jammu and Kashmir), however, gave
rise to what remains the greatest source of tension in South Asia.
In 1947, the mainly Muslim population of Kashmir was ruled by a
Hindu prince, Maharaja Hari Singh. His ancestor was Ranjit Singhs

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The History of India

nobleman Raja Gulab Singh, who had received the kingdom a century
earlier after assisting the East India Companys invasion of the Sikh
empire. The partition of British India gave Kashmir borders with both
India and Pakistan, but Hari Singh did not accede to either new country.
Then, in October 1947, a Muslim revolt broke out against the maharaja, perhaps at the instigation of Pakistan. Pakistani volunteers
flooded in to join the revolt, and Hari Singh appealed to India for help.
This was granted in return for Kashmirs accession to India. Indian
troops stopped the Pakistani advance in this first Indo-Pakistani war,
but not before Pakistan had won control over about a third of Kashmir.
Fighting continued until the United Nations arranged a cease-fire.
India and Pakistan agreed that Kashmiris could decide the future of
their state, but they never came to terms on the mechanics of the voting. By the mid-1950s, India was unwilling to lose Kashmir by either
war or the ballot box, and dropped its support for a plebiscite. This
was partly a reaction to the creation of Pakistan, which produced a
determination on the part of many Indians not to give up any more
territory. Equally important was the realization that a vote by mainly
Muslim Kashmir to secede from India and join Pakistan might seem
to confirm Jinnahs claim that South Asian Muslims formed a separate
nation from their Hindu compatriotsa claim that India had never
accepted. As a result, to this day Kashmir is divided between India
and Pakistan, each of which considers the other to be in illegal occupation of a portion of the state.
A thousand miles to the south, Hyderabad presented a reverse image
of Kashmir. There, a Hindu population was governed by a Muslim,
Nizam Osman Ali Khan, descended from the Mughal nobleman Nizam
ul-Mulk, who had established himself as ruler of much of the Deccan in
the eighteenth century. India would not accept the nizams desire for an
independent Hyderabad, and in September 1948 invaded the state to
force Osman Ali Khan to accede. This gave India overlordship over the
last holdout in what had been Indian India.
By the time of the conquest of Hyderabad, however, Patel had
moved beyond accession. Perhaps fearing that the popularity of many
princes and chiefs among their subjects threatened the political dominance of Congress, he set about ending monarchy in India. Between
1947 and 1949, the rulers were persuaded or compelled to renounce
their sovereignty in return for pensions, called privy purses, and a
guarantee of their royal titles and privileges. Most states were merged
into larger units parallel to the provinces of the former British India.
By now, India had lost the man who had led its struggle for freedom. After independence, communal hostility exploded into violence

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141

on both sides of the new Indo-Pakistani border. This was followed by

the largest transfer of population in the history of the world, as fearful
Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan while Muslims left India. Further violence occurred when Indians and Pakistanis attacked departing refugees. In the end, over 13 million people found new homes in India or
Pakistan, and nearly 1 million died. Mahatma Gandhi spoke out
against the carnage, particularly when the arrival of Hindu and Sikh
refugees in Delhi sparked attacks on Muslims. He tried to defuse
communal hostility, which he linked with his governments tardiness
in dividing British Indian assets with Pakistan. On January 30, 1948,
however, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu who resented his
attempts to accommodate Muslims.
Nehru appealed to Indians to heed the nonviolence preached
by their murdered leader. This, and a temporary ban on Hindu and
Muslim communal organizations, abated religious warfare. To
reassure those Muslims who wished to stay in India that they were
welcome, the government committed itself to what it called secularism. This did not mean the separation of religion and politics, but
rather guaranteed religious minorities the freedom to practice their
faiths, even at the cost of exempting them from the law. For example,
in the 1950s, new legislation regarding the rights of Indian women to
divorce or inherit was explicitly not extended to Muslim women,
who remained subject to Islamic law as interpreted by theologians.
The fundamental law of independent India is the constitution, officially the work of the constituent assembly but in fact largely drafted
by a small group of men including Nehru, Patel, and the Untouchable
leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. The constitution went into effect
with the establishment of the Republic of India on January 26, 1950.
Like the 1935 Government of India Act (on which it was based), it provides for a division of the powers of government between the federal
Center and independent Indias states (which included both the
old provinces of British India and what remained of Indian India).
The creation of Pakistan had rendered irrelevant the arguments that
a weak federal government was essential to keep the Muslimmajority provinces within India. Instead, there was a consensus that
only a strong Center could safeguard independence and unity, maintain law and order, and carry out social and economic development.
The constitution therefore allocated the more lucrative and important
powers to the Center, as well as any powers not specifically named.
Moreover, the Center may create new states, abolish existing ones, or
dismiss a state government and temporarily assume control of the
state through what is called Presidents Rule. (Partly in order to

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The History of India

reconcile its inhabitants to their new Indian nationality, Kashmir was

given a special autonomous status that limited the Centers authority
within the state.)
There was a general feeling in India that dominion status was not
quite independence. The constitution accordingly removed the British
monarch from his position as formal head of state. He was replaced
with a president, elected by Central and state legislators. The duties
of the president of India, however, resemble those of the sovereign of
the United Kingdom more than those of the president of the United
States, especially in that he normally acts on the advice of the prime
minister and cabinet. Like his British counterpart, the Indian prime
minister derives his authority from a bicameral parliament, in this
case consisting of the Lok Sabha (the House of the People, elected
by popular vote) and the Rajya Sabha (the Council of States, most
of whose members are chosen by state legislatures).
The prime minister must have the support of a majority of the members of the Lok Sabha. If over half the members come from a single
party, its leader automatically becomes prime minister. If no party
commands a majority of Lok Sabha seats, as was the case in 1969
1971, 19791980, 19891994, and 19962014, a would-be prime minister must get support from other parties besides his own. If a prime
minister loses his majority, he must resign. Then, either someone else
assembles a majority and becomes prime minister or a Lok Sabha election is held.
The prime minister chooses ministers who oversee external affairs,
finance, and other government departments. He and his principal ministers form the cabinet, which meets periodically to set government policy.
All ministers, including the prime minister, must be members of either
the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha. The main function of parliament is,
however, to make laws (on the advice of the prime minister, the
president can also issue ordinances without parliamentary approval).
Like its American counterpart, the Supreme Court of India rules on the
constitutionality of laws, although most of its time is occupied in trying
cases and hearing appeals.
The president may call a Lok Sabha election at any time, so long as no
more than five years pass without one. A popular prime minister may
ask the president for an early election in the expectation that his party
will sweep the seats. India is divided into parliamentary constituencies,
each with one representative in the Lok Sabha. The constitution replaced
the restricted franchise of British times with universal adult suffrage.
Congress had long opposed separate electorates for Muslims and other
minorities, and they were now abolished. To ensure representation for

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disadvantaged groups, however, the constitution borrowed the scheme

introduced in 1935 following the agreement between Gandhi and
Ambedkar: in certain constituencies, all candidates for election must be
either Untouchables or Tribals. The Untouchable and Tribal communities are described in a schedule (appendix) to the constitution, from
which they are called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
The constitution explicitly bans discrimination against Untouchables. It names other social and economic reforms in its Directive Principles, measures that the government should undertake for the benefit
of poor and downtrodden groups. The Directive Principles are desirable but not mandatory, however, and in any case implementing them
may infringe on the fundamental rights (to liberty, property, and so
on) that the constitution guarantees. So that these rights do not hinder
the maintenance of law and order, the constitution allows the
president to suspend basic freedoms if he and the prime minister
believe that a national emergency has arisen.
Government in the states parallels that at the Center, with a governor
(appointed by the president on the advice of the prime minister) corresponding to the president, a chief minister replacing the provincial
prime ministers of the 1935 constitution, a legislative assembly, and a
High Court. (Until 1956, governors in much of what had been Indian
India were called rajpramukhs, and were chosen by former rulers rather
than by the president.) Before 1971, elections for state assemblies were
normally held simultaneously with Lok Sabha elections.
To strike a balance between diversity and the need for unity, independent India adopted a policy of pluralism, recognizing differences
rather than suppressing them. Compromise was integral to the process, as became evident in debates over language. Many Indians felt
that with independence, Hindi, the countrys most widely spoken
language, should replace the English of their former rulers in the
Central government, and the constitution accordingly declared Hindi
to be Indias official language. This meant that Hindi alone would be
used in parliament and in all jobs under the control of the Center, from
the bureaucracy to publicly owned enterprises.
The majority of Indians who spoke other languages objected that
this would give Hindi-speakers an unfair advantage, and they secured
a constitutional provision that English would be the working language of the Center until 1965. It was hoped that by then, knowledge
of Hindi would have spread to the point that English could be
dropped. This did not happen, however. In 1963, Parliament confirmed that Hindi would become the official language in 1965, but
added that English would be used alongside it for at least 10 years.

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Even this was too much for many non-Hindi speakers, who wanted
English to be kept in perpetuity. In 1966, a new language law therefore
enshrined the joint use of English and Hindi in parliament and provided that all dealings between the Center and non-Hindi-speaking
states would be conducted in English. Since then, the huge Bollywood
film industry has extended understanding of Hindi, but English
remains the principal language of business, the professions, the higher
bureaucracy, and elite schools and universities.
The constitution also recognized 13 regional tongues as national
languages, the official languages of the states where they are spoken.
Examinations for jobs administered by the Center are offered in
national languages, whose number has gradually been increased to
21. Indias state and linguistic boundaries did not originally coincide;
a given national language might be spoken in several states, or a single
state might be inhabited by speakers of several national languages.
Thus, in the old Madras state, Tamil was spoken in the south and
Telugu in the north. A campaign for a separate Telugu state culminated in the death of a Telugu leader during a hunger strike in 1952.
The resulting anger raised the specter of a Telugu insurrection, and
the Center quickly divided the state into Madras (for Tamils) and
Andhra (for Telugus). It was obvious that the process could not stop
there, and in 1956 state boundaries were redrawn in accordance with
language.
This form of pluralism virtually eliminated linguistic separatism in
India. The process was not always easy, particularly in Punjab. Sikhs
had always been a scattered minority there. In 19471948, however,
the flight of Muslims to Pakistan and the arrival of Sikh refugees from
the same country created a Sikh majority in the western part of Indias
share of Punjab. There were calls for the creation of a Sikh state, but
the Center rejected them on the grounds that Indias secularism ruled
out political boundaries based on religion. In the now mainly Sikh
west of Indian Punjab, Punjabi was the predominant language, while
in the east its place was taken by Hindi. Proponents of a Sikh state
accordingly pursued their objective on linguistic rather than overtly
religious grounds, by asking for the partition of Punjab into separate
Punjabi- and Hindi-speaking states. In 1966, the Center finally agreed
to a linguistic division of Punjab, largely in order to build support
among Sikhs for the Congress government. This created a new and
much-shrunken Punjab, in which most of the population spoke Punjabi
and a bare majority was Sikh, and the Hindi-speaking Haryana.
Meanwhile, a movement for independence had begun among the
Naga Tribals of Assam, who felt themselves victimized by the

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Assamese majority in their state. Naga extremists resorted to armed

rebellion, and throughout the 1950s an undeclared war raged between
Nagas and the Indian military. The Center opened negotiations with
more moderate Nagas, and the two sides eventually agreed that a separate Naga state would remove the need for independence. The state of
Nagaland accordingly came into being in 1963. In the 1970s and 1980s,
other Tribal groups in the northeast were given states of their own, and
in 2000 the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were created for the
Tribals of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. In almost all cases, the redrawing
of state boundaries showed that advocates of pluralism were correct in
their assumption that official recognition in the form of separate states
would pacify discontented linguistic and Tribal communities.

POLITICS IN THE 1950s

By 1949, Patel was winning the power struggle with Nehru.
He dominated the Congress partys politicians and its organization
of card-carrying members, and secured the election of supporters as
presidents both of India and of the party. Then, Patels sudden death in
1950 allowed Nehru and his followers to regroup. The party president
was forced to resign, and Nehru assumed control of the Congress
organization. In 1952, the first elections to parliament and the state
legislatures were held. Nehru played a large part in leading Congress
to victory, and this established his dominance over the partys political
wing. For the next 10 years, his supremacy was unassailable.
Jawaharlal Nehru was born in a North Indian Brahmin family in
1889. His father Motilal Nehru was a wealthy lawyer, anglicized in
habits and ideas, and a Moderate member of Congress. Jawaharlal
was educated in Britain, where he acquired a flawless command of
English, and followed his father into the law. His upbringing and
schooling left him a devotee of progress; convinced of the inherent
equality of the sexes, castes, and classes; a religious skeptic; and
unable to understand anyone who did not share his views.
Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru were among the many Indians who
turned against the British during and after World War I, and they
joined Gandhis satyagraha of 19201922. During the 1920s, both Nehrus served as president of Congress. Motilal wrote the Nehru Report,
and engineered Mahatma Gandhis return to active politics in 1928.
But it was Jawaharlal who became Gandhis close friend and political
heir, even though they disagreed about everything from religion to
violence. Until his death, his relationship with the Mahatma was one
of Nehrus greatest assets.

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Jawaharlal Nehru (left) with Mohandas Gandhi at a meeting of the Indian

National Congress in Mumbai, in 1946. (Library of Congress)

During Nehrus heyday in the 1950s, Congress was the strongest

party in India. Parliamentary and state elections were held in 1952,
1957, and 1962; Congress always won majorities in the Lok Sabha,
and usually in the state legislatures. This reinforced the trend that
went back to the 1930s, by which anyone desirous of power or influence joined the party. Many local and district committees, the lowest
levels of the party organization, had long been controlled by rich peasants, who during the 1950s also took over at the state level in much of
India. (The national leadership of the party, however, remained in the
hands of upper-caste urban professionals like Nehru. This is part of
the reason that the rich peasants were never able to get Congress to
pursue their interests exclusively.) These party bosses delivered votes
to would-be members of parliament and the state assemblies. In
return, politicians interceded to obtain favors for friends and dependents of the bossesfor example, preferential access to fertilizers or
protection from the police. The bosses thereby increased their own influence and the number of voters under their control. Whatever else
may be said of it, this gave Congress politicians genuine grassroots
support.

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Congresss voting base extended far beyond the party organization.

Candidates for parliament and state assemblies were selected on the basis
of popular appeal. They included princes running in their former kingdoms, and members of large castes that dominated the population of
their constituencies. After independence, Congress secured the electoral
support of religious minorities (especially Muslims) and many newly
enfranchised poor people, often members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
Local bosses frequently left these voters little choice but to cast their ballots
for Congress. Bosses and politicians alike also bought support with promises of help for the downtrodden, which often remained unfulfilled.
But Congress was never as strong as it looked. It owed its electoral
majorities to the fragmentation of its opponents, who in the 1950s ranged
across the political spectrum. The Communists, who supported a proSoviet foreign policy and a Stalinist crash program of heavy industrialization, were strongest in West Bengal and Kerala, where Congress had
never established a firm base. The Socialists were simply a faction of
Congress until 1948, when Patel drove them out as dangerous revolutionaries; their power centered in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and they
favored neutrality in the Cold War and economic development through
small-scale industries. On the right, the Swatantra (free) Party wanted
a free market economy and diplomatic alignment with the United States;
and the Jan Sangh, or Peoples Organization, was devoted to upholding
Hindu culture and the Hindi language, and opposed the Congress definition of secularism as special rights for non-Hindus. Swatantra was particularly strong in the old states of Indian India. The Jan Sangh centered
in the Hindi-speaking area of northern and central India; it was allied
with the paramilitary organization founded by Hedgewar in 1925, the
RSS, whose members drummed up support for the party at election time.
Congresss legislative majorities meant that Nehru could normally be
generous to politicians from opposition parties, whom he allowed full
participation in parliament and the state assemblies. (This was also true
of rank-and-file legislators from his own party: Nehru encouraged them
to take an active part in lawmaking rather than simply rubber-stamp the
decisions made by their leaders.) At the same time, the prime minister
was always watchful for non-Congressmen who posed a real threat;
he would either undermine them, not always in the most gentlemanly
fashion, or lure them into joining his party.

PLANNED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The cornerstone of Nehrus economic policy was governmentdirected development. The prime minister and his colleagues were in

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agreement on the need for a modern industrial economy in a country

where in 1947 over 80 percent of the population was rural. Industrialization would create the wealth to give Indians health care and education
and build a modern infrastructure; establish the economic selfsufficiency that would help protect the countrys political independence;
and end the reliance on trading raw materials for finished goods that
had led to the economic crises of the 1930s.
Many politicians, economists, businessmen, and industrialists agreed
that only the state could industrialize India. Even before independence,
in 1945, the colonial government of India had announced plans to take
over public utilities, railways, and other key industries if their resources
were inadequate, and to bring other important industries under its
supervision. In 1951, Nehrus administration followed this up with an
order for all industrial concerns to obtain government licenses, which
among other things specified the quality and limited the quantity of
production.
During World War II, limits had been placed on imports of consumer goods, mainly so that India-bound ships had room for materiel
needed for the war effort. After 1947, import restrictions were temporarily reimposed several times. Food and raw materials cost more in
India than elsewhere, and other countries could not afford Indian
exports. As a result, no foreign currency was coming into the country,
even as it flowed out to buy nonessential imports. The controls saved
foreign exchange for imports that were really needed. During the
1950s, the government instituted steep protective tariffs on imports,
and quantitative restrictions that limited or barred outright importation of over 10,000 consumer and agricultural items. At the same time,
the right of private citizens to own foreign currency was restricted.
All this was intended to force Indian industry to supply all the manufactured goods that the country needed, which would eventually render imports unnecessary. Indian industry was defined so that
foreign investment in manufacturing and retail within India was also
barred. At the same time, economists believed that if Indians could
neither buy consumer goods nor hold foreign currency, they would
by default invest their savings in the domestic economy.
The most distinctive feature of Nehruvian economic policy, however, was central planning. In 1944, the British had established a
Department of Planning and Development to discuss Indias postwar
economic policy. Its proposals ultimately gave rise to the National
Planning Commission, created in 1950 to advise the government on
questions of economic development. As prime minister, Nehru was
chairman of the Commission, which he allowed to make economic

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policy rather than simply advise. The Commission spelled out its
policy in its Five Year Plans, programs to foster economic growth over
a period of five years. The main objective of the First Plan, which ran
from 1951 to 1956, was to stabilize the economy, and it poured
government investment into agriculture, and transportation and communications; only 2.8 percent of investment went to large-scale industry and mining. In the early 1950s, good weather, the cultivation of
new land, more intensive use of labor, and improved irrigation
increased agricultural production. The result was that although
economic growth during the First Plan was not spectacular, it was
adequate.
This gave the Commission the heart to move on to industrialization,
the real objective, in the Second and Third Plans (19561966). These
gave a central role to government-owned factories. In 1956, an
Industrial Policy Resolution divided Indian industry into three parts.
In 17 strategic industries, including iron and steel production, and
most mining and mineral processing, all new operations would
belong to the government, which could nationalize competitors whenever it wished. Another 11 basic industries, such as machine tool
and fertilizer manufacturing, were to be in mixed public and private
ownership. Other industries would remain in private hands, subject
to the licensing laws. The Second and Third Plans set up state-owned
factories that produced everything from cars to chemicals, not to mention the industrial technology that was supposed to end Indias
dependence on imported machines.
By the late 1950s, the Nehruvian economy was well established, with
its tight regulation of industry, import controls, planning, and mixed
government and private ownership. The tariff barriers and quantitative
restrictions protected domestic manufacturing, and those who knew
how to work the licensing system could shut out rivals. Many businessmen found all this to their liking, and the output of heavy industry grew
rapidly: between 1951 and 1966, Indias industrial output doubled, and
the share of manufacturing in the national product grew from 10 percent
to 16 percent. India could now produce many goods that had to be
imported in 1947, and there is little doubt that none of this would have
happened without government direction and state-owned factories.
But the Second and Third Plans were less successful than anticipated.
Agriculture stagnated, so that total economic growth was modest.
All the while, the population was growing more rapidly than ever
before, keeping pace with the creation of industrial jobs.
Moreover, the government was unable to invest the sums called
for by the Plans. Much of the reason was the need for imported

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machinery, which could only be bought with foreign currency. At first,

India drew on the Sterling Balances, the debt that Britain had run up
during World War II, which it put toward imports from countries that
used the pound. But the Sterling Balances were spent in 1956, just as
another source of foreign exchange, Indian exports, was rapidly
declining due to rising prices and poor promotion. (For example, in
1955 India supplied 46 percent of the worlds peanut oil exports. The
figure shrank to just 1 percent only five years later.) This left Plan
expenditure dependent on budgetary deficits, higher taxation, and
increasinglyforeign aid.
Lack of resources was not the only problem faced by the
government-owned firms, which were often built in bad locations,
overstaffed, and subject to shortages of supplies, mechanical difficulties, and poor labor relations. Most made no profits and relied on
government subsidies to meet their expenses. Even private industry
was inefficient, shielded as it was from competition by import restrictions. Productivity was further hurt by the limitations of the industrial
labor force. The Indian constitution states the desirability of assuring
primary schooling to all children. Education, however, is a state
responsibility, and most states lacked either the funds or the will to
institute universal education. Instead, resources went to higher education for the few. This gave India a pool of well-trained intellectuals,
professionals, and technicians (now typically experts in computer
software). Most came from the existing educated elite, whose dominance was thus reinforced. The bulk of the population was unable to
obtain even the primary education required to take up skilled jobs or
further studies. As a result, Indian workers as a whole lag behind East
Asians, Southeast Asians, and Latin Americans in literacy and skills.
Perhaps the greatest failure of the Second and Third Plans was in
agriculture. Rural India was crucial to the Nehruvian economy: the
peasants, who formed the majority of the countrys population, were
supposed to be the principal buyers of Indian industrial products;
the taxpayers who would help finance the Plans, and (with their savings) the investors in private industry. They would also feed the country so that foreign currency would not have to go toward imported
food. All this assumed a strong agricultural economy, something India
did not have. Population growth outstripped food production, and
from 1957, grain had to be imported in large quantities. Most peasants
had no money for buying anything beyond necessities or paying taxes,
let alone investing.
For many years, Congress had blamed this poverty on zamindars
and other rural aristocrats who collected rent from the peasants and

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forwarded land revenue to the government. In the 1950s, state laws

abolished such intermediaries, so that the only payments required
of cultivators were their taxes to the government. Other than eliminating the landlord class, however, this had little effect. Most rural
Indians held either no land at all or farms so small that they could
not even feed themselves, let alone produce a surplus (in the 1950s,
three quarters of landholdings measured less than five acres). To make
ends meet, they often rented additional land from rich peasants or
from former landlords who had set themselves up as gentleman farmers. Moreover, zamindari abolition had no effect on the millions of
landless laborers who worked the fields of their wealthier neighbors.
The First Five Year Plan attacked these problems by calling for peasants with under five acres of land to merge their plots into cooperative
farms. These would be jointly worked by all the smallholders and
laborers of the village, and would be large enough to qualify for the
subsidized water, fertilizers, and machinery that the Plan provided
for farmers with larger holdings. This was ineffective, as most peasants had no desire to pool their resources with neighbors whom they
knew only as rivals in the competition for scant resources. The Second
Plan did little for agriculture beyond urging the states (which are
responsible for agriculture under the constitution) to limit the amount
of land one person could own; the excess was to be confiscated and
given to laborers and smallholders. This was a direct attack on the
wealth of the rich peasants who were Congress stalwarts in the
countryside, and most of the time they ensured that land reform did
not hurt them. In the early 1970s, 39 percent of Indias land was
controlled by 6 percent of its households.
The Third Plan all but gave up on state-driven agricultural development. It advocated private investment in fertilizers and irrigation, but
beyond that, it left it for the wealth that would supposedly be generated by industrialization to trickle down to the peasantry. Rural India
remained poor and was unable to play the part assigned to it in the
Nehruvian economy.

FOREIGN POLICY
Nehru and Jinnah hoped for friendship between India and Pakistan,
but the population transfers and violence of 19471948, and the war
over Kashmir, guaranteed a rocky relationship. Pakistan is central to
Indias foreign policy, but has never monopolized it. During the
1950s, Nehrus international travels made him one of the worlds
best-known statesmen. His foreign policy centered on nonalignment,

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or neutrality in the Cold War between the worlds two superpowers,

the United States and the Soviet Union. He urged other countries to
follow his example, which he promised would make the world a more
peaceful place. He also believed that nonalignment would give India
the freedom to devote its resources to development rather than to
defense. Certainly it made possible friendly relations with both superpowers, and the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective
allies were generous with their aid to India.
Associated with nonalignment was decolonization, ending European rule in Asia and Africa. Nehru tried to recruit newly independent countries to his nonaligned movement, and to join him in
working for development. Peaceful decolonization was the ideal, as
when Nehru persuaded France to give him what remained of its holdings in India. This did not always work, though. Portugal refused to
cede Goa and other Indian territories that had been under its rule since
the sixteenth century. Nehru finally had enough; in 1961 his army
invaded the Portuguese settlements, and after some loss of life, incorporated them in India.

THE END OF THE NEHRU AGE

Nehru assumed that once he and the Planning Commission had
made policies, they would be implemented, and the modern India of
his dreams would swiftly come into being. The problem was that for
implementation, he had to rely on the bureaucracy, and Congresss
state and local leaders. Before 1947, Nehru had advocated thoroughly
reforming the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and the rest of the civil service, to root out the conservatism that was natural in a body whose
purpose was to maintain stability in British-ruled India.
The aftermath of independence, however, ruled out reforms, which
would have antagonized the experienced bureaucrats whom the
government needed to oversee the myriad problems that arose from
dealing with refugees, communal violence, the merger of Indian India,
and development. The ICS was renamed the Indian Administrative
Service, or IAS, and most of its British members retired. But the IAS
recruited its officers with the same competitive examinations that the
ICS had used, and drew on the same segment of English-educated
Indians. Bureaucrats in New Delhi and the state capitals were often
halfhearted in implementing measures dictated by politicians. District
collectors, normally from the IAS, kept the authoritarian powers that
they had held under the British, and rarely thought it necessary or
desirable to enforce reforms that would disturb the people under their

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control. Perhaps significantly, one change that did take place in local
administration was an increase in the power of District Superintendents
of Police, who became almost partners of the collectors. A DSP was even
less likely than an IAS officer to want to shake up rural society.
The rich peasants among Congress politicians and bosses might
eagerly cooperate in the abolition of zamindari rights, which eliminated their principal rivals in the countryside, just as urban professionals supported new university programs for their children. But
few Congress leaders were willing to work toward the socialistic society that Nehru wanted, as this would inevitably erode their own
standing. Their ability to obstruct change they opposed was highlighted in 1959. Two years earlier, a Communist government had been
elected to power in the state of Kerala. It launched reforms in land
ownership and education, which was a direct attack on the interests
of local Congress strongmen. The latter started an agitation against
the Communists. Nehru was very reluctant to use the Centers powers
to interfere in state politics, but the Kerala Congress got the support of
party bosses in other states. They eventually forced Nehru to dismiss
the Communist government, impose Presidents Rule, and ensure that
Congress won the ensuing election to the Kerala legislature. This was
a violation of Nehrus federalist principles, as well as flagrant misuse
of a constitutional power that had been designed to cope with instability or unrest. It inaugurated a trend that lasted until the 1990s, with the
Center using Presidents Rule to remove state governments that it
disliked.
The results of obstructionism can also be seen in the fate of a reform to
which Nehru attached great importance, raising the status of women
and members of Scheduled Castes or SCs (the former Untouchables).
True, women were admitted on the same terms as men to all public services. In 19551956 laws enhanced the rights of Hindu women in marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption, and in 1961 it was made
illegal to demand dowry from a bride. The constitution banned discrimination against SCs and guaranteed them places in legislatures,
government jobs, and universities. In 1955, Parliament passed a law to
punish violations of the ban, and SC ministers sat in the Central and
state governments.
Some women and members of SCs did benefit, particularly if they
had the education to know their rights and the opportunity to assert
them. But families and village leaders often ignored the new laws,
which provided minimal penalties for violators even when state and
local officials were willing to enforce them. To this day, young girls
are married off by their families, dowry is collected, and women are

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deprived of inheritances. SCs often remain at the bottom of society.

Even the franchise did not help much: Until the 1980s, Congress
bosses were usually able to ensure that the former Untouchables voted
for their party.
In 19581959, Nehru tried to overcome obstructionism by introducing elected institutions at the level of government that had the closest
contact with the people. His panchayat (council) scheme called for
elected bodies to run villages, groups of villages, and districts. The
power to create panchayats lay with the states, most of which did set
up the councils. But they refused to give them the power or the resources to accomplish anything significant. Moreover, and not surprisingly, local elites often gained control of the panchayats, and used
them to secure their own interests.
The failure of many of Nehrus domestic policies only became
apparent after his death, which was hastened by a humiliation arising
from his foreign policy. Nehru believed that China was Indias natural
friend, as the two Asian giants shared a glorious cultural heritage and
(at least after Mao Zedongs breach with the Soviet Union) nonalignment. This, and a natural unwillingness to risk war unless India came
under attack, led Nehru to acquiesce in the Chinese occupation of
Tibet in 1950. When the Chinese crushed the Tibetan revolt of 1959,
Nehru granted refuge to the Dalai Lama, but refused to criticize
Chinas policy.
For many years, China had claimed territory in both northeastern
and northwestern India. The late 1950s saw border skirmishes and
unsuccessful talks between the two neighbors, but Nehru refused to
heed suggestions that India was in serious danger. Then, without
warning, Chinese forces invaded the disputed regions in October 1962,
and routed the unprepared Indian army. After a month of fighting,
China announced a cease-fire, but it has never left the conquered
areas.
Nehru realized that he had erred by failing to recognize either the
intense nationalism of Maos government, which wanted to secure
every square inch of land that it considered to be rightfully Chinese,
or Chinas desire to prove its military strength to its former Soviet ally.
The immediate effect of the war was a massive increase in Indias
defense spending, which ate up 40 percent of the budget in 1963
1964 at the cost of deep cuts to development expenditure. Nehru did
not renounce nonalignment. During the war, however, he asked the
United States for assistance (Washington agreed to send an aircraft
carrier to the Indian Ocean as a show of solidarity), and afterward he
sought military aid from the West.

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The war cost Nehru much of his popularity. Opposition politicians

stepped up their criticism, and the prime minister s support in
Congress, parliament, and the cabinet weakened. Nehru turned to a
group of state bosses who became known as the Syndicate and were
unimpeachably loyal to him. He began to put them in positions of
power in the cabinet and the party organization. At the same time,
several important politicians who had questioned Nehrus leadership
were sent to work at the lower levels of the party. But in January 1964,
Nehru suffered a stroke. Four months later, a second stroke killed him,
ending the 17-year tenure of independent Indias first prime minister.

9
Toward a New Dynasty
LAL BAHADUR SHASTRI
Nehru always refused to name a successor. He said that if he died in
office, it would be up to the Congress members of parliament to
choose a new party leader who (provided Congress retained its majority in the Lok Sabha) would automatically become prime minister.
Nehrus dominance prevented the emergence of even an unofficial
political heir, and throughout his tenure most of his principal colleagues were men of his generation who had been active in the nationalist movement. The strongest of these was Morarji Desai. He served
as finance minister until 1963, when he was one of the cabinet ministers who was banished to the lower levels of the party organization
by Nehru and the Syndicate.
At Nehrus death, Desai staked his claim to the succession.
His plans were, however, blocked by the Syndicate bosses, who knew
that the former finance minister would curb their power if he became
prime minister. Instead, they used their influence to secure the selection of a man who they knew would rule in cooperation with them.
This was Lal Bahadur Shastri, a quiet but respected member of
Nehrus cabinet, who became the second prime minister of independent

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India. One of the junior members of the new government was Nehrus
daughter, Indira Gandhi. (Indira, as she was known, was unrelated to
Mahatma Gandhi: her husband had been a Congress politician named
Feroze Gandhi.)
Shastris premiership was dominated by one issue: Indias relations
with Pakistan. In 19621963, the two neighbors held talks to try to
resolve their differences, of which Kashmir was the most important.
The talks ended in failure, however, and the president of Pakistan,
Mohammad Ayub Khan, realized that India planned to keep its portion of Kashmir forever. Then, at the end of 1963, an Islamic relic was
stolen from a mosque in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar. Angry Kashmiri Muslims protested the theft with demonstrations and riots that
had anti-Indian overtones. Ayub Khan took this as a sign of Kashmiri
support for annexation to Pakistan, which he decided to bring about
by military means. In early 1965, Pakistani troops crossed the undemarcated frontier with India in the Great Rann of Kutch, a desolate
area between Sindh and Gujarat. As Ayub Khan had hoped, Shastri
agreed to let an arbitrator determine the exact location of the border.
To the Pakistani leader, this meant that India was unwilling to fight.
That summer, infiltrators entered Indian Kashmir from Pakistan to
carry out acts of arson and sabotage, with which they hoped to incite
a popular uprising. In August, the Indian army attacked the infiltrators bases inside Pakistan, and on September 1, 1965, the second
Indo-Pakistani War broke out. The conflict lasted three weeks before
it ended with a ceasefire arranged by the United Nations. The
government of the Soviet Union invited Shastri and Ayub Khan to
meet at the Soviet city of Tashkent and work out a permanent settlement to replace the ceasefire. The meeting was successful. In January 1966, Shastri and Ayub Khan concluded an agreement that
provided for all troops to withdraw to the positions they had held
before the war, and committed the two leaders to working for friendly
relations between their countries. Shastri was worn out by the grueling conference, however, and died in Tashkent just a few hours after
signing the document.

THE RISE OF INDIRA GANDHI

The Congress members of parliament therefore had to choose a new
prime minister for the second time in less than two years. Morarji
Desai was again the leading candidate. The Syndicate, however,
arranged the election of Nehrus daughter Indira Gandhi, who the
party bosses thought would be too weak to resist their domination.

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159

This was a miscalculation on their part, as Indira had no intention of

letting anyone dominate her. For the next six years, Indira, Desai,
and the Syndicate struggled for control, until Indira outmaneuvered
her rivals and assumed more power than any previous leader in
Indian history.
Elections for the Lok Sabha and the state legislatures were due a
year after Indira became prime minister. By this time, the Indian
economy was flagging. The industrial expansion fueled by the Second
and Third Five Year Plans was coming to an end, partly because the
market for replacements for foreign imports could not grow indefinitely. Agriculture was hit by a bad harvest in 19651966 and a severe
drought in 19661967, resulting in famine in the north, scarcity elsewhere, and high prices everywhere. Heavy expenditure on defense
since the war with China had drained Indias foreign currency
reserves, which were further weakened by low sales of the countrys
few exports. Unable to buy much food abroad, India became increasingly dependent on food aid, but even that was never enough. Indira
and her cabinet could not agree on how to handle the economic difficulties. One sign of this was their failure to approve a successor to
the Third Five Year Plan, which ended in 1966; for the next three years,
the Indian economy was guided by a series of stopgap one-year plans.
Inevitably, and not without justification, the Congress party was
widely blamed for all this.
At the same time, some of Congresss long-standing weaknesses
now came to the surface. One problem was that the partys inclusiveness had become a liability. There were constant factional struggles
among bosses and politicians whose interests were incompatible,
and Congress was unwilling to enact any policies that might anger
some of its diverse supporters. New sections of the community were
becoming active in politics, alongside the upper castes and rich peasants who had hitherto dominated. The new entrants were typically
middle peasants, members of agricultural castes that ranked
between rural elites and the Scheduled Castes. Their place in society
was largely responsible for their political mobilization: they lacked
the jobs, education, and power enjoyed by the higher or Forward
castes, butunlike most members of the Scheduled Castesthey
had enough resources to be able to raise themselves to some degree.
They were commonly called Other Backward Classes, or OBCs.
These resources often included numbers, as in much of rural India
OBCs formed the largest segment of the population. In some states,
they used this advantage to take over control of Congress from the
Forward Castes. Where this was impossible, they often formed their

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own parties, which could count on much of the OBC population as a

vote bank. This created a distinctive feature of Indian state politics
between the 1960s and the 1990s: a two-party system that pitted a
national party, Congress, against a party that existed only in the state
in question, and drew its support from local OBCs.
The elections were held in February 1967. Congress retained its
majority in the Lok Sabha, but with only 54 percent of the seats compared to the 73 percent it had won in 1962. The party lost heavily in
the state legislatures, and non-Congress governmentsusually from
regional partiesassumed office in eight of the seventeen states that
India then comprised. In Punjab, which had had a Sikh majority in the
population since the separation of Haryana four months earlier, the
Sikhs Akali Dal formed a government for the first time. The Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progressive Federation), or DMK, took
power in Madras, and showed its Tamil regionalist credentials by
renaming the state Tamil Nadu, or Tamil-land. (The DMK and its offshoot the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, AIADMK,
named for a leader called C. N. Annadurai, have ruled Tamil Nadu ever
since.) The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had broken away
from the Communist Party of India in 1964, won control of the legislature of Kerala eight years after Nehru had dismissed the states
last Communist government. In Uttar Pradesh, the peasant leader
Chaudhuri Charan Singh took his followers out of Congress and became
chief minister. His new Bharatiya Kranti Dal (Indian Revolution Party)
joined with other North Indian peasant movements to form the Lok
Dal, the Peoples Party, which supported land ownership by peasants
in opposition to both landlords and cooperatives.
The Syndicate blamed Congresss loss of its monopoly of power on
the alienation of the partys conservatives, who looked to Morarji
Desai as their leader, and forced Indira to bring her rival back into
the cabinet as deputy prime minister and finance minister. New Delhi
then set about undermining the non-Congress state governments,
usually by persuading legislators to withdraw their support so that
the chief minister lost his majority and had to resign. In February
1968, for example, this happened to Charan Singh of Uttar Pradesh;
the Center put the state under Presidents Rule for a year, and then
orchestrated a new election that Congress won.
After the 1967 elections, Indira, the Syndicate, and Desai schemed
against one another to dominate the government. Then, in May 1969,
the president of India, Zakir Husain, died. Under the constitution,
his successor was to be chosen by the members of parliament and
the state legislatures. The Syndicate selected Congresss candidate,

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Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, a former president of the party. It was taken

for granted that with the backing of the bosses, he would win easily.
Indira, however, put up her own candidate, the countrys former vice
president, Varahagiri Venkata Giri, and made it clear that she regarded
the presidential election as a test of strength between herself and the
Syndicate. At the same time, she struck against her other rival when
she fired Desai as finance minister. He angrily quit his second cabinet
post, that of deputy prime minister, and aligned himself with the
Syndicate.
The presidential election was held in August. Giri won narrowly,
showing that Indira had more support among the countrys lawmakers than the Syndicate did. The Congress bosses responded by
announcing that Indira no longer belonged to their party. They
assumed that this would force the Congress members of the Lok
Sabha to withdraw their support from her, depriving her of her majority and compelling her to resign as prime minister. Indira, however,
called on her followers to accompany her out of the bosses Congress.
The party split in two, as the Congress executive, legislators, and ordinary members joined either Indiras Congress (R) (the R stood for
Requisitioned, as Indira had launched her faction with a written order
or requisition for her supporters to meet) or the Syndicates Congress
(O) (Organization, because the power of the bosses derived from their
control of the party organization).
Congress (R) had fewer than half the seats in the Lok Sabha. To keep
her majority and stay on as prime minister, Indira sought the support
of members of parliament from the regional and Communist parties.
Concessions in Punjab and Tamil Nadu secured the cooperation of
the Akali Dal and the DMK. The alliance with the Communists was
the natural sequel to leftist policies with which Indira had increasingly
come to identify herself. For example, she had ended the friendly
relationship that India and the United States enjoyed after the war
with China. During the agricultural crisis of 19651967, Washington
increased what was already substantial food aid to India. The administration of Lyndon Johnson, however, tied the aid to economic
reforms: New Delhi was forced to loosen its restrictions on foreign
investment and devalue the Indian rupee in relation to other currencies. The latter step made Indian exports more competitive, which
brought in foreign currency with which to buy food, but also priced
whatever goods India still imported out of reach of most consumers.
The Indian left criticized these concessions to foreign interests.
In July 1966, mainly to show that she was not a puppet of the United
States, Indira condemned American policy in Vietnam. Johnson

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responded by tightening the conditions under which India received

food aid. This drove Indira to adopt an openly anti-American tone.
During her struggle with the Syndicate, Indira made another gesture to the left. Some time earlier, Congress had voted to nationalize
Indias large private banks so that they could be compelled to serve
rural and small-business clients (many of whom were unable to open
bank accounts or obtain bank loans). The Syndicate had blocked parliamentary implementation of the policy, but in July 1969 Indira suddenly used her powers as prime minister to nationalize the banks.
This not only won her the support of the Communists in parliament,
who had long advocated such a step. It was also a play for the support
of OBCs and other poorer voters who had become disillusioned with
Congress: they could interpret nationalization as a sign that whatever
the Syndicate might do, the prime minister had their interests at heart.
Bank nationalization was a dramatic gesture, but one that carried
few risks: the only people whose interests it adversely affected were
the handful of bank owners, who were already more likely to support
the Swatantra Party or Congress (O) than Congress (R). The same was
true of Indiras policy toward the princes and chiefs who had once
governed Indian India. When they gave up their states in 19471949,
the former rulers were accorded pensions (called privy purses) and
certain royal privileges. These were enshrined in the Indian
constitution. In 1967, Congress voted to delete the constitutional provisions relating to privy purses and privileges, but (like bank nationalization) the decision was not implemented by parliament.
During the 1960s, Indian royalty became increasingly active in politics. In 1967, 24 princes were elected to the Lok Sabha, and others
entered state legislatures. Many of them belonged to Congress, but
not all did. For example, the maharaja of Patna led the Swatantra Party
to victory over Congress in Odisha, and became chief minister of his
state. When Indiras government attempted to give parliament the
power to amend the constitutions Fundamental Rights (mainly to
make it easier to nationalize property), the maharaja of Dhrangadhra,
a member of the Lok Sabha, floated a plan under which the Fundamental Rights could only be altered with the approval of the voters.
Indira now fixed her sights on the princes, both to punish such
political opponents as the maharajas of Patna and Dhrangadhra and
to demonstrate her leftist credentials. In 1970, she tried to secure a constitutional amendment abolishing the privy purses and privileges, but
was narrowly defeated in the Rajya Sabha. She then had the president
of India withdraw recognition of all former rulers, making them ineligible for their privy purses and privileges. In December 1970, in

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response to a petition from a group of princes including Dhrangadhra,

the Supreme Court ruled that the president had acted illegally.
Indira responded immediately, arranging a Lok Sabha election for
March 1971; for the first time since independence, it did not coincide
with state legislative elections. Over the previous four years, Indira
had traveled all over the country, meeting with the poor and hearing
their problems. This had made her the best-known politician in India.
During the election campaign, she pointed to her policies toward the
banks and the princes as early installments in her campaign to garibi
hatao (drive away poverty). All this paid off. When the voting took
place, Congress (O) and the other opposition parties lost heavily, while
Congress (R) won two thirds of the seats in the Lok Sabha. Indira was
firmly in control at the Center. She used her position to push through

Indira Gandhi broke through traditional gender boundaries and as prime minister
led India for 16 years. (Library of Congress)

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the constitutional amendments that had eluded her before the election, giving parliament the power to amend Fundamental Rights and
abolishing the rulers privy purses and privileges.
There remained only for Indira to secure her power in the states,
where legislative elections were scheduled for 1972. Pakistan inadvertently came to her aid. In December 1970, the first parliamentary election in Pakistani history was held. The Awami League (Common
Peoples League) won a majority in parliament, but the countrys
president (Ayub Khans successor Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan),
army, and political elites all opposed the formation of an Awami
government. This was because the Awami League was based in East
Pakistan (the former East Bengal), and its victory signaled a shift in
power from the Punjabis, Sindhis, and other West Pakistanis who
had dominated Pakistan since 1947. Mujibur Rahman, known as
Sheikh Mujib, the head of the Awami League, was willing to settle
for autonomy for East Pakistan rather than the prime ministership of
the whole country, but this too was rejected by Yahya Khan.
When the president tried to crush the Awami League by imposing
martial law on East Pakistan in March 1971, Sheikh Mujib declared
his province independent under the name of Bangladesh. A crackdown by Pakistani troops sent almost 10 million Bangladeshi refugees,
most of them Hindus, across the border into India. Ostensibly to make
it possible for the refugees to return home, but in reality to strike a
blow against Indias longtime rival Pakistan, Indira decided to support the struggle for an independent Bangladesh. She provided training and equipment to the Mukti Bahini, the Freedom Army, a force
of Bangladeshi guerrillas who fought the Pakistanis. An angry Yahya
Khan declared war on India in December 1971. The third war between
the two neighbors ended in a total victory for India; Pakistan recognized the independence of Bangladesh, and India was predominant
in the subcontinent.
Indira took advantage of the situation in Bangladesh to reorient her
foreign policy. Uncertain relations with India had led the United States
to turn to Pakistan as its principal ally in South Asia. This was reinforced in 1971 by the first stages of the normalization of relations
between Washington and Beijing, which was also friendly to Pakistan.
Throughout 1971, the United States therefore backed Yahya Khan
against Sheikh Mujibs demands. To fend off American criticism of
Indias support for the Mukti Bahini in the United Nations, and to
obtain the support of a superpower in the event of trouble with China,
Indira turned to the Soviets. In August 1971, India and the Soviet
Union signed a 20-year pact of peace, friendship, and cooperation.

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Indira had abandoned her fathers doctrine of nonalignment in all

but name, while strengthening her alliance with pro-Soviet Communists in her own country. In March 1972, the state elections were
held. Indiras defeat of Pakistan, and her wooing of leftist and poor
voters, won Congress (R) majorities in every legislature except that
of Tamil Nadu.

INDIRA IN POWER
Her battles with the Syndicate and Morarji Desai left Indira
obsessed with the danger of rivals inside her own party. She therefore
set about filling the political and organizational wings of Congress (R)
with people who were unquestionably loyal to her. This often meant
displacing bosses with independent power bases in favor of men
whose only asset was their obsequiousness to her. They could not
challenge her, as their careers depended on her favor. They were also
unlikely to block policies set out in New Delhi, because unlike their
predecessors, they could not afford to place their interests or those of
their dependents above the goodwill of the Center.
In the long run, however, this destroyed the grassroots base on
which Congress had drawn since the 1930s. In much of India, lowerlevel Congress committees disappeared altogether. Where they did
survive, their power was greatly reduced. Whereas the old-style
bosses had been local strongmen who could be counted on to bring
out voters in return for the partys patronage, the new ones were often
little more than representatives of a prime minister whose electoral
success depended on her personal popularity. This meant that
Congress (R) faced electoral disaster if anything happened to diminish
Indiras popularity, as there was no longer any effective party organization to prevent voters from turning to other parties.
Loyalty to Indira also became the route to seats in parliament
and the cabinet, which both consequently declined in importance.
The prime minister did not expect Congress backbenchers in the Lok
Sabha to take an active part in debates; their function was to vote in
favor of the governments policies. Indiras insistence on blind obedience from her ministers produced a decline in the quality of the members of the cabinet, until she could no longer rely on them for useful
advice. The prime minister therefore increasingly set policy in consultation with her secretariat, comprising senior bureaucrats chosen by
her, or with her circle of friends and relatives.
To ensure the loyalty of state governments, Indira personally chose
chief ministers and their cabinets. If she wanted to replace a chief

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minister, she first won over the support of enough state legislators for
her opponent to lose his majority, and then threw her new allies
behind her candidate. More and more often, the Center used dubious
pretexts to place a state under Presidents Rule in order to remove an
unwanted chief minister from office. All this eroded the constitutions
division of authority between the states and the Center. Opposition
parties increasingly demanded the restoration of a genuine federal
system in which the Center respected the autonomy of the states.
Indira denounced all such protests as subversive. This was a dangerous course to take, as it could easily turn frustrated exponents of
states rights into secessionists.
Indiras method of dominating Congress and the states was ultimately counterproductive. Dismissed bosses and chief ministers
turned against the prime minister, taking their power bases with them.
Denied access to power through Congress, trade unions, religious
organizations, caste societies, and other nonpolitical bodies became
increasingly vocal in pursuit of their interests. This created new foci
for the political aspirations of many Indians. In some states, Indiras
replacement of independent-minded upper-caste chief ministers with
loyal OBCs provoked caste conflict.
Perhaps paradoxically, Indira found that by centralizing power in
her own hands, she had reduced her ability to implement her own policies. In the early 1970s, she nationalized the coal and insurance industries, as further symbols of her war on poverty. Nationalization
accomplished little, but more importantly it met with no significant
opposition becauselike the attack on the princesit hurt so few people. The story was different with programs to provide the poor with
tools, skills, and temporary jobs, and to break up large landholdings
for the benefit of poor peasants. By undermining the Congress organization and the state governments, Indira had destroyed the only
bodies that could have made her plans work over the objections of rich
peasants and other vested interests, and she was no more successful at
driving away poverty than her father had been.
In economic policy, Indira abandoned Nehrus dream of transforming
India with central planning. After the plan holiday that followed the
end of the Third Five Year Plan in 1966, the Fourth and Fifth Plans
(19691979) focused on specific problems rather than grandiose visions.
For example, the population of India was now increasing so fast (there
were almost 600 million people) that it ate up any economic growth that
occurred. The Fifth Plan addressed this with heavy government spending on birth control. The plans of the 1970s also restored the emphasis
on agriculture that had characterized the First Plan.

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167

In part, this reflected developments that had taken place during

the previous decade. Scientists in Mexico and the Philippines had
developed new strains of wheat and rice that produced much more
grain per acre than traditional varieties. In 1965, one of their creations, a kind of wheat, was introduced on farms in Punjab, Haryana,
and western Uttar Pradesh. This region, Indias wheat belt, was
characterized by consolidated landholdings, mostly owned by rich
peasants who could afford to experiment with their crops. Over
the next four years, the government used a loan from the International Monetary Fund and aid from the United States to provide
the irrigation facilities and chemical fertilizers that the new highyield variety required. This launched Indias Green Revolution.
By 1970, the country grew five times as much wheat as it had 10 years
earlier. Thanks to continued population growth, however, this translated into only a slight increase in the amount of food available per
person. Nevertheless, it was enough that the country normally no
longer needed to import food, and in fact became a net agricultural
exporter.
In the early 1970s, however, the impact of the Green Revolution was
limited. The tiny holdings and poverty of most Indian peasants precluded the introduction of the new wheat on their farms, as did the
impossibility of year-round irrigation in many areas. Moreover, outside of the wheat belt, the principal crop in much of India was rice. It
was only in the 1980s that high-yield rices were found that suited the
Indian environment, and then they merely doubled rather than quintupled production. The Green Revolution made Punjab the richest
state in India, but most of the gains went to the successful wheat farmers. It also cemented the social and economic dominance of rich peasants in the northwest, while leaving the lives of poor and landless
cultivators unchanged. Nor was the new wealth as secure as it
seemed, as the high-yield crops proved far more susceptible to
drought and disease than ordinary Indian wheats and rices.
As the Green Revolution got underway, the spread of high-yield
wheat cultivation led to a decline in the production of other grains.
In 19721973, this contributed to a steep increase in the price of food,
and shortages in some areas. Then, after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973,
oil producers cut their exports sharply, and the cost of petroleumbased fuel skyrocketed. Indira was powerless to halt the inflation that
the agricultural and oil crises unleashed, and her popularity plummeted. In 1974, she tried to recover the lost ground by trying out the
nuclear explosives that Indian scientists had secretly developed.
Indira asserted that her country intended to use the technology for

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peaceful purposes, but the successful tests signaled that India was
capable of making nuclear weapons.
Despite the surge in Indian patriotism that followed the tests, discontent mounted, thanks not only to the economic situation but also
to the incompetence and corruption of many of Indiras handpicked
colleagues and chief ministers. One symptom was increasing industrial unrest, culminating in paralyzing strikes. Another was a surge
in the kind of extra-parliamentary protest movements that India had
known since the campaigns against the partition of Bengal. During
the 1950s, agitation had typically centered on linguistic and religious
questions and on the demands of peasants for higher agricultural
prices. By the 1960s, some protests had turned to violence, notably
the various revolutionary Communist terrorist cells that were collectively called Naxalites (from the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal,
where they first struck). The 1970s saw violent and nonviolent protests
against Indira and Congress state governments in many parts of India.
One of the countrys most unpopular state governments was that of
Bihar, where a nonviolent movement was launched to force the resignation of an inept administration. This set the stage for the return to
politics of Jayaprakash Narayan. J.P., as he was called, had risen to
prominence in 1921, during Gandhis first great satyagraha campaign.
A friend of Nehru, he was leader of the socialists within Congress in
the 1930s and 1940s, until he was driven out of the party by Sardar
Patel. In the 1950s, J.P. left politics to devote himself to improving the
lives of villagers. He was revered by many as a true successor to the
Mahatma. In March 1974, he accepted leadership of the agitation in
Bihar. Meanwhile, Indiras old rival Morarji Desai organized protests
against the Gujarat state government. Later in the year, J.P. and Desai
joined forces and established the Janata Morcha, or Peoples Front.
They increasingly directed their ire at Indira, whom they saw as the
ultimate cause of Indias problems.
On June 12, 1975, the state High Court of Uttar Pradesh rendered its
decision on a complaint that had been lodged after the 1971 election.
An opposition candidate in Indiras Lok Sabha constituency had
charged that the prime ministers use of government facilities during
her campaign gave her an unfair electoral advantage. The court
upheld the complaint, and imposed the penalty of barring Indira from
elective office for six years. The next day, the Janata Morcha won a
majority in elections for the Gujarat legislature, which had been dissolved as a result of Desais agitation. By now, J.P. and Desai had garnered support across the political spectrum, from the remnants of the
now-fragmented Socialist party; Charan Singh and his Bharatiya Lok

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Dal (Indian Peoples Party), formed in 1974 through the merger of the
Lok Dal with a radical socialist group; and the Swatantra Party. On
June 25, the two Janata Morcha leaders organized a huge rally in
New Delhi. They called for a nationwide satyagraha to force Indira
to abide by the courts ruling, and resign as prime minister.
The next day, on Indiras instructions, the president of India
declared a state of emergency. This activated the constitutional provisions that allowed the Center to suspend basic rights. Indiras main
opponents were immediately arrested, and the government took control of the press. According to Indira, the Emergency was necessitated
by the breakdown of order, by which she meant the strikes and protests of recent months. She attacked the economic causes of discontent
with a 20-point program that included controls on wage and price
increases (these quickly brought inflation under control) and further
promises of land reform. Indira also enforced workplace discipline,
compelling bureaucrats to work harder than many had ever done
before and banning strikes. Partly for these reasons, industrial production rose. This, and good harvests in 1975, seemed to support the
prime ministers claim that her policies would create the prosperity
that had hitherto eluded India.
Indira said that the Emergency would be withdrawn once order was
restored, but many of her actions suggested that she was creating a
permanent dictatorship. She had parliament erase the laws under
which the Uttar Pradesh court had convicted her, and oversaw constitutional amendments that further restricted rights and increased the
power of the prime minister. In 1976, she imposed Presidents Rule
on Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, the two states with non-Congress (R) governments, and postponed the Lok Sabha elections due the same year.
By now, Indira relied heavily for advice on the younger of her two
sons, Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay had little use for the democratic forms
that his grandfather had so carefully fostered, and transformed
Congress (R)s youth wing into a private army to turn against his
opponents. His rise to power was a sign of a growing belief in a
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. For all but two years since independence,
the country had been ruled by Nehru and Indira, and many now felt
that their family was uniquely qualified to govern. Sanjay was increasingly seen as Indiras political heir, in a way that his mother had never
been regarded during Nehrus lifetime.
Two of Indira and Sanjays policies were particularly hated. One
was slum clearance in Shah Jahans Mughal city of old Delhi. Thousands of poor people, mostly Muslims, saw their homes bulldozed
and were forcibly removed to new residences miles from their places

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of work. Their discontent spread among the Muslims of North India,

who had faithfully supported Congress since 1947. The other was
sterilization, which Sanjay saw as the only way of bringing population
growth under control. All male government employees with three
children or more were required to have vasectomies, and other men
were encouraged to undergo the operation. In some areas, local officials were given vasectomy quotas, which they inevitably met by forcibly sterilizing unwilling patients. A wave of fear swept the country,
especially among peasants.
As a result, anger against Indira grew rather than receded during
the Emergency. The prime minister was oblivious to all this, though,
as Sanjay and the rest of her circle carefully shielded her from knowledge of the publics resentment. In January 1977, convinced that she
was as popular as she had been five years earlier in the wake of the
Bangladesh war, Indira ended the Emergency, freed political prisoners, and scheduled a Lok Sabha election for March. All the principal
non-Congress parties except the Communists joined with J.P. and
Desais Janata Morcha in an alliance called the Janata Party, Peoples
Party. For many voters, the sole issue was the experiences of the
Emergency.
Just before polling day, the Janata Party acquired a new ally when
Jagjivan Ram, the countrys most important Scheduled Caste leader,
resigned from Indiras cabinet to support J.P. and Desai. Many Scheduled Caste voters followed his lead. When the votes were counted,
Janata and its allies held two thirds of the seats in the Lok Sabha,
and Congress (R) was reduced to little more than a quarter. The new
party also won many of the state legislative elections that followed in
19771978.

THE JANATA GOVERNMENT

The Janata government started off badly, with a disagreement
between Jagjivan Ram and Morarji Desai as to which of them should
be prime minister. With J.P.s support, the 81-one-year-old Desai
won, but he had to share power with the Bharatiya Lok Dals Chaudhuri Charan Singh, aged 74, who assumed Sardar Patels old posts of
deputy prime minister and home minister. The new parliament
rescinded the more authoritarian of Indiras constitutional amendments, and passed laws to make a future declaration of Emergency
more difficult. Desai left foreign policy in the hands of Atal Bihari
Vajpayee of the Jan Sangh, who dropped Indiras tilt toward the
Soviet Union in favor of genuine nonalignment. Charan Singh

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presided over an economic policy that centered on peasant agriculture

and small-scale industry, and underlay the Sixth Five Year Plan from
1980 to 1985.
Some aspects of the Emergency had found favor with many Indians.
Among these were the taming of inflation and the ban on strikes. The
Janata governments lifting of repression led to a recrudescence of
both, however, and the economy slowed down sharply. Perhaps inevitably, the heterogeneity of Desais coalition frequently paralyzed the
government. If the cabinet went so far as to implement policies, it
would almost certainly lose the support of one or another of its members. At the same time, most ministers were as concerned with preserving the identities of their original parties as they were with
governing India. Whatever the intentions of J.P. and Desai, it was clear
that many members regarded the Janata Party as a temporary alliance,
which they could leave just as easily as they had joined it.
Relations between Desai and Charan Singh were especially acrimonious. After one bad quarrel, Desai dismissed his deputy prime minister, losing Janata the support of the Bharatiya Lok Dal. In July 1979, the
coalitions left grew concerned that Desai was leaning toward
the Hindu nationalists of the Jan Sangh. First the socialists and then
the followers of J.P. withdrew their support, depriving the prime minister of his majority in the Lok Sabha. On July 19, Desai resigned. He
was succeeded by Charan Singh, who was unable to cobble together
a majority and in turn resigned after only three weeks. It was clear that
the Lok Sabha was so divided that no one could get the support of a
majority of its members. The president saw no alternative but to hold
a new election. Charan Singh remained as caretaker prime minister till
the voting took place in January 1980.
In 1977, many leaders of Congress (R) had turned against Indira,
whom they blamed for the victory of the Janata Party. Indira and her
followers responded by forming a new party, called Congress (I). The
I stood for Indira, making it clear that this was even more her
vehicle than Congress (R) had been. Between then and 1980, Indira
rebuilt her power base. She was particularly eager to win back the
support of Muslims and Scheduled Castes, whose desertion had been
crucial to her loss in 1977. Two and a half years of Janata rule had persuaded many disadvantaged groups that whatever her faults, Indira
was better than any alternative. The lethargy of Desais government
contrasted sharply with Indiras decisiveness. During the run-up to
the 1980 election, it became increasingly likely that Indira would
win. Her support grew as people scrambled to get on the winning
side. By the time the voting took place, the Janata Party was on the

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verge of breaking up into its component parts. Congress (I) won two
thirds of the seats in the Lok Sabha, and Indira Gandhi was once again
prime minister of India.

THE DYNASTY
Soon after Indiras return to power, the pervasiveness of belief in the
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was illustrated when her son Sanjay, her
right-hand man and heir apparent, was killed in a flying accident.
Indira immediately turned to her other son, Rajiv. He was an airline
pilot who had shown no interest in politics, but he was quickly
brought into parliament and installed as the new heir. His sole qualification was that he was Indiras son. The 1980s and 1990s saw the
spread of this kind of dynasticism to some states, as the offices of chief
minister or party leader became the patrimony of particular families.
More even than during the 1970s, in the 1980s the Center devoted
considerable effort to maintaining the power of the dynasty. The
Congress (I) organization, parliament, and the cabinet often seemed
to have little purpose beyond glorifying Indira and Rajiv. The erosion
of federalism continued, as Indira used intrigue and Presidents Rule
to make and unmake chief ministers. In 1984, she had her governor
of Andhra Pradesh announce that the states chief minister had lost
his legislative majority and dismiss him, without even allowing a
meeting of lawmakers to prove the claim. A handpicked successor
was installed, but the governor ensured that the legislature did not
convene until the new chief minister had won over enough members
to have a majority. This practice thereafter became common.
State governors were one agency that Indira and Rajiv used as instruments of Congress (I). Others were the bureaucracy and the police. In
1980, Indira purged the administration of senior civil servants who had
been appointed by the Janata government. The bureaucracy was increasingly politicized as Indira and her chief ministers made loyalty the test
for appointments and promotions. Bureaucrats and politicians became
interdependent, with administrators upholding the interests of their
political masters in return for rewards. These rewards often included
the right to corruption. During the 1980s, bureaucrats at all levels (except
perhaps the IAS) demanded bribes from the public simply for carrying
out their assigned duties. This might be a way of recovering their own
losses, as government ministers sometimes exacted payments in
exchange for plum bureaucratic appointments.
Indira continued the practice that she had begun in the 1970s of
relying on the upper bureaucracy rather than the cabinet for advice

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173

in policymaking. This allowed administrators to institute measures

that furthered their interests, or at least to ensure that the government
did nothing to harm them. All the while, the civil service was undergoing the rapid expansion that had begun with the creation of the
Nehruvian economy: between 1953 and 1988, the number of bureaucrats rose from 4 million to 18.5 million. It has been suggested that
the burden of bureaucrats salaries was part of the reason the Indian
government was never able to invest adequately in development
projects.
The Center and the states also appointed senior police officers on
the basis of political loyalty, or in return for payments, rather than
for competence. This contributed to demoralization in the lower ranks
of the police, symptomized by increasing police brutality. The demoralization was worsened as criminals went into politics, particularly in
northern and western India. Drug lords and extortionists had the
wealth and power to coerce or buy votes, and Congress (I) was only
one of several political parties that welcomed such men into
parliament and state legislatures in return for their support. The criminals then expected to be shielded from the law. In some areas, bureaucrats and police cooperated with gangsters, demarcating interests and
refraining from causing any trouble to one another.
This fed rising political violence, as politicians used criminal allies
to intimidate or eliminate rivals. The pattern set by Sanjay Gandhis
Youth Congress during the Emergency became normal: most parties
now recruited toughs from gangs, slums, and universities and set
them against their enemies. (University students were susceptible to
recruitment because the proliferation of poorly funded regional institutions had created a pool of young people stuck in mediocre schools,
living in abysmal hostels or dormitories, with few prospects after
graduation.) Peaceful extra-parliamentary politics gave way to violent
demonstrations to secure political ends. More and more politicians
needed bodyguards, and even those who were not in danger
demanded protection as a status symbol. The unreliability of the
police, and the scale of the violence, led the Center to rely on troops
to control political disturbances.
The destruction of the federal system and the spread of political violence were symptoms of the weakness of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty
rather than its strength. The Center and states often virtually lost control of local administration. Criminals and corrupt bureaucrats or
police officers simply ignored the government as they pursued their
own interests. After 1977, non-Congress state administrations had
revived the panchayat system of local councils to secure some power

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for themselves even if Congress returned to power. As in the 1950s

and 1960s, the panchayats were often dominated by rural elites.

PUNJAB
Indiras meddling in state politics and her toleration of political violence led to her death at the hands of two Sikh bodyguards. Although
a small community, the Sikhs formed a prominent one. Sikh farmers
were among the principal beneficiaries of the Green Revolution. In
the 1960s, many Sikhs migrated from Punjab to other parts of India,
where they were heavily represented in fields ranging from the army
officer corps to the taxi service in Delhi.
After the separation of Haryana in 1966, Punjab had a population
that was three fifths Sikh. Many Sikhs were still not satisfied, however.
They wanted their Punjab to enjoy the same autonomy as Indias
only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir. They were angry over what they
believed to be unfairness in the division of both irrigation river waters
and territory between Punjab and Haryana. The symbol of Sikh disgruntlement was Chandigarh, a city designed by the modernist architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s to serve as the capital of Punjab. In 1966,
Punjab and Haryana each claimed Chandigarh. The Center compromised by making the city the capital of both new states. It was placed
on the border between them but did not belong to either, being administered directly by New Delhi. Most Sikhs, however, wanted exclusive
possession of Chandigarh for Punjab.
The main political parties in Punjab were Congress and the Sikhs
Shiromani Akali Dal. After the split of Congress in 1969, Indira needed
the support of the Akali Dal to keep her majority in the Lok Sabha, and
she promised that Chandigarh would become part of Punjab in 1975.
But her election victory in 1971 eliminated the need to court other parties, and Indira ignored her promise. Thereafter, relations between
Indira and the Akali Dal deteriorated. In 1973, the Sikh party committed itself to the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, calling for an enlarged
and autonomous Sikh state; in 1975, it was prominent in opposing
the Emergency; in 1977, it demanded that the Center respect
federalism, and hand over Chandigarh. During the 1970s, many Sikhs
transferred their loyalty from Congress to the Akali Dal.
Not surprisingly, after she regained power in 1980, Indira dismissed
the Akali Dal government that had won the Punjab legislative election
in 1977. A fresh state election brought Congress (I) to power. Soon
afterward, the prime minister approved construction of a massive
new canal that would divert water from Punjab to Haryana. In 1982,

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Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, the leader of the Akali Dal, inaugurated a satyagraha to stop the canal project, and to force New Delhi
to accept the Anandpur Sahib Resolution.
To Indira, the solution was to wean the Sikhs away from the Akali
Dal. She thought she had a means of doing just that. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great majority of Sikhs came to
accept the reforms of Guru Gobind Singh, the creator of the Khalsa.
Among the few remaining non-Khalsa Sikhs were the Sant Nirankaris,
who had their own guru. There was considerable hostility between
Khalsa and Sant Nirankari Sikhs, each of whom considered the
other to be heretical. In 1977, a holy man named Sant Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale became head of the Damdami Taksal, an organization
dedicated to upholding the Khalsa as the only authentic embodiment
of Sikhism. The following year, the Sant Nirankaris met in the Sikh
holy city of Amritsar. Seeing this as an affront, Bhindranwales followers attacked the meeting with swords. Unfortunately, the Sant
Nirankaris had firearms and won the resulting battle.
This increased the enmity between the Khalsa and the Sant Nirankaris. In 1980, the Sant Nirankari guru was assassinated. This was followed by a wave of murders of Sant Nirankaris, almost certainly
instigated by Bhindranwale, whose disciples also attacked Punjab state
police, officials, and government buildings. By 1983, ordinary Hindu
Punjabis as well as Sant Nirankaris were being killed. Hindus in Punjab
and elsewhere took revenge by murdering innocent Sikhs. Violence
between Hindus and Sikhs became so common that it seemed almost
inevitable. Many took it for granted that the two faiths could not get
along, overlooking the fact that they had lived together peacefully for
centuries. (In the same way, in the 1990s, Hindu-Muslim violence on a
scale not seen for over 40 years convinced many that the two largest
religious communities of South Asia were natural enemies.)
Bhindranwale wanted a Punjab that was inhabited exclusively by
Khalsa Sikhs. It is not clear just what place he saw for his purified Punjab in relation to India. He certainly supported the autonomy
demanded in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, but many believed that
his real goal was Khalistan, the land of the Khalsa or Pure Land,
an independent Sikh state. The idea of Khalistan had been discussed
throughout the 1970s. It initially found little support, but during the
1980s it attracted increasing numbers of Sikhs who became convinced
that their communitys interests would be ignored as long as Punjab
remained part of India.
However, Indira saw Bhindranwale as an instrument in the struggle
to uphold her dynasty. She both prohibited action against him and

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refused to make even token concessions to Longowals demands.

This was intended to undermine the Akali Dal, by suggesting to Sikhs
thathowever questionable his methodsBhindranwale fought for
their interests far more effectively than Longowal. The prime minister
also hoped to use Bhindranwale to control the Congress (I) state
government in Punjab: chronic violence would ensure that the chief
minister remained dependent on the Center. It would also foster disagreements over strategy within his government, creating factions
that Indira could play off against each other. In October 1983, however,
a bloody massacre of Hindus by Bhindranwales followers generated
enough political pressure that Indira had to do something: blaming
the chief minister of Punjab for allowing the killings, she put the state
under Presidents Rule.
This did not stop either the slaughter of Hindus or tit-for-tat murders of Sikhs. By December 1983, Indira realized that the situation in
Punjab was spiraling out of control, and she ordered Bhindranwales
arrest. The holy man, however, evaded capture by moving into the
Akal Takht, the headquarters of the Sikh priesthood in the Golden
Temple complex at Amritsar, from where he apparently orchestrated
attacks by militants in Punjab and beyond.
A Lok Sabha election was due in 1985. For Indira, this transformed
the violence in Punjab into a political liability: if the Hindus, who formed
four fifths of Indias population, felt that a Congress (I) government
could not protect them from Sikh attacks, they might give their votes to
other parties, particularly the newly founded Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The prime minister accordingly now decided to crush
Bhindranwale. On June 4, 1984, the Indian army attacked the Golden
Temple complex. Three days of hard fighting ended with the Akal Takht
in ruins and almost 6,000 dead. Bhindranwale had perished. So had
priests and pilgrims in the Golden Temple complex, and villagers who
had tried to go to Amritsar to defend their holy places.
Even Sikhs who opposed Bhindranwale and Khalistan were outraged by the desecration of the center of their religion. Their protests
were broken up by the police, and many demonstrators were killed.
The discontent extended to Sikh soldiers. Many deserted; others mutinied, and were often shot. Sikh anger focused on Indira, but the prime
minister insisted that only a small faction of unpatriotic Sikhs opposed
her. Whether out of bravery or out of navete, she showed her faith in
Indias Sikhs by using them as guards. Her trust was misplaced.
On October 31, 1984, her bodyguards shot her dead. Sikhs around the
world celebrated. In several Indian cities, particularly Delhi, Hindus
responded by massacring thousands of Sikhs, indiscriminately blaming

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177

them for the assassination. The police stood by, and in some neighborhoods, Congress (I) leaders directed the killings.
The Congress (I) members of parliament immediately chose Rajiv
Gandhi to be party leader and prime minister. Rajiv had been in politics
for only four years, but as Indiras son, he was taken to be the best
person to rule India. It was also correctly assumed that his lineage
would draw votes to his party. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty had become
a reality.

10
India Transformed
RAJIV
Soon after assuming the premiership of India, Rajiv Gandhi called a
Lok Sabha election for December 1984. He campaigned on the
Nehru-Gandhi dynastic record and his mothers memory. He urged
all patriotic Indians to vote for him as the only person who could protect the country against what he claimed were its enemies, both external (the United States and Pakistan) and internal (the Sikhs). Ironically
for a grandson of the secularist Nehru, he stressed his commitment to
defending Hindus and Hinduism. All this paid off. Congress (I) did
better than ever before or than it has done since, garnering just under
half of all the votes cast, and 77 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha.
India had high expectations of the young and handsome Rajiv. For a
time, it looked as if the new prime minister was replacing the
government-directed economy with the free market, as he loosened
licensing laws, import controls, and restrictions on joint business ventures between Indians and foreigners. His Seventh Five Year Plan
(19851990) made the private sector responsible for funding economic
development. Then, Rajiv lost interest in economic reform. It has been
suggested that he wanted nothing more than to open India to the

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high-technology imports (such as computers or video cassette recorders) that were desired by the urban middle class; Rajiv claimed that
these goods would help fight poverty, but he never properly explained
how. He probably could have done little more under any circumstances: too many people benefited from the planned economy, from
the bureaucrats who oversaw it to the politicians who sold licenses.
Nevertheless, the Indian economy grew rapidly throughout the
1980s. The reasons are uncertain, although they probably had little to
do with Rajivs reforms. It has been suggested that Nehruvian economics were finally paying off: investment in roads, electricity, and
so on had created a modern infrastructure that, although by no means
complete, made growth inevitable. Others point to the huge middle
class that had come into being since the 1950s, again partly as a result
of Nehrus policies; educated, well-off professionals, businessmen,
civil servants, and service employees wanted consumer goods, and
had the money to buy them. Or perhaps it was heavy government
spending that stimulated the economy. Whatever the cause, from the
late 1980s this internally driven economic growth was supplemented
by a boom in Indian exports of everything from trucks to chemicals,
which were sold in East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North
America. Meanwhile, the proportion of the population unable to
afford basic needs declined steadily between the mid-1970s and the
late 1980s. This was partly because the Green Revolution lowered
the cost of food. Another reason was the growth of alternative employment for the rural poor, who could work in construction or services
in the expanding cities, or as laborers and servants in the Persian
Gulf states.
Like Indira, Rajiv dominated a weak cabinet. For advice, he relied
on his cronies, many of them old friends from his exclusive boarding school. He continued his mothers policy of overriding federalism,
dismissing chief ministers and imposing Presidents Rule to make
sure that state governments were loyal to him. His interventions in
state politics could be constructive, though. In the 1960s, the Mizo
Tribals rebelled against the state government of Assam, which they
felt had ignored them during a famine. In 1972, Indira pacified the
Mizo moderates by forming their homeland into the Union Territory
of Mizoram; as a territory, it had its own legislature and chief minister,
but was more tightly controlled by the Center than states were. The
hardliners continued the rebellion. In 1986, however, Rajiv met the
leader of the rebels, and bought him off by making him chief minister
in place of the Congress (I) incumbent. The following year, Mizoram
was made a full-fledged state.

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181

Just as Rajiv was ending the revolt in Mizoram, he was helping

to provoke one in Kashmir. From the 1930s, the most important politician in Kashmir was Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who led a party
called the National Conference. The Sheikh died in 1982, when his son
Farooq Abdullah succeeded him as head of the National Conference
and chief minister. Farooq ran afoul of Indira, who replaced him with
one of his rivals in the National Conference. The new chief minister
was dismissed in 1986. Soon afterward, Rajiv reinstated Farooq, and
ordered elections for the Kashmir legislature for March 1987. Knowing
that their parties had become unpopular in the state, Rajiv and Farooq
rigged the voting so that Congress (I) and the National Conference
won 66 of the 76 legislative seats. Such blatant electoral fraud provoked
great anger, especially among educated young Kashmiri Muslims. They
were already suffering from high unemployment and a lack of opportunities, and saw the election as the last straw. Many traced all their problems to the fact that Kashmir was part of India, and now raised calls for
independence or merger with Pakistan.
Rajivs principal concern was, of course, Punjab. He started out
well, meeting the Akali Dal leader Longowal and promising to compensate the families of victims of the Delhi massacres, to reinstate Sikh
soldiers who had been dismissed after the attack at Amritsar, to give
Chandigarh to Punjab, and to review the division of water between
Punjab and Haryana. The promises did not stop the violence, however. Its victims included Longowal, who was assassinated by hardline Sikhs soon after his accord with Rajiv. Leadership of the Akali
Dal passed to Surjit Singh Barnala, who became chief minister of
Punjab when Presidents Rule ended in September 1985.
The massacres had left many Sikhs unable to trust Hindus,
Congress (I), or the Center. Their attitude hardened when Rajiv did
not honor his undertakings. Barnala was discredited by his association
with the prime minister; his legislative majority collapsed; and Punjab
was again put under Presidents Rule. More and more Sikhs were
drawn to the idea of an independent Khalistan. All the while, Punjab
was suffering from economic problems. Agricultural profits declined
with the end of the growth generated by the Green Revolution, and
political unrest helped raise unemployment. Discontented young
men were drawn into militant groups, which called their terrorist
strikes a war of independence for Khalistan. The police and army
retaliated with unprovoked attacks on Sikh villagers. During 1987,
Punjab slipped into a full-scale civil war.
Probably with justification, India accused Pakistan of helping the
militants in Punjab. Pakistan also indirectly affected Indias relations

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with the superpowers. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to

bolster Communist rule there. They were met by Afghan guerrillas,
who obtained the backing of the United States. Washington funneled
its support through Pakistan, which from 1981 received heavy American
economic aid and military assistance. A worried Indira turned to
Moscow, which agreed to give India the same volume of aid as Pakistan
received from the United States. In return, Indira and then Rajiv
refrained from criticizing the Afghan war, and in the 1980s, India was
even closer to the Soviet Union than it had been in the 1970s.
India was not a superpower, but Rajiv saw it as a regional power in
South Asia. In 1987, in keeping with this vision, he intervened in the
war between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, who wanted self-rule for the Tamilspeaking parts of the island. Rajiv brokered an agreement between
the two sides, and then sent Indian troops to Sri Lanka to oversee its
implementation. The LTTE refused to keep their promise to disarm,
however; fighting resumed, and the Indian peacekeepers soon found
themselves at war with the Tamil rebels. They suffered heavy losses
until their withdrawal in 1991.

THE ELECTION OF 1989

By the late 1980s, the patent failure of Rajivs policy in Punjab and
Sri Lanka was eating away at his popularity. So was the arrogance of
many of his cronies, who were widely suspected of using their friendship with the prime minister for personal gain. One of the members of
Rajivs team with a reputation for honesty was Vishwanath Pratap
Singh, called V.P. V.P. was a Rajput landlord from Uttar Pradesh, who
served as minister of finance and then of defense. In 1987, he found
indications that some of Rajivs cronies had received money from
Bofors, a Swedish armaments manufacturer, in return for a lucrative
contract to supply the Indian army with artillery. The prime ministers
role in the Bofors scandal is still unclear, but at the very least he
shielded his friends from investigation. V.P. angrily resigned from
the cabinet. A few months later, Rajivs cronies orchestrated his expulsion from Congress (I).
V.P. was widely seen as a new J.P. Narayan, a crusader against a corrupt Congress government. He reestablished J.P. and Desais Janata
Morcha (Peoples Front) and with a Lok Sabha election due in 1989
pursued alliances with other parties. The most important of these
were two offshoots of the old Janata Party, which had broken up in
1980. One, which kept the Janata Party name, was led by Chandra

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183

Shekhar, a former member of Congress with leftist leanings. The other

was the Lok Dal, the resuscitated party of Chaudhuri Charan Singh
(who had died in 1987). At the end of 1988, V.P.s Janata Morcha, the
Janata Party, the Lok Dal, and various defectors from Congress (I)
united to form the Janata Dal (Peoples Party), under V.P.s leadership.
Other parties were also readying themselves for the election.
Regional parties had proliferated since the 1970s. Besides the National
Conference in Kashmir, the Akali Dal in Punjab, and the DMK and its
offshoot the AIADMK (All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam)
in Tamil Nadu, they included the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh, the Asom Gana Parishad (Assam Community Council) of
Assam, and the Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva or of Shivaji) of Maharashtra. These were devoted to upholding the language and culture of
their own states and the interests of their native-born inhabitants.
India also had a new national party in the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata
Party or Indian Peoples Party.
The BJP was founded in 1980 by people who had belonged to the
Jan Sangh until its merger into the Janata Party in 1977. The BJPs
Hindu nationalist principles are summed up by the word Hindutva,
or Hinduness. The partys goal is to transform India into a world
power, industrialized, and militarily strong. This requires national
unity, which according to the BJP can only come from Indias shared
Hindu culture. In the interests of unity, the party insists that the
minority of Indians who are not Hindus must accommodate themselves to that culture. This necessitates the abandonment of Congresss
version of secularism, which the BJP argues undermines India by
giving official recognition to the special interests of non-Hindus.
The BJP was particularly concerned over what it saw as pampering
of Muslims: their Aligarh Muslim University was subsidized by the
government; their state of Kashmir enjoyed special autonomy; they
were exempt from the family law that applied to other Indians. This
had recently been illustrated after a court awarded alimony to Shah
Bano, a divorced Muslim woman. Muslim theologians protested that
the award violated the teachings of Islam. To pacify them, Rajiv had
parliament reiterate that Muslim divorces were governed by Islamic
law, as interpreted by the theologians, who could thus ensure that
women like Shah Bano did not receive alimony.
The BJP has wrongly been called conservative or Hindu fundamentalist. The partys vision of a modern India is emphatically not
conservative; and the BJP upholds Hindu culture and symbols, but
not religious and social practices. For example, it rejects the traditional
caste system as a barrier to national unity.

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The party is associated with several like-minded groups in what is

called the Sangh Parivar, or Family of Organizations. The oldest is
the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925, which calls
itself a cultural organization. Then there are the Bajrang Dal, or Strong
Party, an armed force that ostensibly protects Hindus during communal disturbances; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (Indian Laborers
Organization), a federation of Hindu nationalist trade unions; and
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Council of Hindus).
From the late 1940s until the early 1980s, Hindutva found solid but
limited support. The creation of Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim violence, and
the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi helped discredit religious-based
nationalism in the eyes of many Indians. Rajivs tenure as prime minister, however, saw an explosion of support for the BJP, especially in the
urban middle class of the Hindi-speaking states of the north. The party
attracted people who disliked the corruption of Congress (I) and its fixation on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and of course Hindus who felt that
their interests were being overridden to placate religious minorities.
Much of the BJPs strength was drawn from the Rama temple movement. Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, is regarded as an earthly
incarnation of Vishnu, and in North India is one of the most popular
Hindu deities. He is said to have been born at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. In the sixteenth century, a general of the Mughal emperor Babur
built a mosque at Ayodhya, called the Babri Masjid or Babur Mosque.
According to devotees of Rama, the mosque was built on the site of a
demolished temple to their deity, and from at least the nineteenth century, Hindus and Muslims disputed control of the site. After independence, the Ayodhya district administration sealed the mosque and
prevented members of either community from worshipping there.
In 1986, the VHP started a campaign to tear down the Babri Masjid
and build a new temple to Rama in its place. The drive was supported
by the other like-minded organizations of the Sangh Parivar, including
the BJP. The Rama temple movement became a symbol of the dispute
between Hindutva and secularism and hence of the differences between
the BJP and Congress (I). Building the temple would affirm Indias
essentially Hindu character; preserving the mosque would prove that
India heeded the wishes of Muslims and other minority communities,
even if this meant ignoring the sensibilities of the majority.

V.P. SINGH AND CHANDRA SHEKHAR

Early in 1989, V.P. Singhs Janata Dal, the Telugu Desam Party, the
Asom Gana Parishad, and the DMK formed the National Front, an

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185

alliance to fight Congress (I) in the election at the end of the year.
The BJP and the National Front later agreed not to run candidates in
the same constituency, which reduced the chance of splitting the
anti-Congress (I) vote. The election left Congress (I) the largest party
in the Lok Sabha, but for the first time ever no party won a majority:
Rajivs party was reduced to 37 percent of the seats; the Janata Dal followed with 27 percent, and the BJP got 16 percent. Rather than see
Rajiv retain power, the BJP and Indias largest communist faction, the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), agreed to support a National
Front government. This gave V.P. just enough backing to become
prime minister.
V.P.s short term seemed dominated by war against secessionists.
His efforts to resolve the conflict in Punjab came to nothing, as the
need to keep his parliamentary allies happy forced him to renege on
promises to end Presidents Rule, try the ringleaders of the Delhi massacres, and reinstate Sikhs in the army. Just as V.P. was taking over the
prime ministers office in December 1989, the simmering anger of
many young Kashmiris boiled over into a violent revolt. Pakistan gave
moral and probably financial support to the militants, and India
accused its neighbor of organizing the uprising. The Indian army
planned an attack on what it said were rebel bases in Pakistan. Pakistan responded by readying the nuclear weapons it had developed
after Indira Gandhi tested Indias in 1974, and for several days there
was a danger of nuclear war in South Asia. It passed, but during
1990 the uprising in Kashmir developed into a civil war far deadlier
than that in Punjab.
At the same time, fighting broke out in Assam. Thanks to its low
population density, the northeastern state saw heavy immigration
throughout the twentieth century. After the Bangladesh War of 1971,
Hindus and Muslims from Bangladesh illegally settled in Assam in
such numbers that the Assamese were afraid of being overwhelmed.
The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), which was established
in 1980, organized a civil disobedience campaign to force the Center to
deport the immigrants. In 1985, Rajiv promised to deprive illegal
immigrants of the right to vote and deport those who had come from
Bangladesh since 1971. Nothing was done, however, and in 1990 the
ULFA launched a war of independence in Assam, arguing that the
immigrants would not leave as long as the state was part of India.
It has been suggested that V.P. should have remained a purely moral
leader, as Mahatma Gandhi and J.P. Narayan had done. By accepting
political power, he set himself up to fail. It is unlikely that any prime
minister could have met the expectations that V.P.s campaign against

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Rajiv had generated. The need to hold together the Janata Dal and the
National Front, and retain the parliamentary support of both the BJP
and the Marxists, made V.P.s administration particularly ineffective.
During 1990, his popularity fell rapidly. When Devi Lal, the deputy
prime minister and leader of the Lok Dal, was dismissed from the
cabinet in August 1990, it was obvious that the days of the Janata Dal
government were numbered. Its collapse might require a new election,
and V.P. decided to shore himself up with a dramatic gesture.
Twelve years earlier, Morarji Desais government had appointed the
Mandal Commission to study the position of the Other Backward
Classes (OBCs), the Hindu communities that were neither upper
castes nor Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. OBCs were not
guaranteed seats in legislatures, government jobs, or universities,
even though many of them were almost as disadvantaged as the SCs
and STs, which did enjoy reservations. The Mandal Commission advocated the extension of reservations to OBCs and provided a long list of
communities that it claimed fell into that category. The central
government refused to implement the recommendations. This was
partly because the Mandal list included many groups that had no
need of helpfor example, castes composed of rich peasants.
On August 7, 1990, V.P. announced that, in accordance with the
10-year-old report, 27 percent of all employment under the Center
would be reserved for OBC communities named in the Mandal list.
This included jobs in both the bureaucracy and state-owned firms,
although the reservations would not apply to seats in the legislatures
or to education. With the 22.5 percent of posts already guaranteed to
SCs and STs, this closed half of the Centers positions to the higher
castes, who protested with demonstrations and even public suicides.
Groups not in the Mandal Report began fighting for recognition as
OBCs, and caste conflict reached new heights.
Earlier in the year, the BJP had formed its first state governments
after winning legislative elections in Himachal Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh, and Rajasthan. As V.P.s popularity fell, that of the party of
Hindutva soared. The discord evoked by the Mandal Report posed a
serious threat to the BJP, which was devoted to Hindu unity both as
a matter of principle and to maximize its support among voters. Lal
Krishna Advani, the leader of the party, resolved on a gesture of his
own to unite Hindus behind the BJP. In September 1990, he set off on
a great rath yatra. This term, literally chariot procession, is normally
used in connection with a parade of the image of Vishnu. Advanis
rath yatra was a motorized journey across North India, from Somnath
in Gujarat to Ayodhya. The significance of its starting point was

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unmistakable. A thousand years earlier, the Muslim raider Mahmud

the Ghaznawid had destroyed a great temple of Shiva at Somnath. In
1950, devotees had begun to rebuild it. Now, the BJP chief was calling
for Hindus to follow this example at Ayodhya, by tearing down the
Babri Masjid and restoring the Rama temple.
Advani was enthusiastically welcomed by Hindus all along his
route. His stops were often followed by attacks on Muslims. A month
into the rath yatra, however, he was arrested by the Janata Dal chief
minister of Bihar on the plea that he was stirring up communal violence. Not surprisingly, the BJP refused to continue to back a Janata
Dal government in New Delhi. It withdrew its parliamentary support
from V.P. Singh, who thereby lost his majority and resigned as prime
minister. The president offered the job back to Rajiv Gandhi, whose
Congress (I) was still the largest party in the Lok Sabha. Rajiv refused
the invitation. He knew that if he became prime minister now, he
would need the support of other parties. This would leave him just
as weak as V.P. had been. He preferred to wait for a new election,
which he hoped would restore Congress (I)s majority, and threw his
partys support behind Chandra Shekhar, the one-time leader of the

Lal Krishna Advani, deputy prime minister of India (left), shakes hands with
Abdul Gani Bhat, a leader of the Kashmiri nationalist All Parties Hurriyat
Conference (APHC), in a meeting in New Delhi on January 22, 2004. (AP Photo)

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The History of India

Janata Party. By combining his faction of the Janata Dal with Congress
(I), Chandra Shekhar secured a majority in the Lok Sabha and became
prime minister.
But Rajiv was merely waiting till he felt ready to face the voters. The
time came in March 1991. Using the excuse that the government had
put him under police surveillance, he withdrew Congress (I)s support
from Chandra Shekhar. No one else could assemble a majority in the
Lok Sabha, and an election was scheduled for late May. Rajiv again
campaigned on his dynastys name, although he abandoned the overt
appeals to Hinduism that he had made in 1984 and reasserted the old
Congress commitment to secularism. V.P. Singh aimed for the OBC
vote; and Advani drummed up Hindu nationalist support with references to his rath yatra, the Babri Masjid, and communal violence.
Voting began on May 20, 1991. The next day, Rajiv was assassinated
by supporters of the LTTE, the Tamil nationalist insurgents whom his
troops had fought in Sri Lanka, and the remainder of the election was
postponed till mid-June. Rajivs cronies turned to the only adult
member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, the murdered mans Italian
widow Sonia Gandhi. (Sanjay Gandhis widow Maneka was an active
politician, but bad relations with her in-laws had taken her into the
Janata Dal.) Sonia declared that she was not interested in politics and
declined the leadership of her husbands party. This provoked a
power struggle within Congress (I). It was won by Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao, a former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and
cabinet minister under Indira and Rajiv. For the first time since 1947,
barring the 19-month tenure of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Congress had a
leader drawn from outside the dynasty.

LIBERALIZATION
In the remainder of the election, Congress (I) was helped by a wave
of sympathy over Rajivs death. It retained its place as Indias most
popular political party, although it received fewer votes than in 1989.
The striking feature of the election was a breakthrough on the part of
the Bharatiya Janata Party, which doubled its share of the vote to
20 percent and replaced the Janata Dal as the second largest party in
parliament. The rest of the seats in the lower house were divided
among a much-reduced Janata Dal, and leftist and regional parties.
There were several reasons for the BJPs success. The party was the
natural beneficiary of the continuing spread of Hindu nationalism
and (in some quarters) of anti-Muslim sentiment. Both were fueled
by the Rama temple movement and communal violence, which were

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linked to the BJP through Advanis rath yatra. Upper-caste Hindus

who were angry over V.P. Singhs decision to implement the Mandal
Report and unwilling to support the secular Congress (I), turned
toward the BJP. More broadly, many Indians who regarded the
Congress (I) and Janata Dal governments as failures transferred their
votes to the BJP, the only other national party.
As Congress (I) was the largest party in parliament, its leader Narasimha Rao was installed as prime minister. Narasimha Raos followers
occupied only 42 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha, but he managed to secure guarantees of support from enough small parties to
cobble together a majority. Over the next few years, Congress (I) won
several by-elections to fill vacant seats, including (for reasons that will
be explained) 12 of Punjabs 13 Lok Sabha seats. In 1994, the prime
minister acquired a parliamentary majority in his own right when a
dissident faction that had broken away from the Janata Dal joined
Congress (I).
When Narasimha Rao became the leader of his party, he was
approaching his seventieth birthday and in poor health. He was
widely regarded as an interim chief, and without the authority of the
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, he lacked the full support of his colleagues
in Congress (I). To secure his position against them, he turned to the
party organization. In some states, he called elections to local and state
Congress committees for the first time since the early 1970s. No one
could deny that the new committees represented the party members,
and the fact that they gave their support to Narasimha Rao strengthened the prime minister against his rivals. In 1992, the All-India
Congress Committee, chosen by the state committees, met to elect
the Congress Working Committee (the party executive). Narasimha
Rao stood for election as party president, something that Rajiv had
never done. He won, confirming that he was the chosen leader of
Congress (I) and making his position unassailable.
As soon as he became prime minister, Narasimha Rao had begun to
reform Indias economic policy. It has been seen that there is a debate
as to whether British rule enriched or impoverished India. The same
is true of the effects of Nehrus planned economic development. It
unquestionably made India a major industrial manufacturer, but there
is no way of knowing how the economy would have fared without it.
Many economists believe that when India became independent,
planned development offered the only possible route to economic
growth, but that it was kept in place for too long until it became a hindrance rather than a help. The planners, licensers, and managers of
state-owned firms (called public sector undertakings) became a

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massive bureaucracy. Not only were they costly, many were also corrupt and determined to prevent any changes that interfered with their
interests. Most public sector undertakings were grossly inefficient: as
late as 2000, after nine years of the economic reforms that are discussed below, only 134 of Indias 240 state-owned firms made profits.
The rest relied on subsidies from taxation to keep afloat.
All this aside, by 1991 the Nehruvian economy was politically
unpopular in many circles. The urban middle class wanted to buy consumer goods, but these were often simply unavailable: production in
India was held back by the licensing laws and limits on foreign investment, while quantitative restrictions and tariff barriers kept out
imports. The old arguments in favor of these policies had evaporated.
Forty years experience had disproved the theory that a lack of consumer goods would force Indians to invest their savings in domestic
development projects. Few still believed that foreign investment and
imports threatened the countrys political independence. This was
not merely because memories of colonial rule had faded: the nature
of the modern global economy meant that if India did open its doors
to foreign business, it would attract firms from so many countries that
no one of them could acquire control as the British East India Company had done. Finally, the economic collapse of the Soviet bloc in
the 1980s had discredited the idea of a planned economy.
During the first half of 1991, India drifted into a severe economic crisis. In 1989, the Soviet satellites in central and eastern Europe had
asserted their independence, and now the Soviet Union itself was
about to break up. This not only disrupted Indias trade with the
Eastern Bloc, which had both bought Indian exports and supplied
machinery and military materiel, it also cut off most of Indias aid
from the Soviets. Then came the First Gulf War in 1991, which drove
up the price of petroleum products and contributed to runaway inflation in India. The war also led to the repatriation of 130,000 Indians
who had been working in Persian Gulf states, and whose wages had
been one of Indias major sources of foreign currency.
In recent years, the Indian government had borrowed heavily to
finance its budget deficits. Several big loans from multilateral banks
were due for repayment (in dollars) in mid-1991. Unfortunately,
despite the restrictions on the purchase of foreign goods, India was
spending more on imports than it was earning from exports. This
drained the reserves of foreign exchange, which had shrunk to just
$600 million. As a result, India could not repay its loans. One of the
last acts of Chandra Shekhars government was to raise funds by selling $200 million worth of gold. This was only a stopgap measure,

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191

though, and full repayment required help from the International

Monetary Fund. This body made it clear that it would not issue credits
unless India loosened its licensing laws, admitted foreign firms, and
reduced government spending.
The economy was therefore Narasimha Raos first priority. He chose
a well-known economist named Manmohan Singh to be his finance
minister. Manmohan Singh promptly devalued the rupee, which
increased the competitiveness of Indian exports, boosted sales, and
thus brought in foreign exchange. He and Narasimha Rao then
launched a program of economic reforms, called liberalization. Over
the next decade, India was governed by four prime ministers, from
three political parties. All were committed to the policy of liberalization, which dismantled most of the central elements of the Nehruvian
economy.
One of the first things that Manmohan Singh did was to abolish
licensing for all but 18 industries. Two years later, limits on production
were removed from cars and domestic appliances, two lines of consumer goods that had remained licensed. Import duties were also
slashed, with the average falling from 71 percent in 1993 to 35 percent
in 1998. Between 1996 and 2001, the quantitative restrictions that had
curtailed or barred imports were almost entirely phased out. All this
resulted in huge increases in both the quantities of goods available to
consumers, and the quantities of equipment available to manufacturers.
During the five years after 1991, new regulations allowed foreigners
to own up to 51 percent of businesses in India. One of the most
dramatic results of this was in the field of automobile production.
In 1991, there were three car manufacturers in India, turning out
190,000 vehicles a year. A decade later, there were ten, producing
500,000 cars. Most of the new entrants were joint ventures between
Indian investors and firms based in the United States, Japan, and
South Korea.
These reforms were what the International Monetary Fund had
wanted, and with the World Bank it lent India enough money to repay
the immediate debts. Over the next few years, Indias exports
increased rapidly, at a rate of growth that reached 27 percent a
year in the mid-1990s. The foreign exchange reserves swelled to
$18.8 billion in September 1994, and India repaid the International
Monetary Fund loans ahead of schedule.
Free market economists wanted liberalization to include privatization, the transfer of state firms to private ownership. Soon after becoming finance minister, Manmohan Singh said that a number of concerns
would be privatized. In 1994, shares in several state-owned firms were

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sold to private investors, who from 1998 were allowed to own up to

74 percent of nonstrategic concerns. In 2000, full privatization seemed
to begin in earnest when the Indian branch of a European multinational bought ownership of a government bakery, but since then the
sale of state firms has all but stalled. The main obstacle to privatization
has been political: the public sector undertakings have 2 million
employees and are administered by another 4 million bureaucrats,
and Indias labor laws prevent firms from laying off or firing workers.
Given private businesss emphasis on efficiency, this discourages
interest in public sector undertakings, even if the government were
willing to sell off its concerns.
However, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh did allow private
enterprise to compete with the public sector undertakingsfor example, in domestic airline service from 1991, steel production from 1992,
and coal mining and processing from 1997. This ended the
government monopolies that had been created by the Industrial Policy
Resolution of 1956 and Indira Gandhis nationalizations. The new
theory was that increased competition would improve the efficiency
of both state and private enterprise.
In the long term, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh hoped to
bring about economic growth through increased competition, modernization, and foreign investment. This would allow the integration
of India into the world economy, boosting trade and investment, and
leading to still further growth. In 1994, India signed the final act of
the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade,
committing itself to an open economy of a sort unimaginable only a
few years earlier.
Liberalization was indeed followed by rapid economic growth.
During the decade before 1991, Indias gross domestic product had
grown by an average of 5.6 percent a year; during the next decade, this
increased to 6.1 percent, with a peak of 7.5 percent during the years
between 1994/1995 and 1996/1997. At least part of the reason was
the development of a huge computer software industry: India sold
no software abroad in 1991, but $8.3 billion worth in 200015 percent
of the total value of its exports. This was one of the reasons why
between 1996 and 1998, according to the World Bank, the Indian
economy replaced the German as the fourth largest in the world (only
the American, Chinese, and Japanese were bigger).
At the same time, economic growth was limited by Indias weak
infrastructure. Poor roads and port facilities often hinder trade. To this
day, the greatest problem is electricity: the supply is uncertain, with frequent failures (in 2012, 620 million people lost power in a mammoth

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193

blackout), and very expensive. One reason is that as much as 40 percent

of the electricity generated in India is siphoned off by people who do not
pay for it. Another is that to get votes, politicians have given electricity
to some groups at virtually no cost, which raises the rates for other consumers. For example, in many states, farmers pay a low flat rate for
power, however much they use. In 2003, parliament passed legislation
to reform the generation, distribution, transmission, and sale of power,
but it has been of limited effectiveness.

PUNJAB, ASSAM, AND AYODHYA

Beside economic reforms, Narasimha Raos term as prime minister
saw continuing secessionist and communal violence. To head the Punjab
police, V.P. Singhs National Front government had appointed K.P.S.
Gill, a Sikh but a fierce opponent of the pro-Khalistan militants. Gill
led his men in an all-out campaign, fighting terror with terror. Suspected
militants, and many innocent Punjabis, were tortured or summarily
executed. Some of Gills officers took advantage of the violence and the
resulting climate of fear to commit rape or robbery on the side.
The Akali Dal, which was becoming increasingly friendly toward
the militants, was outraged when Narasimha Rao left Gill at his job.
When elections for the Punjab seats in the Lok Sabha and for the state
legislature were held in February 1992, the party showed its anger by
calling on its supporters to boycott the polls. Fewer than one in four
Punjabi voters cast ballots. Most of those who did vote were supporters of Congress (I), which won all but one Lok Sabha seat, and a majority in the state legislature.
Whatever else might be said about it, Gills policy worked. Once
enough militant leaders had been killed, their surviving colleagues
not only found themselves unable to recruit new members, but lost
interest in attacking civilian and government targets. By mid-1993,
Punjab was calm, after nine years of virtual civil war that had left
16,000 people dead. The Center had finally begun to heed Sikh grievances, and this eroded support for Khalistan. Chandigarh has not
become part of Punjab; but in 19951996, the courts convicted and
imprisoned many people for their role in the massacres of Sikhs that
took place in Delhi in 1984, and a former government minister belonging to Congress (I) was put on trial for instigating the violence.
In 1992, the state government of Assam won over the moderates of
the United Liberation Front of Assam and crushed the extremists. This
ended the Fronts secessionist campaign. Meanwhile, Bodo tribesmen
in the same state, afraid of losing their land and angry over their

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exclusion from public sector jobs, started a struggle for autonomy in

1988. The conflict became especially violent in the mid-1990s, but
was defused in 2003 when the governments of India and Assam
reached an agreement with Bodo leaders to grant limited autonomy
to Bodoland.
During the 1990s, Hindu-Muslim relations in India were worse than
at any time since the 1940s. The great symbol of communal conflict
was the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. In Uttar Pradesh, the state where
Ayodhya lies, a legislative election was held in 1991, at the same time
as the Lok Sabha polls that brought Narasimha Rao to power. It was
won by the BJP, whose state leader Kalyan Singh became chief minister. The new administration transferred the land surrounding the
Babri Masjid to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the organization that
had started the Rama temple movement. Then, volunteers from the
Parishad and its ally the Bajrang Dal demolished all the buildings
around the mosque. The Supreme Court of India banned any construction in the area, but the volunteers ignored it and laid the foundations for their temple.
The central government sent security forces to protect the Babri
Masjid, but Kalyan Singhs government barred them from the area,
and on December 6, 1992, the volunteers demolished the mosque.
Because the Babri Masjid had become such a powerful symbol for
many Hindus and Muslims, this immediately raised communal
tensions all over India. Riots in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, and
Jaipur left 1,150 dead within six days. On January 6, 1993, one month
after the demolition, fresh Hindu-Muslim clashes broke out in
Mumbai, killing 557 in a week.
Narasimha Rao responded with a combination of repression and
concessions. He dismissed Indias four BJP state governments (in Uttar
Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan) and temporarily banned militant Hindu and Muslim organizations, including
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and the RSS. Two days
after the demolition, the prime minister ordered the arrest of Lal Krishna
Advani and other BJP leaders (they were freed the next month). Finally,
the Center set up a trust to rebuild the Babri Masjid and to build a Rama
temple beside it, although neither project has yet been started.

CASTE POLITICS
In September 1991, Narasimha Rao confirmed that V.P. Singhs
promise to implement the Mandal Report would go ahead. To meet
complaints that this was unfair to groups that were upper caste but

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195

disadvantaged, another 10 percent of jobs were promised to economically backward communities of any caste. The following year, the
Supreme Court rejected the guarantee of an additional 10 percent as
unconstitutional, and the 27 percent reservations for Other Backward
Classes alone went into effect in 1993. Many state governments imitated the Mandal Report by restricting jobs at their disposal to OBCs.
Ruling parties might recognize communities that supported them as
OBCs, even if there was no real social or economic justification for calling them backward. The situation might verge on the ridiculous: in
1994, Tamil Nadu reserved 69 percent of state posts to Scheduled
Castes and what it defined as OBCs, and Karnataka 73 percent.
As this suggests, by the 1990s caste played a larger role than ever in
Indian politics. A prime minister or chief minister has always had to
balance major castes when appointing his cabinet, and state chief ministers are often chosen on account of their caste. This is particularly
true in the two big states of North India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The local Congress organizations in both states were founded by
Brahmins, including the Nehrus of Uttar Pradesh. In the 1930s, they
were joined by rural elites from the landholding Rajput and Bhumihar
castes. After independence, these forward castes ensured that their
OBC and SC dependents supported Congress as well. During the
1960s, rising political awareness took the OBCs into other parties, first
the various incarnations of the Lok Dal, and then V.P. Singhs Janata
Dal. Except in the 1977 election, however, the SCs of Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar continued to support Congress, which was thus able to
retain control of both states.
Then, in 1989, many SCs transferred their votes to Janata Dal.
During the 1990s, the Janata Dal fragmented. In Bihar, both OBCs
and SCs have given their backing to two Janata Dal offshoots, the
Rashtriya Janata Dal (National Peoples Party) and the Janata Dal
(United), which have been able to keep both Congress (I) and the BJP
out of power since 1990. In Uttar Pradesh, on the other hand, the two
low-caste groupings formed separate parties, the OBCs Samajwadi
(Socialist) Party and the SCs Bahujan Samaj Party (Party of the Majority Community). The Rama temple movement helped take most members of Uttar Pradeshs upper castes, and some OBCs and SCs, into the
BJP. Since 1989, the government of Uttar Pradesh has rotated among
the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the BJP. Another
manifestation of the politicization of caste has been an increase in caste
violence since the 1990s. The most notorious examples have occurred
in parts of Bihar, where higher caste landowners and SC landless
laborers have at times been virtually at war.

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The History of India

THE UNITED FRONT

There were frequent accusations of corruption against Narasimha
Raos government. In 1992, a huge stock market swindle came to
light. The ringleader of the scheme claimed to have given bribes to
Narasimha Rao, but the prime minister denied the charge. Two years
later, Arjun Singh, Narasimha Raos main rival in Congress (I),
resigned from the cabinet, alleging that several of his colleagues were
blatantly corrupt.
During 1996, corruption became a major political issue. One businessman said that many top-ranking politicians were on his bribe payroll, and another claimed to have given $100,000 to a Hindu holy man
who was apparently the prime ministers personal guru. Then, allegations emerged that in 1993 Narasimha Rao had bribed four members
of the Lok Sabha from a small party to vote with his government so
that he could keep his parliamentary majority.
The rising distrust of Congress (I) was one reason that the party won
only three of the nine state legislative elections held in 1994 and 1995.
A fresh Lok Sabha election was due in 1996, just as evidence of corruption was piling up. When polling took place, Congress (I)s share of
the vote fell sharply, from 42 percent in 1991 to 30 percent; the BJPs
rose from 20 to 24 percent; and support for the Janata Dal continued
its freefall. Because the BJPs support was more evenly spread across
the country, the Hindu nationalist party won more seats in the Lok
Sabha than Congress (I). For only the second time in the history of independent India, Congress was not the largest party in parliament.
A trend that had been emerging in 1989 and 1991 was now clear: the
division of the Lok Sabha into several blocs, each consisting of a
national party and its allies from regional parties. All were modeled
on V.P. Singhs National Front (the Janata Dal and its allies): the member
parties agreed not to run candidates against each other in the general
elections, and to form a coalition government if they obtained a majority
in the Lok Sabha. Besides the National Front, the Lok Sabha contained
the BJP and Congress (I) blocs, and the Left Front, which was dominated
by the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
In 1993, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had replaced Lal Krishna Advani as
the political head of the BJP. Many said that the party had picked
Vajpayee, who had been minister of external affairs under Morarji
Desai, because he seemed less of a Hindutva extremist than Advani.
Thanks to his partys triumph in the 1996 election, Vajpayee took office
as prime minister. He became the countrys first leader since 1947 who
had never belonged to Congress (where Morarji Desai, Chaudhuri

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197

Charan Singh, V.P. Singh, and Chandra Shekhar had all spent part of
their political careers).
Nevertheless, even with its allies, the BJP controlled only a third of the
seats in the Lok Sabha. Vajpayee was unable to persuade other parties to
join his bloc, and he resigned after only 12 days. The National Front, the
Left Front, and several unaffiliated small parties hastily joined together
in a United Front. Congress (I) agreed to support a United Front
government, assuring it a majority in the Lok Sabha. After some infighting, the Janata Dal chief minister of Karnataka, Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda, was selected as prime minister.
The United Front spelled out its policy in a Common Minimum
Program. To keep the support of Congress (I), the new government
undertook to maintain secularism and to continue the economic
reforms. As a sop to the regional parties of the National Front, it promised to increase the autonomy of the states. It met the wishes of peasant parties and the Left Front with a commitment to increase
government assistance to farmers and workers. All this was topped
off with plans to guarantee representation in parliament and the state
legislatures to women.
Little of this was actually done, however. The main reason was that
if he wanted to retain his majority, Deve Gowda could not alienate
either Congress (I) or any of the members of the United Front. Thus,
a bill to reserve one third of the countrys legislative seats for women
failed, largely due to opposition from OBC parties: their leaders feared
that womens seats would go to upper-caste women, which would
reduce OBC representation. (Although the Mandal Report guaranteed
OBCs government jobs, it did not touch the legislatures.)
Like Chandra Shekhars administration in 19901991, the United
Front government could only last as long as it had the approval of
Congress (I), which after just 10 months turned against Deve Gowda.
Allegedly because of his failure to consult it regarding his policies,
Congress (I) withdrew support from the prime minister, though not
the rest of the government. Deve Gowda was replaced with his minister of external affairs, Inder Kumar Gujral. Then, in late 1997, the
report of the official inquiry into the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi
was released. It said that the DMK, one of the two main parties in
Tamil Nadu, had played a role in the killing. The DMK was now a
member of the United Front, and Congress (I) demanded its expulsion
from the ruling coalition on the grounds of this complicity. Gujral
refused to dump his ally, lost Congress (I)s support, and resigned.
As no one else could get a majority in the Lok Sabha, a new election
was called for February and March 1998.

11
Into the Twenty-First Century
ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE
In the general elections of 1998, the Janata Dal was almost wiped out.
The BJP rose to a third of the seats in the Lok Sabha, and Congress (I)
held steady at just over a fourth. Vajpayee was reappointed prime
minister in March 1998. It looked as if there might be a replay of the
events of 1996, but there was an important difference: the destruction
of the Janata Dal had so weakened the United Front that the bloc was
unlikely to be able to form a government. On the other hand, the BJP
and its allies needed only a few more seats to have a majority. Several
United Front parties deserted their sinking ship and joined the BJP bloc
in return for places in the government. With this and a few independent
members of the Lok Sabha, Vajpayee obtained a bare majority.
The BJP and its allies called themselves the National Democratic
Alliance. The new government comprised eighteen parties, five more
than the United Front. To maintain unity, Vajpayee agreed not to push
Hindu nationalist issues. Instead, his alliance issued a National
Agenda for Governancepromising to reconsider nuclear policy; divide the huge states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh;
guarantee legislative seats for women; and review the constitution.

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These were among the few points that all the member parties could
claim to agree on.
The National Agenda immediately had dramatic results in one area.
Indira Gandhi had successfully tested nuclear explosives in 1974, and
India had functional nuclear weapons by the late 1980s. Officially, only
the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France were members
of the nuclear club although it was general knowledge that India,
Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea also belonged. During most of the
1990s, American policy in South Asia centered on nuclear nonproliferation, which meant putting pressure on India and Pakistan to get
rid of their nuclear weapons. This was widely resented in India as
hypocrisy: the United States had no plans either to give up its own
weapons or to ask the other members of the nuclear club or Israel
and North Korea to do so. (This was because Britain, France, and Israel
were Washingtons friends, and it was a foregone conclusion that any
pressure on Russia, China, and North Korea would be futile.)
Indeed, many Indians wanted their country to test its weapons and
become a full member of the club. This was partly for security, especially against Indias nuclear neighbors China and Pakistan, but it
was also for symbolic reasons: it would make it clear that India was
both a major power and a modern country with some of the best scientists in the world. This view was shared by most Indian political parties; Narasimha Rao and Gujral both refused to sign the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in 1996 India voted against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the General Assembly of the United
Nations. The review of nuclear policy promised in the National
Agenda for Governance resulted in successful tests of the weapons
on May 11 and 13, 1998. Pakistan followed with its own tests 2 weeks
later. Western countries were furious at this South Asian intrusion into
the nuclear club, and the United States banned both technological cooperation with India and American investment in Indian industries.
Most Indians were pleased, however.

WAR AND ELECTION

Narasimha Rao had resigned as head of Congress (I) a few months
after losing the prime ministership in 1996, and was replaced with
Sitaram Kesri. In 1991, Rajiv Gandhis Italian-born widow Sonia had
declared herself uninterested in politics. Now, she reconsidered, and
during the 1998 election campaign she overshadowed Kesri. Some
credited Sonia with saving Congress (I) from oblivion by appealing
to voters who believed in the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and after the

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election she took Kesris place as president of the party. In April 1999,
the new chief became persuaded that if the Tamil regional party the
AIADMK pulled out of the National Democratic Alliance and joined
the Congress (I) bloc, she would have a majority in the Lok Sabha.
She got the AIADMK to withdraw its support from Vajpayee, depriving him of his majority and forcing him to resign.
Sonia thereupon asked the president to appoint her as prime minister. She had miscounted, however. When the numbers were tallied,
Sonia did not have a majority either. As no bloc could now control
the Lok Sabha, a new election had to be held. It was set for
September-October, after the rainy season, and only 19 months after
the last election. Vajpayee remained in office as caretaker prime minister. As in the 1972 legislative elections, conflict with Pakistan apparently played a part in the poll results.
By the mid-1990s, Pakistan was intimately involved in the insurgency in Kashmir. Guerrillas were trained at camps in Pakistan and
were probably funded by the Pakistani government. Many, perhaps
most, of them were not Kashmiris, but Muslims from Pakistan and other
countries. The guerrillas massacred Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim civilians
in Kashmir; dueled with Indian soldiers and police; and bombed
government and military installations. Pakistani troops gave them cover
by shelling Indian positions, and the Indians shelled Pakistani positions
and training camps in return. Perhaps 50,000 civilians have died at the
hands of the militants in Kashmir since the 1980s.
At least since the defeat of Pakistan in 1971, India has been South
Asias dominant power. According to Inder Kumar Gujral, this meant
that it could afford to make concessions to its neighbors, without
demanding anything in return. One of the fruits of this was an agreement that ended a long-standing dispute with Bangladesh over
the use of the waters of the Ganges. Vajpayee was particularly keen
on improving relations with Pakistan. In February 1999, a bus service
started between Delhi and Lahore, the largest city of northern
Pakistan. Vajpayee traveled on the first run to meet the Pakistani
prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The two leaders agreed to try to resolve
their countries disagreements and to reduce the risk of accidental or
unauthorized use of their nuclear weapons.
In May 1999, however, India learned that armed bands had crossed
the line between the Pakistani and Indian sectors of Kashmir and
established control over territory in the Kargil district on the Indian
side. This was a significant change from hit-and-run attacks by militants, and it had apparently begun even before Vajpayees bus trip.
Nawaz Sharif claimed that the infiltrators were acting on their own

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initiative, but Vajpayee treated them as Pakistani invaders and

ordered the Indian armed forces to drive them back across the line.
India was victorious, and in July Nawaz Sharif promised to withdraw
the remaining infiltrators. This confirmed that Pakistan had sent them:
if they really had been independent guerrillas, Sharif would not have
been able to control them.
The fighting produced a surge of patriotism in India, and this probably helped Vajpayee in the election. Some hard-core Hindu nationalist support may have drifted away from the BJP because of Vajpayees
sidelining of Hindutva issues, but Sonia was an undynamic leader of
Congress (I), and the National Democratic Alliance made her Italian
birth a campaign issue. In the end, the NDA took 54 percent of the
Lok Sabhas 545 seats. The Congress (I) bloc fell to just 24 percent.
Vajpayees majority was secure.

THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE

Vajpayee and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) governed
India until 2004. In some ways, the difficulties of maintaining a
coalition government were healthy for Indian politics. Deve Gowda,
Gujral, and Vajpayee (as well as Vajpayees successor Manmohan
Singh) all needed to maintain the support of the junior partners within
their blocs. This meant that they could not ignore parliament as Indira
and Rajiv had done. As a result, parliament regained some power.
Moreover, the coalition cabinets included representatives of not only
the main party but also its allies. To keep those allies, the prime ministers had to listen to their ministers, whose power accordingly
increased.
The same dynamic also revived federalism, which had been particularly eroded under Indira. In 1994, the Supreme Court limited the
circumstances under which the Center could impose Presidents Rule.
The need to retain the support of regional parties made Deve Gowda,
Gujral, and Vajpayee sensitive to state concerns, and Vajpayee promised
not to impose Presidents Rule except where it was legitimately needed,
usually if no one could maintain a majority in a state legislature.
At least initially, Vajpayee put his electoral mandate to good use.
In 2000, in accordance with the National Agenda, the three big states
of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh were divided, creating
Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Uttaranchal (later renamed Uttarakhand). The first two are inhabited largely by Tribals. Most of the
people of Uttarakhand are considered high caste (60 percent of them
are Rajputs, who in the rest of India are a small elite community).

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203

In Uttar Pradesh as a whole, however, OBCs and SCs formed half the
population, and the Uttarakhandisoften as disadvantaged as lowcaste Hindus elsewheredemanded their own state to end reverse
discrimination at the hands of the OBCs and SCs who dominated
the Uttar Pradesh government in the 1990s.
Vajpayee also reoriented Indias foreign policy. Nehru had based his
external relations on nonalignment and decolonization, to which
Indira added friendship with the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, however,
all these became unviable. The close of the Cold War made nonalignment meaningless. With the end of the European colonial empires,
India had transformed decolonization into opposition to white rule
in South Africa, but this too ended in 1993. And after the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia was unable and unwilling to maintain
a close relationship with India.
By way of compensation, India pursued friendly relations with the
United States. In 1992, the two countries conducted joint military exercises. Indo-American relations worsened after the nuclear tests in
1998, but thereafter improved, especially when President Bill Clinton
visited India for 5 days in 2000. Clinton was only the fourth U.S.
president to go to India. His visit was very successful, and later the
same year Vajpayee made a return visit to Washington, during which
the United States agreed to resume the economic assistance that had
been stopped in 1998.
Relations between India and the United States were particularly
close during the administration of George W. Bush from 2001 to
2009. Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on
September 11, 2001, India pledged its full cooperation in the ensuing
American War on Terror. In reward, the United States lifted the
remaining sanctions that had been imposed on India in 1998. Even
Indias refusal to support the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003
had little effect on the diplomatic and military ties between the two
countries, which were accompanied by ever-tightening economic
links. Today, the United States is the second-largest buyer of Indian
exports (after the United Arab Emirates), taking $36 billion worth in
20122013 (12 percent of the total), when it also supplied $25 billion
(5 percent) of all imports into India.
In the opening years of the twenty-first century, the Indian economy
grew rapidly. Much of the growth was driven by exports, with new
manufactured goods joining Indias longstanding products; for example, in 2003 the South Korean automaker Hyundai began selling
Indian-built cars in Europe. The NDA government oversaw public
and private investment in infrastructure, particularly roads and

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airports, which began to alleviate longstanding bottlenecks in transportation and thus assisted production. Economic growth reached
the point that in 2003, the government announced that India would
stop accepting foreign development aid from all except five of the
wealthiest countries of the world, and it launched its own comprehensive program of aid to southeast Asia and Africa.
But on balance, the National Democratic Alliance accomplished
less than might have been expected. As under the United Front,
the need to hold together the bloc made tough decisions impossible.
The National Agendas promises to guarantee legislative seats for
women and review the constitution went nowhere. The NDA
remained committed to economic liberalization, but after a promising
start, little was accomplished. Vajpayees parliamentary allies and
even members of his own BJP blocked privatization of state-owned
undertakings. Continuing disagreements about Kashmir rendered fruitless Vajpayees renewed efforts to mend relations with Pakistan, which
included inviting Nawaz Sharifs military successor Pervez Musharraf
to talks in the old Mughal city of Agra in 2001. One of the few things that
most Pakistanis agree on is that none of Kashmir should remain part of
India (some want it annexed to their country, while others are prepared
to let Kashmiris become independent if they wish). As a result, successive Pakistani regimeswhether democratic or authoritarianhave
been either unwilling or politically unable to stop supporting the militants campaign against India without large commitments to change on
the part of India.
This played a part in a rising tide of violence. Militants with connections to Kashmir ranged outside of the state, with attacks on the
parliament building in New Delhi at the end of 2001, a Hindu temple
in Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, in 2002, and two crowded areas
of Mumbai in 2003. The Indian government saw such militant violence
as international terrorism, conducted by proxies of Pakistan. Many
non-Muslim Indians, however, knowing that a large number of Muslim Kashmiris supported the aims (and sometimes the methods) of
the guerrillas who wanted to take Kashmir out of India, regarded the
violence as proof of the disloyalty of Muslim citizens of India in general. Their interpretation seemed to receive further credence from the
fact that a few Muslim groups in other parts of India declared their
support for the militants. This contributed to increased suspicion and
hostility toward Indian Muslims on the part of non-Muslims. Muslims
responded in kind.
In 2002, this atmosphere led to the most serious communal violence
India had seen in many years, which also set the stage for an epic

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205

transformation in Indian politics a decade later. In February 2002, 59

people, mainly Vishwa Hindu Parishad volunteers who had gone to
Ayodhya in support of the construction of the Rama temple, were
killed in a train fire near the station of Godhra in Gujarat. There is still
disagreement as to how the fire started, but many Hindus believed
that it was set by a Muslim mob. The fire was followed by antiMuslim riots across Gujarat. Estimates of the number of dead (mostly
Muslims) range from 1000 to 2000, and more than 100,000 Muslims
fled into relief camps.
The government of Gujarat was then headed by Narendra Damodardas Modi, an OBC who had worked his way up through the ranks
of the RSS and had taken charge as chief minister just five months earlier. Many claimed that Modi had deliberately blocked police action to
stem the anti-Muslim violence, and withheld relief from Muslim refugees. There were widespread calls for him to resign as chief minister.
Rather than do so, Modi called new elections for the Gujarat legislature. He campaigned on an overtly pro-Hindutva platform, and led
the BJP to an overwhelming victory.
Over the next two years, Modi came increasingly to be the icon of
supporters of Hindutva, who disliked Vajpayees more moderate
stances. At the same time, he presided over a period of spectacular
economic growth in Gujarat, which he credited to the sort of probusiness policies that coalition politics had made impossible for
Vajpayee. In 2007 and 2012, Modi won further huge victories in the
Gujarat legislative elections. His image as an economic modernizer
with unimpeachable Hindu nationalist credentials set Modi on track
to become prime minister of India.

THE UNITED PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE

The Lok Sabhas five-year term was scheduled to end in October 2004.
However, with the economy apparently strong, Vajpayee and his colleagues decided to hold elections four months early, in April-May.
They campaigned on the slogan India Shining, a reference to the
economic conditions. There was a general consensussupported by
opinion pollsthat the National Democratic Alliance would renew its
mandate.
When the results came in, however, the NDA had lost its majority in
the Lok Sabha. This was widely attributed to the fact that while recent
economic growth had benefited Indias city dwellers, it had done
nothing for the countrys rural majority. It is likely that at least as large
a role was played by the voters dissatisfaction with the governments

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The History of India

failure to accomplish much, and the manifest corruption of some

members of the BJP and their allies in the NDA.
Sonia Gandhi, the leader of Congress (I), once again staked a claim
to the premiership. She cobbled together a bloc around her party,
called the United Progressive Alliance, or UPA. With the support of
the Communist-led Left Front bloc, Sonia now commanded a majority
in the Lok Sabha. The fact that she had not been born in India evoked
widespread concern all across the political spectrum, however. Sonia
kept her position as president of Congress (I), but yielded the office
of prime minister to Manmohan Singh, the former finance minister
and architect of liberalization. Many believed that Sonia regarded
Manmohan as simply a placeholder, who when the time came would
make way for her 33-year-old son Rahul Gandhi.
As it turned out, Manmohan Singh held office for 10 years, longer
than any other prime minister except Nehru and Indira. Mainly
because of divisions in the BJP, he led the UPA to reelection in 2009.
In many ways, he maintained Vajpayees policies. In 2006, Manmohan
capped the ever-improving relations with the United States with a
long-discussed agreement on nuclear energy. The United States
resumed sales to India of nuclear fuel and technology, over 30 years
after they had been suspended following the nuclear tests of 1974,
and India agreed to follow the guidelines on nuclear policy set by
the International Atomic Energy Agency. Vajpayee had begun to
rebuild ties with Russia, with the two countries signing a declaration
on strategic partnership in 2000, and Manmohan continued to foster
the relationship.
Todays India does not simply want the friendship of the United
States or Russia, however. It was noted that the nuclear tests of 1998
were a sign of its desire to be recognized as a major power. Another
indication of the same desire is heavy military expenditure: India has
the third largest army in the world, and defense now absorbs almost
15 percent of the budget (10 times the percentage it took in 1938). India
is particularly interested in a permanent seat on the United Nations
Security Council, which it sees as the badge of a great power. It has
as much right to one as China had at the formation of the United
Nations, and today may have a better claim than Britain or France.
In 2010, the American president Barack Obama gave public support
to this demand of Indias.
Like its predecessor, the UPA sought to mend relations with
Pakistan. This, however, was hampered by continuing attacks by terrorists with ties to Pakistan. In 2006, 209 people were killed and over
700 wounded in attacks on commuter trains in Mumbai. Then, in

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November 2008, a group of 10 Pakistanis secretly landed in Mumbai

and for two and a half days attacked targets across the city. Casualties
were lower than in 2006, with 164 dead and over 300 wounded, but
the widespread nature of the onslaught was terrifying. One terrorist
was taken alive; after confirming Pakistans role in the attacks, he
was convicted of murder and other charges and executed. Relations
between India and Pakistan have not yet recovered.
Manmohan also followed the NDA in encouraging joint public and
private investment (both domestic and foreign) in improvements to
infrastructure, to which he added rural investment to improve irrigation, provide easy credit, and create jobs. Once again, however, coalition politics prevented meaningful economic reforms. For example,
Manmohans allies in the Left Front opposed privatization of all
government firms that made profits, as well as any foreign investment
in retail trading.
As a result, economic growth continued to depend largely on
exports and good harvests. At first, all was well, and the gross domestic product grew at an annual average rate of almost 9 percent
between 2003 and 2008. Partly because the slow pace of liberalization
meant that Indias economy was only partially integrated into the
global system, the worldwide downturn of 2008 did not immediately
have much impact. The slowdown did, however, slash foreign
imports of Indian products, and then bad weather cut agricultural
yields. By 2013, the growth rate had slipped to 5 percent. Unemployment rose, accompanied by inflation, which reached 10 percent a year.

THE RISE OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Meanwhile, economic grievances were joined by growing anger
over corruption. It is often said that while bribery has long existed in
India, until 1991 it tended to be petty stuff: a matter of giving a few
rupees to police constables or railroad ticket agents, a few more to
bureaucrats who could smooth a businessmans way through the regulations of the Nehruvian economy, perhaps even more to legislators
in return for giving or withholding their support to a particular prime
minister or chief minister. There were occasionally indications of corruption on a larger scale, as when Rajivs cronies took bribes in the
Bofors scandal of the mid-1980s, but these were relatively rare.
Over the last two decades, however, the situation seems to have
been transformed by a combination of liberalization, the introduction
of new technologies, and the gradual integration of India into the
global economy. All of these have multiplied opportunities for

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politicians and bureaucrats to enrich themselves. At the same time,

modern electronic media have made corruption far more visible than
ever before. An early example came in 2001, when the news Web site
Tehelka released film showing several leading members of Vajpayees
National Democratic Alliance accepting what they believed were
bribes from arms dealers. The scandal almost brought down the
government, and led to the resignation of the Defense Minister George
Fernandes and the imprisonment of the then-president of the BJP,
Bangaru Laxman.
Under Manmohan Singhs United Progressive Alliance government, several big corruption scandals came to light. In 2005, the new
government introduced a scheme to guarantee paid work to the rural
poor. Over the next few years, many instances emerged of bureaucrats
collecting and pocketing money for non-existent laborers. In 2008,
bureaucrats and politicians took huge bribes in return for allocating
radio frequency bands to mobile telephone companies. In 2010, India
hosted the Commonwealth Games, which are held every 4 years by
the members of the Commonwealth of Nations (mainly former British
colonies). The Games were marred by the discovery of large-scale corruption on the part of the Organizing Committee. The same year, the
public learned that politicians and bureaucrats in Mumbai had
acquired luxury apartments that were intended primarily for the widows of soldiers who had been killed in the Kargil war in Kashmir
in 1999.
Since the 1970s, a number of states had created the office of Lokpal
(protector of the people) or Lokayukta (appointed by the people), an
independent ombudsman with the power to hear and redress complaints about corruption. Legislation to create a Lokpal with authority
over the entire country had repeatedly failed in parliament. In 2010,
as anger over the scandals of the previous decade boiled over into
anticorruption protests across the country, the UPA government
announced that it would appoint a Lokpal. The proposed legislation
severely circumscribed the ombudsmans power, however, and the
protesters demanded the appointment of a Lokpal who could actually
take on corruption.
In April 2011, the demand for a Lokpal was taken up by Anna
Hazare, an army veteran who had become well known for his efforts
to improve the lives of the people of his home village in Maharashtra.
Hazare advocated a satyagraha to force the government to create an
effective Lokpal, and did his part by launching a hunger strike. Manmohans government quickly announced that the Lokpal legislation
would be revised to meet the demands, and Hazare ended his fast.

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209

But the governments draft law provided for a far weaker and less independent Lokpal than the protesters had demanded. Hazare staged
further hunger strikes in August and December 2011, and at the end
of the year the Lok Sabha passed an amended version of the legislation. It remained stalled in parliament for two years until it was
passed by the Rajya Sabha in December 2013. It is unclear how far
the new All-India Lokpal will be able to tackle corruption.
Meanwhile, in 2012 the anticorruption movement had splintered.
Hazare preferred to continue extra-parliamentary satyagrahas and
protests. One of his associates, a former civil servant named Arvind
Kejriwal, argued that the experiences of dealing with the government
and parliament proved that the only way of bringing about legislation
that would really address corruption was through direct political
action. Kejriwal formed a new party, the Aam Admi Party (AAP, or
Common Man Party), with a platform of making political leaders truly
accountable to ordinary Indians.
In December 2013, elections were held for the legislative assembly
of the Union Territory of Delhi, the national capital territory. (As a
territory, Delhi has less autonomy from the Center than a state would,
but it has its own administration and chief minister.) The territory had
been controlled by Congress (I) for 15 years. Kejriwals anticorruption
movement combined with the unpopularity of the UPA government
at the Center to almost wipe out Congress (I). The BJP won a plurality
of seats, but the AAP came in second and with the support of the remnants of Congress (I), Kejriwal took office as chief minister. In February 2014, he tried to introduce Lokpal legislation, but this was
blocked for procedural reasons and he resigned the chief ministership.
The AAP soon fragmented, but between them Hazare and Kejriwal
had played a large part in voicing the demand for the eradication of
corruption.
At least before Kejriwal shifted into overt political activity, the
movements against corruption were an indication that a growing
number of Indians believed that extra-parliamentary action was sometimes the best means of bringing about change. In some ways, this represented a revival of the mass mobilization that Gandhi had perfected
during his satyagraha campaigns, and Hazare is sometimes referred
to as a Gandhian. In others ways, however, the movements testify
to the emergence in India of what scholars sometimes call a civil society, through which citizens of a modern state use nongovernmental
associations to pressure legislators to address public concerns.
Another manifestation of the same phenomenon was growing public
outrage over violence against women. In the 1990s and early 2000s,

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there was apparently a sharp rise in incidents of bride burning, in

which young women were murdered by their husbands families
due to feelings that they had brought insufficient dowries into their
marriages. (Laws to ban the payment of dowry have been almost
entirely ineffective.) Some connected the increase with the spurt in
demand for material goods that followed Rajivs economic reforms
of the mid-1980s and liberalization in 1991, both of which made a
much larger range of consumer products available than had been the
case before. Activists demanded action, and in 2005 parliament
responded by passing the Protection of Women from Domestic
Violence Act.
Meanwhile, while the ratio of reported rapes to population is far
smaller in India than in the United States and other Western countries,
there is no doubt that the crime is widespread. It appears that often
neither the police nor the judicial system has regarded it as a particularly serious offense. Particularly in rural areas, sexual attacks may
be one of the weapons with which men of higher castes try to enforce
their dominance over the lower castes, especially SCs. As elsewhere,
rape seems to become more prevalent during times of social dislocation. For example, it has been estimated that up to 100,000 women
were raped during the violence that surrounded Partition in 1947.

Women demonstrate for civil rights and a healthy environment in Goa, India, on
November 26, 2007. (Dreamstime.com)

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211

Rapes have been committed by both government and insurgent forces

in Punjab and Kashmir, and during communal riots.
In the opening years of the twenty-first century, there was a widespread perception that rape was becoming more common in India.
Some observers spoke of the spread of a rape culture in which rape
was accepted, or at least regarded as something that could not be
stopped. In 2012, a young woman died after being gang raped and
beaten on a private bus in Delhi. This provoked widespread outrage,
especially among educated young urban Indians. The government of
Manmohan Singh initially dismissed the incident, which provoked
huge demonstrations across the country. Politicians recognized the
need to do something, and a few months later parliament revised the
Indian penal code to broaden the definition of rape and to enhance
penalties. The crime remains rampant in much of India, but the protests and subsequent legislation were an indication of the power of
public opinion in effecting change.

THE END OF THE NEHRU-GANDHI DYNASTY

Rajiv and Sonia Gandhis son Rahul was elected to the Lok Sabha in
2004. His mother was grooming him to replace both her as president
of Congress (I) and Manmohan Singh as prime minister of India.
In 2007, the post of general secretary of Congress (I) was created especially for Rahul, making him second in command of the party after his
mother. During the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Rahul campaigned
extensively for Congress (I), and at least some observers credited
him with the UPAs return to power.
In 2013, the two national parties geared up for the next Lok Sabha
elections. After venomous party infighting, the BJP chose Narendra
Modi from Gujarat as its candidate for prime minister. In Congress
(I), Rahuls title was changed from general secretary to vicepresident, but the party decided not to designate a candidate for the
prime ministership. This probably reflected uncertainty as to whether
Rahul was an asset or a liability.
The elections were held in phases between April 7 and May 12,
2014. Campaigning was vigorous, and a record 66 percent of eligible
voters went to the polls. With widespread discontent over the slowdown in economic growth, unemployment, inflation, and corruption,
all predictions indicated a victory for the BJPs bloc the National
Democratic Alliance, but its scale was unforeseen. When the results
were announced on May 16, Modis BJP had 51 percent of the seats
in the Lok Sabha. This was the first time since Rajivs victory 30 years

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earlier that a single party had won a parliamentary majority. With the
BJPs allies, the NDA held an astonishing 62 percent of the seats.
Congress (I) was reduced to just 44 out of 543 seats, or 8 percent, and
the UPA had a total of 11 percent. Most of the remaining seats were
held by members of a new bloc called the Federal Front, made up of
regional parties which together held 20 percent of the seats. The
once-powerful Left Front was reduced to just 12 seats, or 2 percent.
It was a crippling defeat for Congress (I), and the fact that it took place
under the leadership of Sonia and Rahul may mark the end of the
Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty.
Modi took office as prime minister on May 26, 2014. He is the first
OBC prime minister to command a majority in the Lok Sabha. (The
two previous OBC prime ministers, Charan Singh in 19791980 and
H. D. Deve Gowda in 19961997, presided over short-lived minority
governments.) He is the first prime minister to be born after the end
of British rule in India, and only the second (after Vajpayee) who never
belonged to one of the incarnations of the Indian National Congress.
His swearing-in marked the first time that an Indian prime minister
had been installed in the presence of the presidents or prime ministers
of all the countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (except for Bangladesh, which was represented by the
speaker of its parliament). The guests included Nawaz Sharif, who
had returned to power in Pakistan the previous year. His participation
was criticized in both India and Pakistan, but it seemed to signal a
desire for better relations on the part of the leaders of both countries.
Modi has aroused high expectations: Indians look to him to revive
the economy, create jobs, tame inflation, eliminate corruption, and perhaps resolve the tensions with Pakistan, while also upholding traditional BJP policies by standing up for Indias interests against such
hostile countries as China, building the Rama Temple at Ayodhya,
and eliminating special constitutional provisions for Muslims and for
the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. Whether he
succeeds or fails, it is certain that the elections of 2014 will mark the
beginning of a new era in the history of India.

Notable People in the

History of India
Advani, Lal Krishna (1927). Politician. Joined the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh 1947; member of the Jan Sangh (until 1977), the
Janata Party (19771980), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (1980), and
president of the BJP 19861991, 19931998, and 20042006; a minister
in the Indian cabinet 19771979 and 19982004; led the rath yatra
(chariot procession) of 1990 in support of the demolition of the Babri
Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque that many Hindus believe was
built on the site of the birthplace of the deity Rama.
Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam (18351908). Religious leader. Founder of
the Ahmadi movement; his followers believe that he completed the
work of the Prophet Muhammad.
Akbar (15421605). Ruler. The third emperor of the Mughal dynasty
(15561605) and son and successor of Humayun; brought present-day
northern and central India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and southern
Afghanistan under Mughal rule; moved away from orthodox Islam;
patron of the arts; established an alliance between the Mughals and
the Rajputs; organized the nobility with a system of mansabs (ranks);

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Notable People in the History of India

reformed the collection of revenues; often regarded as the greatest of

all the Mughal emperors.
Ala ud-Din Khalji (?1316). Ruler. Second sultan of Delhi from the
Khalji dynasty (12961316); subjugated much of India.
Ali Brothers. Politicians. Mohamed Ali (18781931) and Shaukat Ali
(18731938), two Muslim nationalist leaders; interned by the British
during World War I; prominent in the Khilafat movement, which
urged lenient treatment of Turkey after the War; joined with Mahatma
Gandhi in organizing the Noncooperation Satyagraha of 19201922.
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji (18911956). Politician. Leader of the
Untouchables (Scheduled Castes); with Mahatma Gandhi devised
the system of reserving legislative seats for Untouchables; one of the
authors of the Indian constitution.
Ashoka (?c. 235 BCE). Ruler. The second king of Magadha of
the Mauryan dynasty (c. 272235 BCE); ruled much of modern India;
the first known king in South Asian to set up inscriptions; became a
Buddhist and adopted the ethical policy of dhamma; considered one
of the greatest rulers of ancient India.
Aurangzeb (16181707). Ruler. The sixth emperor of the Mughal
dynasty (16581707) and son and successor of Shah Jahan; a devout
Muslim who tried to rule in accordance with Islamic precepts; conquered the sultanates of Bijapur and Golkonda in the Deccan, and
brought almost the entire Indian subcontinent under his rule; faced
rebellions by the Marathas, the Rajputs, the Jats, and the Sikhs.
Babur (14831530). Ruler. The first emperor of the Mughal dynasty
(15261530). Conquered the Delhi sultanate 1526.
Bahadur Shah I (16431712). Ruler. The seventh emperor of the
Mughal dynasty (17071712), and son and successor of Aurangzeb;
tried (with some success) to end the rebellions that had plagued his
father; the last great Mughal ruler.
Bahadur Shah II (17751862). Ruler. The seventeenth and last
emperor of the Mughal dynasty (18371857); nominal monarch under
British domination; agreed to support the anti-British rebels during

Notable People in the History of India

215

the Great Revolt of 1857; deprived by the British of his title of emperor
1857 and deported to Burma.
Bajirav (17001740). Ruler. Peshwa of the Maratha kingdom (1720
1740), in succession to his father Balaji Vishvanath Bhat; pushed the
Maratha king (a descendant of Shivaji) into the background and made
the Marathas the most powerful force in India.
Besant, Annie (18471933). Religious leader and politician.
President of the Theosophical Society 19071933; supported the Indian
nationalist movement; founded a Home Rule League 1916; president
of the Indian National Congress 1917.
Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singh (19471984). Religious leader.
A leader of the Khalsa (orthodox) Sikhs, and perhaps a supporter of
an independent Sikh state (Khalistan); apparently instigated violent
attacks on heterodox Sikhs, Hindus, and government institutions
19781984; killed in the Indian armys attack on the Golden Temple
at Amritsar 1984.
Bose, Subhas Chandra (18971945?). Politician. Radical nationalist
leader; president of the Indian National Congress 19381939; supported the Axis powers during World War II and organized the Indian
National Army to fight alongside the Japanese; apparently killed in an
airplane crash 1945, although many of his followers believed that he
was still alive many years later.
Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) (c. 563483 BCE? or died between
378 and 358 BCE?). Religious leader. Founder of Buddhism.
Chandra Gupta II (?c. 415 CE). Ruler. Seventh and greatest king of
the Gupta dynasty (c. 375415 CE); ruled north India and much of the
Deccan.
Chandragupta Maurya (?c. 297 BCE). Ruler. The first king of Magadha of the Mauryan dynasty (c. 325 or 321297 BCE); ruled much of
northern and central India.
Clive, Robert (later first Baron Clive) (17251774). Administrator.
Officer of the British East India Company; fought the French in South
India; defeated Nawab Siraj ud-Daula of Bengal at the battle of Plassey

216

Notable People in the History of India

1757; served as the companys governor in Bengal 17571760 and

17651766; secured the appointment of his company as diwan of
Bengal and Bihar 1765.
Cornwallis, Lord (Charles Cornwallis, second Earl Cornwallis,
later first Marquess Cornwallis) (17381805). Administrator. Served
as a general in the British army during the American Revolution; governor general of Bengal (with authority over all British activities in
India) 17861793 and 1805; created the Indian Civil Service; implemented the Permanent Settlement in Bengal and Bihar 1793.
Curzon, Lord (George Nathaniel Curzon, first Baron Curzon
of Kedleston, later first Earl Curzon of Kedleston and then first
Marquess Curzon of Kedleston) (18591925). Administrator. Member
of the British parliament; viceroy of India 18991905; implemented the
Partition of Bengal 1905; a minister in the British cabinet 19151924.
Dalhousie, Lord (James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, tenth Earl of
Dalhousie, later first Marquess of Dalhousie) (18121860). Administrator. Governor general of India 18481856; implemented the Doctrine of
Lapse to annex Indian states when their rulers died without heirs;
annexed the Sikh empire 1849, Lower Burma 1852, and Awadh 1856.
Desai, Morarji Ranchhodji (18961995). Politician. Joined Indian
National Congress 1930 and took part in Mahatma Gandhis Salt
Satyagraha; chief minister of the state of Bombay 19521957; a minister
in the Indian cabinet 19581963 and 19671969; wished to become
prime minister 1964 and 1966, but failed on both occasions; a leader
of Congress (O) 19691977 and of the Janata Party 19771980; prime
minister of India 19771979.
Gandhi, Indira Priyadarshini (nee Nehru) (19171984). Politician.
Daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru; mother of Rajiv Gandhi and Sanjay
Gandhi; president of the Indian National Congress 1959 and of
Congress (I) 19781984; one of the leaders of Congress (O) 19691978;
a minister in the Indian cabinet 19641966; prime minister of India
19661977 and 19801984; declared a state of Emergency 1975; assassinated 1984.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (18691948). Politician. Indias Father of the Nation; trained as a barrister in London;
lived in South Africa 18931914, where he developed the techniques

Notable People in the History of India

217

of satyagraha; led the Noncooperation Satyagraha 19201922, the Salt

Satyagraha 19301931, the Individual Satyagraha against participation
in World War II 1940, and the Quit India movement 1942; president of
the Indian National Congress 1924; assassinated 1948.
Gandhi, Rahul (1970). Politician. Son of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi;
general secretary of Congress (I) 20072013 and vice president of
Congress (I) since 2013.
Gandhi, Rajiv (19441991). Politician. Son of Indira Gandhi, husband of Sonia Gandhi, and father of Rahul Gandhi; an airline pilot
until he entered politics after the death of his brother Sanjay 1980;
prime minister 19841989 and president of Congress (I) 19851991;
assassinated 1991.
Gandhi, Sanjay (19461980). Politician. Son of Indira Gandhi; his
mothers principal adviser during the Emergency of 19751977; killed
in an airplane crash 1980.
Gandhi, Sonia (nee Edvige Antonia Albina Ma`ino) (1946). Politician. Italian-born wife of Rajiv Gandhi and mother of Rahul Gandhi;
president of Congress (I) since 1998.
Gobind Singh (formerly Gobind Das) (16661708). Religious
leader. Tenth and last human guru of the Sikhs (16751708), in succession to his father Tegh Bahadur; fought against the Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb and created the Khalsa 1699; assassinated 1708.
Gokhale, Gopal Krishna (18661915). Politician. Joined the Indian
National Congress 1889 and was its president 1905; leader of the Moderate
faction of Congress in succession to Pherozeshah Mehta; apparently played
a large part in securing the Morley-Minto reforms of 19091910, which significantly increased Indian representation in the government of British
India; a mentor of both Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Harshavardhana (?647 CE). Ruler. Last great king of ancient North
India (606647 CE).
Humayun (15081556). Ruler. The second emperor of the Mughal
dynasty (15301540 and 15551556) and son and successor of Babur;
driven into exile by Shir Shah Sur 1540 and lived in Iran for many
years; returned to India 1555 but died six months later.

218

Notable People in the History of India

Iltutmish, Shams ud-Din (?1236). Ruler. Slave of Qutb ud-Din

Aybeg, who ruled much of North India from Lahore 12061210; established himself at Delhi 1210, founding the Delhi sultanate, and was
first sultan of Delhi of the Shamsid dynasty (12101236).
Jahangir (15691627). Ruler. The fourth emperor of the Mughal
dynasty (16051627) and son and successor of Akbar; named Salim
before his accession to the throne; with his wife Nur Jahan was a great
patron of the arts, and oversaw the development of the Mughal style
of painting.
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali (c. 18761948), called Qaid-e-Azam (Great
Leader). Politician. Trained as a barrister in London and practiced
law in Mumbai; joined the Indian National Congress 1904 and was a
leading Moderate under the leadership of Gopal Krishna Gokhale;
also joined the All-India Muslim League 1913; left Congress 1920;
president of the Muslim League from 1935; headed the demand for
Pakistan in the 1940s; first governor general of Pakistan 19471948.
Kautilya (also called Chanakya or Vishnugupta). Administrator.
Adviser of King Chandragupta Maurya of Magadha (?c. 297 BCE);
said to have written the Arthashastra.
Linlithgow, Lord (Victor Alexander John Hope, second Marquess
of Linlithgow) (18871952). Administrator. Viceroy of India 1936
1943, and was in office at the time of the implementation of the 1935
Government of India Act and the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Mahavira (Vardhamana) (599527 BCE?). Religious leader. Founder
of Jainism.
Modi, Narendra Damodardas (1950). Politician. Joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a young man; a member of the Bharatiya
Janata Party since 1985; chief minister of Gujarat 20012014, and was
in office at the time of the communal riots of 2002; prime minister of
India 2014.
Mountbatten, Lord (Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, first Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, later first Earl Mountbatten of Burma) (19001979). Administrator. Commissioned in the Royal
Navy 1916 and served as an officer until 1965; Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia Command, 19431946; viceroy of India 1947;

Notable People in the History of India

219

oversaw the independence and partition of India 1947 and was first
governor general of independent India 19471948.
Muhammad Shah (17021748). Ruler. The twelfth emperor of the
Mughal dynasty (17191748); during his reign, the Mughal empire
effectively fragmented; its weakness was demonstrated when Nadir
Shah of Iran sacked Delhi in 1739.
Muizz ud-Din Muhammad Ghauri (c. 11501206). Ruler. Muslim
sultan of the Ghauri dynasty (11731206); ruled what are now
Afghanistan and Pakistan; conquered North India 11921206 and laid
the foundations for Muslim rule in much of the Indian subcontinent.
Nanak (14691539). Religious leader. Founder of Sikhism and first
guru of the Sikhs.
Naoroji, Dadabhai (18251917). Politician. Settled in England 1855
and played a central role in enunciating the concerns of the first generation of Indian nationalists; president of the Indian National Congress
1886, 1893, and 1906; member of the British parliament (representing a
London constituency) 18921895; called the Grand Old Man of India.
Narasimha Rao, Pamulaparti Venkata (19212004). Politician.
Active in the nationalist movement as a young man; joined the Indian
National Congress; chief minister of Andhra Pradesh 19711973; a
minister in the Indian cabinet 19801989; prime minister of India and
president of Congress (I) 19911996; with Manmohan Singh oversaw
the implementation of Liberalization.
Narayan, Jayaprakash (J.P.) (19021979). Politician. Joined
Mahatma Gandhis Noncooperation Satyagraha 1920; head of the
socialists within the Indian National Congress 19341948; left
Congress 1948; joined Morarji Desai in leading the Janata Morcha in
opposition to Indira Gandhi 1974, and in forming the Janata Party
which defeated Indira in the Lok Sabha elections of 1977.
Nehru, Jawaharlal (18891964). Politician. Son of Motilal Nehru
and father of Indira Gandhi; trained as a barrister in London; became
active in the Indian National Congress 1912 and served as its
president 19291930, 19361937, and 19511954; heir apparent of
Mahatma Gandhi; prime minister of India 19471964; pursued policies of planned economic development and nonalignment.

220

Notable People in the History of India

Nehru, Motilal (18611931). Politician. Father of Jawaharlal Nehru;

a barrister by profession; became active in the Indian National
Congress and served as its president 1919 and 1928; author of the
Nehru Report.
Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai (18751950). Politician. A barrister by
profession; drawn into nationalist politics by Mahatma Gandhi and
became a leader of the Indian National Congress, serving as its
president 1931; deputy prime minister of India 19471950; oversaw
the accession and merger of the states of Indian India.
Ranjit Singh (17801839). Ruler. A Sikh chieftain; founded the Sikh
empire (in the present northern Pakistan and northwestern India), and
made his capital at Lahore; ruled 17991839.
Roy, Rammohun (c. 17741833). Religious leader. Employed in the
administration of the East India Company; retired 1815 and devoted
himself to purifying Hinduism; founded the Brahmo Sabha (later
Brahmo Samaj) 1828.
Saraswati, Swami Dayananda (18241883). Religious leader. Lived
as a wandering ascetic for many years; founded the Bombay Arya
Samaj at Mumbai 1875; settled in Punjab 1877 and founded a new
Arya Samaj.
Shah Jahan (15921666). Ruler. Fifth emperor of the Mughal
dynasty (16281658) and son and successor of Jahangir; the greatest
builder of the dynasty, responsible for the Taj Mahal at Agra (which
he built as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal) and for the monuments
of Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi); expanded the Mughal territories in the
Deccan.
Shastri, Lal Bahadur (19041966). Politician. Joined Mahatma
Gandhis Salt Satyagraha 1930; a minister in the Uttar Pradesh cabinet
19471951 and the Indian cabinet 19511964; prime minister of India
19641966; led the country during the Second Indo-Pakistan War
(1965); died in office 1966.
Shekhar, Chandra (19272007). Politician. Active in socialist
politics; a member of the Indian National Congress 19641969, of
Congress (R) 19691975, of the Janata Party 19751988, of the Janata

Notable People in the History of India

221

Dal 19881990, and of his own Samajwadi Janata Party from 1990;
prime minister of India 19901991.
Shivaji (16301680). Ruler. Leader of the Maratha rebellion against
the sultans of Bijapur and the Mughal emperors; first ruler of the
Maratha kingdom (16741680).
Singh, Chaudhuri Charan (19021987). Politician. Born into a former royal family of the Jat caste; practiced law; joined Mahatma Gandhis Salt Satyagraha 1930, the Individual Satyagraha against World
War II 1940, and the Quit India movement 1942; a member of the
Indian National Congress 19301967, the Bharatiya Kranti Dal 1967
1974, the Lok Dal 19741977, the Janata Party 19771979, and the Lok
Dal again 19791987; chief minister of Uttar Pradesh 19671968 and
1970; deputy prime minister of India 19771979; prime minister of
India 19791980.
Singh, Manmohan (1932). Politician. Trained as an economist and
worked in his profession until 1991, when he was appointed minister
of finance in the cabinet of Narasimha Rao; held office until 1996,
and with Narasimha Rao oversaw the implementation of liberalization; prime minister of India 20042014.
Singh, Vishwanath Pratap (19312008). Politician. Member of
Congress (R) 19691977, of Congress (I) 19771987, of the Jan Morcha
(which he founded) 19871988, of the Janata Dal 19882006, and of
the Jan Morcha from 2006; chief minister of Uttar Pradesh 19801982;
a minister in the Indian cabinet 19761977 and 19831987; prime minister of India 19891990; announced the implementation of the Mandal
Report on reservations of public sector jobs for members of Other
Backward Classes.
Siraj ud-Daula (1736/17371757). Ruler. Nawab of Bengal (1756
1757); defeated by Clive at the Battle of Plassey, 1757, and was
executed soon afterward.
Syed Ahmed Khan, Sir (18171898). Religious leader. Born into a
noble family in Delhi; worked in the administration of the East India
Company before the Great Revolt of 1857; later devoted himself to
establishing good relations between Indian Muslims and the British,
and to demonstrate that Islam and modern learning are compatible;

222

Notable People in the History of India

founder of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (now Aligarh

Muslim University).
Tagore, Rabindranath (18611941). Poet and philosopher. Author of
Jana Gana Mana, now the national anthem of India; winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature 1913; knighted by King George V 1915;
renounced his knighthood during Mahatma Gandhis Noncooperation Satyagraha of 1920.
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar (18561920). Politician. Joined the Indian
National Congress 1890 and led the Extremist wing of the movement,
which separated from Gokhales Moderate Congress 1907; rejoined
Congress 1914; founded a Home Rule League 1916.
Tipu Sultan (17501799). Ruler. Sultan of Mysore (17821799) in
succession to his father Haidar Ali; fought three wars against the British East India Company; defeated and killed by the British 1799.
Tughluq, Ghiyas ud-Din (?1324). Ruler. First sultan of Delhi of the
Tughluq dynasty (13201324); subjugated almost all of India; assassinated 1324, allegedly by his son Muhammad who succeeded him as
sultan.
Vajpayee, Atal Bihari (1924). Politician. Arrested 1942 for participating in the Quit India movement; joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; member of the Jan Sangh 19511977, the Janata Party
19771980, and the BJP since 1980; president of the BJP 19801986; a
minister in the Indian cabinet 19771979; prime minister of India
1996 and 19982004; ordered the nuclear tests of 1998; victorious in
the Kargil War 1999.
Vivekananda, Swami (18631902) (originally named Narendranath
Datta). Religious leader. Educated in English; became a devotee of the
religious reformer Sri Ramakrishna, and in 1886 succeeded as leader
of his movement; traveled around the world 18931897, and spoke at
the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago and elsewhere; founder
of the Ramakrishna mission.
Wavell, Lord (Archibald Percival Wavell, first Viscount Wavell,
later first Earl Wavell) (18831950). Administrator. Commissioned in
the British army 1901 and served as an officer until he retired as a field
marshal 1943; viceroy of India 19431947; attempted to negotiate the

Notable People in the History of India

223

terms of Indias independence with nationalist and British leaders

19451947.
Wellesley, Lord (Richard Colley Wellesley, second Earl of
Mornington, later first Marquess Wellesley) (17601842). Administrator. Member of the Irish and British parliaments; governor general
of Bengal (with authority over all British activities in India) 1798
1805; defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the Marathas, and made
the British the most powerful force in India; brother of the Duke of
Wellington.

Appendix
Mughal Emperors, British
Governors General and
Viceroys, Prime Ministers
of India
MUGHAL EMPERORS
Babur (14831530), 15261530
Humayun (15081556), 15301540 and 15551556
Akbar I (15421605), 15561605
Jahangir (15691627), 16051627
Shah Jahan I (15921666), 16281658
Aurangzeb (Alamgir I) (16181707), 16581707
Bahadur Shah I (Shah Alam I) (16431712), 17071712
Jahandar Shah (16611713), 17121713
Farrukhsiyar (16831719), 17131719
Rafi ud-Darjat (died 1719), 1719
Rafi ud-Daula (Shah Jahan II) (died 1719), 1719
Muhammad Shah (17021748), 17191748
Ahmad Shah (17251774), 17481754

226

Appendix

Alamgir II (16991759), 17541759

Shah Alam II (17281806), 17591806
Akbar II (17601837), 18061837
Bahadur Shah II (17751862), 18371857

BRITISH GOVERNORS GENERAL AND VICEROYS 1

Warren Hastings (17321818), 17741785
Sir John Macpherson (17451821), 17851786
Lord Cornwallis (17381805), 17861793
Sir John Shore (later Lord Teignmouth) (17511834), 17931798
Lord Mornington, from 1799 Lord Wellesley (17601842), 17981805
Lord Cornwallis (second term), 1805
Sir George Hilaro Barlow (17621847), 18051807
Lord Minto (17511814), 18071813
Lord Moira, from 1816 Lord Hastings (17541826), 18131823
Lord Amherst (17731857), 18231828
Lord William Henry Cavendish Bentinck (17741839), 18281835
Lord Auckland (17841849), 18361842
Lord Ellenborough (17901871), 18421844
Sir Henry Hardinge, from 1846 Lord Hardinge (17851856), 18441848
Lord Dalhousie (18121860), 18481856
Lord Canning (18121862), 18561862
Lord Elgin and Kincardine (18111863), 18621863
Lord Lawrence (18111879), 18631869
Lord Mayo (18221872), 18691872
Lord Northbrook (18261904), 18721876
Lord Lytton (18311891), 18761880
Lord Ripon (18271909), 18801884
Lord Dufferin (18261902), 18841888
Lord Lansdowne (18451927), 18881894
Lord Elgin and Kincardine (18491917), 18941899
Lord Curzon of Kedlestone (18591925), 18991905
Lord Minto (18451914), 19051910
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (18581944), 19101916
Lord Chelmsford (18681933), 19161921
Lord Reading (18601935), 19211926
Lord Irwin (18811959), 19261931
Lord Willingdon (18661941), 19311936
Lord Linlithgow (18871952), 19361943
Lord Wavell (18831950), 19431947
Lord Mountbatten of Burma (19001979), 1947

Appendix

227

PRIME MINISTERS OF INDIA

Jawaharlal Nehru (18891964), 19471964
Lal Bahadur Shastri (19041966), 19641966
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (19171984), 19661977
Morarji Ranchhodji Desai (18961995), 19771979
Chaudhuri Charan Singh (19021987), 19791980
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, 19801984
Rajiv Gandhi (19441991), 19841989
Vishwanath Pratap Singh (19312008), 19891990
Chandra Shekhar (19272007), 19901991
Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao (19212004), 19911996
Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924 ), 1996
Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda (1933 ), 19961997
Inder Kumar Gujral (19192012), 19971998
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 19982004
Manmohan Singh (1932 ), 20042014
Narendra Damodardas Modi (1950 ), 2014

NOTE
1. The official title was Governor General of Bengal 17741833; Governor General of India 18331858; and Viceroy and Governor General of India 18581947.

Glossary
Aam Admi Party (AAP): (Hindi, common man party): Political
party, founded 2012 by the anticorruption activist Arvind Kejriwal.
Agni: (Sanskrit, fire): The Brahminical god of fire.
Ahimsa: (Sanskrit, nonviolence): Used particularly with reference
to nonviolence in Jainism and in the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.
Ahmadi: Member of a sect founded in the nineteenth century by
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whose followers believe he completed the
message of the Prophet Muhammad.
AIADMK: See All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
Akali Dal: See Shiromani Akali Dal.
All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK): (Tamil,
All India Anna Dravidian Progress Federation, with Anna referring to C. N. Annadurai, founder of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or DMK): Tamil regional political party, which broke away
from the DMK in 1972; since 1977 it has alternated with the DMK
as the ruling party in Tamil Nadu.
All-India Muslim League: Political party, founded 1906; led by
Muhammad Ali Jinnah 19351948; supported the creation of

230

Glossary

Pakistan from 1940; since 1947, its name has been perpetuated by
parties in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Anandpur Sahib Resolution: Call for autonomy for Punjab as a
mainly Sikh state, approved by the Shiromani Akali Dal in a meeting
at the city of Anandpur Sahib in 1973.
Aranyakas: (Sanskrit, of the forest): Brahminical and Hindu
religious text; one of the Vedas.
Arthashastra: (Sanskrit, science of prosperity): Ancient Indian
political text, said to have been written by Chandragupta Mauryas
adviser Kautilya.
Aryan: (Sanskrit, one to be respected): Cultural group in ancient
Indian, apparently referring to anyone who adopted certain social
practices, the Brahminical religion, and the Vedic language.
Arya Samaj: (Hindi from Sanskrit, society of Aryans): Hindu
reformist movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayananda
Saraswati.
Ashram: (Hindi pronunciation of Ashrama): A refuge.
Ashrama: (Sanskrit, from a root connoting weariness): One of the
four stages in the life of a Hindu man; a hermitage.
Atharva Veda: (Sanskrit, from the name of its legendary author
Atharvan and veda, knowledge): Brahminical and Hindu religious
text; part of the Samhitas.
Babri Masjid: Sixteenth-century mosque at Ayodhya in Uttar
Pradesh, built at what many Hindus believe was the birthplace of
Rama; demolished 1992.
Bhagavad Gita: (Sanskrit, Song of the Lord): Section of the
Mahabharata, in which Krishna explains the principles that should
guide human actions; many Hindus regard it as the main message
of their religion.
Bhakti: (Sanskrit, in this context meaning devotion): Devotional
Hinduism, based on a loving relationship between God and humans.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): (Hindi, Indian Peoples Party):
Political party, founded 1980; supplied the prime minister 1996,
19982004, and since 2014; part of the Sangh Parivar.
BJP: See Bharatiya Janata Party.
Bodhisattva: (Sanskrit, being of enlightenment): in Mahayana
Buddhism, a being who in reward for living an exemplary life has
the power to grant salvation.

Glossary

231

Bollywood: (a combination of Bombay, or Mumbai, and Hollywood):

The Mumbai-based Hindi-language Indian film industry.
Brahma: (Sanskrit): In Hinduism, God in His form as creator.
Brahman: (Sanskrit): In Brahminical and Hindu philosophy, the
substance from which all things in the universe emerged.
Brahmanas: (Sanskrit, of a Brahmin): Brahminical and Hindu
religious text; one of the Vedas.
Brahmin: (Sanskrit): Aryan priest; member of one of the four Varnas;
later, member of the highest-ranking Hindu Caste.
Brahminical: (English word, derived from Brahmin): Having to do
with Brahmins; applied here to the Aryan religion.
Brahmo Sabha: (Bengali from Sanskrit, association of Brahma):
Hindu reformist movement founded by Rammohun Roy; later reorganized and renamed the Brahmo Samaj (society of Brahma).
Caste: Used here for any one of the traditional divisions of Hindu society,
apparently formed through the merger of the Varna and Jati systems.
Center: The federal government of India.
Collector: The head of the administration of a district (subdivision of
a state).
Congress, Congress (I), Congress (O), Congress (R): See Indian
National Congress.
Dalit: See Untouchable.
Dasa, Dasyu, Pani: (Sanskrit): Indian who did not adopt the Aryan
ways; later forcibly incorporated into Aryan society (see Shudras).
In modern Indian languages, words derived from Dasa are used to
mean slave or devotee.
Deccan: (Urdu, derived from the Sanskrit dakshina, south): Peninsular
India.
Deoband School: Seminary for Muslim theologians, founded at the
city of Deoband in 1867.
Dhamma: (Prakrit, law, derived from the Sanskrit dharma): Used
here for the ethical policy of Ashoka.
Dharma: (Sanskrit, with several meanings related to the concept of
law): The Hindu religion; laws regarding human conduct.
Dhimmi: (Arabic): Follower of a non-Islamic religion (Judaism,
Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism) that Muslims recognize as
a legitimate faith, in return for payment of the Jizya.

232

Glossary

Diwan: (Persian or Arabic, originally meaning collection of written

papers): Head of the provincial taxation department in the Mughal
empire.
DMK: See Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK): (Tamil, Dravidian Progress
Federation): Tamil regional political party, founded 1949; since
1969 it has alternated with the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (AIADMK) as the ruling party in Tamil Nadu.
Faraizis: (from the Arabic word for duties): Muslim reformist
movement founded by Hajji Shariat Ullah.
Golden Temple: Spiritual center of Sikhism, at Amritsar in Punjab.
Granth Sahib or Adi Granth: (Punjabi, honored book or first
book): The holy book of Sikhism.
Gurdwara: (Punjabi, gateway of the guru): A Sikh temple.
Guru: (Sanskrit, teacher): Any teacher in Hinduism; the title given
to Nanak and his successors as spiritual leaders of Sikhism.
Hadith: (Arabic, narrative): Collection of stories about the Prophet
Muhammad, which serve to guide the behavior of Muslims.
Hartal: (Hindi, lock market): A general strike, especially as a
political protest.
Hinayana: (Sanskrit, lesser vehicle): The form of Buddhism that
looks to ethical conduct and meditation for salvation (see also
Mahayana and Vajrayana).
Hindutva: (twentieth-century Sanskrit): Hindu-ness, the principles
on which Hindu nationalism is based.
IAS: See Indian Administrative Service.
ICS: See Indian Civil Service.
INC: See Indian National Congress.
Indian Administrative Service (IAS): Corps of elite bureaucrats in independent India; successor of the Indian Civil Service.
Indian Civil Service (ICS): Corps of elite bureaucrats in British-ruled
India; renamed the Indian Administrative Service after independence.
Indian National Army (INA): Army recruited during World War II
by Subhas Chandra Bose from Indian soldiers who had been
captured by the Japanese; fought against the British.

Glossary

233

Indian National Congress (INC, Congress): Political party, founded

1885; supplied prime ministers 19471977, 19801989, 19911996,
20042014. Since 1969, Congress has split several times. Its offshoots
include Congress (I) (for Indira Gandhi), Congress (O) (for Organization), and Congress (R) (for Requisitioned).
Indra: (Sanskrit, of uncertain meaning): Brahminical god of war and
weather.
Iqta: (Arabic): The right to keep the taxes from a specified region,
used by Sultans to pay their officials (similar to a Jagir). A person
who has an iqta is called a Muqta.
Jagir: (Persian, place-holding): The right to keep the taxes from a
specified region, used by the Mughal emperors to pay their officials
(similar to an Iqta).
Janata Dal: (Hindi, peoples party): Political party, founded 1988 in
opposition to the government of Rajiv Gandhi; supplied prime
ministers 19891991, 19961998.
Janata Morcha: (Hindi, peoples front): Two antigovernment movements. The first was founded by J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai in
1974, the second by V. P. Singh in 1987.
Janata Party: (Hindi, peoples party): Political party, founded 1977
by the opponents of Indira Gandhi in the aftermath of the Emergency of 19751977; supplied prime ministers 19771980; broke up
after 1980.
Jan Sangh: (Hindi from Sanskrit, peoples organization): Hindu
nationalist political party, founded 1951; merged into the Janata
Party 1977.
Jat: (Hindi): Hindu caste of North India; many Jats converted to Islam
and Sikhism.
Jati: (Sanskrit, birth): In Aryan society, a group of related people;
now means a caste.
Jizya: (Arabic): Tax paid by Dhimmis.
Karma: (Sanskrit, action or deed): In Hinduism, deeds that determine the nature of our rebirth.
Khalifa: (Arabic, successor): Successor of the prophet Muhammad
as spiritual leader of Islam.
Khalistan: (Persian, land of the Khalsa or pure land): Used in the
1980s as the name of the proposed independent Sikh state.

234

Glossary

Khalsa: (Punjabi, from Arabic khalisa): Pure ones, the body of Sikh
men initiated according to the rituals devised by Gobind Singh in
1699.
Khilafat: (Arabic): The office of Khalifa.
Krishna: (Sanskrit, dark): Character in the Mahabharata, regarded
by Hindus as an earthly incarnation of Vishnu.
Kshatriya: (Sanskrit, from kshatra, dominion): originally called
Rajanya: Aryan warrior; member of one of the four Varnas.
Land Revenue: Tax on agricultural production.
Left Front: Political bloc in the Indian parliament, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist); part of the United Front 19961998 and
of the Third Front 20092014.
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE): Tamil rebel movement in
Sri Lanka (Ilam or Eelam is the Tamil name for the island).
Lok Dal: (Hindi, peoples party): Political party, founded 1974
under the leadership of Chaudhuri Charan Singh; merged into the
Janata Party 1977 and the Janata Dal 1988.
Lokpal: (Hindi from Sanskrit, protector of the people): An ombudsman with authority over cases of corruption.
Lok Sabha: (Hindi from Sanskrit, officially translated as House of
the People): The lower house of the Indian parliament.
LTTE: See Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Mahabharata: (Sanskrit): Sanskrit epic poem, telling the story of the
war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas and regarded as one
of the Hindu scriptures; includes the Bhagavad Gita.
Maharaja: (Hindi from Sanskrit, great king): Title of many Hindu
kings.
Mahayana: (Sanskrit, great vehicle): The form of Buddhism
that looks to a Bodhisattva for salvation (see also Hinayana and
Vajrayana).
Mandal Report: (named for Bindheshwari Prasad Mandal, an OBC
politician who chaired the drafting committee): Report on reserving
places for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in government jobs and
higher education, completed 1980; implementation ordered by V. P.
Singh 1989.
Mansab: (Arabic, rank): Rank held by a Mughal noble (mansabdar).
Mansabdar: (Persian, holder of a mansab): Mughal noble, holding a
mansab.

Glossary

235

Maratha: (Marathi, probably of Prakrit origin): Hindu caste of

Maharashtra.
Monsoon, Southwest: The winds that bring rain to India in June or
July.
Muqta: (Arabic): The holder of an Iqta.
Muslim League: See All-India Muslim League.
National Democratic Alliance: Political bloc in the Indian parliament
led by the Bharatiya Janata Party; the ruling coalition at the Center
19982004.
National Front: Political bloc in the Indian parliament, led by the
Janata Dal; the ruling coalition at the Center 19891990; part of the
United Front 19961998.
Nawab: (Arabic, plural of naib, deputy): Title of most Muslim
rulers who broke away from the Mughal empire in the eighteenth
century; held by Muslim princes and landowners into the twentieth
century.
Nirvana: (Sanskrit, blown out, as of a candle): A state of being
attained by Buddhists.
Nizam: (Arabic, order, shortened from Nizam ul-Mulk, which has
been translated as administrator the country): Title of the rulers
of Hyderabad from 1724 to 1948.
OBC: See Other Backward Classes.
Other Backward Classes (OBC): Disadvantaged Hindu communities
that rank above Untouchables.
Panchayat: (Hindi from Sanskrit, derived from pancha, five, from
the ancient number of members): A council, originally with jurisdiction over the inhabitants of a village or the members of a caste; since
1958 the name of the bodies forming the lowest elected level of
government in India.
Permanent Settlement: Fixing the Land Revenue rate in perpetuity,
carried out in Bengal and Bihar 1793.
Peshwa: (Persian, leader): Prime minister of the Maratha kingdom.
Prakrit: (Sanskrit, natural): One of the spoken languages of the first
millennium BCE, derived from the older Sanskrit.
Presidents Rule: Temporary administration of a state by the Center
following the removal of the state government.
Quran: (Arabic, recitation): The holy book of Islam.
Rajanya: (Sanskrit, royal): see Kshatriya.

236

Glossary

Rajput: (Hindi, kings son): Hindu caste of North India.

Rajya Sabha: (Hindi from Sanskrit, officially translated as Council of
States): The upper house of the Indian parliament.
Rama: (Sanskrit): King of Kosala and hero of the Ramayana, regarded
by Hindus as an earthly incarnation of Vishnu.
Ramakrishna Mission: Hindu reformist movement founded by Swami
Vivekananda and named in honor of his teacher Sri Ramakrishna.
Ramayana: (Sanskrit): Sanskrit epic poem, telling the story of Rama
and his wife Sita and regarded as one of the Hindu scriptures.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS): (Hindi from Sanskrit,
national volunteers association): Hindu paramilitary organization, founded 1925; part of the Sangh Parivar.
Rath Yatra: (Hindi from Sanskrit, chariot procession): used for the
journey undertaken in 1990 by Lal Krishna Advani, head of the
Bharatiya Janata Party, to build support for replacing the Babri
Masjid with a temple to Rama.
Rig Veda: (Sanskrit rig, praise, and veda, knowledge): Brahminical and Hindu religious text; part of the Samhitas; the oldest surviving literary work from India.
Rita: (Sanskrit, right): In the Brahminical religion, the law that
keeps order in the universe.
RSS: See Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Rupee: (Hindi, from the dialectal word rup, silver, which is
ultimately from a Sanskrit word meaning beautiful): The unit of
Indian currency.
Sama Veda: (Sanskrit saman, melody, and veda, knowledge):
Brahminical and Hindu religious text; part of the Samhitas.
Samhitas: (Sanskrit, collections): The Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur
Veda, and Atharva Veda; one of the Vedas. (Sometimes, the term
Vedas is applied specifically to the Samhitas.)
Sangh Parivar: (Hindi from Sanskrit, family of organizations):
Group of Hindu nationalist organizations, including the Bajrang
Dal, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
Sanskrit: (Sanskrit, refined): The Vedic language as used for
religious and literary purposes since the first millennium BCE.
Sant Nirankari: (Punjabi from Sanskrit, sant meaning an ascetic but
here referring to a devotee of a God without form or attributes, and

Glossary

237

nirankari, formless): Member of a Sikh sect, regarded by Khalsa

Sikhs as heterodox; came into conflict with the Khalsa followers of
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale 1978.
Sati: (Sanskrit, virtuous): A custom by which a widow followed her
husband onto the funeral pyre, practiced occasionally by some
Hindu castes.
Satyagraha: (Hindi from Sanskrit, satya truth and agraha insistence or grasping): Mahatma Gandhis method of resolving
conflict without violence.
SC: See Scheduled Castes.
Scheduled Castes: Hindu communities belonging to the Untouchable
category.
Scheduled Tribes: Communities belonging to the Tribal category.
Shaikh: (Arabic, elder): In India, typically refers to a Sufi holy man.
Shangam (or Sangam) Literature: (apparently Sanskrit sangama,
meeting): Ancient Tamil heroic poems.
Shiromani Akali Dal: (Punjabi, supreme army of the immortals):
Sikh political party, founded 1920.
Shiva: (Sanskrit, auspicious): In Hinduism, one of the basic forms
of God (see also Vishnu).
Shudras: (Sanskrit): Menial, originally a Dasa who had been forcibly
incorporated into Aryan society; later an Aryan peasant and craftsman; member of one of the four Varnas.
Singh Sabhas: (Punjabi, association of lions or of Singhs, referring to the name taken by Sikh men who have been initiated into
the Khalsa): Sikh reformist associations established from 1873.
ST: See Scheduled Tribes.
Sufi: (Arabic): A Muslim who uses meditation, trances, and other
similar techniques in worship.
Sultan: (Arabic, monarch): Title of many Muslim rulers.
Swadeshi: (Hindi from Sanskrit, of ones own country): the principle of buying Indian-made goods.
Swami Narayana Sampradaya: (Gujarati from Sanskrit, community
of Lord Narayana a name of Vishnu): Hindu reformist movement
founded by Sahajananda Swami.
Swaraj: (Hindi, self-rule): Refers both to Mahatma Gandhis ideals
of self-control, and to the political concept of self-government.

238

Glossary

Swatantra Party: (Sanskrit svatantra, free): Political party, founded

1959; merged into the Janata Party 1977.
Syndicate: Senior politicians who dominated the Indian National
Congress 19641969.
Taalluqedar: (Urdu, from Persian, holder of a landed estate): Rural
landowner, especially in Awadh.
Theosophical Society: Religious movement founded in New York in
1875; includes elements of Hinduism.
Tribal: Member of a community that traditionally lived in forested
or hilly regions, typically by hunting and gathering or shifting
cultivation.
Ulama: (Arabic, plural of alim scholar): Interpreters of Islamic law.
United Front: Political bloc in the Indian parliament, formed by the
Left Front and the National Front 1996; the ruling coalition at the
Center 19961998.
United Progressive Alliance: Political bloc in the Indian parliament
led by the Indian National Congress (I); the ruling coalition at the
Center 20042014.
Untouchable: Member of the lowest-ranking Hindu castes. The socalled Untouchable castes are now officially called Scheduled Castes.
Many of their members prefer the name Dalit (Sanskrit, oppressed).
Mahatma Gandhi called them Harijans (children of God).
Upanishads: (Sanskrit, sitting near): Brahminical and Hindu
religious text; one of the Vedas.
Vaishya: (Sanskrit, from vish, the people): Aryan peasant, later
merchant; member of one of the four Varnas.
Vajrayana: (Sanskrit, vehicle of the thunderbolt): The form of
Buddhism that looks to magic for salvation (see also Hinayana and
Mahayana).
Varnas: (Sanskrit): The four divisions of Aryan society (see Brahmin,
Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra); sometimes confused with caste.
Varnashramadharma: (Sanskrit, a compound of varna, ashrama, and
dharma, all of which are defined in this glossary): The law of caste
and stage of life, by which Hindus should act.
Varuna: (Sanskrit): Brahminical father-god.
Vedas: (Sanskrit, veda, knowledge): Brahminical and Hindu religious texts, comprising the Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and
Upanishads; sometimes applied specifically to the Samhitas.

Glossary

239

Vedic: (English, derived from Veda): Having to do with the Vedas;

applied here to the Aryan language; later called Sanskrit.
Vishnu: (Sanskrit): In Hinduism, one of the basic forms of God (see
also Shiva); Krishna and Rama are regarded as earthly incarnations
of Vishnu.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad: (Hindi from Sanskrit, world council of
Hindus): Hindu nationalist organization; part of the Sangh Parivar.
Yajur Veda: (Sanskrit yajus sacrificial text and veda knowledge):
Brahminical and Hindu religious text; part of the Samhitas.
Zamindar: (Persian, holder of land): Collector of the land revenue
in Bengal and Bihar, made into a landlord under the Permanent
Settlement.

Bibliographic Essay
Students of Indian history are fortunate to have Maureen L. P. Pattersons phenomenal South Asian Civilizations: A Bibliographic Synthesis
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), which lists
over 28,000 books and articles in Western languages on all aspects of
South Asia. This may be supplemented with the Bibliography of Asian
Studies, published annually by the Association for Asian Studies
available in book form from 1941 to 1971, both in book form and online from 1971 to 1991, and online only since 1991. Most of the books
named in this essay contain good bibliographies.
The two principal multivolume English-language histories of India
are now dated: E. J. Rapson, Sir Wolesley Haig, Sir Richard Burn, Sir
Theodore Morison, and H. H. Dodwell, editors, The Cambridge History
of India (five of six planned volumes published, plus a supplementary
volume by Sir Mortimer Wheeler; Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 19221968); and R. C. Majumdar, general editor, The History
and Culture of the Indian People (11 volumes; Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan, 19511977).
Good one-volume comprehensive histories are remarkably scarce,
but see Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India

242

Bibliographic Essay

(5th edition, New York: Routledge, 2010); R. C. Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhuri, and Kalikinkar Datta, An Advanced History of India (4th edition, Delhi: Macmillan India, 1978); Peter Robb. A History of India
(Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002); and Stanley Wolpert, A
New History of India (8th edition, New York: Oxford University Press,
2009). A recent nonacademic history is John Keay, India: A History
(2nd edition, New York: Grove Press, 2011).
For recent centuries, there are Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern
South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (3rd edition, New York:
Routledge, 2011), which focuses on the last 300 years; Judith M.
Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (2nd edition,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), which is mainly concerned
with the period 18571947; and Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 18851947
(2nd edition, New York: St. Martins Press, 1989).
Useful surveys of premodern Indian cultural history are A. L.
Basham, The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture
of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims (3rd edition,
London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1982) and S. A. A. Rizvi, The Wonder That
Was India, Volume II: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian
Sub-Continent from the Coming of the Muslims to the British Conquest
12001700 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987). Sources of Indian Tradition (2nd edition, volume 1, edited by Ainslie T. Embree, volume 2,
edited by Stephen Hay, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
brings together 4,000 years worth of writings by Indians about religion, philosophy, politics, economics, and society. In recent years,
there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on ancient India.
Notable works include Romila Thapar, editor, Recent Perspectives of
Early Indian History (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1995), which brings
together the research of some of the principal Indian historians of
the period from the Harappans to the Muslim conquests; Gregory L.
Possehl, editor, Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective (2nd edition,
New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing and American Institute of
Indian Studies, 1993); Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic
Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and F. R. Allchin, The Archaeology of Early Historic
South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
Recent studies of the three great religions that emerged in ancient
India are Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History,
and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael
Carrithers and Caroline Humphrey, editors, The Assembly of Listeners:
Jains in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and

Bibliographic Essay

243

A. L. Basham (edited and annotated by Kenneth G. Zysk), The Origins

and Development of Classical Hinduism (Boston: Beacon Press, and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
The history of Islam and India from the earliest contacts to the
thirteenth century is recounted in Andre Wink, Al Hind: The Making
of the Indo-Islamic World (3 volumes, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 19912004). For
the principal Muslim state of medieval India, see Peter Jackson, The
Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). A provocative study of conversion to Islam is
Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 12041760
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987) has little in common with its predecessor
beyond the name: rather than a connected narrative history of India,
it is a collection of books on various aspects of Indian history since
the fourteenth century, each by an authority on his or her subject.
Among the volumes are Milo Cleveland Beach, Mughal and Rajput
Painting (volume I.3); John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (volume
I.5); C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
(volume II.1); J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (volume II.3);
Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
(volume II.5); B. R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India 1860
1970 (volume III.3); Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence
(volume IV.1); Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (volume IV.2);
and Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth
Century to the Modern Age (volume IV.3).
The many books on colonial India include Mushirul Hasan and
Narayani Gupta, editors, Indias Colonial Encounter: Essays in Memory
of Eric Stokes (Delhi: Manohar, 1993). The Profiles in Power series contains volumes on the two greatest figures in the struggle for independence: David Arnold, Gandhi (Harlow: Longman, 2001) and Judith M.
Brown, Nehru (London and New York: Longman, 1999). For the formation of various South Asian identities since the nineteenth century, see
Ian Talbot, India and Pakistan (London: Arnold, 2000). For an overview
of the history of Indian India, there is Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian
Princes and their States: The New Cambridge History of India, volume III.6
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
For a collection of assessments of India and Pakistan since independence, see Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg, and Dennis Kux,
editors, India and Pakistan: The First Fifty Years (Cambridge: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sarvepalli Gopal, editor, Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of

244

Bibliographic Essay

Communal Politics in India (London: Zed Books, 1993) examines one of

the principal issues in Indian politics in the 1990s.
Finally, readers interested in India should not miss the works of
some of todays great Indian novelists. These include Rohinton Mistry,
A Fine Balance; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; and Salman
Rushdie, Midnights Children.

Index
Aam Admi Party, 209
Advani, Lal Krishna, 18688,
194, 196
Afghans. See Pashtuns
Africans, 47, 6061
Agriculture. See Economy
Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam, 99100
Ahmadis, 99100, 212
Ahmadnagar sultanate, 5354,
57, 6061, 62
Ahmad Shah (Mughal
Emperor), 73
Ahmad Shah Durrani
(Afghan ruler). See Durrani,
Ahmad Shah
Ahmed Khan, Sir Syed, 99, 109
Akali Dal (Shiromani Akali Dal),
12122, 132, 137, 160, 161,
17475, 181, 183, 193
Akbar, 5560, 64

Akbar, Muhammad, 66
Akbar II, 83
Alamgir. See Aurangzeb
Alamgir II, 74
Ala ud-Din Khalji. See Khalji,
Ala ud-Din
Ali brothers (Mohamed
Ali and Shaukat Ali),
113, 11618
Aligarh Muslim University,
99, 183
Ali, Haidar. See Haidar Ali
Allahwardi Khan, 70, 71, 76
All-India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam
(AIADMK), 160, 183, 201
All-India Hindu Mahasabha, 121
All-India Muslim League,
10813, 121, 12938
Ambar, Malik, 6061

246

Ambedkar, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji,

126, 141
Amritsar Massacre, 117
Anandpur Sahib Resolution,
17475
Andhras (Satavahanas), 26
Architecture. See Arts
Arjan, 64
Arts, 1011; ancient and
medieval, 1415, 24, 25;
Mughal, 58, 60, 6162, 63
Aryans, 1620, 3031
Arya Samaj, 1013, 121
Ashoka, 2325
Assam, insurgency in, 14445,
180, 185, 19394
Attlee, Clement, 135, 137
Aurangzeb (Alamgir), 6268, 73
Awadh: British annexation of,
8889, 9192, 95; nawabs of,
70, 74, 77, 81
Aybeg, Qutb ud-Din, 41
Ayodhya. See Rama temple
movement
Babri Masjid. See Rama temple
movement
Babur, 4546, 55, 58
Bahadur. See Banda Bahadur;
Tegh Bahadur
Bahadur Shah, 68
Bahadur Shah II, 83, 9293
Baha ud-Din Balaban. See
Balaban, Baha ud-Din
Bahmanis, 53
Bajirav, 7071
Bajirav II, 81, 89
Balaban, Baha ud-Din, 42, 47
Balvantrav. See Nana Saheb
(Balvantrav)
Banda Bahadur, 68, 70
Banerjea, Surendranath, 107, 108

Index

Bengal, nawabs of, 6970, 71, 73,

7677
Bengal, Partition of, 10712
Bengal sultanate, 45, 51, 52
Bentinck, Lord William, 87
Besant, Annie, 102, 11213, 11618
Bhagavad Gita, 30
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 5,
176, 183212
Bharatiya Kranti Dal, Bharatiya
Lok Dal. See Lok Dal
(Bharatiya Lok Dal)
Bhat, Balaji Vishvanath, 70
Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail
Singh, 17576
Bhonsle, Raghuji, 71
Bhonsle, Shahji, 62, 65
Bhonsle, Shivaji, 65, 105
Bhownaggree, Sir Mancherjee
Merwanjee, 106
Bijapur sultanate, 5354, 57,
6162, 65
Bikaner, maharaja Ganga Singh
of, 113
Bindusara, 2223
Birlas, 128
Bofors, 182, 207
Bollywood, 11, 144
Bose, Subhas Chandra,
122, 129, 135
Brahminical religion, 1921, 26,
28. See also Hinduism,
Hindus
Brahmo Sabha, later Brahmo
Samaj, 98, 100101
Bride burning, 20910
British India, 83, 95, 12426,
128, 131
Bronze, 14
Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama),
Buddhism, Buddhists, 2122,
23, 25, 28, 3940, 48

Index

Cabinet Mission, 136, 138

Carnatic, nawabs of, 7576, 81
Caste: under British, 1034;
Mandal Commission and
report, 186, 19495; in
modern India, 8, 15354, 183,
19495; origins, 3031, 50
Chaitanya, 50
Chanakya (Kautilya,
Vishnugupta), 2224
Chandra Gupta II, 2627
Chandragupta Maurya. See
Maurya, Chandragupta
Chandra Shekhar. See Shekhar,
Chandra
Charan Singh, Chaudhuri. See
Singh, Chaudhuri Charan
Chauhan, Prithviraj, 4041
Chelmsford, Lord, 11315
China War, 15455
Cholas, 3839
Christianity, Christians, 32, 88,
92, 98, 101, 126
Civil Society, 20711
Climate, 3
Clive, Robert, 7677
Communalism (Hindu-Muslim
tensions since 1947), 14041,
18384, 18687, 194, 2045. See
also Rama temple movement
Communications, 7, 10, 89,
9596, 2034, 208
Communism, Communist Party
of India, Communist Party of
India (Marxist), Communists,
120, 147, 153, 160, 16162, 165,
168, 196, 206
Congress. See Indian National
Congress
Constitution of 1950, 14145,
16264, 190, 199
Cornwallis, Lord, 7980

247

Corruption, 172, 182, 196, 2089

Cripps, Sir Stafford, 133, 136
Curzon, Lord, 107
Dadabhai Naoroji. See Naoroji,
Dadabhai
Da Gama, Vasco, 53
Dalhousie, Lord, 8889
Dalip Singh, 87
Dalits. See Scheduled Castes;
Untouchables
Dara Shikoh, 6263
Das, Gobind. See Gobind Singh
(Gobind Das)
Defense of India Act, 113, 116
Delhi sultanate, 4150
Deoband School, 99
Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian, 9899
Desai, Morarji, 15761, 165,
16871, 186
Deve Gowda, Haradanahalli
Doddegowda, 197
Dharmapala, 37
Dhimmis, 39, 4849
Dhrangadhra, maharaja of, 162
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
(DMK), 16061, 183, 184, 197
Dravidian languages, 6, 26, 27, 104
Dupleix, Joseph, 7576
Durrani, Ahmad Shah, 74
East India Company, English
(later British), 66, 7593
Economic liberalization. See
Liberalization, economic
Economic planning. See Planned
economic development
Economy, 78; ancient and
medieval, 1316, 18, 19, 20,
2427, 3739, 43, 47, 53;
colonial, 7880, 8587, 89,
9397, 120, 123, 12628,

248

13334; Mughal, 5960, 66;

19471991, 14751, 159,
16669, 17980; since 1991,
18893, 2034, 207
Education, 9, 10, 88, 97, 120, 150
Elections, 45, 1056, 107,
10910; of 1920, 11415, 118;
of 1923, 119; of 1937, 12829;
of 194546, 136; of 1952, 1957,
and 1962, 146; of 1967,
15960; of 1971, 16364; of
1977, 170; of 1980, 17172; of
1984, 179; of 1989, 185; of
1991, 188; of 1996, 19697; of
1998, 199; of 1999, 202; of
2004, 2056; of 2009, 206, 211;
of 2014, 21112
Emergency, 4, 16970
Emigrants and emigration, 5
English language, 6, 88, 97, 120,
14344
Faraizis, 98, 103
Farrukhsiyar, 6869, 70
Film, 11, 144
Five Year Plans. See Planned
economic development
Foreign relations (since 1947),
13940, 15152, 154, 158,
16162, 16465, 170, 18182,
200, 2012, 203, 204, 2067, 212
Gaharwars, 4041
Gandhi, Indira, 4, 15877
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
(Mahatma), 11520,
12341, 184
Gandhi, Rahul, 206, 21112
Gandhi, Rajiv, 172, 17788, 197
Gandhi, Sanjay, 16970, 172
Gandhi, Sonia, 5, 188, 200202,
206, 211

Index

Ganga Singh, maharaja of

Bikaner, 113
Ganges, 2, 19, 29
Gautama. See Buddha
Geography, 13
Ghauri, Muizz ud-Din
Muhammad, 4041
Ghauris, 4041
Ghaznawids, 40
Ghiyasids, 42
Ghulam Ahmad, Mirza. See
Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam
Gobind Singh (Gobind Das), 64,
67, 1023
Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 1089,
113, 118, 129
Golkonda sultanate, 5354,
57, 62, 66
Government: ancient and
medieval, 1620, 2327,
3638, 40, 4649, 5354;
colonial, 7779, 8384, 9395,
1059; Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms, 11315; MorleyMinto reforms, 10910;
Mughal, 5760. See also
Constitution of 1950; Government of India Act (1935)
Government of India Act (1935),
12331
Gowda, Haradanahalli
Doddegowda Deve. See Deve
Gowda, Haradanahalli
Doddegowda
Granth Sahib, 64
Great Revolt, 9193
Green Revolution, 167, 174,
180, 181
Gujral, Inder Kumar, 197, 201
Gulab Singh, Raja, 87, 140
Guptas, 2627
Gurjara-Pratiharas, 3738, 40

Index

Haidar Ali, 75
Haley, Nimrata Nikki
Randhawa, 5
Harappans, 1416
Harshavardhana, 27, 35
Hastings, Lord, 82
Hazare, Anna, 2089
Health, 910, 120
Hindi, 6, 100, 130, 14344
Hinduism, Hindus: and Muslim
rulers, 3940, 4850, 5254,
57; origins, 2832; reform
movements, 98103; spread,
3637. See also Brahminical
religion
Hindu nationalism, 121. See also
Bharatiya Janata Party;
Communalism; Jan Sangh;
Rama temple movement;
Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS)
Home Charges, 94, 123, 135
Home Rule Leagues, 113, 117
Humayun, 55, 58
Hume, Allan Octavian, 107
Hyderabad, 70, 7576, 81, 140.
See also Nizam ul-Mulk
Ilbert Bill, 106
Iltutmish, Shams ud-Din, 41, 47
Imad ul-Mulk, 73
Indian Administrative Service
(IAS), 15253, 172. See also
Indian Civil Service
Indian Civil Service (ICS), 79, 83,
1057, 114, 123, 152. See also
Indian Administrative
Service
Indian India and Princes:
accession and merger, 13840;
under East India Company,
83, 8889, 92; after Great

249

Revolt, 95; 19061947, 10910,

11415, 12326, 13031; and
Indira Gandhi, 16264
Indian National Army, 135
Indian National Congress,
Indian National Congress
(Indira), Indian National
Congress (Organization),
Indian National Congress
(Requisitioned): and Indira
Gandhi, 15965, 17174; and
Jawaharlal Nehru, 14555;
origins, 10610; since 1991, 5,
18889, 19597, 2002, 206,
21112; and struggle for
independence, 11138
Indian states. See Indian
India and Princes
Indo-European languages, 67,
1618
Indo-Pakistani Wars: 19471948,
140; 1965, 158; 1971, 164; 1999,
2012
Indus, 2, 1416
Industrialization, 7, 9697, 111,
12728, 14750
Iqbal, Mohammad, 132
Iqta, 4243, 47
Iron, 19, 26, 97
Irwin, Lord, 12325
Islam and Muslims: under
Mughals, 578, 613; origins,
3536; reform movements,
99100, 103; since 1947, 147,
16970, 171; spread in India,
3941, 467, 4854. See also
All-India Muslim League;
Communalism; Khalifa and
khilafat; Pakistan movement
Jafar, Mir, 7677
Jagir, 59

250

Jahandar Shah, 68
Jahangir (Salim), 60, 64
Jahan, Nur. See Nur Jahan
Jains, Jainism, 22, 32
Jammu and Kashmir. See
Kashmir
Janata Dal, 18399
Janata Morcha, 16869, 18283
Janata Party, 16972, 183
Jang, Safdar. See Safdar Jang
Janjira, 61
Jan Sangh, 147, 171, 183
Jats, 67, 70, 103
Jews, Judaism, 3233
Jindal, Piyush Bobby, 5
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 121,
12938
Jizya, 39, 4849, 57, 62, 68
Justice Party, 119
Kabir, 6364
Kafur, Malik, 42
Kanishka, 25
Kashmir, 52, 87, 13940, 142, 158,
181, 185, 2012, 204
Kautilya (Chanakya,
Vishnugupta), 2224
Kejriwal, Arvind, 209
Khalifa and khilafat: in colonial
India, 100, 11719, 121; and
medieval sultans, 40, 46, 52;
origins, 36
Khalistan, 17577, 18182, 193
Khalji, Ala ud-Din, 42, 46, 49
Khaljis, 42
Khalsa, 678, 70, 75, 86, 1023,
175. See also Sikhism, Sikhs
Khan. Individuals whose names
include the suffix Khan are listed
under the first part of their
names, for example,
Allahwardi Khan

Index

Khusrau, 60, 64
Kings, kingship. See Government
Kushanas, 25, 26
Lahore Resolution, 13233. See
also Pakistan movement
Lakshmibai, 92
Land revenue, 24, 37, 42, 5960,
7980, 89, 114, 151
Language, 67, 1718, 20, 100,
130, 14344. See also
Dravidian languages; English
language; Hindi; Prakrits;
Sanskrit
Left Front, 196
Liberalization, economic, 18893
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE), 182, 188
Linlithgow, Lord, 13133
Literature, 6, 10, 1819, 2021, 27
Lodi, Ibrahim, 45, 55
Lodis, 45, 55
Lok Dal (Bharatiya Lok Dal), 160,
16869, 171, 183, 186, 195
Lokpal, 2089
Longowal, Harchand
Singh, 175, 181
Lucknow Pact, 113, 120, 129
MacDonald, Ramsay, 12425
Magadha, 20, 2225
Mahabharata, 27, 30
Mahall, Mumtaz. See Mumtaz
Mahall
Mahasabha. See All-India Hindu
Mahasabha
Mahavira (Vardhamana), 22
Mahmud the Ghaznawid,
40, 47, 187
Mandal Commission and report,
186, 19495
Mansab, mansabdar, 59, 6768

Index

Manufacturing. See Economy;

Industrialization
Marathas, 54, 62, 6575, 8082
Mathematics, 27
Maurya, Chandragupta, 22
Mauryas, 2225
Mehta, Pherozeshah, 107, 108, 113
Minto, Lord, 10910
Modi, Narendra Damodardas, 5,
205, 21112
Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental
College (Aligarh Muslim
University), 99, 183
Mongols, 4145
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms,
11315
Morley-Minto Reforms, 10910
Mountbatten, Lord, 13738
Mughals, 4546, 5051, 54, 5574,
83, 9293
Muhammad Ghauri, Muizz udDin. See Ghauri, Muizz udDin Muhammad
Muhammad Shah, 6973
Muizz ud-Din Muhammad
Ghauri. See Ghauri, Muizz
ud-Din Muhammad
Mumtaz Mahall, 6162
Murshid Quli Khan, 69
Muslim League. See All-India
Muslim League
Muslims. See Islam and Muslims
Mysore, 75, 81
Nadir Shah, 71, 74
Nanak, 6364
Nana Saheb (Balvantrav), 71, 74
Naoroji, Dadabhai, 106, 107
Narasimha Rao, Pamulaparti
Venkata, 18896
Narayan, Jayaprakash (J.P.),
16871

251

National Conference, 181, 183

National Democratic Alliance,
199212
National Front, 18488, 196
Nationalism, Indian, 104138
Nationalization, 149, 162, 166,
19192. See also Planned
economic development
Nawab, 7374
Naxalites. See Communism,
Communist Party of India,
Communist Party of India
(Marxist), Communists
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 122, 13055
Nehru, Motilal, 122, 145
Nehru Report, 122, 129, 145
Nehruvian economic policy. See
Planned economic
development
Nizam ul-Mulk, 6970, 75, 140
Nobility, nobles, 4243, 47, 59,
6768. See Government; Land
revenue; Zamindars
Nonalignment. See Foreign
relations
Noncooperation campaign
(19201922), 11719, 129
Nuclear explosives and
weapons, 16768, 185,
199200, 206
Nur Jahan, 60
Osman Ali Khan, nizam of
Hyderabad, 140
Other Backward Classes (OBCs),
8, 15960, 186, 19495, 197,
205, 212
Painting. See Arts
Pakistan movement, 13138
Palas, 37
Pallavas, 27, 38

252

Panchayats, 154
Pandyas, 27, 38, 43
Panipat, 45, 7475
Parsis. See Zoroastrians
Pashtuns, 45, 47, 55, 70
Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 13745
Patna, maharaja of, 162
People, 510
Permanent Settlement. See Land
revenue
Peshwa, 7071, 7475, 8182,
89, 92
Phadnis, Nana, 74
Planned economic development,
14751, 159, 166, 17071,
17980, 18993
Plassey, 76
Politics. See Elections;
Government; specific political
parties
Population, 56, 66, 120, 150
Portuguese, 53, 66, 152
Poverty, 78, 96, 150
Prakrits, 20, 24, 26, 27
Princes. See Indian India and
Princes
Privatization, 19192
Quit India movement, 13334
Quran, 36, 40, 46, 51, 99
Qutb ud-Din Aybeg. See Aybeg,
Qutb ud-Din
Racial discrimination, racism, 79,
83, 95
Rajputs, 37, 54, 5859, 61,
6566, 70
Ramakrishna, Sri, 101
Rama temple movement, 184,
18687, 194, 205
Ramayana, 27, 29, 184
Ram, Jagjivan, 170

Index

Rammohun Roy. See Roy,

Rammohun
Ranjit Singh, 8687
Rao, Pamulaparti Venkata
Narasimha. See Narasimha
Rao, Pamulaparti Venkata
Rape, 21011
Rashtrakutas, 3839
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), 121, 147, 184, 194, 205
Ray, Satyajit, 11
Raziyya, 41, 47
Reform movements,
socioreligious, 97103
Reincarnation, 2021, 28, 2930
Religion, 5. See also under names of
individual faiths
Revolt of 1857, 9193
Rig Veda, 1819, 20
Round Table Conference, 12325
Rowlatt Acts, 11617
Roy, Rammohun, 9899
Safdar Jang, 70, 73
Saheb, Nana. See Nana Saheb
(Balvantrav)
Saklatvala, Shapurji
Dorabji, 106
Salim (Jahangir), 60, 64
Salt Satyagraha (1930),
12225
Sambhaji, 6567
Sangh Parivar, 184
Sanskrit (Vedic language), 1618,
20, 24, 26, 27
Sant Nirankaris, 175
Sarasvati (river), 14, 16
Saraswati, Swami
Dayananda, 101
Satavahanas (Andhras), 26
Satyagraha, 11519, 12325, 132,
169, 209

Index

Sayyid brothers (Sayyid Husain

Ali and Sayyid Abdallah
Khan), 6870
Sayyids, 45
Scheduled Castes, 8, 143, 147,
15354, 170, 171, 19495. See
also Untouchables
Scheduled Tribes, 8, 143, 147,
2023. See also Tribals
Scindias, 74, 81, 83
Sculpture. See Arts
Secularism, 141, 183
Senas, 40
Sen, Keshub Chunder, 100101
Shah. Monarchs whose names
include the suffix Shah are
listed under the first part
of their names, for example,
Ahmad Shah
Shah Alam II, 7374, 77, 83
Shah Jahan, 6163
Shahu, 6871
Shah Wali Ullah, 99
Shamsids, 41
Shams ud-Din Iltutmish. See
Iltutmish, Shams ud-Din
Shangam literature, 26, 27
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 15758
Shekhar, Chandra, 18283,
18788, 190
Shikoh, Dara. See Dara Shikoh
Shiromani Akali Dal.
See Akali Dal
Shir Shah (Shir Khan Sur), 55, 59
Siddhartha Gautama. See Buddha
Sikh Empire, 8688, 93, 99
Sikhism, Sikhs: under colonial rule,
94, 1023, 12122, 126, 137;
origins, 6365; rise of the
Khalsa, 6768, 75; since 1947,
144, 17477, 181, 193; See also
Khalistan; Khalsa; Sikh Empire

253

Simon Commission and

report, 122
Singh. Pre-twentieth century individuals whose names include the
suffix Singh are listed under the
first part of their names, for
example, Gulab Singh
Singh, Bhagat, 120
Singh, Chaudhuri Charan, 160,
16871, 183
Singh, Hari, maharaja of Jammu
and Kashmir, 13940
Singh, Kalyan, 194
Singh, Manmohan, 19192,
20611
Singh Sabhas, 1023
Singh, Vishwanath Pratap (V. P.),
18287
Sinha, Satyendra Prasanna (Lord
Sinha), 106, 113, 122
Siraj ud-Daula, 77
Socialism, socialists,
120, 129, 147, 168
Sports, 11
Subsidiary alliance, 76, 81, 83
Sufis, Sufism, 4647, 51, 57, 60
Sultan, Tipu. See Tipu Sultan
Sur, Shir Khan (Shir Shah), 55, 59
Swami Narayana
Sampradaya, 98
Swatantra Party, 147, 162, 169
Syed Ahmed Khan, Sir. See
Ahmed Khan, Sir Syed
Syndicate, 15565
Tagore, Debendranath, 100
Tagore, Rabindranath, 104, 118
Tamerlane (Temur), 45
Tansen, 58
Tarabai, 6771
Tatas, 97, 128
Tegh Bahadur, 6465

254

Index

Temur (Tamerlane), 45
Terrorism, 108, 204, 2067
Theosophical Society,
Theosophists, 102. See also
Besant, Annie
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 1089, 112,
113, 118
Tipu Sultan, 75, 7281
Todar Mall, Raja, 59
Trade. See Economy
Transportation, 7, 11, 192
Tribals, 8, 13, 24, 31, 37, 48, 5051,
71, 85, 14345, 202. See also
Scheduled Tribes
Tughluq, Firuz Shah,
4445, 47, 50
Tughluq, Ghiyas ud-Din, 43
Tughluq, Muhammad, 4344, 49

Scheduled Castes
Upanishads, 21, 28, 98, 101, 102
Urbanization, 7, 14, 20, 24, 47, 85
Urdu, 6, 100, 130

Ud-Daula, Siraj. See Siraj ud-Daula

Ud-Din Aybeg, Qutb. See Aybeg,
Qutb ud-Din
Ud-Din Iltutmish, Shams. See
Iltutmish, Shams ud-Din
Ulama, 47, 57, 63, 99
Ul-Mulk, Imad. See Imad ul-Mulk
Ul-Mulk, Nizam. See Nizam
ul-Mulk
Unionist Party, 119, 121
United Front, 19697
United Progressive Alliance,
20512
Untouchables, 8, 31, 48, 119,
12526, 143. See also

Wavell, Lord, 13637

Wellesley, Lord, 8081
Wildlife, 34
Women, status of, 89, 32, 51, 98,
141, 15354, 183, 197, 204,
20911
World War I, 11114
World War II, 13134
Writing, 14, 18, 20, 23, 24

Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 20, 170,

196205
Vardhamana (Mahavira), 22
Varna, 3031
Vedas, 21, 32, 101
Vedic language, 1618, 20. See
also Sanskrit
Vijayanagara, 44, 5254
Village settlements, 1314, 18
Vishnugupta (Kautilya,
Chanakya), 2224
Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 184, 194
Vivekananda, Swami, 101

Zamindars, 76, 78, 7980, 93, 95,

15051
Zoroastrianism, Zoroastrians, 33,
57, 106
Zul-Fiqar Khan, 68

About the Author

JOHN MCLEOD, PhD, received a doctorate in Indian history from the
University of Toronto in 1993. He has held research fellowships in
India from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and the American
Institute of Indian Studies, and is now professor of history at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. Most of McLeods scholarly
work has explored two themes: the history of the so-called princely
states of India, which were semiautonomous kingdoms that existed within India until 19481949, and the experiences of minority
groups within the Indian population (he has written on AfricanIndians, Jewish-Indians, and Zoroastrian-Indians). His publications
include Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western India,
19161947 and African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat, coedited with
Kenneth X. Robbins. He is currently completing a biography of the
Parsi (Zoroastrian-Indian) statesman Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee
Bhownaggree (18511933).

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