An Approach To Indian History -Prof. Kittu Reddy

PREVIOUS | CONTENTS | NEXT

 

The coming of the British

As seen in an earlier chapter, it was the Moghul emperor Jehangir who had permitted the English to trade in India in 1608. As a result the English established a factory at Surat. However, India’s connection with the West had started earlier with the Portugese. The Portuguese were the first to establish themselves in India and the last of the Europeans to leave. They arrived as early as 1498 via the ocean route discovered by Vasco-da-Gama.
But it was the East India Company, chartered by the British crown and ultimately responsible to the parliament, that launched British rule in India. The British East India Company was established under a Royal Charter of Queen Elizabeth I for 15 years for spice trading on 31st December 1600 AD with a capital of £70,000. In 1640 the Company acquired the site of modern Madras (Chennai), where it quickly built Fort St George. In 1668 King Charles II transferred to the East India Compay the site of Bombay (Mumbai), which he had received as part of a dowry when marrying the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. In 1690, Job Charnok, at the invitation of Nawab Ibrahim Khan laid the foundations of Calcutta. The site was a swampy land on the Bhagirath comprising the village of Sutanati to which in 1698 were added the villages of Kolikata and Govindapur. 

From this time onwards the three presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal were established and became for all practical purposes the center of British India’s political and military activities. Within a century Britain had acquired almost complete sovereignty over India; but this was neither a swift nor sudden process. Firstly it entailed wars with the Company’s rivals – the Portuguese, the Dutch and more formidably the French.

It was by the battle of Wandiwash that the French threat was eliminated and by the battle of Plassey, a few years earlier that it got a foothold over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.  The battle of Wandiwash was a continuation of the Anglo-French armed struggle and rivalry in Europe and other parts of the world. Eyre Coote commanded the English troops while Comte de Lally commanded the French troops. The British captured the fort in 1759. This battle sealed the fate of the French empire in India. The French were no longer in a position to challenge British superiority.      

A few years earlier, the East India Company had succeeded in establishing itself and getting power in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and the east coast. The decisive step in this direction was the battle of Plassey, more correctly Palasi (from the Palas trees that abound in the area). This battle was fought between the British forces and those of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah.The battle was fought on 23 June 1757 and lasted only one day when the forces of the Nawab were put to flight. The agility and far-sightedness of the English, coupled with their unscrupulous employment of treason, intrigue and conspiracy in the enemy camp crippled the strength of the Nawab’s army. Robert Clive who was the commander of the British forces said in his report on the battle: ‘Mir Jafar, Rai Durlabh and Yar Lutuf Khan gave us no other assistance than standing neutral.’ These three were secretly in league with the East India Company. This battle gave the East India Company control over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

Immediately after the battle of Plassey, the Mughul Emperor Shah Alam granted Dewani of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa to the British East India Company. As a result it secured permission collect land revenue from these provinces in return for an annual tribute and maintaining of order and peace. They collected the land revenues through the local Nawab and took control of his army. This made the East India Company a ruling power and not merely a trading group as it had started. 

As long as the Company’s chief business was trade, it was left to manage its own affairs. But after Plassey, when the Company acquired territory, the British Government felt that a Regulating Act was necessary. With Pitt’s India Act, a Board of Commissioners as a department of the English Government was created to exercise control over political, financial and military affairs over British possessions in India. For the first time a Governor general was appointed who was soon to emerge as politically all-powerful. Within another hundred years, the British took control of almost the whole of India.

Let us now take a look at the political map of India at that time immediately after the battle of Plassey.

• The Mughal Empire had more or less disintegrated, after the Muslim forces of Persian king Nadir Shah plundered Delhi in 1739. Later in 1756, Ahmad Shah, the Emir of Afghanistan, who had previously seized the Punjab, again captured Delhi. A united force of Marathas and Sikhs could not defeat the invaders, and the possibility of a reunification of Indian peoples into a strong national state began to dim.
• In the South of India, an independent state of Hyderabad was established; this was one of the many Muslim and Hindu states to emerge amid the rapid decline of Moghul centralized authority and political chaos in India.
• The East India Company was on its way to the complete control of Bengal, India’s most populous province. At the same time important areas of the Deccan came under the control of the East India Company. From favorable locations on coasts - Madras, Bombay and Calcutta—the East India Company started tapping the interior resources of India's well-developed manufacturing economy, vast population and solid agricultural base; also the British started limiting India's access to world trade with tariffs, by taking command of India's textile industry and exporting Indian gold.
• Warren Hastings was appointed first Governor-General of British India in 1772. From that time onwards, the British relied on superior military power, as well as bribery, extortion, political manipulation of native chieftains; at the same time they exploited the disunity among various Indian kingdoms, to subjugate the entire subcontinent.
• The Marathas, - the successors of Shivaji - had built a Maratha empire; but they were notorious for their plundering raids, and many states were forced to pay them protection money as a means of direct and indirect subjection. In 1761 Afghan Shah Durrani defeated them and this ended their expansion to the west.
• In 1798, Lord Wellesley was appointed as Governor-General. Lord Wellesley was an imperialist and combined the instruments of war and diplomacy to fulfill his ends. Determined to tame all opposition and to wipe out any desire for independence, Wellesley put in place the system of Subsidiary Alliances.  The system was such that when an Indian ruler felt that he was in danger from his neighbours, he could take help of the English; in return he would have to pay and maintain the British troops in his state. This system was a complete success. This system completely undermined the independence of Indian rulers and gave the British total power in India.
• The Sikhs of Punjab after the death of Ranjit Singh attacked British positions, starting a costly war. The Sikhs were one of many groups or individual states that resisted British exploitation, brutality, and territorial seizures at sporadic intervals.

The result was that a series of wars were fought between the British and Indian kingdoms; these wars were known as the Anglo-Mysore wars, the Anglo-Mahratta wars, the Anglo-Sikh wars and the Anglo-Gurkha wars. As a result the Company took control of Mysore by defeating Tipu Sultan in 1792; the Marathas were convincingly defeated in 1819. Further the company expanded its rule by defeating Nepal in 1814-16, Sind in 1843, Punjab in 1848-49 and Burma in 1886.
The wars against Mysore were fought against Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan; they proved to be formidable foes and it was only after four wars that the British took complete control of the areas ruled by the Tipu Sultan. The next war was against the Mahrattas led by Nana Phadnavis. By 1799 Tipu Sultan was defeated and in another twenty years the mighty power of the Mahratta confederacy was reduced to ashes and dust. In the meantime the Mughal emperor in Delhi had shrunk to a mere shadow of his former self; soon he was to become a pensioner of the Company and its virtual prisoner. More by 1818, the proud Rajputs, driven by petty jealousies, had become feudatories of the Company. All that now remained was the conquest of Sind and of the Punjab. The former fell in the aftermath of the disastrous Anglo-Afghan war. In Punjab, as a result of the anarchy after the death of Ranjit Singh, his successors could not stand up to the British.
A few years later Dalhousie became the Governor-General. Determined to extend direct British control over large areas, Dalhousie introduced the Doctrine of Lapse. Under this doctrine, if the ruler of a protected state died without a natural heir, his state would not pass to an adopted heir but would be annexed to British dominions, unless the adoption had been clearly approved earlier by British authorities. This allowed the Company to get a lions-share of Indian states, like Satara in 1848, Nagpur and Jhansi in 1854. Oudh was deposed on the grounds of misgovernment and was annexed in 1856.

While all this was happening, we must not forget, that India was on the verge of the utter loss of her cultural and historical unity in the middle of the 18^th century. For the patriotism that existed then in India was local or dynamic. There was no Indian national feeling at the beginning of the 18^th century. In fact Indian rulers of that time more often allied themselves with the British against other Indian rulers, than allied together to fight the common enemy. The Nawab of Oudh entered into a subordinate alliance with the British against the Marathas. The Rajput rulers wanted protection against the Marathas. Raghoba sold himself to the British to fight the Peshwa in Poona. The Nizam’s forces marched against those of the British in the fight against Tipu.

The British took full advantage of the divisions in India. Right from the beginning they followed a policy of divide and rule. Diplomacy and deceit were used to gain control of revenue collection in the province of Bengal. This gave them effective control of the administration. The Marathas, the Sikhs and the rulers of Mysore could never unite to confront the foreign enemy and fell one by one. By the onset of the 19th century there was no local power that could cope with their onslaught.

Once the British had consolidated their power, commercial exploitation of the natural resources and native labour became ruthless. It is true that there were a few benevolent Governor Generals who initiated social reforms and tried to render the administration more efficient and responsive, but they were exceptions. By the middle of the 19th Century, the arrogant exploitation of the people had tried the patience of the Indians to the limit.

At the same time, the British, to serve their own purpose, set up educational institutions that imparted western education through the English language and had established a vast railway network and telegraph lines. This united the country in an unprecedented manner.

But they also began a systematic exploitation of the Indian people.

The Economic exploitation

Before British rule, there was no private property in land. The self-governing village community handed over each year to the ruler or to his nominee a share of the annual produce. The East India Company put a stop to this and introduced a new revenue system superseding the right of the village community over land and creating two new forms of property on land - landlordism and individual peasant proprietorship. It was assumed that the State was the supreme landlord. Fixed tax payments were introduced based on land whereby payment had to be made to the government whether or not the crop had been successful. As one British commentator put it: “we have introduced new methods of assessing and cultivating land revenue which have converted a once flourishing population into a huge horde of paupers. Indeed the first effect was the reduction in agricultural incomes by 50% thereby undermining the agrarian economy and self-governing village. 

In 1769 the Company prohibited Indians from trading in grain, salt, betel nuts and tobacco and discouraged handicraft. The Company also prohibited the homework of the silk weavers and compelled them to work in its factories. Weavers who disobeyed were imprisoned, fined or flogged. In this way the Company's servants lined their own pockets.

When the British first reached India they did not find a backwater country. A report on Indian Industrial Commission published in 1919 said that the industrial development of India was at any rate not inferior to that of the most advanced European nations. India was not only a great agricultural country but also a great manufacturing country. It had prosperous textile industry, whose cotton, silk, and woolen products were marketed in Europe and Asia. It had remarkable ancient skills in iron working. It had its own shipbuilding industry in Calcutta, Daman, Surat and Bombay. In 1802 skilled Indian workers were building British warships at Bombay. According to a historian of Indian shipping, the teak wood vessels of Bombay were greatly superior to the oaken walls of Old England. Benares was famous all over India for its brass, copper and bell metal wares. Other important industries included the enameled jewellery and stone carving of Rajputana towns as well as filigree work in gold and silver, ivory, glass, tannery, perfumery and papermaking. 

All this altered under the British leading to the de-industrialisation of India - its forcible transformation from a country of combined agriculture and manufacture into an agricultural colony of British capitalism. The British annihilated the Indian textile industry unwilling to tolerate a competitor, which had to be destroyed. 

The shipbuilding industry aroused the jealousy of British firms and its progress and development were restricted by legislation. India's metalwork, glass and paper industries were likewise throttled when British government in India was obliged to use only British-made paper. 

The vacuum created by the contrived ruin of the Indian handicraft industries, a process virtually completed by 1880, was filled with British manufactured goods. Britain's industrial revolution, with its explosive increase in productivity made it essential for British capitalists to find new markets. India turned from an exporter of textiles to an importer. British goods had virtually free entry into India while entry into Britain of Indian goods was met with prohibitive tariffs. It was also decided to curtail direct trade between India and the rest of the world.  Horace Hayman Wilson wrote in The History of British India from 1805 to 1835: ”the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms.  While there was prosperity for British cotton industry there was ruin for millions of Indian craftsmen and artisans. India's manufacturing towns were blighted as in the case of Dacca, once known as the Manchester of India; Murshidabad, which was once Bengal's old capital, was described in 1757 as at least as extensive, populous and rich as London. Millions of spinners, and weavers were forced to seek a precarious living in the countryside, as were many tanners, smelters and smiths. 

India was made subservient to the Empire and vast wealth was sucked out of the subcontinent. Economic exploitation was the root cause of the Indian people's poverty and hunger. Under Imperial rule the ordinary people of India grew steadily poorer. As the economic historian Romesh Dutt said that half of India's annual net revenues of £44m flowed out of India. The number of famines soared from seven in the first half of 19th Century to 24 in second half. According to official figures, 28,825,000 Indians starved to death between 1854 and 1901. The terrible famine of 1899-1900, which affected 474,000 square miles with a population almost 60 million, was attributed to a process of bleeding the peasant, who was forced into the clutches of the moneylenders whom British regarded as their mainstay for the payment of revenue.

Rich though its soil was, India's people were hungry and miserably poor. This grinding poverty struck all visitors - like a blow in the face as described by India League Delegation 1932. In their report ‘Condition of India 1934’, they had been appalled at the poverty of the Indian village. The report says: “It is the home of stark want - the results of uneconomic agriculture, peasant indebtedness, excessive taxation and rack-renting, absence of social services and the general discontent impressed us everywhere. In the villages there were no health or sanitary services, there were no roads, no drainage or lighting, and no proper water supply beyond the village well. Men, women and children work in the fields, farms and cowsheds...All alike work on meagre food and comfort and toil long hours for inadequate returns.” 

India was sometimes called the 'milch cow of the Empire', and indeed at times it seemed to be so regarded by politicians and bureaucrats in London. Educated Indians were embittered when India was made to pay the entire cost of the India Office building in Whitehall. They were further outraged when in 1867 it was made to pay the full costs of entertaining two thousand five hundred guests at a lavish ball honouring the Sultan of Turkey. 

In India, the hunger and poverty experienced by the majority of the population during the colonial period and immediately after independence were the logical consequences of two centuries of British occupation, during which the Indian cotton industry was destroyed, most peasants were put into serfdom (after the British modified the agrarian structures and the tax system to the benefit of the Zamindars - feudal landlords) and cash crops (indigo, tea, jute) gradually replaced traditional food crops. Britain's profits throughout the 19th century cannot be measured without taking into account the 28 million Indians who died of starvation between 1814 and 1901. 

As the British gained power and exploited the country and moved from Bengal to Madras to Bombay to North India, famines followed resulting in the death of millions of Indian peasants. Romesh Diwan and Renu Kallinapur have tabulated these famines chronologic- ally in Productivity and Technical Change in Foodgrains. In Bengal alone, 10 million died in the 1771 famine. Such exploitation and killing famines continued for full hundred years. In the famines of 1877-78 in Madras and 1897 - 1900 all over India fifteen million people died. These are moderate estimates. Over hundred years, at least 100 million people were killed by famines alone resulting from British exploitation. It is important to understand, and recognize, this reality and the enormity of this exploitation. 100 million people in hundred years comes to one million every year. Thus, the result of British exploitation was that at least 2,740 Indians died every day for one hundred years; and this is a conservative estimate . It excludes people killed by hired gunmen by an alien authority. A famine leads not only to deaths but enfeebles the young and weakens the strong. If one uses a multiplier of 30 destitute persons for every one dying, the level of destitution comes to 300 million. This is what colonial rule in India was.

 

PREVIOUS | CONTENTS | NEXT