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The British took over India through a gradual process that began in the 1600’s with a private British trading company, called the East India Company, setting up colonies on the coast of India. The company slowly expanded to takeover large parts of India by making treaties with Indian rulers and fighting wars. The East India Company controlled its colony in India with an army of Indian soldiers called Sepoy. By the 1800’s, the British East India Company controlled most of India and its army of Sepoys that was larger than the British army. The British generally looked down on Indian culture and religions and tried to make the Indians adopt British ways and become Christian. Many Indians resented the way the British treated them. In 1857, this resentment toward the British became a rebellion when the Sepoys mutinied against the Company all across India. In this rebellion, the Sepoy massacred entire British communities in India. The British government responded to the rebellion by sending in the British army. The British army, using better weapons, crushed the Sepoy forces and brutally killed any Sepoy they captured. After this, the British government made India a formal part of the British Empire and was careful to make sure Indians would never be in a position to threaten rebellion again. The British government directly controlled India and built railroads and cotton farms in India to support British industry. These developments made the British very wealthy. However, these changes also contributed to two major famines in India that killed millions of people. Still, many Indians continued to push for Indian independence, but did so through peaceful means that worked with the system of British rule. The development of India over the twentieth century has followed a very different path from Japan and China. At the beginning of the twentieth century India was fully controlled by England and was considered it to be the "Jewel of the Crown" of the British Empire. However, many Indians resented British rule and following World War One, Indian nationalists led by Mohandas Gandhi began to push for Indian independence. Gandhi adopted a policy of passive nonviolent resistance to British rule that slowly eroded the moral authority of the British government and made it more costly for the British to deny India self-rule. By the mid-1930's, the protests of the Indians had worn down the British and the British were willing to grant the Indians self-governance as long as they remained part of the British Empire. However, by this time, Gandhi and the other Indian nationalist leaders sought full independence for India. Yet, when World War Two began, the Indians put their demands for independence on hold and supported Britain in the war.
Following the war, the combination of British exhaustion from fighting the war and the determination of Indian nationalists resulted in Britain granting India independence. When the British granted India independence in 1947, they allowed the Indian colony to be divided into the countries of India and Pakistan. While this was intended to prevent conflict between Hindu and Muslim populations in the colony, it had the opposite effect and resulted in horrific inter-religious and the forced migration of millions of people from one country to the other. Gandhi was a victim of this violence when he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist. The legacy of this violence continues to poison the relationship between India and Pakistan to the present day.
After becoming independent, India became a one-party state that was dominated by the Congress Party. The Congress Party was the political organization most closely connected with Gandhi. As a result, while India was a democracy, the leadership of the Congress Party effectively ruled the country for the first several decades of independence. India chose to be neutral in the Cold War and to become self-sufficient in its economic development. While it was not communist, it adopted the Soviet model of centrally planned five year plans to build up its heavy industry. The combination of economic inefficiency and mismanagement and rampant corruption meant that India remained a poor country. In the 1990's, the government of India made a radical shift and moved way from trying to control the economy and opened itself up to global trade. However, unlike Japan, the Asian Tigers and China, India did not turn itself into an export oriented economy based on manufacturing and inexpensive labor. Instead, India used its large educated English speaking population to make the country a center of computer and communications systems. The result has been a rapid development that has improved the lives of millions of Indians. Unfortunately, this development has been very uneven and has left millions more Indians living in desperate poverty. This large economic inequality poses a significant challenge to India's democracy and continuing economic development.
Biography - Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi was born in 1869 in India to a family of government workers. Gandhi studied law in England, where he first learned of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, both famous writers on the civil disobedience to oppose immoral governments. After this, Gandhi became a lawyer in South Africa. Gandhi decide to dedicate his life to fighting against injustice after he was told that he could not ride in a first class carriage (even though he had purchased a ticket) because he was not white and that he could only ride in a third-class carriage. He was thrown off the train when Gandhi refused to move.
Gandhi spent the next twenty years working to better the rights of Indians in South Africa. It was during his work in South Africa, that Gandhi developed the concept of satyagraha. In the very simplest sense, satyagraha is passive resistance. Needing a new term for the Indian resistance, Gandhi chose the term "satyagraha," which literally means "truth force." In practice, satyagraha was a focused and forceful nonviolent resistance to a particular injustice. The goal was not for there to be a winner and loser of the battle, but rather, that all would eventually see and understand the "truth" and agree to rescind the unjust law.
Gandhi returned to India in 1914 a national hero for his work in South Africa. It was during his first year back in India that Gandhi was given the honorary title of Mahatma ("Great Soul"). The title represented the feelings of the millions of Indian peasants who viewed Gandhi as a holy man. However, Gandhi never liked the title because it seemed to mean he was special while he viewed himself as ordinary.
Before he began his actions to fight for Indian independence from Britain, Gandhi spent several years working to make sure his followers understood the ideals of satyagraha and how to protests from becoming violent. Gandhi also began to develop protests that every Indian could participate in and would make it very expensive for the British to keep India as a colony. Gandhi advocated that Indians spin their own cloth and make their own clothes. The British had made money by growing cotton in India and then sending it to England to be made into clothes to be sold back to the Indians. Gandhi popularized this idea by traveling with his own spinning wheel, often spinning yarn while giving a speech. In this way, the image of the spinning wheel became a symbol for Indian independence.
Gandhi most successful protest against the British was the protest against the salt tax. The British had made it illegal to own salt not sold or produced by the British government. In a tropical environment, salt is an important part of people's daily diets. The tax that Indians paid to buy British salt was used to fund the British rule of India. Gandhi recognized that this tax symbolized the way the British forced the Indians to pay for their own colonization. In 1930, Gandhi lead his followers on the Salt March, a 200 mile march to the sea. When they reached the coast, Gandhi deliberately broke the law by picking up a piece of sea salt that lay on the beach. He then encouraged his followers to do the same and make their own salt. Thousands of people went to the beaches to pick up loose salt while others began to evaporate salt water. Indian-made salt was soon sold across the country. The British responded with mass arrests.
When Gandhi announced that he planned a march on the government-owned Dharasana Salt Works, the British arrested Gandhi and imprisoned him without trial. Although the British had hoped that Gandhi's arrest would stop the march, they had underestimated his followers. As the group of the 2,500 marchers reached the 400 policemen and 6 British officers who were waiting for them, the marchers approached in a column of 25 at a time. The marchers were beaten with clubs, often being hit on their heads and shoulders. The international press watched as the 2,500 marchers did not even raise their hands to defend themselves. The news of the brutal beating by the British of peaceful protesters shocked the world.
Unable to stop protest against the salt tax, the British government met with Gandhi to begin the long process of negotiating Indian independence. Unfortunately, the reality of independence created conflict between Hindus and Muslims over how a new India would be governed. Specifically, the Muslim population feared living in a Hindu dominated India. The Muslim population wanted to create their own country, Pakistan, in the area of northwest India. Gandhi opposed this plan. In 1947, Britain granted independence to India and to the newly formed Muslim country of Pakistan.
The argument over the creation of Pakistan caused massive violence to erupt across India. Hindu and Muslim population massacred each other and it seemed like the country was falling into civil war. Gandhi tried to stop this by travelling across India, hoping his presence could end the violence. Although violence did stop where Gandhi visited, he could not be everywhere. The violence between the Hindus and Muslims continued as millions of Muslim refugees fled to Pakistan and millions of Hindus fled to India. To stop this wide-spread violence, Gandhi started a fast, saying that he would only eat again when he saw clear plans to stop the violence. Realizing that the frail and aged Gandhi could not withstand a long fast, both sides worked together to create a peace.
Unfortunately, not everyone was happy with this peace plan. In particular, radical Hindu groups blamed Gandhi for the creation of Pakistan. On January 30, 1948, the 78-year-old Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting, when a young Hindu, who blamed Gandhi for the partition and creation of Pakistan, stopped before him and bowed. Gandhi bowed back. The young man then shot Gandhi and killed him.
Source # 1 - Video clip from the movie Gandhi showing the Salt March and the protest at the Dharasana Saltworks - click here
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Source # 2 - Cartoon from the Hindustan Times (Indian newspaper) in 1931. Lord Wellington was the Viceroy (another term for Governor) of the British Colony of India.
Source # 3 - Video about Indian Independence and Its Aftermath - click here
You will need to be logged into your BHS Google account to watch the video
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