Colonial India & the National Movement

Weightage: Paper II, Units 1–15 — roughly half the paper. It contains two of the four debates worth preparing in full: the character of 1857, and the drain and deindustrialisation controversy over the economic impact of colonial rule. It also carries the movement's own historiography — nationalist, Marxist, Cambridge and subaltern readings — which structures answers on the national movement.

1. European penetration and British expansion

The sequence of arrivals: the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century, seeking to control the Indian Ocean trade by force through fortified enclaves and the requirement that ships carry passes; the Dutch, whose principal interest was the spice trade of the archipelago with India as a source of textiles for it; the English and French companies in the seventeenth century; and the Danes and others on a smaller scale.

The company form and why it matters: a chartered joint-stock company with a monopoly of its nation's trade to the east, with the capacity to raise capital, maintain armed ships and forts, and — crucially — to make war and treaties in Asia on its own authority. The English company's structure gave it access to a deep capital market and, after the union of competing companies, a stable monopoly, which are advantages the French company's greater dependence on the state did not match.

The struggle for supremacy: the Carnatic wars in the south, arising from the extension of European conflict to Indian territory and from the companies' intervention in succession disputes in Hyderabad and the Carnatic. What they established, and it is the period's decisive discovery: that a small European-trained and disciplined infantry force with artillery could defeat much larger Indian armies, and that intervening in an Indian succession dispute could place a client on a throne and secure a revenue. This is the template for everything that follows.

Bengal: the company's conflict with the Nawab, the battle of Plassey in 1757, decided substantially by the defection of a section of the Nawab's commanders arranged in advance with the company and with Bengali banking interests; and the battle of Buxar in 1764 against a coalition of the Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh and the Mughal emperor. The distinction between them is examinable: Plassey was a conspiracy concluded by a battle, giving the company the power to install a Nawab; Buxar was a genuine military victory over the principal powers of northern India, and it is Buxar that established the company as a territorial power.

The diwani granted in 1765 — the right to collect the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on behalf of the Mughal emperor. Its significance: the company acquired the revenue while the Nawab retained the administration and its costs, an arrangement later called dual government whose consequence was that authority and responsibility were separated, with predictable results in the famine and administrative breakdown that followed.

Mysore: four wars against a state that had modernised its army, reformed its revenue and engaged in state commerce, and which was the most formidable Indian opponent the company faced; its rulers sought French assistance, which brought Mysore within the frame of Anglo-French conflict.

The Marathas: three wars, with the confederacy's structure — a Peshwa at Poona and great chiefs with effectively independent territories — being the strategic fact that allowed the company to fight them separately and to detach some by treaty; the subsidiary alliance accepted by the Peshwa being the instrument that converted the confederacy's head into a protected ruler and precipitated the second war.

Punjab: the Sikh state under Ranjit Singh, which maintained its independence through his lifetime by a combination of a modernised army and a treaty accommodation with the company; its annexation followed after his death in two wars.

The instruments of expansion, which should be named because they are examined.

The subsidiary alliance: an Indian ruler accepted a company force stationed in his territory, paid for it by ceding revenue or territory, surrendered the conduct of foreign relations, accepted a resident at his court, and dismissed other Europeans from his service. Its mechanism: it disarmed the state without conquering it, made the ruler dependent on company troops for internal security, and — because the payment was fixed while the revenue was not — produced fiscal crises that justified further annexation.

The doctrine of lapse: the refusal to recognise adopted heirs of dependent rulers, permitting annexation on the death of a ruler without a natural heir. Its application in several states is one of the specific grievances of 1857.

Outright annexation on grounds of misgovernment, which is the ground on which Awadh was annexed in 1856 — a state whose army supplied a large proportion of the company's Bengal sepoys.

2. The early structure of the British Raj

Parliamentary regulation of the company: the Regulating Act of 1773, establishing a Governor-General in Bengal with a council and a supreme court, and subjecting the company to a degree of parliamentary oversight; Pitt's India Act of 1784, establishing a Board of Control representing the crown alongside the company's Court of Directors, which is the beginning of dual government at the metropolitan end; and the successive charter renewals, which progressively removed the company's trading monopoly — with India in 1813 and with China in 1833 — and converted it into an administrative body.

The revenue settlements, which must be given with their design logic and their consequences rather than as three descriptions.

The Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The design: the revenue demand fixed in perpetuity, with the zamindar recognised as proprietor of the land, liable for a fixed sum payable punctually on pain of the sale of the estate. The reasoning: a fixed demand would give the proprietor an incentive to improve, since he would keep the gains; a landed proprietary class would be a stable social support for the government; and a fixed sum simplified collection. The consequences: the state forfeited the revenue growth from rising prices and extended cultivation, so its share of the agrarian surplus fell steadily in real terms; the sale laws transferred many estates to purchasers from commercial and official backgrounds; the cultivator's rights were unprotected, since the settlement recognised the zamindar's proprietorship and said nothing about occupancy, which produced rack-renting and a chain of sub-infeudation as rights were sublet and re-sublet; and the expected agricultural improvement largely did not occur, since it was easier to raise rent than to invest.

The Ryotwari settlement in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. The design: settlement directly with the cultivator, assessed on the individual holding, revised periodically. The reasoning: it dispensed with intermediaries, and its advocates argued it recognised the actual cultivator's rights. The consequences: the assessment was frequently pitched high and revised upward; it was payable in cash regardless of the season, which drove the cultivator to the moneylender; and the direct relationship with the state meant the cultivator bore the full risk of a bad year with no intermediary to absorb it.

The Mahalwari settlement in the north-western provinces and Punjab. The design: settlement with the village or estate collectively, through its proprietary body, with joint liability, revised periodically. The consequences: joint responsibility could hold a community together and could also mean that the default of some fell on all.

What the three share, which is the analytically important point and the one that carries an answer: all three were designed to make the revenue assessable in cash, fixed in advance and legally enforceable, and each converted customary and layered rights in land into a defined legal property right attached to a specific person liable for the revenue. The transformation of land into an alienable commodity, and the associated transfer of land to non-cultivating creditors through the courts, follow from that common feature rather than from any one settlement.

The administrative structure: the district as the unit under a Collector combining revenue, magisterial and general functions; the provincial governments; and the Governor-General in Council.

The civil service: recruitment initially by the company's patronage, with training at a college established for the purpose; the covenanted service reserved in practice for Europeans; the introduction of competitive examination in the mid-nineteenth century, held in England at an age that made Indian candidature very difficult; and the resulting demand for simultaneous examinations in India, which became a standing nationalist grievance and one of the early Congress's principal demands.

The police: reorganised in the mid-nineteenth century as a regulated armed constabulary answerable to the district administration — designed for the maintenance of order and the protection of the regime rather than as a service for the public, which is the inheritance discussed in the administrative literature.

The judiciary: a hierarchy of civil and criminal courts; the codification of law in the mid-nineteenth century; and the standing tension between the district officer's combined executive and magisterial functions and the principle of judicial independence.

The army: an army recruited in India, officered by Europeans, with the presidency armies; the ratio of European to Indian troops raised after 1857; the reorganisation of recruitment thereafter on the basis of the martial races doctrine, which concentrated recruitment in particular regions and communities and is best understood as a security policy — recruiting from areas that had not rebelled — dressed in a pseudo-ethnological justification.

Education and the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy: the dispute over whether the government's educational funds should support instruction in the classical Indian languages and learning or in English and western knowledge, resolved in favour of English in 1835; the downward filtration theory, that educating a class at the top would diffuse knowledge downward, which was the policy's stated mechanism and which did not operate; the despatch of 1854 setting out a fuller system including universities, grants-in-aid and vernacular primary education; and the founding of the universities in 1857.

How to assess colonial education: it produced a western-educated intelligentsia that supplied the leadership of both reform and nationalism, made English a link language across the subcontinent, and introduced institutions and ideas that were subsequently turned against the government that introduced them. It was also narrow in reach, neglected mass and technical education, and served the administration's need for clerks. Both are true and the answer should say so.

3. The economic impact of colonial rule

This is the first of the block's two great debates and must be handled with the evidence named.

The drain of wealth. The concept: a transfer of resources from India to Britain without an equivalent economic return — that is, an export surplus not balanced by imports of goods or by any corresponding inflow. Its components: home charges, comprising the costs of the India Office in London, pensions and furlough payments to European officers, interest on debt incurred in India's name, and payments for stores; remittances by European officials and businessmen of savings and profits; and the profits of shipping, banking and insurance, which were British-controlled.

The mechanism, which should be stated because it explains why the drain was invisible in the trade figures: India ran a merchandise export surplus for most of the period, and that surplus was absorbed by the home charges and remittances rather than returning as imports or as investment. The nationalist economists' point was precisely that a persistent export surplus in a poor country, unmatched by any inflow, is evidence of a transfer.

The estimates vary widely and depend on which items are counted, so an answer should treat the mechanism as established and the magnitude as disputed.

The counter-arguments must be given: that some of the charges purchased real services — administration, defence, railways, irrigation; that British investment brought capital into India; and that the estimates include items that are ordinary costs of any government. The nationalist reply: that India had no say in the level or composition of these charges; that the services were provided at costs India did not set; and that investment concentrated in sectors serving the export economy rather than in those that would have transformed production.

Deindustrialisation. The claim: that Indian handicraft industry, particularly cotton textiles, was destroyed by competition from machine-made British goods, that the displaced artisans were driven into agriculture, and that this produced an increasing pressure of population on land without any compensating growth of modern industry.

The mechanisms alleged: the loss of the export market as British machine-spun yarn and cloth undercut Indian handloom products in third markets; the loss of the home market as those goods entered India under a tariff regime that gave them free or preferential entry while Indian goods entering Britain faced duties; and the loss of court and elite demand as Indian courts were annexed or reduced.

The evidence and its problems: the export figures for Indian textiles and the import figures for British yarn and cloth are clear; the occupational data on which the shift from industry to agriculture is argued come from censuses whose categories changed and which begin late; and there is regional variation, with some handloom sectors surviving by using imported machine yarn, which is an adaptation rather than a destruction.

The revisionist qualifications: that the handloom sector did not disappear and in some regions expanded output using cheap imported yarn; that some of the occupational shift may reflect classification changes; and that the timing and extent varied by region and product. The nationalist position's core survives these: whatever the fate of the handloom, India experienced the displacement of a manufacturing sector without the emergence of a modern industrial sector to absorb it, which is the distinctive colonial outcome and the one that matters.

Commercialisation of agriculture: the growth of production for the market in cotton, jute, indigo, opium, tea and oilseeds. Its drivers: the cash revenue demand, which compelled sale; the railways, which connected the interior to the ports; and world demand, notably the surge in cotton demand during the American civil war and its collapse afterwards. Its consequences: integration into world markets and exposure to their fluctuations; a shift of land from food to cash crops in some regions; and indebtedness, since cash crops require inputs and the cultivator borrowed against a future crop.

Famine: recurrent and severe famines through the period, with the worst mortality in the later nineteenth century. The explanations: the older official view attributed them to the failure of rains and to over-population. The analysis that supersedes it identifies the causes in entitlement failure rather than in absolute food shortage — the collapse of purchasing power among agricultural labourers and artisans when employment and wages fell, in conditions where grain moved to where prices were highest, along the railways that were supposed to relieve scarcity. Policy contributed: adherence to non-interference in the grain trade, and famine relief conditioned on labour tests at wages set deliberately low.

The growth of modern industry: cotton mills from the mid-nineteenth century, substantially Indian-owned and concentrated in western India; jute mills, substantially European-owned and concentrated in Bengal; coal, and later iron and steel, with the establishment of an Indian steel enterprise in the early twentieth century being the outstanding case of Indian industrial entrepreneurship. The pattern: growth was real, concentrated in a few sectors and regions, and small relative to the size of the economy and the labour displaced.

Indian entrepreneurship: the accumulation of capital in trade — including in the opium and cotton trades — its movement into industry, and the constraints it faced: the absence of tariff protection until the interwar period; the difficulty of access to credit and to shipping and insurance controlled by British firms; the managing agency system, which concentrated control; and government purchasing policy.

The overall assessment worth writing: colonial rule brought railways, irrigation, legal uniformity, a monetised economy and a modern administrative structure, and it presided over the displacement of manufacturing, a transfer of resources abroad, recurrent famine and a near-stagnant per capita income across the period. The two are not in tension, because the infrastructure was built to serve an economy organised around the export of primary products and the import of manufactures. The distinctive feature of the colonial economy is not that nothing changed but that the changes were structured to serve an external economy.

4. Social and cultural developments and the reform movements

Indigenous education before the colonial system: a network of elementary schools and of institutions of higher learning in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, supported by endowments and by local communities. What happened to it: the loss of the endowments as revenue settlements reassigned the land supporting them, and the diversion of official support to the new system.

The press: the growth of newspapers in English and in the Indian languages from the early nineteenth century; the alternation of liberal and repressive phases in press policy, with the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 discriminating explicitly between English and Indian-language papers; and the press's role as the principal instrument of political communication before the mass movements.

Modern vernacular literature: the emergence of prose, the novel, the essay and modern poetry in the Indian languages during the nineteenth century — a development connected to printing, to the new education, and to the reform and nationalist debates that supplied its subject matter.

Science and technology: the establishment of scientific institutions and surveys; the introduction of western scientific education; and the emergence of Indian scientific work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The social and religious reform movements. The useful organisation is by relationship to tradition rather than by chronology, because that is what distinguishes them analytically.

Reformist movements sought change within the tradition by appeal to reason and to selected texts, arguing that objectionable practices were later corruptions of an original purity. The Bengal movement founded in the early nineteenth century is the type: campaigning against sati, for widow remarriage, against polygamy and child marriage, and for women's education, while advancing a monotheistic reading of the Upanishads. Its later divisions, and its influence on the reform of Hindu personal law and on the intelligentsia's outlook, are examinable.

Revivalist movements sought change by return to an idealised past, holding that the tradition's original form was already adequate. The movement founded in the later nineteenth century in the north is the type: calling for a return to the Vedas as the sole authority, rejecting image worship and priestly mediation, opposing caste as practised while accepting varna in principle, promoting education including for women, and undertaking reconversion.

Movements within other communities: the reform and modernist currents among Muslims, of which the movement centred on the college founded at Aligarh is the most significant — advocating western education, arguing that Islam and modern science were compatible, and counselling political abstention from the Congress on the ground that Muslims should first secure education and employment; the reform currents in the Parsi and Sikh communities; and the theosophical movement, whose Indian significance lies in its valorisation of Indian tradition by Europeans.

Movements from below: the anti-caste movements, which are the period's most radical social current and are frequently under-treated. The movement in western India founded in the mid-nineteenth century attacked brahmanical authority directly, established schools for girls and for subordinated castes, and offered a historical account in which caste was a system of conquest and subordination rather than a religious order. The movements in the south asserted a non-brahmin identity and demanded representation in education and employment. Their significance: they identified caste rather than colonial rule as the primary structure of oppression, and their relationship with the national movement was correspondingly complicated.

Women's questions: the campaigns against sati, for widow remarriage, against child marriage and for education; the legislative measures that followed; and the important qualification that these were largely conducted by men about women, with women's own organised participation developing later — through women's organisations from the late nineteenth century and, decisively, through mass participation in the national movement.

How to assess the reform movements: they were socially narrow, drawn from the western-educated and the upper castes, and their legislative achievements had limited reach; they were intellectually decisive, establishing that Indian society could be discussed, criticised and reformed by Indians; and they were politically consequential, because the argument that Indians were capable of self-improvement is the premise from which the claim to self-government follows. The anti-caste movements are the necessary corrective to an account written only from the reformist mainstream.

5. The Indian response to British rule and the revolt of 1857

Peasant and tribal movements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: numerous, regionally dispersed and frequently very violent, arising from the revenue demand, from land alienation to moneylenders and outsiders, from the loss of customary forest and grazing rights, and from the compulsions of commercial cropping — the indigo cultivators' resistance in Bengal being the best-known instance of the last.

Their characteristics: local and specific grievances; leadership from within the community, frequently with a religious or millenarian idiom; targets that were the immediate exploiter — the moneylender, the planter, the zamindar, the forest officer — before they were the government; and suppression by force.

Their significance and its limits: they demonstrate that resistance to colonial arrangements was continuous and widespread, and they were not nationalist — they were responses to specific dispossessions, without a programme for the country as a whole. The subaltern historiography's claim is that these movements had an autonomous political consciousness that the nationalist narrative subsumed, and that reading them only as precursors misses what they were. That claim is examinable and should be stated.

The revolt of 1857, the first of the block's two great debates.

The causes, given by type.

Political: annexations, particularly of Awadh in 1856 on grounds of misgovernment, which affected a state supplying a large proportion of the Bengal army's sepoys and disturbed the taluqdars' position; the doctrine of lapse and the refusal of adopted heirs; and the reduction of the Mughal emperor's status.

Economic: the revenue demand and the resulting transfers of land; the position of the taluqdars in Awadh after the summary settlement; and the displacement of artisans.

Social and religious: the apprehension that the government intended conversion, fed by missionary activity, by legislation on Hindu practice, and by the general reforming temper.

Military: grievances over pay, allowances and promotion; the General Service Enlistment Act requiring service overseas, which raised caste objections; the ratio of European to Indian troops, which was unusually low in 1857; and the greased cartridge, which is the immediate occasion rather than a cause, and whose significance is that it was believed — a rumour is effective in proportion to the fears already present.

The course: outbreak at Meerut and the seizure of Delhi; the proclamation of the Mughal emperor as sovereign, which is the revolt's central symbolic act; centres at Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi and elsewhere; and suppression through 1858.

The debate on its character.

The mutiny reading: a military rising over sepoy grievances, joined opportunistically by displaced rulers, and confined to particular regions.

The war of independence reading: a national uprising against foreign rule, drawing in peasants, artisans and rural elites alongside the sepoys.

What the evidence supports on each side. For more than a mutiny: the very large civilian participation, particularly in Awadh, where the revolt had the widest social base; the attacks on the apparatus of colonial authority — record rooms, treasuries, courts, moneylenders' bonds — which are attacks on a system rather than on officers; and the proclamation of a common sovereign, which supplied a political focus beyond regimental grievance.

Against a national war: the regional limitation, with Bengal, Punjab and the south largely uninvolved and in some cases actively supporting the government; the participation of Indian troops and states on the government's side; the absence of a common programme beyond the restoration of a pre-colonial order; and the fact that several leaders' objectives were the recovery of their own particular rights.

The defensible position: the revolt was more than a mutiny and less than a national war — a broad-based rebellion against colonial authority in a defined region, with genuinely popular participation and without a national programme or a national reach. Saying that, and giving the evidence on both sides, is the answer.

The consequences: the transfer of government from the company to the crown in 1858, with the proclamation promising non-interference in religion and the observance of treaties with princes; the reorganisation of the army with a higher European ratio and recruitment concentrated in regions that had not rebelled; a policy of support for princes and landholders as conservative allies; the abandonment of annexation; and a deepened racial distance between rulers and ruled.

6. The birth and growth of Indian nationalism

The factors.

Administrative and political unification: a single administrative system, a common legal framework and the extension of communications, which created the conditions for a subcontinental politics.

Western education and the intelligentsia: a class educated in English, exposed to liberal and nationalist ideas, and increasingly aware that the professions and services were closed to them at the higher levels.

The press and modern communications: newspapers in English and the Indian languages, and the railways and telegraph, which made simultaneous political activity possible across regions.

Economic grievances: the drain, the tariff arrangements, the burden of the revenue demand, famine, and the exclusion of Indians from the higher services and from state contracts. The economic critique developed by the early nationalist economists is a decisive intellectual event, because it converted resentment into an analysis of the mechanism.

Racial discrimination, of which the controversy over the bill proposing to allow Indian magistrates to try Europeans in the mofussil is the standing example — significant less for the bill than for the European community's organised agitation against it, which demonstrated that organised pressure worked and taught the lesson to those who watched.

The politics of association: the regional political associations of the mid-nineteenth century — in Bengal, Bombay and Madras — through which the educated classes petitioned, memorialised and lobbied, and which are the Congress's institutional ancestors.

The foundation of the Congress in 1885, and the safety-valve thesis — the claim that it was founded at official instigation to provide a controlled outlet for discontent and thereby forestall a violent explosion. How to handle it: the thesis rests on the involvement of a retired official in the founding and on a later account of his motives. Against it: the initiative and the organisation came from Indian political associations already active; the founding generation's own objectives are documented and were their own; and the thesis attributes to a single official an outcome produced by a broad social development. The reasonable position: the official's involvement is a fact and the safety-valve explanation of the Congress's origin is not supported, since it mistakes a participant for a cause.

The early Congress: programme and methods. The objectives: expansion of the legislative councils and of the elective element within them; simultaneous civil service examinations in India and England; separation of judicial from executive functions; reduction of military expenditure; tariff and revenue reform; and the redress of specific economic grievances.

The methods: petition, resolution, deputation and press campaigning — the method called constitutional agitation, whose premise was that British rule was open to persuasion by reasoned argument and that publicity would produce redress.

The achievement of the Moderates, which should be stated because they are habitually dismissed: they produced the economic critique of colonial rule, which is the intellectual foundation of everything that followed; they established a national organisation meeting annually and speaking for the country; and they trained a generation in political work. Their limitation: the method assumed a responsiveness that the government did not show, and its failure over two decades is what produced the Extremists.

Moderates and Extremists. The disagreement was over method and premise, not over the ultimate objective. The Extremists held that petitioning had failed and that reliance on British good faith was misplaced; that self-government was a right rather than a concession to be earned; and that political work required mass participation and a willingness to accept sacrifice, including passive resistance and boycott. Their appeal drew on cultural and religious symbols to reach beyond the English-educated, which extended the movement's reach and had costs that appear later.

The partition of Bengal in 1905 and the Swadeshi movement. The measure: the division of the province, defended on administrative grounds and widely understood as an attempt to divide the Bengali-speaking population and weaken a politically active region.

The movement's techniques, which are its lasting contribution: boycott of British goods; swadeshi, the promotion of Indian production, including the founding of enterprises; national education, with schools and a national council of education; passive resistance; and the use of festivals, songs and processions to reach a mass audience.

Its achievements and limits: it made boycott and swadeshi permanent instruments of Indian politics; it drew in students and, for the first time in numbers, women; it produced a genuine expansion of political participation in Bengal. Its limits: it remained substantially confined to Bengal and to the educated; it did not reach the Muslim peasantry of eastern Bengal, some of whom saw advantage in the new province; and its failure to sustain itself pushed a section toward revolutionary activity.

The Congress split at Surat in 1907, and the subsequent reunion in 1916; the Lucknow Pact of the same year between the Congress and the Muslim League, which conceded separate electorates in return for a joint constitutional demand; and the Home Rule leagues of 1916, which built organisation and agitation on a scale the Congress had not previously attempted.

7. Gandhi and the mass phase of the national movement

The rise of Gandhi: the South African years, in which satyagraha was developed as a technique in a series of campaigns against discriminatory legislation; the return to India in 1915; and the early Indian campaigns — Champaran on behalf of indigo cultivators, Ahmedabad on behalf of mill workers, and Kheda on behalf of peasants seeking revenue remission — each local, specific and successful, which established his method and his reputation before any national campaign.

The character of Gandhian nationalism, which must be stated analytically rather than reverentially.

Satyagraha is not passive resistance but a technique with a stated theory: the resister openly breaks a specific unjust law, accepts the legal penalty without resistance, refuses to hate the opponent, and aims at the opponent's conversion rather than his defeat. Why the theory matters practically: a movement committed to non-violence and to accepting penalties can mobilise people who could not fight, is difficult to suppress without visible brutality, and places the government in a position where repression damages it.

Its programmatic content: swadeshi and khadi, which connected the political to the economic and gave every participant a daily act; constructive work — village industry, sanitation, education, the removal of untouchability, communal unity — which maintained organisation between campaigns; and the framing of the movement's aims in a moral idiom intelligible without political education.

Gandhi's popular appeal: the use of a religious and moral vocabulary widely understood; personal asceticism, which authenticated the message; the inclusion of those the earlier movement had not reached — peasants, women, the poorly educated; and the provision of forms of participation available to anyone, from spinning to attending a meeting to courting arrest.

The critiques to state: that the moral idiom was drawn substantially from one religious tradition, which limited its reach; that constructive work substituted social service for structural change; that the movements were suspended at moments of intensity, which alienated those who had taken risks; and — the most substantial — the criticism from Ambedkar and the anti-caste movement, that the approach to untouchability was reformist and paternalist, treating it as a moral failing of caste Hindus to be corrected rather than as a structure requiring political and legal power in the hands of those subordinated by it.

The Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919 against legislation extending emergency powers into peacetime; the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and its effect on Indian opinion, which converted moderate loyalty into opposition more effectively than any campaign.

The Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, 1920–22. The alliance: the Khilafat agitation over the treatment of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph after the war, joined with the Congress's national demands. Its significance: the most substantial Hindu-Muslim political cooperation of the period. The criticism: that it rested on a pan-Islamic religious question extraneous to Indian politics, and that when the issue disappeared with the Caliphate's abolition, the alliance had no other basis.

The non-cooperation programme: surrender of titles; boycott of legislatures, courts, schools and foreign cloth; and the eventual prospect of refusal to pay taxes. The withdrawal after the violence at Chauri Chaura in 1922, which is the standing controversy — Gandhi's position that a movement committed to non-violence could not continue after such an incident, against the criticism that the withdrawal demobilised a movement at its height and that the leadership's control over the mass base was thereby revealed as its priority.

The interval, 1922–1930: the Swarajist entry into the legislatures to obstruct from within, against the no-changers' commitment to constructive work; the Simon Commission of 1927, boycotted because it contained no Indian member; the Nehru Report of 1928, the Indians' own constitutional proposal, and the objections to it from the Muslim League; and the Congress's adoption of complete independence as its objective at Lahore in 1929.

The Civil Disobedience movement, 1930–34: the salt march and the breach of the salt law, chosen because the salt tax affected everyone and the act of making salt was available to anyone; the movement's spread, its regional forms, and the very large participation of women; the Gandhi-Irwin pact and the second Round Table Conference; the Communal Award and the Poona Pact with Ambedkar, substituting reserved seats within joint electorates for the separate electorate awarded to the Depressed Classes; and the movement's resumption and eventual withdrawal.

The Government of India Act 1935: provincial autonomy with responsible government in the provinces; a federal scheme at the centre requiring the accession of the princely states, which never came into operation; safeguards and reserved powers for the Governor-General and Governors; and an extended franchise with separate electorates retained and extended. The Congress's position: rejection of the Act and participation in the 1937 elections under it, followed by the formation of ministries in most provinces — with the resignation of those ministries in 1939 over the declaration of war without consultation.

The Quit India movement, 1942: the demand for immediate British withdrawal after the failure of the Cripps mission; the arrest of the entire leadership on the movement's first day, which left it without central direction; the resulting character of the movement as a spontaneous mass upsurge with attacks on communications and government property, parallel administrations in some districts, and an underground organisation; and its suppression. Its significance: it demonstrated the depth of anti-colonial feeling and the government's dependence on force, and it removed any prospect of a settlement on pre-war terms.

8. Constitutional developments, 1858–1935

The sequence should be held as a structure with a consistent logic rather than as a list of statutes: each measure conceded a limited elective and consultative element while retaining the executive's ultimate control, and each was overtaken by demands it had stimulated.

1858: the transfer of government to the crown, with a Secretary of State and a Council of India in London and a Viceroy in India.

1861: the addition of non-official Indian members to the legislative councils in an advisory capacity, with no power over the budget or the executive.

1892: an enlarged council with an indirect and limited element of recommendation by certain bodies, and the right to discuss the budget without voting on it.

1909: an enlarged council with an elected element, the right to move resolutions and to question, and — the measure's decisive feature — separate electorates for Muslims, which introduced communal representation into the constitutional structure.

1919: dyarchy in the provinces, dividing subjects into transferred subjects administered by ministers responsible to the legislature and reserved subjects retained by the Governor; an enlarged franchise; and a bicameral central legislature without responsible government. Dyarchy's structural flaw: the transferred subjects were the ones requiring money and the reserved subjects included finance, so ministers were responsible for departments they could not fund.

1935: provincial autonomy replacing dyarchy, with full responsible government in the provinces subject to the Governor's special powers; a federal scheme that never came into force; and separate electorates retained and extended to further groups.

The consistent features across the sequence: an expanding franchise and elective element; a retained executive veto and reserved powers; and the entrenchment of communal representation from 1909, which is the constitutional development with the largest political consequences.

9. Other strands: revolutionaries and the left

The revolutionaries. Their reasoning: that constitutional agitation had failed, that the government responded only to force, and that acts of dramatic violence would inspire a wider rising.

Their phases and regions: the early Bengal and Maharashtra groups; the Punjab; the organisation abroad, with a movement among Indian emigrants on the west coast of North America that attempted a rising during the war; and the interwar revival, in which the northern organisation adopted an explicitly socialist programme, distinguishing itself from the earlier purely nationalist revolutionism, and undertook actions designed for their propaganda effect — the assembly bomb case being explicitly intended to be arrested and tried in order to secure a platform.

Assessment: the revolutionaries did not come close to overthrowing the government, and their significance is different — they demonstrated that sacrifice was possible, they were a very large influence on the political imagination of the young, and the trials became national events. The later groups' turn to socialism connects them to the left within the movement.

The left. The Communist Party from the 1920s, working within and alongside the national movement with a class analysis of colonialism; the Congress Socialist Party formed in 1934 to work for socialism within the Congress; and the left within the Congress — with Nehru's socialism, expressed in the planning committee and in his writing, and Subhas Chandra Bose's more confrontational position leading to his election as Congress president against the leadership's preference and his subsequent resignation.

The left's contribution: it brought class questions — land reform, workers' rights, planning — onto the national agenda; it organised peasant and worker movements, of which the peasant organisations of the 1930s and the workers' unions are the substantial achievements; and it argued that political independence without social and economic transformation would leave the structure of exploitation intact.

Its limits: division over strategy, particularly over whether to work within the Congress or against it; the difficulty of reconciling class mobilisation with the national front; and, for the Communists, the political cost of positions taken during the war.

10. The politics of separatism and partition

The development, given as a sequence of mechanisms rather than as blame.

Colonial enumeration and representation: the census fixing religious categories as countable and comparable, and the constitutional recognition of separate electorates from 1909, which made religious community a unit of political representation. This is the single most consequential structural factor, because it created a form of politics in which a leader's constituency was defined by religion and in which appeals across the community were electorally worthless.

The Muslim League: founded in 1906 to represent Muslim political interests; cooperating with the Congress in the Lucknow Pact of 1916; the divergence thereafter over the Nehru Report's rejection of separate electorates and over the terms of representation; the 1937 elections, in which the League performed poorly and the Congress formed ministries in most provinces without League participation — a period whose importance lies in the League's subsequent argument that Congress rule had demonstrated the danger of a permanent Hindu majority; the Lahore resolution of 1940 demanding independent states in the Muslim-majority regions; and the League's transformation into a mass party by the 1946 elections, in which it won the overwhelming majority of Muslim seats.

The Hindu Mahasabha and associated organisations: the assertion that the nation was defined by a religious and cultural identity, the campaigns of reconversion and consolidation, and the corresponding communal politics on the other side. The analytical symmetry worth stating: both separatisms rest on the same proposition — that a religious community is a political community with a single set of interests conflicting with another's — and neither can be understood without the other.

Communal violence from the 1920s, and its escalation in 1946.

The transfer of power: the Cripps mission of 1942 and its failure; the Cabinet Mission of 1946, which proposed a federal union with groupings of provinces and which both parties accepted and then interpreted differently; Direct Action Day and the violence in Calcutta and its aftermath; the interim government; the announcement of a date for withdrawal; and the partition plan of June 1947 with the boundary commissions and the accelerated timetable.

The debate on responsibility: the readings that attribute partition to League intransigence, to Congress unwillingness to concede a federal structure with adequate provincial autonomy, to the British policy of communal representation and to the accelerated withdrawal. The defensible position is that the outcome had several necessary conditions and no single sufficient cause: the constitutional entrenchment of communal representation created the political form; the failure of the Cabinet Mission's federal proposal removed the last agreed alternative; the violence of 1946 made a shared future appear unsafe to both communities; and the compressed timetable of 1947 removed the possibility of an orderly settlement, with consequences in the scale of the killing and displacement.

11. Consolidation as a nation

The integration of the princely states: the lapse of paramountcy on independence, leaving the states legally free to accede to either dominion or to remain independent; the instrument of accession covering defence, external affairs and communications; the accession of the great majority before independence; and the distinct cases — Junagadh, resolved by plebiscite; Hyderabad, resolved by military action in 1948; and Kashmir, whose accession followed an armed incursion and whose status became the subject of a continuing dispute and of the war of 1947–48. The subsequent process: the merger of states into unions and then into provinces, the abolition of the privy purses and privileges in 1971, and the entry of former princes into electoral politics, where several were successful.

Linguistic reorganisation: the initial official reluctance, on the ground that linguistic states would encourage fissiparous tendencies; the agitation in the Telugu-speaking areas and the death of a hunger striker in 1952, which forced the creation of Andhra; the States Reorganisation Commission and the reorganisation of 1956; and the subsequent creation of further states.

The assessment: linguistic reorganisation strengthened rather than weakened the union, and the mechanism should be stated — recognition is indivisible and therefore non-negotiable, while resources and representation are divisible and therefore negotiable, so conceding recognition converted an existential demand into a distributive one, which is the ordinary business of politics.

The national language question: the constitutional provision for Hindi as the official language with English continuing for a period; the resistance in the non-Hindi-speaking south, culminating in the agitation of 1965; and the settlement providing for the indefinite continuation of English alongside Hindi, which is the same accommodative logic applied to language as to territory.

Regionalism and regional inequality: the persistence of large inter-state disparities in income and human development; the demands for further states on grounds of development neglect; and the recurring tension between the claims of national integration and of regional autonomy.

Nehru's foreign policy: non-alignment, which should be described accurately as the retention of freedom to judge each issue on its merits rather than as neutrality or as equidistance; Panchsheel, the principles of mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and peaceful coexistence; support for decolonisation and for anti-racial-discrimination causes; and Asian and Afro-Asian solidarity.

India and her neighbours, 1947–64: the Kashmir dispute and the 1947–48 war with Pakistan; the Indus waters settlement; relations with China from the recognition and the 1954 agreement through the border dispute to the war of 1962 and its consequences for Indian defence policy, for non-alignment's credibility and for Nehru's position; and relations with the smaller neighbours.

12. Caste, ethnicity and economic change after 1947

Constitutional provisions: the abolition of untouchability; reservation in legislatures, public employment and educational institutions for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; and the provision for the appointment of a commission to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes.

Backward castes in electoral politics: the emergence from the 1960s of political formations based on the middle and backward peasant castes, particularly in the northern states; the Mandal Commission report and the implementation of reservation for Other Backward Classes in central government employment in 1990, and the political realignment that followed; and the general process by which caste became a resource in electoral politics — which is the point Rajni Kothari's formulation captures: it is not that caste entered politics but that politics transformed caste, giving it modern organisational forms, wider scale through the aggregation of local jatis into larger blocs, and a secular register of demands.

Dalit movements: Ambedkar's political and intellectual legacy, including the analysis of caste as a graded inequality defended by many of those it subordinates and resting on religious sanction, so that economic change alone does not dissolve it; the conversion movement; the assertive movements of the 1970s onward with their literature and their political formations; and the persistence of atrocity and of residential and occupational segregation, which is the evidence that stigma-based exclusion has been the least amenable to the changes that have affected caste generally.

Tribal politics: the constitutional Schedules; the movements for autonomy and statehood in the north-east and the central belt; and the questions of land alienation, displacement and forest rights.

Economic development and political change.

Land reforms: the abolition of intermediary tenures, which was the most successfully implemented measure and which removed a large class of rent-receivers; tenancy reform, providing security of tenure and regulation of rent, which was widely evaded through resumption for self-cultivation and unrecorded tenancy; and ceilings on holdings, which were largely defeated by partition of holdings within families and by exemptions. The assessment: abolition of intermediaries succeeded, redistribution largely did not, and the difference is that the first required the state to act against a defined and politically weakened group while the second required it to act against the dominant rural class on which state politics rested.

The green revolution: the introduction of high-yielding varieties with fertiliser, assured irrigation and price support from the mid-1960s. Its achievement: a decisive increase in wheat and later rice output and the end of dependence on imported food. Its distributional consequences, which are the examinable part: benefits concentrated in irrigated regions, principally the north-west, widening inter-regional disparity; concentrated among larger farmers with access to credit and inputs, widening intra-regional disparity; increased demand for labour and for purchased inputs, altering rural class relations; and the environmental costs of groundwater depletion and soil degradation, which appeared later.

Planning and the era of growth: the planning framework, the emphasis on heavy industry and public sector investment, industrial licensing and import substitution; the slow growth of the first decades relative to what was intended; the shift in the 1980s; and the liberalisation of 1991 — the balance of payments crisis, the dismantling of industrial licensing, the reduction of tariffs, and the opening to foreign investment. The political consequence: economic reform was undertaken by successive governments of different parties, which indicates a shift in the terms of political competition from the question of whether to liberalise to the question of how the gains are distributed.

13. Worked answer — a 20-mark question

Question: Examine the character of the revolt of 1857. (20 marks)

Framing. The question is a historiographical one, and the two positions — a sepoy mutiny and a first war of independence — are both partly supported and both incomplete. The answer must set out what each can show, identify what neither accommodates, and state a position with the evidence for it.

The causes, which determine what kind of event it was.

Political: the annexation of Awadh in 1856 on grounds of misgovernment, which disturbed the taluqdars' position and affected the state from which a very large proportion of the Bengal army's sepoys were recruited — so a political grievance and a military one were located in the same population, which is the single most important structural fact about the revolt. The doctrine of lapse and the refusal of adopted heirs; and the reduction of the Mughal emperor's status.

Economic: the revenue demand and consequent transfers of land; the summary settlement in Awadh, which affected taluqdari rights; and the displacement of artisans.

Social and religious: the apprehension of an intention to convert, fed by missionary activity, by legislation touching Hindu practice, and by the general reforming temper of the administration.

Military: grievances over pay, allowances and promotion prospects; the General Service Enlistment Act, requiring service overseas and raising caste objections; the unusually low ratio of European to Indian troops in 1857; and the greased cartridge, which is the immediate occasion rather than a cause — its significance being that it was believed, and a rumour is effective in proportion to the fears already present.

The mutiny reading, and what supports it. The rising began in the army, over a military grievance, and spread through military units. Its regional limitation is real and substantial: Bengal, Punjab and the south were largely uninvolved, Punjab supplied troops for the reconquest, and several Indian states and rulers actively supported the government. There was no common programme beyond the restoration of a pre-colonial order, and several leaders' objectives were the recovery of their own particular rights and territories.

The war of independence reading, and what supports it. Civilian participation was very large, particularly in Awadh, where the revolt had by far its widest social base and where taluqdars, peasants and sepoys acted together. The targets are revealing: record rooms, treasuries, courts and moneylenders' bonds were attacked — these are attacks on a system of authority and obligation, not on officers or on regimental grievances, and they indicate that participants understood what they were destroying. And the proclamation of the Mughal emperor as sovereign supplied a political focus above regimental and local grievance, which participants across regions and communities accepted.

What neither reading accommodates. The mutiny reading cannot explain the civilian rising in Awadh, the attacks on the records of obligation, or the acceptance of a common sovereign. The war of independence reading cannot explain the regional limitation, the participation of Indians on the government's side, or the absence of any programme beyond restoration.

A further consideration on the second reading's origins: it was formulated substantially by nationalist writers for whom establishing a long ancestry for the freedom struggle was a political purpose, and that origin does not make it wrong but does mean the category was applied retrospectively rather than derived from the participants' own statements.

The defensible position. The revolt was more than a mutiny and less than a national war: a broad-based rebellion against colonial authority within a defined region, in which a military rising over specific grievances became the occasion for a wider revolt by populations with independent grievances against the same regime, unified by a symbolic sovereign and lacking any programme for the country beyond the restoration of a pre-colonial order.

The consequences, which the answer should reach. The transfer of government from the company to the crown in 1858, with a proclamation promising non-interference in religion and observance of treaties with princes. The reorganisation of the army, with a higher European ratio, artillery kept in European hands, and recruitment concentrated in the regions that had not rebelled — the martial races doctrine being a security policy given a pseudo-ethnological justification. A deliberate policy of support for princes and landholders as conservative allies, and the abandonment of annexation. And a deepened racial distance between rulers and ruled.

The final assessment. The revolt's importance is not settled by choosing a label. Its consequences shaped the structure of British rule for the following ninety years — the conservative alliance, the reconstructed army, and the abandonment of the reforming confidence of the preceding decades — and its memory supplied later nationalism with a demonstration that the regime could be challenged. Both of those are true whichever name is given to it, and an answer that spends its length on the label rather than on the evidence and the consequences has answered the smaller question.

Common traps

• Treating the safety-valve thesis as established; it mistakes a participant for a cause.
• Dismissing the Moderates, whose economic critique is the intellectual foundation of everything after them.
• Presenting the drain's magnitude as settled; the mechanism is established and the estimates are disputed.
• Asserting deindustrialisation without the revisionist qualifications, or conceding them so far that the distinctive colonial outcome — displacement without industrial absorption — is lost.
• Writing on 1857 as a label dispute rather than as an evidence and consequences question.
• Explaining partition by a single cause; the outcome had several necessary conditions and no sufficient one.
• Writing the national movement without the anti-caste critique, which is the necessary corrective to an account from the mainstream alone.
• Describing non-alignment as neutrality; it was the retention of freedom to judge each issue.
• Treating land reform as a uniform failure; abolition of intermediaries succeeded and redistribution did not, and the difference is explicable.

Memory aids

• Plassey against Buxar: a conspiracy concluded by a battle, against a genuine victory over northern India's principal powers.
• Subsidiary alliance: disarm without conquering, fix the payment, let the fiscal crisis justify annexation.
• The three settlements share: cash, fixed in advance, legally enforceable, attached to a named proprietor.
• The drain's mechanism: an export surplus absorbed by home charges and remittances.
• Deindustrialisation's core: displacement of manufacturing without industrial absorption.
• 1857: more than a mutiny, less than a national war.
• 1909: separate electorates — the constitutional development with the largest political consequences.
• Dyarchy's flaw: transferred subjects needed money, and finance was reserved.
• Linguistic reorganisation: recognition is indivisible, resources are divisible.

Exam protocol

1. Name the mechanism in economic questions — how the transfer or the displacement actually worked.
2. On 1857 and on partition, give the evidence on both sides and then take a position.
3. State the design logic of a revenue settlement before its consequences.
4. Bring the anti-caste and subaltern critiques into national movement answers where the question admits them.
5. On the movement's phases, distinguish disagreements over method from disagreements over objective.
6. On post-1947 questions, give the mechanism of accommodation — indivisible recognition, divisible resources.
7. Close with a position and its reason in a single sentence.