Chapter 10
Colonialism and the Countryside
Exploring Official Archives

Rajmahal hills-

Paharias and the Santhals lived

Bengal and the Zamindars

• Colonial rule was first established in Bengal.
• Earliest attempts were made to reorder rural society and establish a new regime of land rights and a new revenue system.

An auction in Burdwan

• In 1797 there was an auction in Burdwan (present day Bardhaman).
• A number of mahals (estates) held by the Raja of Burdwan were being sold.

Permanent Settlement - 1793

• The East India Company had fixed the revenue that each zamindar had to pay.
• The estates of those who failed to pay were to be auctioned to recover the revenue.
• Numerous purchasers came to the auction and the estates were sold to the highest bidder.
• Many of the purchasers turned out to be servants and agents of the raja who had bought the lands on behalf of their master.
• The raja’s estates had been publicly sold, but he remained in control of his zamindari.
• Raja (literally king) was a term that was often used to designate powerful zamindars.

The problem of unpaid revenue

• In introducing the Permanent Settlement, British officials hoped to resolve the problems they had been facing since the conquest of Bengal.
• By the 1770s, the rural economy in Bengal was in crisis, with recurrent famines and declining agricultural output.
• Officials felt that agriculture, trade and the revenue resources of the state could all be developed by encouraging investment in agriculture.
• This could be done by securing rights of property and permanently fixing the rates of revenue demand.
• Permanent Settlement was made with the rajas and taluqdars of Bengal.
• They were now classified as zamindars, and they had to pay the revenue demand that was fixed in perpetuity.
• Zamindar was not a landowner in the village, but a revenue Collector of the state.
• Zamindars had several (sometimes as many as 400) villages under them.
• In Company calculations the villages within one zamindari formed one revenue estate.
• The Company fixed the total demand over the entire estate whose revenue the zamindar contracted to pay.
• The zamindar collected rent from the different villages, paid the revenue to the Company, and retained the difference as his income.
• Charles Cornwallis (1738-1805), painted by Thomas Gainsborough, 1785
• He was the commander of the British forces during the American War of Independence and the Governor General of Bengal when the Permanent Settlement was introduced there in 1793.

Merits and Demerits of the Permanent Settlement-

Merits of Permanent Settlement:

1) With the implementation of Permanent Settlement the condition of the peasants improved a lot and their fields began to produce rich crops.

The improvement in agriculture also influenced the trade and commerce of the country. As a result of this all round progress, the province of Bengal became the most prosperous one.

It was also relieved from the famines Economics prosperity of Bengal helped the rise of art and literature. In this way the education and culture developed in Bengal.

2) The Government of the company was benefited a lot by the Permanent Settlement. The political advantages of the English made this settlement all the more significant.

All the landlords who became the owners of the land felt obliged to the English Government and became its true supporters as the time of revolt. Owing to the liberal view of the Government their separate category was formed and they began to earn ample of money without any effort or labour.

3) With the passage of time the rich landlords began to invest their wealth in trade and commerce. Although the government could not increase the revenue in future yet the flourishing trade enabled the English to impose some fresh taxes on the traders and thus they earned a lot of wealth through new tax levied on these landlords. Besides this, the Permanent Settlement led India towards modernisation in the sphere of revenue system.

4) It freed the English government of the problem of fixation of revenue every year. Moreover, the income of the government was fixed once for all, which enabled it to make its planning according to its resources of income. In case, the landlords did not make payment of their tax, the loss was made good by selling a part of the land of the zamindar.

5) The implementation of the permanent settlement also benefited the peasants. So far, they were forced to pay more and more to the landlords but now their revenue and also fixed through a patty agreement deed which saved them from the harassment from the landlords.

6) It not only increased the agricultural produce but also enhanced the area under cultivation.

7) So far, a large number of employees were involved in the revenue administration of the company but the implementation of the permanent settlement enabled them to devote their services to the other department of the company as there was no work in this department now.

Demerits of the Permanent Settlement-

1) The Permanent Settlement adversely affected the income of the company as the revenue was fixed quite on the low side due to lack of proper measurement.

2) It benefited only the landlords and the condition of the farmers could not be improved as much as was expected. The poor farmers continued to be the victims of the harassments of the landlords who exploited them for their own selfish motives.

3) The British government expected that with the implementation of permanent settlement the income of the company would increase tremendously but their expectations were not fulfilled.

4) This settlement also proved harm full for the landlords who failed to deposit the required revenue in the royal treasury in time. As a result, their land was sold off.

5) The landlords became indolent and led luxurious lives due to their richness. They did not pay proper attention to their lands and left them to their employees who made no serious efforts for the improvement of agricultural produce.

6) The peasants continued to be at the receiving end of the cruelties of the landlords. They continued to realise the maximum revenue from the peasants and deposited only the minimum in the treasury of the company.

7) It hurt the national feeling of the people because this system created a special class of zamindars in the country who became the true devotees of the English. This class did not support the people during the war of independence.

8) It was really a great mistake on the part of Cornwallis that he deprived the majority of the cultivators of the right of ownership of land and made the landlords owners to the land.

Sir Charles Metcalfe writes about it, "Cornwallis instead of being the creator of prosperity in India was the great destroyer of it."

Why zamindars defaulted on payments?

• Company officials felt that a fixed revenue demand would give zamindars a sense of security and, assured of returns on their investment, encourage them to improve their estates.
• In the early decades, zamindars regularly failed to pay the revenue demand and unpaid balances accumulated.

The reasons for this failure were various.

1. 1^st initial demands were very high.
2. 2^nd high demand was imposed in the 1790s, a time when the prices of agricultural produce were depressed, making it difficult for the ryots to pay their dues to the zamindar.
3. 3^rd the revenue was invariable, regardless of the harvest, and had to be paid punctually. In fact, according to the Sunset Law, if payment did not come in by sunset of the specified date, the zamindari was liable to be auctioned.
4. 4^th the Permanent Settlement initially limited the power of the zamindar to collect rent from the ryot and manage his zamindari.

• The Company had recognised the zamindars as important, but it wanted to control and regulate them, subdue their authority and restrict their autonomy.
• The zamindars’ troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished, and their “cutcheries” (courts) brought under the supervision of a Collector appointed by the Company.
• Zamindars lost their power to organise local justice and the local police.
• Over time the collectorate emerged as an alternative centre of authority, severely restricting what the zamindar could do.
• At the time of rent collection, an officer of the zamindar, usually the amlah, came around to the village.
• But rent collection was a perennial problem.
• Sometimes bad harvests and low prices made payment of dues difficult for the ryots.
• At other times ryots deliberately delayed payment.
• Zamindars could prosecute defaulters, but the judicial process was long drawn.

The rise of the jotedars

• While many zamindars were facing a crisis at the end of 18^th century, a group of rich peasants were consolidating their position in the villages. (jotedars)
• By the early 19^th century, jotedars controlled local trade as well as money lending, exercising immense power over the poorer cultivators of the region.
• Unlike zamindars who often lived in urban areas, jotedars were located in the villages and exercised direct control over a considerable section of poor villagers.
• The jotedars were most powerful in North Bengal, although rich peasants and village headmen were emerging as commanding figures in the countryside in other parts of Bengal as well.
• In some places they were called haoladars, elsewhere they were known as gantidars or mandals.

The zamindars resist

• Faced with an exorbitantly high revenue demand and possible auction of their estates, they devised ways of surviving the pressures.
• The Raja of Burdwan, for instance, first transferred some of his zamindari to his mother, since the Company had decreed that the property of women would not be taken over.
• When a part of the estate was auctioned, the zamindar’s men bought the property, outbidding other purchasers.
• Subsequently they refused to pay up the purchase money, so that the estate had to be resold.
• Once again it was bought by the zamindar’s agents, once again the purchase money was not paid, and once again there was an auction.
• This process was repeated endlessly, exhausting the state, and the other bidders at the auction.
• At last the estate was sold at a low price back to the zamindar.

The Fifth Report

• Often referred to petitions of zamindars and ryots, reports of collectors from different districts, statistical tables on revenue returns, and notes on the revenue and judicial administration of Bengal and Madras (present-day Tamil Nadu) written by officials.
• From the time the Company established its rule in Bengal in the mid-1760s, its activities were closely watched and debated in England.
• There were many groups in Britain who were opposed to the monopoly that the East India Company had over trade with India and China.
• An increasing number of private traders wanted a share in the India trade, and the industrialists of Britain were keen to open up the Indian market for British manufactures.
• Many political groups argued that the conquest of Bengal was benefiting only the East India Company but not the British nation as a whole.
• The British Parliament passed a series of Acts in the late 18^th century to regulate and control Company rule in India.
• It forced the Company to produce regular reports on the administration of India and appointed committees to enquire into the affairs of the Company.
• The Fifth Report became the basis of intense parliamentary debates on the nature of the East India Company’s rule in India.

The Hoe and the Plough

In the hills of Rajmahal

• Paharias- subsisting on forest produce and practising shifting cultivation.
• They cleared patches of forest by cutting bushes and burning the undergrowth.
• On these patches, enriched by the potash from the ash, the Paharias grew a variety of pulses and millets for consumption.
• From the forests they collected mahua (a flower) for food, silk cocoons and resin for sale, and wood for charcoal production.
• The life of the Paharias – as hunters, shifting cultivators, food gatherers, charcoal producers, silkworm rearers
• With their base in the hills, the Paharias regularly raided the plains where settled agriculturists lived.
• These raids were necessary for survival, particularly in years of scarcity; they were a way of asserting power over settled communities; and they were a means of negotiating political relations with outsiders.
• The zamindars on the plains had to often purchase peace by paying a regular tribute to the hill chiefs.
• British encouraged forest clearance, and zamindars and jotedars turned uncultivated lands into rice fields.

• In the 1770s the British embarked on a brutal policy of extermination, hunting the Paharias down and killing them.
• Then, by the 1780s, Augustus Cleveland, the Collector of Bhagalpur, proposed a policy of pacification.
• Paharia chiefs were given an annual allowance and made responsible for the proper conduct of their men.
• They were expected to maintain order in their localities and discipline their own people.
• The lower hills were taken over by Santhal settlers, the Paharias receded deeper into the Rajmahal hills.

The Santhals: Pioneer settlers

• At the end of 1810- Ganjuria Pahar, which was part of the Rajmahal ranges- soil here was rocky but “uncommonly fine”, and nowhere had Buchanan seen finer tobacco and mustard.
• The Santhals had begun to come into Bengal around the 1780s.
• Zamindars hired them to reclaim land and expand cultivation, and British officials invited them to settle in the Jangal Mahals.
• Having failed to subdue the Paharias and transform them into settled agriculturists, the British turned to the Santhals.
• The Santhals- clearing forests and ploughing the land with vigour.
• By 1832 a large area of land was demarcated as Damin-i-Koh.
• The land grant to the Santhals stipulated that at least 1/10^th of the area was to be cleared and cultivated within the first ten years.
• After the demarcation of Damin-i-Koh, Santhal settlements expanded rapidly.
• As cultivation expanded, an increased volume of revenue flowed into the Company’s coffers
• Shifting agriculture depended on the ability to move to newer and newer land and utilisation of the natural fertility of the soil.
• When the most fertile soils became inaccessible to them, being part of the Damin, the Paharias could not effectively sustain their mode of cultivation.
• The Santhals, by contrast, gave up their earlier life of mobility and settled down, cultivating a range of commercial crops for the market, and dealing with traders and moneylenders.
• The state was levying heavy taxes on the land that the Santhals had cleared, moneylenders (dikus) were charging them high rates of interest and taking over the land when debts remained unpaid, and zamindars were asserting control over the Damin area.
• By the 1850s, the Santhals felt that the time had come to rebel against zamindars, moneylenders and the colonial state, in order to create an ideal world for themselves where they would rule.
• It was after the Santhal Revolt (1855-56 ) that the Santhal Pargana was created, carving out 5,500 square miles from the districts of Bhagalpur and Birbhum.
• The colonial state hoped that by creating a new territory for the Santhals and imposing some special laws within it, the Santhals could be conciliated.

Santhal Revolt

• The Santhal Revolt took place in 1855-56. Santhals are a group of tribals concentrated in the state of Jharkhand.
• This was the first peasant movement which took place in India. The revolt has reference to the establishment of the permanent land settlement of 1793.
• The aforesaid settlement pattern by the British took away lands from Santhals which they had cultivated for centuries.
• The zamindars, moneylenders, groups of Europeans and the British government officials increased the land tax levied on them and oppressed the farmers. They were so exploited that they decided to rise against the zamindars and the government.
• The Santhals took to guerrilla fighting. This was a new experience for Bihar.
• The Santhals made their own armies, composed of rebellious peasants marching against their op­pressors.
• The Santhal army broke down the postal and rail­way communications.
• The government realised that the Santhal rebellion had all the characteristics of defying the government. Surely, the Santhal revolt was very strong but it could not succeed against the power of the government and was suppressed.

A Revolt in the Countryside- The Bombay Deccan

• In the 19^th century, peasants in various parts of India rose in revolt against moneylenders and grain dealers.
• On 12 May1875, ryots from surrounding rural areas gathered and attacked the shopkeepers, demanding their bahi khatas (account books) and debt bonds.
• They burnt the khatas, looted grain shops, and in some cases set fire to the houses of sahukars.
• From Poona the revolt spread to Ahmednagar.
• As the revolt spread, British officials saw the spectre of 1857.
• Police posts were established in villages to frighten rebellious peasants into submission.
• As British rule expanded from Bengal to other parts of India, new systems of revenue were imposed.
• The Permanent Settlement was rarely extended to any region beyond Bengal.

Reasons-

• One reason was that after 1810, agricultural prices rose, increasing the value of harvest produce, and enlarging the income of the Bengal zamindars.
• Since the revenue demand was fixed under the Permanent Settlement, the colonial state could not claim any share of this enhanced income.
• Keen on expanding its financial resources, the colonial government had to think of ways to maximise its land revenue.
• So in territories annexed in 19^th century, temporary revenue settlements were made
• There were other reasons too. When officials devise policies, their thinking is deeply shaped by economic theories they are familiar with.
• According to Ricardian ideas, a landowner should have a claim only to the “average rent” that prevailed at a given time.
• When the land yielded more than this “average rent”, the landowner had a surplus that the state needed to tax.
• If tax was not levied, cultivators were likely to turn into rentiers, and their surplus income was unlikely to be productively invested in the improvement of the land.
• There the zamindars seemed to have turned into rentiers, leasing out land and living on the rental incomes.
• The revenue system that was introduced in the Bombay Deccan came to be known as the ryotwari settlement.
• Unlike the Bengal system, the revenue was directly settled with the ryot.
• The average income from different types of soil was estimated, the revenue-paying capacity of the ryot was assessed and a proportion of it fixed as the share of the state.
• The lands were resurveyed every 30 years and the revenue rates increased.
• Therefore the revenue demand was no longer permanent.

Ryotwari system

• This system of land revenue was instituted in the late 18th century by Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras in 1820.
• This was practiced in the Madras and Bombay areas, as well as Assam and Coorg provinces.
• In this system, the peasants or cultivators were regarded as the owners of the land. They had ownership rights, could sell, mortgage or gift the land.
• The taxes were directly collected by the government from the peasants.
• The rates were 50% in dry land and 60% in wet land.
• The rates were high and unlike in the Permanent System, they were open to being increased.
• If they failed to pay the taxes, they were evicted by the government.
• Ryot means peasant cultivators.
• Here there were no middlemen as in the Zamindari system. But, since high taxes had to paid only in cash (no option of paying in kind as before the British) the problem of moneylenders came into the show. They further burdened the peasants with heavy interests.

Revenue demand and peasant debt

• The first revenue settlement in the Bombay Deccan was made in the 1820s.
• The revenue that was demanded was so high that in many places peasants deserted their villages and migrated to new regions.
• When rains failed and harvests were poor, peasants found it impossible to pay the revenue.
• However, the collectors in charge of revenue collection were keen on demonstrating their efficiency and pleasing their superiors.
• So they went about extracting payment with utmost severity.
• When someone failed to pay, his crops were seized and a fine was imposed on the whole village.
• By the 1830s the problem, became more severe.
• Prices of agricultural products fell sharply after 1832 and did not recover for over a decade and a half.
• This meant a further decline in peasants’ income.
• At the same time the countryside was devastated by a famine that struck in the years 1832-34.
• One third of the cattle of the Deccan were killed, and half the human population died.
• Those who survived had no agricultural stocks to see them through the crisis.
• Unpaid balances of revenue mounted.
• Revenue could rarely be paid without a loan from a moneylender.
• But once a loan was taken, the ryot found it difficult to pay it back.
• As debt mounted, and loans remained unpaid, peasants’ dependence on moneylenders increased.
• They now needed loans even to buy their everyday needs and meet their production expenditure.
• By the 1840s, officials were finding evidence of alarming levels of peasant indebtedness everywhere.
• By the mid-1840s there were signs of an economic recovery of sorts.
• Many British officials had begun to realise that the settlements of the 1820s had been harsh.
• The revenue demanded was exorbitant
• After 1845 agricultural prices recovered steadily.
• But to expand cultivation peasants needed more ploughs and cattle.
• They needed money to buy seeds and land.
• For all this they had to turn once again to moneylenders for loans.

Mahalwari system

• The government of Lord William Bentinck, Governor-General of India (1828 to 1835) introduced the Mahalwari system of land revenue in 1833.
• This system was introduced in North-West Frontier, Agra, Central Province, Gangetic Valley, Punjab, etc.
• This had elements of both the Zamindari and the Ryotwari systems.
• This system divided the land into Mahals. Sometimes, a Mahal was constituted by one or more villages.
• Tax was assessed on the Mahal.
• Each individual farmer gave his share.
• Here also, ownership rights were with the peasants.
• Revenue was collected by the village headman or village leaders (Lambardar).
• It introduced the concept of average rents for different soil classes.
• The state share of the revenue was 66% of the rental value. The settlement was agreed upon for 30 years.
• This system was called the Modified Zamindari system because the village headman became virtually a Zamindar.

Then came the cotton boom

• Before the 1860s, 3/4^th of raw cotton imports into Britain came from America.
• British cotton manufacturers had for long been worried about this dependence on American supplies.
• In 1857 the Cotton Supply Association was founded in Britain, and in 1859 the Manchester Cotton Company was formed.
• India was seen as a country that could supply cotton to Lancashire if the American supply dried up.
• It possessed suitable soil, a climate  favourable to cotton cultivation, and cheap labour.
• When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, a wave of panic spread through cotton circles in Britain.
• Raw cotton imports from America fell to less than three per cent of the normal
• As cotton prices soared export merchants in Bombay were keen to secure as much cotton as possible to meet the British demand.
• So they gave advances to urban sahukars who in turn extended credit to those rural moneylenders who promised to secure the produce.
• When there is a boom in the market credit flows easily, for those who give out loans feel secure about recovering their money
• These developments had a profound impact on the Deccan countryside. The ryots in the
• Deccan villages suddenly found access to seemingly limitless credit.
• While the American crisis continued, cotton production in the Bombay Deccan expanded.
• By 1862 over 90per cent of cotton imports into Britain were coming from India.
• But these boom years did not bring prosperity to all cotton producers.
• Some rich peasants did gain, but for the large majority, cotton expansion meant heavier debt.

Credit dries up

• While the boom lasted, cotton merchants in India had visions of capturing the world market in raw cotton, permanently displacing America.
• As the Civil War ended, cotton production in America revived and Indian cotton exports to Britain steadily declined.
• Export merchants and sahukars in Maharashtra were no longer keen on extending long-term credit.
• So they decided to close down their operations, restrict their advances to peasants, and demand repayment of outstanding debts.

The experience of injustice

• The refusal of moneylenders to extend loans enraged the ryots.
• What infuriated them was not simply that they had got deeper and deeper into debt, or that they were utterly dependent on the moneylender for survival, but that moneylenders were being insensitive to their plight.
• The moneylenders were violating the customary norms of the countryside.
• Money lending was certainly widespread before colonial rule and moneylenders were often powerful
• A variety of customary norms regulated the relationship between the moneylender and the ryot.
• One general norm was that the interest charged could not be more than the principal.
• This was meant to limit the moneylender’s exactions and defined what could be counted as “fair interest”.
• Under colonial rule this norm broke down.
• In one of the many cases investigated by the Deccan Riots Commission, the moneylender had charged over Rs 2,000 as interest on a loan of Rs 100.
• In 1859 the British passed a Limitation Law that stated that the loan bonds signed between moneylenders and ryots would have validity for only three years.
• This law was meant to check the accumulation of interest over time.
• The moneylender, however, turned the law around, forcing the ryot to sign a new bond every three years.
• When a new bond was signed, the unpaid balance – that is, the original loan and the accumulated interest – was entered as the principal on which a new set of interest charges was calculated.
• Deeds and bonds appeared as symbols of the new oppressive system.
• The British, however, were suspicious of transactions based on informal understanding, as was common in the past.
• Peasants were made to sign and put thumb impressions on documents, but they did not know what they were actually signing.

The Deccan Riots Commission

• Government of India, worried by the memory of 1857, pressurised the Government of Bombay to set up a commission of enquiry to investigate into the causes of the riots.
• The commission produced a report that was presented to the British Parliament in 1878.
• The commission held enquiries in the districts where the riots spread, recorded statements of ryots, sahukars and eyewitnesses, compiled statistical data on revenue rates, prices and interest rates in different regions, and collated the reports sent by district collectors

Chapter 11
Rebels and the Raj-
The Revolt of 1857 and Its Representations

• On 10 May 1857, the sepoys in the cantonment of Meerut broke out in mutiny.
• It began in the lines of the native infantry, spread very swiftly to the cavalry and then to the city.
• The ordinary people of the town and surrounding villages joined the sepoys.
• The sepoys captured the bell of arms where the arms and ammunition were kept and proceeded to attack white people, and to ransack and burn their bungalows and property.
• Government buildings – the record office, jail, court, post office, treasury, etc. – were destroyed and plundered.
• The telegraph line to Delhi was cut.
• As darkness descended, a group of sepoys rode Off towards Delhi
• The sepoys arrived at the gates of the Red Fort early in the morning on 11 May.
• Europeans were killed in large numbers; the rich of Delhi were attacked and looted.
• The revolt thus acquired a kind of legitimacy because it carried on in the name of the Mughal emperor.
• Through 12 and 13 May, North India remained quiet.
• Once word spread that Delhi had fallen to the rebels and Bahadur Shah had blessed the rebellion, events moved swiftly. Cantonment after cantonment in the Gangetic valley and some to the west of Delhi rose in mutiny.

Pattern of the Rebellion

• The sepoys first seized the bell of arms and plundered the treasury.
• They then attacked government buildings – the jail, treasury, telegraph office, record room, bungalows – burning all records.
• Everything and everybody connected with the white man became a target.
• Proclamations in Hindi, Urdu and Persian were put up in the cities calling upon the population, both Hindus and Muslims, to unite, rise and exterminate the firangis.
• When ordinary people began joining the revolt, the targets of attack widened.
• In major towns like Lucknow, Kanpur and Bareilly, moneylenders and the rich also became the objects of rebel wrath.
• Peasants not only saw them as oppressors but also as allies of the British.
• The mutiny in the sepoy ranks quickly became a rebellion.

Lines of communication

• There was communication between the sepoy lines of various cantonments.
• After the 7th Awadh Irregular Cavalry had refused to accept the new cartridges in early May, they wrote to the 48^th Native Infantry that “they had acted for the faith and awaited the 48th’s orders”.
• Sepoys or their emissaries moved from one station to another.
• People were thus planning and talking about the rebellion.
• Captain Hearsey of the Awadh Military Police had been given protection by his Indian subordinates during the mutiny.
• The 41^st Native Infantry, which was stationed in the same place, insisted that since they had killed all their white officers, the Military Police should also kill Hearsey or deliver him as prisoner to the 41st.
• The Military Police refused to do either, and it was decided that the matter would be settled by a panchayat composed of native officers drawn from each regiment.
• The sepoys lived in lines and shared a common lifestyle and that many of them came from the same caste, it is not difficult to imagine them sitting together to decide their own future.
• The sepoys were the makers of their own rebellion.

Leaders and followers

• In Kanpur, the sepoys and the people of the town gave Nana Sahib, the successor to Peshwa Baji Rao II, no choice save to join the revolt as their leader.
• In Jhansi, the Rani was forced by the popular pressure around her to assume the leadership of the uprising.
• So was Kunwar Singh, a local zamindar in Arrah in Bihar.
• In Awadh, where the displacement of the popular Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and the annexation of the state were still very fresh in the memory of the people, the populace in Lucknow celebrated the fall of British rule by hailing Birjis Qadr, the young son of the Nawab, as their leader.
• Often the message of rebellion was carried by ordinary men and women and in places by religious men too.
• Elsewhere, local leaders emerged, urging peasants, zamindars and tribals to revolt.
• Shah Mal mobilised the villagers of pargana Barout in Uttar Pradesh; Gonoo, a tribal cultivator of Singhbhum in Chotanagpur, became a rebel leader of the Kol tribals of the region.

Two rebels of 1857 Shah Mal

• Shah Mal lived in a large village in pargana Barout in Uttar Pradesh. He belonged to a clan of Jat cultivators whose kinship ties extended over chaurasee des (eighty-four villages).
• The lands in the region were irrigated and fertile, with rich dark loam soil. Many of the villagers were prosperous and saw the British land revenue system as oppressive: the revenue demand was high and its collection inflexible.
• Consequently cultivators were losing land to outsiders, to traders and moneylenders who were coming into the area.
• Shah Mal mobilised the headmen and cultivators of chaurasee des, moving at night from village to village, urging people to rebel against the British.
• As in many other places, the revolt against the British turned into a general rebellion against all signs of oppression and injustice. Cultivators left their fields and plundered the houses of moneylenders and traders.
• Displaced proprietors took possession of the lands they had lost.
• Shah Mal’s men attacked government buildings, destroyed the bridge over the river, and dug up metalled roads – partly to prevent government forces from coming into the area, and partly because bridges and roads were seen as symbols of British rule.
• They sent supplies to the sepoys who had mutinied in Delhi and stopped all official communication between British headquarters and Meerut.
• Locally acknowledged as the Raja, Shah Mal took over the bungalow of an English officer, turned it into a “hall of justice”, settling disputes and dispensing judgments.
• He also set up an amazingly effective network of intelligence.
• For a period the people of the area felt that Firangi raj was over, and their raj had come.
• Shah Mal was killed in battle in July 1857

Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah

• Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah was one of the many maulvis who played an important part in the revolt of 1857.
• Educated in Hyderabad, he became a preacher when young.
• In 1856, he was seen moving from village to village preaching jehad (religious war) against the British and urging people to rebel.
• He moved in a palanquin, with drumbeaters in front and followers at the rear.
• He was therefore popularly called Danka Shah – the maulvi with the drum (danka).
• British officials panicked as thousands began following the maulvi and many Muslims began seeing him as an inspired prophet.
• When he reached Lucknow in 1856, he was stopped by the police from preaching in the city. Subsequently, in 1857, he was jailed in Faizabad.
• When released, he was elected by the mutinous 22nd Native Infantry as their leader.
• He fought in the famous Battle of Chinhat in which the British forces under Henry Lawrence were defeated.
• He came to be known for his courage and power.
• Many people in fact believed that he was invincible, had magical powers, and could not be killed by the British.
• It was this belief that partly formed the basis of his authority.

Rumours and prophecies

• Rumours and prophecies played a part in moving people to action.
• The sepoys who had arrived in Delhi from Meerut had told Bahadur Shah about bullets coated with the fat of cows and pigs and that biting those bullets would corrupt their caste and religion.
• They were referring to the cartridges of the Enfield rifles which had just been given to them.
• The British tried to explain to the sepoys that this was not the case but the rumour that the new cartridges were greased with the fat of cows and pigs spread like wildfire across the sepoy lines of North India.
• Captain Wright, commandant of the Rifle Instruction Depot, reported that in the third week of January 1857 a “low-caste” khalasi who worked in the magazine in Dum Dum had asked a Brahmin sepoy for a drink of water from his lota.
• The sepoy had refused saying that the “lower caste’s” touch would defile the lota.
• This was not the only rumour that was circulating in North India at the beginning of 1857.
• There was the rumour that the British government had hatched a gigantic conspiracy to destroy the caste and religion of Hindus and Muslims.
• To this end, the rumours said, the British had mixed the bone dust of cows and pigs into the flour that was sold in the market.
• There was fear and suspicion that the British wanted to convert Indians  to Christianity.
• The response to the call for action was reinforced by the prophecy that British rule would come to an end on the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, on 23 June 1857

Awadh in Revolt

• In 1851 Governor General Lord Dalhousie described the kingdom of Awadh as “a cherry that will drop into our mouth one day”.
• Five years later, in 1856, the kingdom was formally annexed to the British Empire.
• The conquest happened in stages.
• The Subsidiary Alliance - 1801.
• By the terms of this alliance the Nawab had to disband his military force, allow the British to position their troops within the kingdom, and act in accordance with the advice of the British Resident who was now to be attached to the court.
• Deprived of his armed forces, the Nawab became increasingly dependent on the British to maintain law and order within the kingdom.
• British felt that the soil there was good for producing indigo and cotton, and the region was ideally located to be developed into the principal market of Upper India.
• By the early 1850s, moreover, all the major areas of India had been conquered: the Maratha lands, the Doab, the Carnatic, the Punjab and Bengal.
• The takeover of Awadh in 1856 was expected to complete a process of territorial annexation that had begun with the conquest of Bengal almost a century earlier.
• Lord Dalhousie’s annexations created disaffection in all the areas and principalities that were annexed but nowhere more so than in the kingdom of Awadh in the heart of North India.
• Here, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was dethroned and exiled to Calcutta on the plea that the region was being misgoverned.
• The British government also wrongly assumed that Wajid Ali Shah was an unpopular ruler.
• The widespread sense of grief and loss at the Nawab’s exile was recorded by many contemporary observers.

Subsidiary Alliance

• Subsidiary Alliance was a system devised by Lord Wellesley in 1798.
• All those who entered into such an alliance with the British had to accept certain terms and conditions:
• The British would be responsible for protecting their ally from external and internal threats to their power.
• In the territory of the ally, a British armed contingent would be stationed.
• The ally would have to provide the resources for maintaining this contingent.
• The ally could enter into agreements with other rulers or engage in warfare only with the permission of the British.

Firangi raj and the end of a world

• A chain of grievances in Awadh linked prince, taluqdar, peasant and sepoy.
• In different ways they came to identify firangi raj with the end of their world – the breakdown of things they valued, respected and held dear.
• A whole complex of emotions and issues, traditions and loyalties worked themselves out in the revolt of 1857.
• In Awadh, more than anywhere else, the revolt became an expression of popular resistance to an alien order.
• The annexation displaced not just the Nawab.
• It also dispossessed the taluqdars of the region.
• Before the coming of the British, taluqdars maintained armed retainers, built forts, and enjoyed a degree of autonomy, as long as they accepted the suzerainty of the Nawab and paid the revenue of their taluqs.
• The British were unwilling to tolerate the power of the taluqdars.
• Immediately after the annexation, the taluqdars were disarmed and their forts destroyed.
• After annexation, the first British revenue settlement, known as the Summary Settlement of 1856, was based on the assumption that the taluqdars were interlopers with no permanent stakes in land: they had established their hold over land through force and fraud.
• The Summary Settlement proceeded to remove the taluqdars wherever possible.
• Figures show that in pre-British times, taluqdars had held 67 per cent of the total number of villages in Awadh; by the Summary Settlement this number had come down to 38 per cent.
• In areas like Awadh where resistance during 1857 was intense and long lasting, the fighting was carried out by taluqdars and their peasants.
• Many of these taluqdars were loyal to the Nawab of Awadh, and they joined Begum Hazrat Mahal (the wife of the Nawab) in Lucknow to fight the British; some even remained with her in defeat.
• For decades the sepoys had complained of low levels of pay and the difficulty of getting leave.
• By the 1850s there were other reasons for their discontent.
• The relationship of the sepoys with their superior white officers underwent a significant change in the years preceding the uprising of 1857.
• The large majority of the sepoys of the Bengal Army were recruited from the villages of Awadh and eastern Uttar Pradesh.
• Many of them were Brahmins or from the “upper” castes. Awadh was, in fact, called the “nursery of the Bengal Army’’.
• The fears of the sepoys about the new cartridge, their grievances about leave, their grouse about the increasing misbehaviour and racial abuse on the part of their white officers were communicated back to the villages.

What the Rebels Wanted

• The rebel proclamations in 1857 repeatedly appealed to all sections of the population, irrespective of their caste and creed.
• Many of the proclamations were issued by Muslim princes or in their names but even these took care to address the sentiments of Hindus.
• The ishtahars harked back to the pre-British Hindu-Muslim past and glorified the coexistence of different communities under the Mughal Empire.
• The proclamation that was issued under the name of Bahadur Shah appealed to the people to join the fight under the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir.
• It was remarkable that during the uprising religious divisions between Hindus and Muslim were hardly noticeable despite British attempts to create such divisions.
• In Bareilly in western Uttar Pradesh, in December 1857, the British spent Rs 50,000 to incite the Hindu population against the Muslims.

Against the symbols of oppression

• The proclamations completely rejected everything associated with British rule or firangi raj as they called it.
• They condemned the British for the annexations they had carried out and the treaties they had broken.
• The British, the rebel leaders said, could not be trusted.
• Every aspect of British rule was attacked and the firangi accused of destroying a way of life that was familiar and cherished.
• The proclamations expressed the widespread fear that the British were bent on destroying the caste and religions of Hindus and Muslims and converting them to Christianity – a fear that led people to believe many of the rumours that circulated at the time.
• People were urged to come together and fight to save their livelihood, their faith, their honour, their identity – a fight which was for the “greater public good”.
• Often the rebels deliberately sought to humiliate the elites of a city.
• In the villages they burnt account books and ransacked moneylenders’ houses.
• This reflected an attempt to overturn traditional hierarchies, rebel against all oppressors.
• It presents a glimpse of an alternative vision, perhaps of a more egalitarian society.
• Such visions were not articulated in the proclamations which sought to unify all social groups in the fight against firangi raj.

The search for alternative power

• Once British rule had collapsed, the rebels in places like Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur tried to establish some kind of structure of authority and administration.
• The leaders went back to the culture of the court.
• Appointments were made to various posts, arrangements made for the collection of land revenue and the payment of troops, orders issued to stop loot and plunder.
• Side by side plans were made to fight battles against the British.
• The administrative structures established by the rebels were primarily aimed at meeting the demands of war.
• However, in most cases these structures could not survive the British onslaught.
• In Awadh, where resistance to the British lasted longest, plans of counter-attack were being drawn up by the Lucknow court and hierarchies of command were in place as late as the last months of 1857 and the early part of 1858.

Repression

• By a number of Acts, passed in May and June 1857, not only was the whole of North India put under martial law but military officers and even ordinary Britons were given the power to try and punish Indians suspected of rebellion.
• In other words, the ordinary processes of law and trial were suspended and it was put out that rebellion would have only one punishment– death.
• Armed with these newly enacted special laws and the reinforcements brought in from Britain, the British began the task of suppressing the revolt.
• They, like the rebels, recognised the symbolic value of Delhi.
• The British thus mounted a two-pronged attack.
• One force moved from Calcutta into North India and the other from the Punjab – which was largely peaceful – to reconquer Delhi.
• British attempts to recover Delhi began in earnest in early June 1857 but it was only in late September that the city was finally captured.
• The fighting and losses on both sides were heavy.
• One reason for this was the fact that rebels from all over North India had come to Delhi to defend the capital.
• In the Ganegtic plain too the progress of British reconquest was slow.
• The forces had to reconquer the area village by village.
• The countryside and the people around were entirely hostile.
• As soon as they began their counter-insurgency operations, the British realised that they were not dealing with a mere mutiny but an uprising that had huge popular support.
• In Awadh, for example, a British official called Forsyth estimated that three-fourths of the adult male population was in rebellion.
• The British used military power on a gigantic scale.
• But this was not the only instrument they used.
• In large parts of present-day Uttar Pradesh, where big landholders and peasants had offered united resistance, the British tried to break up the unity by promising to give back to the big landholders their estates.
• Rebel landholders were dispossessed and the loyal rewarded.
• Many landholders died fighting the British or they escaped into Nepal where they died of illness or starvation.

Nationalist imageries

• The national movement in the twentieth century drew its inspiration from the events of 1857.
• It was celebrated as the First War of Independence in which all sections of the people of India came together to fight against imperial rule.
• Heroic poems were written about the valour of the queen who, with a sword in one hand and the reins of her horse in the other, fought for the freedom of her motherland.
• Children in many parts of India grow up reading the lines of Subhadra Kumari Chauhan: “Khoob lari mardani woh to Jhansi wali rani thi” (Like a man she fought, she was the Rani of Jhansi).
• In popular prints Rani Lakshmi Bai is usually portrayed in battle armour, with a sword in hand and riding a horse – a symbol of the determination to resist injustice and alien rule.

Chapter 12
Colonial Cities
Urbanisation, Planning and Architecture

• Company agents settled in Madras in 1639 and in Calcutta in 1690.
• Bombay was given to the Company in 1661 by the English king, who had got it as part of his wife’s dowry from the king of Portugal.
• The Company established trading and administrative offices in each of these settlements

Towns and Cities in Pre-colonial Times

• Towns came to represent specific forms of economic activities and cultures.
• Towns by contrast were peopled with artisans, traders, administrators and rulers.
• Towns dominated over the rural population, thriving on the surplus and taxes derived from agriculture.
• Towns and cities were often fortified by walls which symbolised their separation from the countryside.
• However, the separation between town and country was fluid.
• When towns were attacked, people often sought shelter in the countryside.
• Traders and pedlars took goods from the towns to sell in the villages, extending markets and creating new patterns of consumption.
• During 16^th & 17^th centuries the towns built by the Mughals were famous for their concentration of populations, their monumental buildings and their imperial grandeur and wealth. Agra, Delhi and Lahore were important centres of imperial administration and control.
• Mansabdars and jagirdars who were assigned territories in different parts of the empire usually maintained houses in these cities: residence in these centres of power was symbolic of the status and prestige of a noble.
• The presence of the emperor and noblemen in these centres meant that a wide variety of services had to be provided.
• Artisans produced exclusive handicrafts for the households of nobles.
• Grain from the countryside was brought into urban markets for the town dwellers and the army.
• The treasury was also located in the imperial capital.
• Thus the revenues of the kingdom flowed into the capital regularly.
• Within these towns were gardens, mosques, temples, tombs, colleges, bazaars and caravanserais
• In the towns of South India such as Madurai and Kanchipuram the principal focus was the temple.
• Medieval towns were places where everybody was expected to know their position in the social order dominated by the ruling elite.
• In North India, maintaining this order was the work of the imperial officer called the kotwal who oversaw the internal affairs and policing of the town.

Changes in the eighteenth century

• With political and commercial realignments, old towns went into decline and new towns developed.
• Mughal capitals, Delhi and Agra, lost their political authority.
• The growth of new regional powers was reflected in the increasing importance of regional capitals – Lucknow, Hyderabad, Seringapatam, Poona (present-day Pune), Nagpur, Baroda (present day Vadodara) and Tanjore (present-day Thanjavur).
• Traders, administrators, artisans and others migrated from the old Mughal centres to these new capitals in search of work and patronage.
• Continuous warfare between the new kingdoms meant that mercenaries too found ready employment there.
• Some local notables and officials associated with Mughal rule in North India also used this opportunity to create new urban settlements such as the qasbah and ganj.
• In some places there was renewed economic activity, in other places war, plunder and political uncertainty led to economic decline.
• The European commercial Companies had set up base in different places early during the Mughal era: the Portuguese in Panaji in 1510, the Dutch in Masulipatnam in 1605, the British in Madras in 1639 and the French in Pondicherry (present-day Puducherry) in 1673.
• With the expansion of commercial activity, towns grew around these trading centres. By the end of the eighteenth century the land-based empires in Asia were replaced by the powerful sea-based European empires.
• Forces of international trade, mercantilism and capitalism now came to define the nature of society.
• From the mid-18^th century, there was a new phase of change.
• Commercial centres such as Surat, Masulipatnam and Dhaka, which had grown in 17^th century, declined when trade shifted to other places.
• As the British gradually acquired political control after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and the trade of the English East India Company expanded, colonial port cities such as Madras, Calcutta and Bombay rapidly emerged as the new economic capitals.
• They also became centres of colonial administration and political power.
• New buildings and institutions developed, and urban spaces were ordered in new ways.
• New occupations developed and people flocked to these colonial cities.
• By about 1800, they were the biggest cities in India in terms of population.

Finding Out about Colonial Cities

• From the late 19^th century the British tried to raise money for administering towns through the systematic annual collection of municipal taxes.
• To avoid conflict they handed over some responsibilities to elected Indian representatives.
• Institutions like the municipal corporation with some popular representation were meant to administer essential services such as water supply, sewerage, road building and public health.
• The activities of municipal corporations in turn generated a whole new set of records maintained in municipal record rooms.
• The growth of cities was monitored through regular headcounts.
• By the mid-nineteenth century several local censuses had been carried out in different regions.
• The first all-India census was attempted in 1872.
• Thereafter, from 1881, decennial (conducted every ten years) censuses became a regular feature.

Trends of change

• After 1800, urbanisation in India was sluggish.
• All through the nineteenth century up to the first two decades of the twentieth, the proportion of the urban population to the total population in India was extremely low and had remained stagnant.
• In the forty years between 1900 and 1940 the urban population increased from about 10 per cent of the total population to about 13 per cent.
• Beneath this picture of changelessness, there were significant variations in the patterns of urban development in different regions.
• The smaller towns had little opportunity to grow economically.
• Calcutta, Bombay and Madras on the other hand grew rapidly and soon became sprawling cities.
• In other words, the growth of these three cities as the new commercial and administrative centres was at the expense of other existing urban centres.
• As the hub of the colonial economy, they functioned as collection depots for the export of Indian manufactures such as cotton textiles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• After the Industrial Revolution in England, this trend was reversed and these cities instead became the entry point for British-manufactured goods and for the export of Indian raw materials.
• The introduction of railways in 1853 meant a change in the fortunes of towns.
• Economic activity gradually shifted away from traditional towns which were located along old routes and rivers.
• Every railway station became a collection depot for raw materials and a distribution point for imported goods.
• For instance, Mirzapur on the Ganges, which specialised in collecting cotton and cotton goods from the Deccan, declined when a railway link was made to Bombay
• With the expansion of the railway network, railway workshops and railway colonies were established.
• Railway towns like Jamalpur, Waltair and Bareilly developed

What Were the New Towns Like?

• By the eighteenth century Madras, Calcutta and Bombay had become important ports.
• The English East India Company built its factories (i.e., mercantile offices) there and because of competition among the European companies, fortified these settlements for protection.
• In Madras, Fort St George, in Calcutta Fort William and in Bombay the Fort marked out the areas of British settlement.
• Indian merchants, artisans and other workers who had economic dealings with European merchants lived outside these forts in settlements of their own.
• Thus, from the beginning there were separate quarters for Europeans and Indians, which came to be labelled in contemporary writings as the “White Town” and “Black Town” respectively.
• Once the British captured political power these racial distinctions became sharper.
• From the mid 19^th century the expanding network of railways linked these cities to the rest of the country.
• As a result the hinterland – the countryside from where raw materials and labour were drawn – became more closely linked to these port cities.
• After the 1850s, cotton mills were set up by Indian merchants and entrepreneurs in Bombay, and European-owned jute mills were established on the outskirts of Calcutta.
• This was the beginning of modern industrial development in India.
• Although Calcutta, Bombay and Madras supplied raw materials for industry in England, and had emerged because of modern economic forces like capitalism, their economies were not primarily based on factory production.
• The majority of the working population in these cities belonged to what economists classify as the tertiary sector.
• There were only two proper “industrial cities”: Kanpur, specialising in leather, woollen and cotton textiles, and Jamshedpur, specialising in steel.
• India never became a modern industrialised country, since discriminatory colonial policies limited the levels of industrial development.
• Calcutta, Bombay and Madras grew into large cities, but this did not signify any dramatic economic growth for colonial India as a whole.

A new urban milieu

• Colonial cities reflected the mercantile culture of the new rulers. Political power and patronage shifted from Indian rulers to the merchants of the East India Company.
• Indians who worked as interpreters, middlemen, traders and suppliers of goods also had an important place in these new cities.
• Economic activity near the river or the sea led to the development of docks and ghats.
• Along the shore were godowns, mercantile offices, insurance agencies for shipping, transport depots, banking establishments.
• Further inland were the chief administrative offices of the Company.
• The Writers’ Building in Calcutta was one such office. Around the periphery of the Fort, European merchants and agents built palatial houses in European styles
• The rich Indian agents and middlemen built large traditional courtyard houses in the Black Town in the vicinity of the bazaars.
• They bought up large tracts of land in the city as future investment.
• To impress their English masters they threw lavish parties during festivals.
• They also built temples to establish their status in society.
• The labouring poor provided a variety of services to their European and Indian masters as cooks, palanquin bearers, coachmen, guards, porters and construction and dock workers.
• After the Revolt of 1857 British attitudes in India were shaped by a constant fear of rebellion.
• They felt that towns needed to be better defended, and white people had to live in more secure and segregated enclaves, away from the threat of the “natives”.
• Pasturelands and agricultural fields around the older towns were cleared, and new urban spaces called “Civil Lines” were set up.
• Cantonments– places where Indian troops under European command were stationed – were also developed as safe enclaves.
• These areas were separate from but attached to the Indian towns.
• With broad streets, bungalows set amidst large gardens, barracks, parade ground and church, they were meant as a safe haven for Europeans as well as a model of ordered urban life in contrast to the densely built-up Indian towns.
• For a long while the British were interested primarily in the cleanliness and hygiene of the “White” areas.
• But as epidemics of cholera and plague spread, killing thousands, colonial officials felt the need for more stringent measures of sanitation and public health.
• From the 1860s and 1870s, stringent administrative measures regarding sanitation were implemented and building activity in the Indian towns was regulated.
• Underground piped water supply and sewerage and drainage systems were also put in place around this time.
• Sanitary vigilance thus became another way of regulating Indian towns.

The first hill stations

• As in the case of cantonments, hill stations were a distinctive feature of colonial urban development.
• The founding and settling of hill stations was initially connected with the needs of the British army.
• Simla (present-day Shimla) was founded during the course of the Gurkha War (1815-16); the Anglo-Maratha War of 1818 led to British interest in Mount Abu; and Darjeeling was wrested from the rulers of Sikkim in 1835.
• Hill stations became strategic places for billeting troops, guarding frontiers and launching campaigns against enemy rulers.
• The temperate and cool climate of the Indian hills was seen as an advantage, particularly since the British associated hot weather with epidemics.
• Cholera and malaria were particularly feared and attempts were made to protect the army from these diseases.
• The overwhelming presence of the army made these stations a new kind of cantonment in the hills.
• These hill stations were also developed as sanitariums, i.e., places where soldiers could be sent for rest and recovery from illnesses.
• Because the hill stations approximated the cold climates of Europe, they became an attractive destination for the new rulers.
• It became a practice for viceroys to move to hill stations during the summer months.
• In 1864 the Viceroy John Lawrence officially moved his council to Simla, setting seal to the practice of shifting capitals during the hot season.
• Simla also became the official residence of the commander-in-chief of the Indian army.
• In the hill stations the British and other Europeans sought to recreate settlements that were reminiscent of home.
• The Anglican Church and educational institutions represented British ideals. Even recreation activities came to be shaped by British cultural traditions.
• The introduction of the railways made hill stations more accessible to a wide range of people including Indians.
• Upper-and middle-class Indians such as maharajas, lawyers and merchants were drawn to these stations because they afforded them a close proximity to the ruling British elite.

Social life in the new cities

• There was a dramatic contrast between extreme wealth and poverty.
• New transport facilities such as horse-drawn carriages and, subsequently, trams and buses meant that people could live at a distance from the city centre.
• Travelling from home to office or the factory was a completely new kind of experience.
• Also, though the sense of coherence and familiarity of the old towns was no longer there, the creation of public places – for example, public parks, theatres and, from the twentieth century, cinema halls – provided exciting new forms of entertainment and social interaction.
• Within the cities new social groups were formed and the old identities of people were no longer important.
• All classes of people were migrating to the big cities.
• There was an increasing demand for clerks, teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants.
• As a result the “middle classes” increased.
• As educated people, they could put forward their opinions on society and government in newspapers, journals and public meetings.
• Cities, for instance, offered new opportunities for women.
• Middle-class women sought to express themselves through the medium of journals, autobiographies and books.
• But many people resented these attempts to change traditional patriarchal norms.
• Conservatives feared that the education of women would turn the world upside down, and threaten the basis of the entire social order.
• Even reformers who supported women’s education saw women primarily as mothers and wives, and wanted them to remain within the enclosed spaces of the household, and factory workers, teachers, and theatre and film actresses.
• Another new class within the cities was the labouring poor or the working class.
• Paupers from rural areas flocked to the cities in the hope of employment.
• Some saw cities as places of opportunity; others were attracted by the allure of a different way of life, by the desire to see things they had never seen before.
• To minimise costs of living in the city, most male migrants left their families behind in their village homes.
• They were enthusiastic participants in religious festivals, tamashas (folk theatre) and swangs (satires) which often mocked the pretensions of their masters, Indian and European.

Segregation, Town Planning and Architecture- Madras, Calcutta and Bombay

• Madras, Calcutta and Bombay gradually developed into the biggest cities of colonial India.

Settlement and segregation in Madras

• The Company had first set up its trading activities in the well-established port of Surat on the west coast.
• Subsequently the search for textiles brought British merchants to the east coast.
• In 1639 they constructed a trading post in Madraspatam.
• This settlement was locally known as Chenapattanam.
• The Company had purchased the right of settlement from the local Telugu lords, the Nayaks of Kalahasti, who were eager to support trading activity in the region.
• Rivalry (1746-63) with the French East India Company led the British to fortify Madras and give their representatives increased political and administrative functions.
• With the defeat of the French in 1761, Madras became more secure and began to grow into an important commercial town.
• Fort St George became the nucleus of the White Town where most of the Europeans lived.
• The Company did not permit any marriages with Indians.
• Other than the English, the Dutch and Portuguese were allowed to stay here because they were European and Christian.
• The administrative and judicial systems also favoured the white population.
• Despite being few in number the Europeans were the rulers and the development of Madras followed the needs and convenience of the minority whites in the town.
• The Black Town developed outside the Fort.
• It was laid out in straight lines, a characteristic of colonial towns.
• It was, however, demolished in the mid-1700s and the area was cleared for a security zone around the Fort.
• A new Black Town developed further to the north.
• This housed weavers, artisans, middlemen and interpreters who played a vital role in the Company trade.
• The new Black Town resembled traditional Indian towns, with living quarters built around its own temple and bazaar.
• Chintadripet was an area meant for weavers.
• Washermanpet was a colony of dyers and bleachers of cloth.
• Royapuram was a settlement for Christian boatmen who worked for the Company.
• Madras developed by incorporating innumerable surrounding villages and by creating opportunities and spaces for a variety of communities.
• Several different communities came and settled in Madras, performing a range of economic functions.
• The dubashes were Indians who could speak two languages – the local language and English.
• They worked as agents and merchants, acting as intermediaries between Indian society and the British.
• They used their privileged position in government to acquire wealth.
• Their powerful position in society was established by their charitable works and patronage of temples in the Black Town.
• Initially jobs with the Company were monopolised by the Vellalars, a rural caste who took advantage of the new opportunities provided by British rule.
• With the spread of English education in the nineteenth century, Brahmins started competing for similar positions in the administration.
• Telugu Komatis were a powerful commercial group that controlled the grain trade in the city.
• Gujarati bankers had also been present since 18^th century.
• Paraiyars and Vanniyars formed the labouring poor.
• The Nawab of Arcot settled in nearby Triplicane which became the nucleus of a substantial Muslim settlement.
• Mylapore and Triplicane were earlier Hindu religious centres that supported a large group of Brahmins.
• San Thome with its cathedral was the centre for Roman Catholics.
• All these settlements became part of Madras city.
• Thus the incorporation of many villages made Madras a city of wide expanse and low density.
• This was noticed by European travellers and commented on by officials.
• As the British consolidated their power, resident Europeans began to move out of the Fort.
• Garden houses first started coming up along the two main arteries – Mount Road and Poonamalee Road – leading from the Fort to the cantonment.
• Wealthy Indians too started to live like the English.
• As a result many new suburbs were created from existing villages around the core of Madras.
• This was of course possible because the wealthy could afford transport.
• The poor settled in villages that were close to their place of work.
• The gradual urbanisation of Madras meant that the areas between these villages were brought within the city.
• As a result Madras had a semi-rural air about it.

Town planning in Calcutta

• Modern town planning required preparation of a layout of the entire urban space and regulation of urban land use.
• Planning was usually inspired by a vision of what the city should look like, how it would be developed and the way in which spaces would be organised and ordered.
• The ideology of “development” that this vision reflected presumed exercise of state power over urban lives and urban spaces.
• There were many reasons why the British took upon themselves the task of town planning from the early years of their rule in Bengal.
• In 1756, Sirajudaula, the Nawab of Bengal, attacked Calcutta and sacked the small fort which the British traders had built as their depot for goods.
• The English East India Company traders had been continuously questioning the sovereignty of the Nawab.
• They were reluctant to pay customs duties, and refused to comply with the terms on which they were expected to operate.
• So Sirajudaula wanted to assert his authority.
• Subsequently, in 1757, when Sirajudaula was defeated in the Battle of Plassey, the East India Company decided to build a new fort, one that could not be easily attacked.
• Calcutta had grown from three villages called Sutanati, Kolkata and Govindapur.
• The Company cleared a site in the southernmost village of Govindapur and the traders and weavers living there were asked to move out.
• Around the new Fort William they left a vast open space which came to be locally known as the Maidan or garer-math.
• This was done so that there would be no obstructions to a straight line of fire from the Fort against an advancing enemy army.
• Once the British became more confident about their permanent presence in Calcutta, they started moving out of the Fort and building residences along the periphery of the Maidan.
• That was how the English settlement in Calcutta gradually started taking shape.
• The vast open space around the Fort (which still exists) became a landmark, Calcutta’s first significant town planning measure.
• The history of town planning in Calcutta of course did not end with the building of Fort William and the Maidan.

In 1798, Lord Wellesley became the Governor General.

• He built a massive palace, Government House, for himself in Calcutta, a building that was expected to convey the authority of the British.
• He became concerned about the condition of the Indian part of the city – the crowding, the excessive vegetation, the dirty tanks, the smells and poor drainage.
• These conditions worried the British because they believed at the time that poisonous gases from marshlands and pools of stagnant water were the cause of most diseases.
• Creating open places in the city was one way of making the city healthier. Wellesley wrote a Minute (an administrative order) in 1803 on the need for town planning, and set up various committees for the purpose.
• Many bazaars, ghats, burial grounds, and tanneries were cleared or removed.
• From then on the notion of “public health” became an idea that was proclaimed in projects of town clearance and town planning.
• After Wellesley’s departure the work of town planning was carried on by the Lottery Committee (1817) with the help of the government.
• The Lottery Committee was so named because funds for town improvement were raised through public lotteries.
• In other words, in the early decades of 19^th century raising funds for the city was still thought to be the responsibility of public minded citizens and not exclusively that of the government.
• The Lottery Committee commissioned a new map of the city so as to get a comprehensive picture of Calcutta.
• Among the Committee’s major activities was road building in the Indian part of the city and clearing the river bank of “encroachments”.
• The threat of epidemics gave a further impetus to town planning in the next few decades.
• Cholera started spreading from 1817 and in 1896 plague made its appearance.
• The cause of these diseases had no yet been established firmly by medical science.
• The government proceeded on the basis of the accepted theory of the time: that there was a direct correlation between living conditions and the spread of disease.
• Such views were supported by prominent Indian merchants in the city, such as Dwarkanath Tagore and Rustomjee Cowasjee, who felt that Calcutta needed to be made healthier.
• Densely built-up areas were seen as insanitary since they obstructed direct sunlight and circulation of air.
• That was why working people’s huts or “bustis” became the target of demolition.
• The poor in the city – workers, hawkers, artisans, porters and the unemployed – were once again forced to move to distant parts of the city.
• By the late 19^th century, official intervention in the city became more stringent.
• Gone were the days when town planning was seen as a task to be shared by inhabitants and the government.
• Instead, the government took over all the initiatives for town planning including funding.
• This opportunity was used to clear more huts and develops the British portions of the town at the expense of other areas.
• The existing racial divide of the “White Town” and “Black Town” was reinforced by the new divide of “healthy” and “unhealthy”
• Indian representatives in the municipality protested against this unfair bias towards the development of the European parts of the town.
• Public protests against these government policies strengthened the feeling of anti-colonialism and nationalism among Indians.
• With the growth of their empire, the British became increasingly inclined to make cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras into impressive imperial capitals.

Architecture in Bombay

• Buildings in cities include forts, government offices, educational institutions, religious structures, commemorative towers, commercial depots, or even docks and bridges.
• Although primarily serving functional needs like defence, administration and commerce these were rarely simple structures.
• They were often meant to represent ideas such as imperial power, nationalism and religious glory.
• Bombay was initially seven islands. As the population grew, the islands were joined to create more space and they gradually fused into one big city.
• Bombay was the commercial capital of colonial India.
• By the end of 19^th century, half the imports and exports of India passed through Bombay.
• One important item of this trade was opium that the East India Company exported to China.
• Indian merchants and middlemen supplied and participated in this trade and they helped integrate Bombay’s economy directly to Malwa, Rajasthan and Sind where opium was grown.
• This collaboration with the Company was profitable and led to the growth of an Indian capitalist class.
• Bombay’s capitalists came from diverse communities such as Parsi, Marwari, Konkani Muslim, Gujarati Bania, Bohra, Jew and Armenian.
• When the American Civil War started in 1861 cotton from the American South stopped coming into the international market.
• In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened and this further strengthened Bombay’s links with the world economy.
• The Bombay government and Indian merchants used this opportunity to declare Bombay Urbs Prima in Indis, a Latin phrase meaning the most important city of India.
• By the late 19^th century Indian merchants in Bombay were investing their wealth in new ventures such as cotton mills.
• They also patronised building activity in the city.
• As Bombay’s economy grew, from the mid 19^th century there was a need to expand railways and shipping and develop the administrative structure.
• Many new buildings were constructed at this time.
• These buildings reflected the culture and confidence of the rulers.
• The architectural style was usually European.
• This importation of European styles reflected the imperial vision in several ways.
• First, it expressed the British desire to create a familiar landscape in an alien country, and thus to feel at home in the colony.
• Second, the British felt that European styles would best symbolise their superiority, authority and power.
• Third, they thought that buildings that looked European would mark out the difference and distance between the colonial masters and their Indian subjects
• Initially, these buildings were at odds with the traditional Indian buildings. Gradually, Indians too got used to European architecture and made it their own.
• The British in turn adapted some Indian styles to suit their needs.
• One example is the bungalow which was used by government officers in Bombay and all over India.
• The name bungalow was derived from bangla, a traditional thatched Bengali hut.
• The colonial bungalow was set on extensive grounds which ensured privacy and marked a distance from the Indian world around.
• The traditional pitched roof and surrounding veranda kept the bungalow cool in the summer months.
• The compound had separate quarters for a retinue of domestic servants.
• The bungalows in the Civil Lines thus became a racially exclusive enclave in which the ruling classes could live self-sufficient lives without daily social contact with Indians.
• For pubic buildings three broad architectural styles were used.
• Two of these were direct imports from fashions prevalent in England. The first was called neo-classical or the new classical.
• Its characteristics included construction of geometrical structures fronted with lofty pillars It was derived from a style that was originally typical of buildings in ancient Rome, and was subsequently revived, re-adapted and made popular during the European Renaissance.
• It was considered particularly appropriate for the British Empire in India.
• The British imagined that a style that embodied the grandeur of imperial Rome could now be made to express the glory of imperial India.
• The Mediterranean origins of this architecture were also thought to be suitable for tropical weather.
• The Town Hall in Bombay was built in this style in 1833.
• Another group of commercial buildings, built during the cotton boom of the 1860s, was the Elphinstone Circle.
• Subsequently named Horniman Circle after an English editor who courageously supported Indian nationalists, this building was inspired from models in Italy.
• It made innovative use of covered arcades at ground level to shield the shopper and pedestrian from the fierce sun and rain of Bombay.
• Another style that was extensively used was the neo-Gothic, characterised by high-pitched roofs, pointed arches and detailed decoration.
• The Gothic style had its roots in buildings, especially churches, built in northern Europe during the medieval period.
• The neo-Gothic or new Gothic style was revived in the mid-nineteenth century in England.
• This was the time when the government in Bombay was building its infrastructure and this style was adapted for
• Bombay. An impressive group of buildings facing the seafront including the Secretariat, University of Bombay and High Court were all built in this style.
• Indian merchants were happy to adopt the neo-Gothic style since they believed that building styles, like many ideas brought in by the English, were progressive and would help make Bombay into a modern city.
• However, the most spectacular example of the neo-Gothic style is the Victoria Terminus, the station and headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company.
• The British invested a lot in the design and construction of railway stations in cities, since they were proud of having successfully built an all- India railway network.
• As a group these buildings dominated the central Bombay skyline and their uniform neo-Gothic style gave a distinctive character to the city.
• Towards the beginning of 20^th century a new hybrid architectural style developed which combined the Indian with the European.
• This was called Indo-Saracenic. “Indo” was shorthand for Hindu and “Saracen” was a term Europeans used to designate Muslim.
• The inspiration for this style was medieval buildings in India with their domes, chhatris, jalis, and arches.
• By integrating Indian and European styles in public architecture the British wanted to prove that they were legitimate rulers of India.
• The Gateway of India, built in the traditional Gujarati style to welcome King George V and Queen Mary to India in 1911, is the most famous example of this style.
• The industrialist Jamsetji Tata built the Taj Mahal Hotel in a similar style.
• The lack of space in the city and crowding led to a type of building unique to Bombay, the chawl, the multi-storeyed single-room apartments with long open corridors built around a courtyard.
• Such buildings which housed many families sharing common spaces helped in the growth of neighbourhood identity and solidarity.

Chapter- 13
Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement
Civil Disobedience and Beyond

• In January 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to his homeland after two decades of residence abroad.
• In South Africa- Mahatma Gandhi first forged the distinctive techniques of non-violent protest known as satyagraha, first promoted harmony between religions, and first alerted upper -caste Indians to their discriminatory treatment of low castes and women.
• The Indian National Congress now had branches in most major cities and towns.
• Through the Swadeshi movement of 1905-07 it had greatly broadened its appeal among the middle classes.
• That movement had thrown up some towering leaders – among them Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra, Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal, and Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab.
• The three were known as “Lal, Bal and Pal”
• These leaders advocated militant opposition to colonial rule, there was a group of “Moderates” who preferred a more gradual and persuasive approach.
• Among these Moderates was Gandhiji’s acknowledged political mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, as well as Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who, like Gandhiji, was a lawyer of Gujarati extraction trained in London.
• On Gokhale’s advice, Gandhiji spent a year travelling around British India, getting to know the land and its peoples.
• His first major public appearance was at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in February 1916.
• Among the invitees to this event were the princes and philanthropists whose donations had contributed to the founding of the BHU.
• Gandhiji had been invited on account of his work in South Africa, rather than his status within India.
• When his turn came to speak, Gandhiji charged the Indian elite with a lack of concern for the labouring poor.
• Gandhiji’s speech at Banaras in February 1916 was, the first public announcement of Gandhiji’s  own desire to make Indian nationalism more properly representative of the Indian people as a whole
• At the annual Congress, held in Lucknow in December 1916, he was approached by a peasant from Champaran in Bihar, who told him about the harsh treatment of peasants by British indigo planters.

The Making & Un making of Non- cooperation

• Mahatma Gandhi was to spend much of 1917 in Champaran, seeking to obtain for the peasants security of tenure as well as the freedom to cultivate the crops of their choice.
• In 1918, Gandhiji intervened in a labour dispute in Ahmedabad, demanding better working conditions for the textile mill workers.
• Then he joined peasants in Kheda in asking the state for the remission of taxes following the failure of their harvest.
• These initiatives in Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda marked Gandhiji out as a nationalist with a deep sympathy for the poor.
• In 1919, the colonial rulers delivered into Gandhiji’s lap an issue from which he could construct a much wider movement.
• During the Great War of 1914-18, the British had instituted censorship of the press and permitted detention without trial.
• Now, on the recommendation of a committee chaired by Sir Sidney Rowlatt, these tough measures were continued.
• In response, Gandhiji called for a countrywide campaign against the “Rowlatt Act”.
• The protests were particularly intense in the Punjab, where many men had served on the British side in the War – expecting to be rewarded for their service. =
• Instead they were given the Rowlatt Act.
• Gandhiji was detained while proceeding to the Punjab, even as prominent local Congressmen were arrested.
• A bloody climax in Amritsar in April 1919, when a British Brigadier ordered his troops to open fire on a nationalist meeting (known as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre)
• It was the Rowlatt Satyagraha that made Gandhiji a truly national leader.
• Emboldened by its success, Gandhiji called for a campaign of “non-cooperation” with British rule.
• Indians who wished colonialism to end were asked to stop attending schools, colleges and law courts, and not pay taxes.
• In sum, they were asked to adhere to a “renunciation of (all) voluntary association with the (British) Government”.
• To further broaden the struggle he had joined hands with the Khilafat Movement that sought to restore the Caliphate, a symbol of Pan-Islamism which had recently been abolished by the Turkish ruler Kemal Attaturk.
• Gandhiji hoped that by coupling non-cooperation with Khilafat, India’s two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, could collectively bring an end to colonial rule.
• Students stopped going to schools and colleges run by the government.
• Lawyers refused to attend court.
• The working class went on strike in many towns and cities: according to official figures, there were 396 strikes in 1921, involving 600,000 workers and a loss of seven million workdays.
• Hill tribes in northern Andhra violated the forest laws.
• Farmers in Awadh did not pay taxes.
• Peasants in Kumaun refused to carry loads for colonial officials.
• These protest movements were sometimes carried out in defiance of the local nationalist leadership.
• Non-cooperation was negative enough to be peaceful but positive enough to be effective. It entailed denial, renunciation, and self-discipline.
• Result of Non-Cooperation Movement-British Raj was shaken to its foundations for the first time since the Revolt of 1857.
• Then, in February 1922, a group of peasants attacked and torched a police station in the hamlet of Chauri Chaura, in the United Provinces (now, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal).
• This act of violence prompted Gandhiji to call off the movement altogether.
• Gandhiji was arrested in March 1922, and charged with sedition.
• The judge who presided over his trial, Justice C.N. Broomfield, made a remarkable speech while pronouncing his sentence.
• Professionals and intellectuals; peasants, workers and artisans also participated in it.
• Many of them venerated Gandhiji, referring to him as their “Mahatma”.
• They appreciated the fact that he dressed like them, lived like them, and spoke their language.
• The act of spinning allowed Gandhiji to break the boundaries that prevailed within the traditional caste system, between mental labour and manual labour.
• Gandhiji’s appeal among the poor, and peasants in particular, was enhanced by his ascetic lifestyle, and by his shrewd use of symbols such as the dhoti and the charkha.
• Mahatma Gandhi was by caste a merchant, and by profession a lawyer; but his simple lifestyle and love of working with his hands allowed him to empathise more fully with the labouring poor and for them, in turn, to empathise with him.
• New branches of the Congress were set up in various parts of India.
• A series of “Praja Mandals” were established to promote the nationalist creed in the princely states.
• Gandhiji encouraged the communication of the nationalist message in the mother tongue, rather than in the language of the rulers, English.
• Thus the provincial committees of the Congress were based on linguistic regions, rather than on the artificial boundaries of British India.
• Among Gandhiji’s admirers were both poor peasants and rich industrialists
• Between 1917 and 1922, a group of highly talented Indians attached themselves to Gandhiji.
• They included Mahadev Desai, Vallabh Bhai Patel, J.B. Kripalani, Subhas Chandra Bose, Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Govind Ballabh Pant and C. Rajagopalachari.
• Mahatma Gandhi was released from prison in February 1924, and now chose to devote his attention to the promotion of home-spun cloth (khadi ), and the abolition of untouchability.
• For, Gandhiji was as much a social reformer as he was a politician.
• He believed that in order to be worthy of freedom, Indians had to get rid of social evils such as child marriage and untouchability.
• Meanwhile, on the economic front Indians had to learn to become self-reliant – hence his stress on the significance of wearing khadi rather than mill-made cloth imported from overseas.

Khilafat Movement-

• The Khilafat Movement, (1919-1920) was a movement of Indian Muslims, led by Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, that demanded the following:
• The Turkish Sultan or Khalifa must retain control over the Muslim sacred places in the erstwhile Ottoman empire; the jazirat-ul-Arab (Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine) must remain under Muslim sovereignty; and the Khalifa must be left with sufficient territory to enable him to defend the Islamic faith.
• The Congress supported the movement and Mahatma Gandhi sought to conjoin it to the Non-cooperation Movement.

The Salt Satyagraha

• In 1928, there was an all-India campaign in opposition to the all-White Simon Commission, sent from England to enquire into conditions in the colony.
• Gandhiji did not himself participate in this movement, although he gave it his blessings, as he also did to a peasant Satyagraha in Bardoli in the same year.
• December 1929- INC session- Lahore

Significant for two things:

• The election of Jawaharlal Nehru as President, signifying the passing of the baton of leadership to the younger generation; and the proclamation of commitment to “Purna Swaraj”, or complete independence
• On 26 January 1930, “Independence Day” was observed, with the national flag being hoisted in different venues, and patriotic songs being sung.
• Gandhiji himself issued precise instructions as to how the day should be observed.
• “It would be good,” he said, “if the declaration [of Independence] is made by whole villages, whole cities even ... It would be well if all the meetings were held at the identical minute in all the places.”

Dandi

• Soon after the observance of this “Independence Day”,
• Mahatma Gandhi announced that he would lead a march to break one of the most widely disliked laws in British India, which gave the state a monopoly in the manufacture and sale of salt.
• For in every Indian household, salt was indispensable; yet people were forbidden from making salt even for domestic use, compelling them to buy it from shops at a high price.
• Although Gandhiji had given advance notice of his “Salt March” to the Viceroy Lord Irwin, Irwin failed to grasp the significance of the action.
• On 12 March 1930, Gandhiji began walking from his ashram at Sabarmati towards the ocean.
• Parallel salt marches were being conducted in other parts of the country
• Across large parts of India, peasants breached the hated colonial forest laws that kept them and their cattle out of the woods in which they had once roamed freely.
• In some towns, factory workers went on strike while lawyers boycotted British courts and students refused to attend government-run educational institutions.
• As in 1920-22, now too Gandhiji’s call had encouraged Indians of all classes to make manifest their own discontent with colonial rule.
• In the wake of the Salt March, Indians were arrested and Gandhiji also
• The progress of Gandhiji’s march to the seashore can be traced from the secret reports filed by the police officials deputed to monitor his movements.
• These reproduce the speeches he gave at the villages en route, in which he called upon local officials to renounce government employment and join the freedom struggle.
• Swaraj merely by the repeal of the salt taxes or other taxes.

The Salt March was notable for at least three reasons-

• First, it was this event that first brought Mahatma Gandhi to world attention. The march was widely covered by the European and American press.
• Second, it was the first nationalist activity in which women participated in large numbers.  Eg. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
• Third, and perhaps most significant, it was the Salt March which forced upon the British the realisation that their Raj would not last forever, and that they would have to devolve some power to the Indians.
• To that end, the British government convened a series of “Round Table Conferences” in London.
• 1^st- November 1930, but without the pre-eminent political leader in India, thus rendering it an exercise in futility.
• Gandhiji was released from jail in January 1931 and the following month had several long meetings with the Viceroy.
• These culminated in what was called the “Gandhi-Irwin Pact’, by the terms of which civil disobedience would be called off, all prisoners released, and salt manufacture allowed along the coast.
• The pact was criticised by radical nationalists, for Gandhiji was unable to obtain from the Viceroy a commitment to political independence for Indians; he could obtain merely an assurance of talks towards that possible end.
• 2^nd- Round Table Conference was held in London in the latter part of 1931.
• Here, Gandhiji represented the Congress.
• However, his claims that his party represented all of India came under challenge from three parties:
• from the Muslim League, which claimed to stand for the interests of the Muslim minority;
• from the Princes, who claimed that the Congress had no stake in their territories;
• and from the brilliant lawyer and thinker B.R. Ambedkar, who argued that Gandhiji and the Congress did not really represent the lowest castes.
• The Conference in London was inconclusive, so Gandhiji returned to India and resumed civil disobedience.
• The new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was deeply unsympathetic to the Indian leader.
• Government of India Act 1935, had promised some form of representative government.
• Two years later, in an election held on the basis of a restricted franchise, the Congress won a comprehensive victory.
• Now eight out of 11 provinces had a Congress “Prime Minister”, working under the supervision of a British Governor.
• The offer was refused.
• In protest, the Congress ministries resigned in October 1939.
• Through 1940 and 1941, the Congress organised a series of individual satyagrahas to pressure the rulers to promise freedom once the war had ended.
• Meanwhile, in March 1940, the Muslim League passed a resolution demanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent.
• The political landscape was now becoming complicated: it was no longer Indians versus the British; rather, it had become a three- way struggle between the Congress, the Muslim League, and the British.
• At this time Britain had an all-party government, whose Labour members were sympathetic to Indian aspirations, but whose Conservative Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was a diehard imperialist who insisted that he had not been appointed the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
• In the spring of 1942, Churchill was persuaded to send one of his ministers, Sir Stafford Cripps, to India to try and forge a compromise with Gandhiji and the Congress.
• In September 1939, two years after the Congress ministries assumed office, the Second World War broke out.
• Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had both been strongly critical of Hitler and the Nazis.
• Accordingly, they promised Congress support to the war effort if the British, in return, promised to grant India independence once hostilities ended.

Quit India

• After the failure of the Cripps Mission, Mahatma Gandhi decided to launch his third major movement against British rule. This was the “Quit India” campaign, which began in August 1942.
• Although Gandhiji was jailed at once, younger activists organised strikes and acts of sabotage all over the country.
• Particularly active in the underground resistance were socialist members of the Congress, such as Jayaprakash Narayan.
• In several districts, such as Satara in the west and Medinipur in the east, “independent” governments were proclaimed.
• “Quit India” was genuinely a mass movement, bringing into its ambit hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians.
• It was in these years that the League began to make a mark in the Punjab and Sind, provinces
• In June 1944, with the end of the war in sight, Gandhiji was released from prison.
• Later that year he held a series of meetings with Jinnah, seeking to bridge the gap between the Congress and the League.
• In 1945, a Labour government came to power in Britain and committed itself to granting independence to India.
• Meanwhile, back in India, the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, brought the Congress and the League together for a series of talks.
• Early in 1946 fresh elections were held to the provincial legislatures.
• The Congress swept the “General” category, but in the seats specifically reserved for Muslims the League won an overwhelming majority.
• A Cabinet Mission sent in the summer of 1946 failed to get the Congress and the League to agree on a federal system that would keep India together while allowing the provinces a degree of autonomy.
• After the talks broke down, Jinnah called for a “Direct Action Day” to press the League’s demand for Pakistan.
• On the designated day, 16 August 1946, bloody riots broke out in Calcutta.
• The violence spread to rural Bengal, then to Bihar, and then across the country to the United Provinces and the Punjab.
• In some places, Muslims were the main sufferers, in other places, Hindus.
• In February 1947, Wavell was replaced as Viceroy by Lord Mountbatten  
• The formal transfer of power was fixed for 15 August.

Satara, 1943

• From the late 19^th century, a non-Brahman movement, which opposed the caste system and landlordism, had developed in Maharashtra.
• This movement established links with the national movement by the 1930s.
• In 1943, some of the younger leaders in the Satara district of Maharashtra set up a parallel government (prati sarkar), with volunteer corps (seba dals) and village units (tufan dals).
• Dominated by kunbi peasants and supported by dalits, the Satara prati sarkar functioned till the elections of 1946, despite government repression and, in the later stages, Congress disapproval.

The Last Heroic Days

• As it happened, Mahatma Gandhi was not present at the festivities in the capital on 15 August 1947.
• He was in Calcutta, but he did not attend any function or hoist a flag there either. Gandhiji marked the day with a 24-hour fast.
• The freedom he had struggled so long for had come at an unacceptable price, with a nation divided and Hindus and Muslims at each other’s throats.
• At the initiative of Gandhiji and Nehru, the Congress now passed a resolution on “the rights of minorities”.
• The party had never accepted the “two-nation theory”: forced against its will to accept Partition, it still believed that “India is a land of many religions and many races, and must remain so”.
• Whatever be the situation in Pakistan, India would be “a democratic secular State where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong”
• At his daily prayer meeting on the evening of 30 January, Gandhiji was shot dead by a young man.
• The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was a Brahmin from Pune named Nathuram Godse, the editor of an extremist Hindu newspaper who had denounced Gandhiji as “an appeaser of Muslims”.
• Mahatma Gandhi regularly published his journal, Harijan

Chapter 14
Understanding Partition
Politics, Memories, Experiences

• Several hundred thousand people were killed and innumerable women raped and abducted.
• Millions were uprooted, transformed into refugees in alien lands.
• The “ethnic cleansing” that characterised the partition of India was carried out by self-styled representatives of religious communities rather than by state agencies.

Why and How Did Partition Happen?

• Some historians, both Indian and Pakistani, suggest that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s theory that the Hindus and Muslims in colonial India constituted two separate nations can be projected back into medieval history.
• Some scholars see Partition as a culmination of a communal politics that started developing in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
• They suggest that separate electorates for Muslims, created by the colonial government in 1909 and expanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature of communal politics.
• Separate electorates meant that Muslims could now elect their own representatives in designated constituencies.
• This created a temptation for politicians working within this system to use sectarian slogans and gather a following by distributing favours to their own religious groups.
• Religious identities thus acquired a functional use within a modern political system; and the logic of electoral politics deepened and hardened these identities.
• Communal identities were consolidated by a host of other developments in the early  20^th century.
• During the 1920s and early 1930s tension grew around a number of issues.
• Muslims were angered by “music-before-mosque”, by the cow protection movement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samaj to bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi) those who had recently converted to Islam.
• Hindus were angered by the rapid spread of tabligh (propaganda) and tanzim (organisation) after 1923.
• As middle class publicists and communal activists sought to build greater solidarity within their communities, mobilising people against the other community, riots spread in different parts of the country.
• Every communal riot deepened differences between communities, creating disturbing memories of violence.
• Partition was a qualitatively different phenomenon from earlier communal politics, and to understand it we need to look carefully at the events of the last decade of British rule.

What is Communalism?

• Communalism refers to a politics that seeks to unify one community around a religious identity in hostile opposition to another community.
• It seeks to define this community identity as fundamental and fixed. It attempts to consolidate this identity and present it as natural – as if people were born into the identity, as if the identities do not evolve through history over time.
• In order to unify the community, communalism suppresses distinctions within the community and emphasises the essential unity of the community against other communities.
• One could say communalism nurtures a politics of hatred for an identified “other”– “Hindus” in the case of Muslim communalism, and “Muslims” in the case of Hindu communalism.
• Communalism, then, is a particular kind of politicisation of religious identity, an ideology that seeks to promote conflict between religious communities.
• In the context of a multi-religious country, the phrase “religious nationalism” can come to acquire a similar meaning.
• In such a country, any attempt to see a religious community as a nation would mean sowing the seeds of antagonism against some other religion/s.

The Lucknow Pact

• The Lucknow Pact of December 1916 was an understanding between the Congress and the Muslim League (controlled by the UP-based “Young Party”) whereby the Congress accepted separate electorates.
• The pact provided a joint political platform for the Moderates, Extremists and the Muslim League

Arya Samaj

A North Indian Hindu reform organisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, particularly active in the Punjab, which sought to revive Vedic learning and combine it with modern education in the sciences

The Muslim League

• Initially floated in Dhaka in 1906, the Muslim League was quickly taken over by the U.P.-based Muslim elite.
• The party began to make demands for autonomy for the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent and/or Pakistan in the 1940s

Hindu Mahasabha

• Founded in 1915, the Hindu Mahasabha was a Hindu party that remained confined to North India.
• It aimed to unite Hindu society by encouraging the Hindus to transcend the divisions of caste and sect.
• It sought to define Hindu identity in opposition to Muslim identity.

The provincial elections of 1937 and the Congress ministries

• In 1937, elections to the provincial legislatures were held for the first time.
• Only about 10 to 12 per cent of the population enjoyed the right to vote.
• Congress won an absolute majority in five out of eleven provinces and forming governments in seven of them.
• It did badly in the constituencies reserved for Muslims, but the Muslim League also fared poorly, polling only 4.4 per cent of the total Muslim vote cast in this election.
• The League failed to win a single seat in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and could capture only two out of 84 reserved constituencies in the Punjab and three out of 33 in Sind.
• In the United Provinces, the Muslim League wanted to form a joint government with the Congress.
• The Congress had won an absolute majority in the province, so it rejected the offer.
• Some scholars argue that this rejection convinced the League that if India remained united, then Muslims would find it difficult to gain political power because they would remain a minority.
• The League assumed, of course, that only a Muslim party could represent Muslim interests, and that the Congress was essentially a Hindu party.
• But Jinnah’s insistence that the League be recognised as the “sole spokesman” of Muslims could convince few at the time.
• Though popular in the United Provinces, Bombay and Madras, social support for the League was still fairly weak in three of the provinces from which Pakistan was to be carved out just ten years later – Bengal, the NWFP and the Punjab.
• Even in Sind it failed to form a government.
• It was from this point onwards that the League doubled its efforts at expanding its social support.
• The Congress ministries also contributed to the widening rift.
• In the United Provinces, the party had rejected the Muslim League proposal for a coalition government partly because the League tended to support landlordism, which the Congress wished to abolish, although the party had not yet taken any concrete steps in that direction.
• Nor did the Congress achieve any substantial gains in the “Muslim mass contact” programme it launched.
• In the end, the secular and radical rhetoric of the Congress merely alarmed conservative Muslims and the Muslim landed elite, without winning over the Muslim masses.
• Maulana Azad, an important Congress leader, pointed out in 1937 that members of the Congress were not allowed to join the League, yet Congressmen were active in the Hindu Mahasabha– at least in the Central Provinces (present-day Madhya Pradesh).
• Only in December 1938 did the Congress Working Committee declare that Congress members could not be members of the Mahasabha.
• Incidentally, this was also the period when the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were gaining strength.
• The latter spread from its Nagpur base to the United Provinces, the Punjab, and other parts of the country in the 1930s.
• By 1940, the RSS had pledged to an ideology of Hindu nationalism, convinced that India was a land of the Hindus.

The “Pakistan” Resolution

• On 23 March 1940, the League moved a resolution demanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent.
• This ambiguous resolution never mentioned partition or Pakistan.
• Sikandar Hayat Khan, Punjab Premier and leader of the Unionist Party, who had drafted the resolution, declared in a Punjab assembly speech on 1 March 1941 that he was opposed to a Pakistan that would mean “Muslim Raj here and Hindu Raj elsewhere
• The origins of the Pakistan demand have also been traced back to the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal, the writer of “Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara”.
• In his presidential address to the Muslim League in 1930, the poet spoke of a need for a “North- West Indian Muslim state”.

Post-War developments

• When negotiations were begun again in l945, the British agreed to create an entirely Indian central Executive Council, except for the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, as a preliminary step towards full independence.
• Discussions about the transfer of power broke down due to Jinnah’s unrelenting demand that the League had an absolute right to choose all the Muslim members of the Executive Council and that there should be a kind of communal veto in the Council, with decisions opposed by Muslims needing a two- thirds majority.
• Given the existing political situation, the League’s first demand was quite extraordinary, for a large section of the nationalist Muslims supported the Congress (its delegation for these discussions was headed by Maulana Azad), and in West Punjab members of the Unionist Party were largely Muslims
• Provincial elections were again held in 1946.
• The Congress swept the general constituencies, capturing 91.3 per cent of the non-Muslim vote.
• Only as late as 1946, therefore, did the League establish itself as the dominant party among Muslim voters, seeking to vindicate its claim to be the “sole spokesman” of India’s Muslims.
• About 10 to 12 per cent of the population enjoyed the right to vote in the provincial elections and a mere one per cent in the elections for the Central Assembly.

A possible alternative to Partition

• In March 1946 the British Cabinet sent a three- member mission to Delhi to examine the League’s demand and to suggest a suitable political framework for a free India.
• The Cabinet Mission toured the country for three months and recommended a loose three-tier confederation. India was to remain united.
• It was to have a weak central government controlling only foreign affairs, defence and communications with the existing provincial assemblies being grouped into three sections while electing the constituent assembly:
• Section A for the Hindu majority provinces, and Sections B and C for the Muslim-majority provinces of the north-west and the north-east (including Assam) respectively.
• The sections or groups of provinces would comprise various regional units.
• They would have the power to set up intermediate-level executives and legislatures of their own.
• Initially all the major parties accepted this plan.
• But the agreement was short-lived because it was based on mutually opposed interpretations of the plan.
• The League wanted the grouping to be compulsory, with Sections B and C developing into strong entities with the right to secede from the Union in the future.
• The Congress wanted that provinces be given the right to join a group.
• It was not satisfied with the Mission’s clarification that grouping would be compulsory at first, but provinces would have the right to opt out after the constitution had been finalised and new elections held in accordance with it.
• Ultimately, therefore, neither the League nor the Congress agreed to the Cabinet Mission’s proposal.
• This was a most crucial juncture, because after this partition became more or less inevitable, with most of the Congress leaders agreeing to it, seeing it as tragic but unavoidable.
• Only Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the NWFP continued to firmly oppose the idea of partition.

Towards Partition

• After withdrawing its support to the Cabinet Mission plan, the Muslim League decided on “Direct Action” for winning its Pakistan demand.
• It announced 16 August 1946 as “Direct Action Day”.
• On this day, riots broke out in Calcutta, lasting several days and leaving several thousand people dead. By March 1947 violence spread to many parts of northern India.
• It was in March 1947 that the Congress high command voted for dividing the Punjab into two halves, one with Muslim majority and the other with Hindu/Sikh majority; and it asked for the application of a similar principle to Bengal.

The Withdrawal of Law and Order

• The bloodbath continued for about a year from March 1947 onwards.
• One main reason for this was the collapse of the institutions of governance.
• Penderel Moon, an administrator serving in Bahawalpur (in present-day Pakistan) at the time, noted how the police failed to fire even a single shot when arson and killings were taking place in Amritsar in March 1947.
• Amritsar district became the scene of bloodshed later in the year when there was a complete breakdown of authority in the city.
• When panic-stricken people appealed for help, British officials asked them to contact Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabh Bhai Patel or M.A. Jinnah.
• The British were busy preparing to quit India.
• Problems were compounded because Indian soldiers and policemen came to act as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.
• In many places not only did policemen help their co-religionists but they also attacked members of other communities.

Gendering Partition

“Recovering” women

• Women were raped, abducted, sold, often many times over, forced to settle down to a new life with strangers in unknown circumstances.
• Deeply traumatised by all that they had undergone, some began to develop new family bonds in their changed circumstances.
• But the Indian and Pakistani governments were insensitive to the complexities of human relationships.
• Believing the women to be on the wrong side of the border, they now tore them away from their new relatives, and sent them back to their earlier families or locations.
• They did not consult the concerned women, undermining their right to take decisions regarding their own lives.

Regional Variations

• The near-total displacement of Hindus and Sikhs eastwards into India from West Punjab and of almost all Punjabi-speaking Muslims to Pakistan happened in a relatively short period of two years between 1946 and 1948.
• Many Muslim families of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh continued to migrate to Pakistan through the 1950s and early 1960s, although many chose to remain in India.
• Most of these Urdu-speaking people, known as muhajirs (migrants) in Pakistan moved to the Karachi- Hyderabad region in Sind.
• In Bengal the migration was even more protracted, with people moving across a porous border.
• Furthermore, unlike the Punjab, the exchange of population in Bengal was not near-total.
• Many Bengali Hindus remained in East Pakistan while many Bengali Muslims continued to live in West Bengal.
• Finally, Bengali Muslims (East Pakistanis) rejected Jinnah’s two-nation theory through political action, breaking away from Pakistan and creating Bangladesh in 1971-72.
• A common religion could not hold East and West Pakistan together.
• There is, however, a huge similarity between the Punjab and Bengal experiences.
• In both these states, women and girls became prime targets of persecution.

Chapter 15
Framing the Constitution
The Beginning of a New Era

• Indian Constitution, which came into effect on 26 January 1950
• Constitution of India was framed between December 1946 and December 1949, held eleven sessions, with sittings spread over 165 days.
• The Constitution was signed in December 1949 after three years of debate.

The making of the Constituent Assembly

• The members of the Constituent Assembly were not elected on the basis of universal franchise.
• In the winter of 1945-46 provincial elections were held in India.
• The Provincial Legislatures then chose the representatives to the Constituent Assembly.
• The Constituent Assembly that came into being was dominated by one party: the Congress.
• The Congress swept the general seats in the provincial elections, and the Muslim League captured most of the reserved Muslim seats.
• But the League chose to boycott the Constituent Assembly, pressing its demand for Pakistan with a separate constitution.
• The Socialists too were initially unwilling to join, for they believed the Constituent Assembly was a creation of the British, and therefore incapable of being truly autonomous.
• In effect, therefore, 82 per cent of the members of the Constituent Assembly were also members of the Congress.
• The Congress members differed in their opinion on critical issues.
• Some members were inspired by socialism while others were defenders of landlordism.
• Some were close to communal parties while others were assertively secular.
• Through the national movement Congress members had learnt to debate their ideas in public and negotiate their differences.
• Within the Constituent Assembly too, Congress members did not sit quiet
• The discussions within the Constituent Assembly were also influenced by the opinions expressed by the public.
• Many of the linguistic minorities wanted the protection of their mother tongue, religious minorities asked for special safeguards, while dalits demanded an end to all caste oppression and reservation of seats in government bodies.

The dominant voices

• The Constituent Assembly had 300 members.
• Of these, six members played particularly important roles.
• Three were representatives of the Congress, namely, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabh Bhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad.
• It was Nehru who moved the crucial “Objectives Resolution”, as well as the resolution proposing that the National Flag of India be a “horizontal tricolour of saffron, white and dark green in equal proportion”, with a wheel in navy blue at the centre.
• Patel, on the other hand, worked mostly behind the scenes, playing a key role in the drafting of several reports, and working to reconcile opposing points of view.
• Rajendra Prasad was President of the Assembly, where he had to steer the discussion along constructive lines while making sure all members had a chance to speak.
• B.R. Ambedkar had been a political opponent of the Congress; but, on the advice of Mahatma Gandhi, he was asked at Independence to join the Union Cabinet as law minister.
• In this capacity, he served as Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution.
• Serving with him were two other lawyers, K.M. Munshi from Gujarat and Alladi Krishnaswamy Aiyar from Madras, both of whom gave crucial inputs in the drafting of the Constitution.
• These six members were given vital assistance by two civil servants.
• One was B. N. Rau, Constitutional Advisor to the Government of India, who prepared a series of background papers based on a close study of the political systems obtaining in other countries.
• The other was the Chief Draughtsman, S. N. Mukherjee, who had the ability to put complex proposals in clear legal language.
• Ambedkar himself had the responsibility of guiding the Draft Constitution through the Assembly.

The Vision of the Constitution

• On 13 December 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru introduced the “Objectives Resolution” in the Constituent Assembly.
• It was a momentous resolution that outlined the defining ideals of the Constitution of Independent India, and provided the framework within which the work of constitution-making was to proceed.
• It proclaimed India to be an “Independent Sovereign Republic”, guaranteed its citizens justice, equality and freedom, and assured that “adequate safeguards shall be provided for minorities, backward and tribal areas, and Depressed and Other Backward Classes … ”
• After outlining these objectives, Nehru placed the Indian experiment in a broad historical perspective.
• An interim administration headed by Jawaharlal Nehru was in place, but it could only operate under the directions of the Viceroy and the British Government in London.
• In fact, as the demand for representation grew, the British had been forced to introduce a series of constitutional reforms.
• A number of Acts were passed (1909, 1919 and 1935), gradually enlarging the space for Indian participation in provincial governments.
• The executive was made partly responsible to the provincial legislature in 1919, and almost entirely so under the Government of India Act of 1935.
• When elections were held in 1937, under the 1935 Act, the Congress came to power in eight out of the 11 provinces.

The problem with separate electorates

• On 27 August 1947, B. Pocker Bahadur from Madras made a powerful plea for continuing separate electorates.
• Minorities exist in all lands, argued Bahadur; they could not be wished away, they could not be “erased out of existence”.
• The need was to create a political framework in which minorities could live in harmony with others, and the differences between communities could be minimised.
• This was possible only if minorities were well represented within the political system, their voices heard, and their views taken into account.
• Only separate electorates would ensure that Muslims had a meaningful voice in the governance of the country.
• This demand for separate electorates provoked anger and dismay amongst most nationalists.
• Most nationalists saw separate electorates as a measure deliberately introduced by the British to divide the people.
• Partition had made nationalists fervently opposed to the idea of separate electorates.
• Countering the demand for separate electorates, Govind Ballabh Pant declared that it was not only harmful for the nation but also for the minorities.
• Not all Muslims supported the demand for separate electorates.
• Begum Aizaas Rasul, for instance, felt that separate electorates were self destructive since they isolated the minorities from the majority.
• By 1949, most Muslim members of the Constituent Assembly were agreed that separate electorates were against the interests of the minorities.
• Instead Muslims needed to take an active part in the democratic process to ensure that they had a decisive voice in the political system.
• After the Partition violence, Ambedkar too no longer argued for separate electorates.
• The Constituent Assembly finally recommended that untouchability be abolished, Hindu temples be thrown open to all castes, and seats in legislatures and jobs in government offices be reserved for the lowest castes.
• Many recognised that this could not solve all problems: social discrimination could not be erased only through constitutional legislation, there had to be a change in the attitudes within society.
• But the measures were welcomed by the democratic public.

The Powers of the State

• The Draft Constitution provided for three lists of subjects: Union, State, and Concurrent.
• The subjects in the first list were to be the preserve of the Central Government, while those in the second list were vested with the states.
• As for the third list, here Centre and state shared responsibility.
• However, many more items were placed under exclusive Union control than in other federations, and more placed on the Concurrent list too than desired by the provinces.
• The Union also had control of minerals and key industries.
• Besides, Article 356 gave the Centre the powers to take over a state administration on the recommendation of the Governor.
• In the case of some taxes (for instance, customs duties and Company taxes) the Centre retained all the proceeds; in other cases (such as income tax and excise duties) it shared them with the states; in still other cases (for instance, estate duties) it assigned them wholly to the states.
• The states, meanwhile, could levy and collect certain taxes on their own- land and property taxes, sales tax, and the hugely profitable tax on bottled liquor.
• The argument for greater power to the provinces provoked a strong reaction in the Assembly.
• The need for a strong centre had been underlined on numerous occasions since the Constituent Assembly had begun its sessions.
• Ambedkar had declared that he wanted “a strong and united Centre (hear, hear) much stronger than the Centre we had created under the Government of India Act of 1935”.
• Reacting to the demands for giving power to the provinces, Gopalaswami Ayyangar declared that “the Centre should be made as strong as possible”.
• One member from the United Provinces, Balakrishna Sharma, reasoned at length that only a strong centre could plan for the well-being of the country, mobilise the available economic resources, establish a proper administration, and defend the country against foreign aggression.
• Before Partition the Congress had agreed to grant considerable autonomy to the provinces.
• This had been part of an effort to assure the Muslim League that within the provinces where the Muslim League came to power the Centre would not interfere.
• After Partition most nationalists changed their position because they felt that the earlier political pressures for a decentralised structure were no longer there.
• There was already a unitary system in place, imposed by the colonial government.
• The violence of the times gave a further push to centralisation, now seen as necessary both to forestall chaos and to plan for the country’s economic development.
• The Constitution thus showed a distinct bias towards the rights of the Union of India over those of its constituent states.

The Language of the Nation

• By the 1930s, the Congress had accepted that Hindustani ought to be the national language.
• Mahatma Gandhi felt that everyone should speak in a language that common people could easily understand.
• Hindustani – a blend of Hindi and Urdu – was a popular language of a large section of the people of India, and it was a composite language enriched by the interaction of diverse cultures.
• This multi-cultural language, Mahatma Gandhi thought, would be the ideal language of communication between diverse communities: it could unify Hindus and Muslims, and people of the north and the south.
• As communal conflicts deepened, Hindi and Urdu also started growing apart.
• On the one hand, there was a move to Sanskritise Hindi, purging it of all words of Persian and Arabic origin.
• On the other hand, Urdu was being increasingly Persianised.
• As a consequence, language became associated with the politics of religious identities.
• Mahatma Gandhi, however, retained his faith in the composite character of Hindustani.

A plea for Hindi

• In one of the earliest sessions of the Constituent Assembly, R. V. Dhulekar, a Congressman from the United Provinces, made an aggressive plea that Hindi be used as the language of constitution-making.
• By now the Language Committee of the Constituent Assembly had produced its report and had thought of a compromise formula to resolve the deadlock between those who advocated Hindi as the national language and those who opposed it.
• It had decided, but not yet formally declared, that Hindi in the Devanagari script would be the official language, but the transition to Hindi would be gradual.
• For the first 15 years, English would continue to be used for all official purposes.
• Each province was to be allowed to choose one of the regional languages for official work within the province.
• By referring to Hindi as the official rather that the national language, the Language Committee of the Constituent Assembly hoped to placate ruffled emotions and arrive at a solution that would be acceptable to all.
• A second important feature of the Constitution was its emphasis on secularism.
• There was no ringing pronouncement of secularism in the Preamble, but operationally, its key features as understood in Indian contexts were spelled out in an exemplary manner.
• This was done through the carefully drafted series of Fundamental Rights to “freedom of religion” (Articles 25-28), “cultural and educational rights” (Articles 29, 30), and “rights to equality” (Articles 14, 16, 17).
• All religions were guaranteed equal treatment by the State and given the right to maintain charitable institutions.
• The State also sought to distance itself from religious communities, banning compulsory religious instructions in State-run schools and colleges, and declaring religious discrimination in employment to be illegal.
• However, a certain legal space was created for social reform within communities, a space that was used to ban untouchability and introduce changes in personal and family laws.
• In the Indian variant of political secularism, then, there has been no absolute separation of State from religion, but a kind of judicious distance between the two.

Important Terminologies-

• Taluqdar literally means “one who holds a taluq” or a connection. Taluq came to refer to a territorial unit.
• Benami, literally anonymous, is a term used in Hindi and several other Indian languages for transactions made in the name of a fictitious or relatively insignificant person, whereas the real beneficiary remains unnamed.
• Bell of arms is a storeroom in which weapons are kept.
• Firangi, a term of Persian origin, possibly derived from Frank (from which France gets its name), is used in Urdu and Hindi, often in a derogatory sense, to designate foreigners.
• Mutiny – a collective disobedience of rules and regulations within the armed forces
• Revolt – a rebellion of people against established authority and power. The terms ‘revolt’ and ‘rebellion’ can be used synonymously.
• In the context of the revolt of 1857 the term revolt refers primarily to the uprising of the civilian population (peasants, zamindars, rajas, jagirdars) while the mutiny was of the sepoys.
• Qasbah is a small town in the countryside, often the seat of a local notable.
• Ganj refers to a small fixed market.
• Both qasbah and Ganj dealt in cloth, fruit, vegetables and milk products. They provided for noble families and the army.
• Pet is a Tamil word meaning settlement, while puram is used for a village
• Confederation – in modern political language it refers to a union of fairly autonomous and sovereign states with a central government with delimited Powers

The name “Pakistan”

• The name Pakistan or Pak-stan (from Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan) was coined by a Punjabi Muslim student at Cambridge, Choudhry Rehmat Ali, who, in pamphlets written in 1933 and 1935, desired a separate national status for this new entity.
• No one took Rehmat Ali seriously in the 1930s, least of all the League and other Muslim leaders who dismissed his idea merely as a student’s dream.
• Unionist Party- A political party representing the interests of landholders – Hindu, Muslim and Sikh – in the Punjab
• The party was particularly powerful during the period 1923-47.
• Secede means to withdraw formally from an association or organisation.