of Muslims—Bengal, the Punjab, Kashmir, and
Malabar—were those that were most distant from
the political centers of the Mughal empire.
Europeans became interested in India during
the 15th century because of the thriving spice
trade that involved Asia, India, the Middle East,
and Africa in a global system of maritime com-
merce. Columbus’s first voyage of discovery to the
New World in 1492 was to find an alternate route
to the “Indies” for the Spanish monarchs. Shortly
thereafter, in 1498, Vasco de Gama sailed to India
via the Cape of Good Hope, opening an era of
European colonial expansion in Asia that would
last for four and a half centuries. The Dutch, the
French, and the English followed the Portuguese,
competing for market access and lucrative trade
agreements with Indian merchants and creditors.
Europeans found that in addition to spice, India
also had other sorts of goods that would bring a
profit in European markets, especially cotton and
silk textiles. The English East India Company,
created in 1600, opened trading “factories” (ware-
houses) at several Indian ports during the 17th
century to purchase and transport such goods to
market, but they found that the most lucrative
profits were to be made in Bengal, where the Gan-
ges River provided good access to production cen-
ters inland. This was also an area that was thriving
as a result of the Mughal policy of promoting
agricultural production on newly reclaimed lands
on the eastern side of the Ganges delta.
The Mughals gave the British free trade rights
so that by 1750 Bengal was providing 75 per-
cent of the company’s goods. Meanwhile, the
company had created its own fortifications and
standing militia to protect warehouses and agents
from attacks by the French or local opponents
and thieves. The company also formed alliances
with local Mughal governors, providing them
with military assistance when it promised to be
advantageous. Before long, these governors, called
nawabs, found that by allying themselves with the
British they could win greater independence from
Mughal overlords in distant Delhi. This was an
era when there was a mingling of cultures as Brit-
ish agents became Indianized, some converting
to Islam and living like Mughal royalty. The situ-
ation changed significantly after company troops
defeated the forces of the nawab of Bengal at the
Battle of Plessey near Calcutta in 1757. With
this victory, the British began to select the local
Muslim governors themselves, and they were able
to levy taxes on the local population to pay for
goods that they shipped to England, rather than
use funds from British investors. They formed a
regular army with Indian recruits, mainly upper-
caste Hindus, called sepoys (from the Persian
sipahi, “infantryman”). This evolved into one of
the largest armies in the world by the end of the
18th century, replacing the forces of the Mughals
and local rulers. Bolstered by victories on the bat-
tlefield, the British developed an air of superiority
over the native populations. Company officials
and employees became more and more corrupt
and greedy in their dealings, and in 1765, their tax
collecting privileges in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa
were legalized by a dispensation from the Mughal
emperor. British control in India increased in the
ensuing decades as they operated from headquar-
ters in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Mughal
rulers became British minions, with very little
independence beyond the walls of their imperial
palace at the Red Fort in Delhi.
In 1773, the British Crown appointed a gov-
ernor general to oversee company operations and
combat corruption among company officials. One
of the first governor generals was Lord Charles
Cornwallis (d. 1805), who had come to India in
1786 after the defeat of his army by American and
French forces in America. The governor gener-
als inaugurated a series of land and tax reforms
and created an administrative organization that
became what is now known as the Indian Civil
Service. Although civil servants initially had to
learn Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and other native
languages to conduct business, English eventually
was made the official language of administration.
English-language schools were established to train
K 354
India
Indians for employment in the civil service and to
serve as a new native elite to help the British rule
the land.
Company officials took an interest in India’s
antiquities and the Sanskrit language as their
power increased. One of them, William Jones
(d. 1794), founded the Royal Asiatic Society of
Bengal in Calcutta (1784), an early center of
Orientalist scholarship. The research its scholars
conducted enhanced knowledge about Sanskrit
language, literature, and ancient Indian religion,
but it was done in a way that portrayed contem-
porary Indians as inferior to modern Europeans
and highlighted differences between Hindus and
Muslims. Thomas Macaulay (d. 1859), a leading
colonial official, declared in 1835 that after having
consulted with Orientalist scholars, he had con-
cluded, “a single shelf of a good European library
was worth the whole native literature of India
and Arabia” (Metcalf and Metcalf, 80–81). Jones’s
scholarship also furthered the process of transfer-
ring Indian law from the hands of Muslim and
Hindu jurists to those of British-style civil courts,
with the ulama and pandits demoted to simply
being court advisers. The ethnocentric zeal of
reforming-minded British administrators even led
to banning the children of mixed Anglo-Indian
parentage from employment in the civil service.
The division between the British and Indians
increased in the 19th century with the invention
of racist theories of culture and the arrival of evan-
gelical Christian missionaries who eagerly sought
to convert Indian Hindus and Muslims from their
“heathen” ways. Even Indians educated in English
schools were treated with derision and contempt.
The antagonisms caused by the shortcomings of
British officials and their policies finally exploded
in 1857 with a rebellion that spread beyond the
ranks of the company army to the general popula-
tion in the cities of northern India. The violent
suppression of this “mutiny” brought an end to
company rule as well as to the Mughal dynasty.
India was placed under the direct rule of the Brit-
ish Crown, represented by the governor general,
who was reclassified as the viceroy of India. This
phase of Indian history now became known as
that of the British Raj (from the Hindi word for
“kingdom,” “rule”).
The 1857 rebellion was a clear sign that a
nationalist spirit was stirring in India. Native
elites had obtained English-language proficiency
and education in the history and liberal secularist
ideals of modern Europe. They used this knowl-
edge to organize themselves and argue for more
egalitarian treatment from British officials. The
railroad system created by the British after 1850,
the expansion of the postal service, and newspa-
pers made it possible for them to effectively com-
municate with each other across the great expanse
of India. At the same time, supporters of religious
reform arose in both the Hindu and Muslim com-
munities, many taking the route of liberalism,
others having strong separatist sympathies.
The desire for independence coalesced in the
creation of the secularly oriented Indian National
Congress (INC), convened originally in Bom-
bay in 1885 by English-educated Indians who
wanted to lobby for greater participation in the
civil service and local legislative councils. This
organization had majority Hindu membership,
but it reached out to English-educated Muslims in
the name of a united Indian nation. Most Muslim
leaders, including the reformer Sayyid Ahmad
Khan, declined to participate. The INC, however,
did attract m
Uhammad
a
li
J
innah
(d. 1948), a
Muslim lawyer who had been admitted to the
bar in London and practiced law in Bombay. He
joined the INC in 1895 and remained active until
differences with m
ohandas
k. g
andhi
caused him
to resign in 1920. Jinnah was also a member of
the a
ll
-i
ndia
m
Uslim
l
eagUe
(AIML), an organi-
zation founded in 1906 to win a greater role for
Muslim elites in the British colonial government.
AIML, under Jinnah’s leadership, joined with the
INC to pursue mutual interests, resulting in the
Lucknow Pact of 1916. This agreement called for
majority representation in government, extending
voting rights to more Indians, and separate elec-
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