Encyclopedia of Islam

India

  

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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 

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India

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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-