19 results in A Concise History of Modern India
Preface to the first edition
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Summary
This is a concise history of India since the time of the Mughals. It comprises the history of what was known as British India from the late eighteenth century until 1947, when the subcontinent was split into the two independent countries of India and Pakistan, and of the Republic of India thereafter. (The history of Pakistan and, after 1971, of Bangladesh, is taken up in a separate volume in this series.)
In this work we hope to capture something of the excitement that has characterized the field of India studies in recent decades. Any history written today differs markedly from that of the late 1950s and early 1960s when we, as graduate students, first ‘discovered’ India. The history of India, like histories everywhere, is now at its best written as a more inclusive story, one with fewer determining narratives. Not only do historians seek to include more of the population in their histories – women, minorities, the dispossessed – but they are also interested in alternative historical narratives, those shaped by distinctive cosmologies or by local experiences. Historians question, above all, the historical narratives that were forged – as they were everywhere in the modern world – by the compelling visions of nationalism. The first histories of India, written from the early decades of the nineteenth century, were the handmaiden of British nationalism. They were subsequently challenged, and rewritten, by Indian nationalist historians. All of these histories, including those written from a Marxist perspective, were shaped by notions of ‘progress’ and what was seen as an inevitable progression toward presumably already known models of ‘modernity’ that included economic development and democracy. In recent years, Indian historians have taken the lead in breaking apart the old narratives, at the cost, some would argue, of a cherished cultural continuity and the stirring stories of heroism that foster patriotism. What they have given us in its place is what the leading ‘subalternist’ Partha Chatterjee calls ‘fragments’ of history. But such a history is no less critical for the formation of an informed citizenry of an individual nation, or of the world.
4 - Revolt, the Modern State, and Colonized Subjects, 1848–1885
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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The revolt of 1857–8, which swept across much of north India in opposition to British rule, has conventionally been taken as the dividing point that marks the beginning of modern India. Historical periodization is, however, always somewhat arbitrary. With greater distance from the colonial period, when the searing chaos of the uprising was understood either as ‘Mutiny’ to the colonial rulers or as the ‘First War of Independence’ to many nationalists, it is possible to focus on substantial, long-term transformations rather than on a single event. Such an emphasis, moreover, places India in the context of changes taking place in the larger world, not just in terms of events and personalities in India itself. Far from modernity ‘happening’ in Europe and then being transplanted to a country like India, many of these changes took place in relation to each other.
Modern technological changes, among them canals, railways, and telegraph, were introduced into India within years of their introduction in Europe. Changes essential to the modern state, including the unification of sovereignty, the surveying and policing of the population, and institutions meant to create an educated citizenry were also, broadly speaking, introduced during the same period in India and in parts of Europe. Indeed, certain modern practices and institutions were either stimulated by the Indian experience or originated in India itself. Municipal cemeteries, as noted above, appeared in India before they did in England; the same is true of English literature as a curricular subject, and of state-sponsored scientific and surveying institutions. The colonial relationship with India was essential, moreover, as Gauri Vishwanathan recently argued, to one of the fundamental characteristics of modern states, namely the practice of state secularism. At the same time, new religious organizations in both India and Britain shared the common pattern of an unprecedented involvement of the laity. In both countries too, the spread of electoral politics was accompanied by debate over the place of religion in public life. Above all, the economic lives of both countries were profoundly, and increasingly, intertwined.
Chronology
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Frontmatter
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Contents
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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2 - Mughal Twilight: The Emergence of Regional States and the East India Company
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Our time traveller in 1707, especially if he had been misled by European accounts of ‘Oriental despots’, may well have failed to appreciate the extent to which the Mughal Empire, like other pre-modern political systems of that scale, operated by a hierarchic distribution of authority among different levels of society. There was no monopoly of military force; there was no monopoly of political authority. The Mughal himself was shahinshah, ‘king of kings’, hence one sovereign among many. Competition to expand geographically was always endemic, as was competition between the vertical levels of the system. It is conflict, as Bernard Cohn has written using the late Mughal period as an example of such systems, that achieves the precarious consensus and balance that allows such political systems to persist. Effective rule required not only resolving competition but also judgment about the conflicts with which to engage. During the first half of the eighteenth century Mughal power contracted, while those who had once been subordinate to the Mughals flourished. Among the new regional powers was a joint stock company of English traders, which, by century's end, was poised to claim the mantle of the Mughals as ruler of the subcontinent.
The ‘Fault Lines’ of Mughal Control
A cogent perspective on Aurangzeb as ruler comes from one Bhimsen, a Hindu Kayastha memoirist, who, in his final decades of service, acted as auditor and inspector for a Rajput noble. Writing at the end of Aurangzeb's life, Bhimsen gives us a ‘grass roots’ view of what he sees as imperial failure. He was, as John Richards has written, one of many who claimed generations of loyalty to the Mughal regime, men who prided themselves on their devotion and courage as well as their mastery of Indo-Persian courtly culture. As Bhimsen followed his master into the futile battles against the rebellious zamindars and chiefs, he despaired of the difference between earlier Mughal rule and that of the later Aurangzeb:
When the aim of the ruling sovereign is the happiness of the people, the country prospers, the peasants are at ease, and people live in peace. The fear of the king's order seizes the hearts of high and low. Now that the last age [kaliyuga] has come, nobody has an honest desire; the Emperor, seized with a passion for capturing forts, has given up attending to the happiness of the subjects. The nobles have turned aside from giving good counsel.
7 - The 1940s: Triumph and Tragedy
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Summary
On 3 September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared India, alongside Britain itself, at war with Hitler's Germany. Two months later, in protest against this unilateral act, which appeared to Indians as a reassertion of high-handed British imperialism, the Congress ministries in the provinces resigned. In March of 1940, taking advantage of what they saw as a fortuitous ‘deliverance’ from Congress rule, the Muslim League, at its annual meeting in Lahore, enacted the Pakistan Resolution, with its ill-defined demand for independent Muslim states. The stage was set for the crises that were to dominate the decade of the 1940s – the war, the Congress's final movement of non-cooperation, the rise of Muslim nationalism, and then, finally, in 1947 independence, with the devastating partition of the subcontinent into two states.
The unilateral declaration of war, a provocative act of the sort that had so often characterized British policy in India, was a tactical blunder. So too, arguably, was the resignation of the Congress ministries, which set in motion a protracted series of negotiations and acts of civil disobedience that were to culminate in the climactic August ‘rising’ of 1942. During the later 1930s Britain and India had been drifting slowly towards an amicable parting of the ways. Britain's stake in India had been declining as economic nationalism took hold around the world, while on the political front, after 1937, Congress politicians had demonstrated an ability to govern that augured well for an independent India. The coming of the war, with the resignation of the Congress ministries, changed everything. Now, suddenly, with its back to the wall, fighting first Hitler, and then from December 1941 the Japanese as well, the British were desperate to retain access to the resources, in men and matériel, as well as the secure bases that India supplied. The Indian Army was increased in size tenfold to fight in the Middle East and South-East Asia, as well as to protect the homeland as the Japanese in 1942 advanced on Assam. As the British endeavoured to feed, clothe, and arm this immense force, they consumed their investments in India; by the end of the war, no longer Britain's debtor, India had piled up sterling balances in London of over 1,000 million pounds.
5 - Civil Society, Colonial Constraints, 1885–1919
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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The decades that spanned the turn of the twentieth century marked the apogee of the British imperial system, whose institutional framework had been set after 1857. At the same time, these decades were marked by a rich profusion and elaboration of voluntary organizations; a surge in publication of newspapers, pamphlets and posters; and the writing of fiction and poetry as well as political, philosophical, and historical non-fiction. With this activity, a new level of public life emerged, ranging from meetings and processions to politicized street theatre, riots, and terrorism. The vernacular languages, patronized by the government, took new shape as they were used for new purposes, and they became more sharply distinguished by the development of standardized norms. The new social solidarities forged by these activities, the institutional experience they provided, and the redefinitions of cultural values they embodied were all formative for the remainder of the colonial era, and beyond.
Yet it was only to be in the 1920s that the British began to recognize the hollowness of their long-held assumption that self-rule for India would be pushed off into an indefinite future. The viceroys who presided over the final decades of the century – Dufferin (1884–8), Lansdowne (1888–94), and Elgin (1894–9) – were, in Percival Spear's phrase, ‘imperial handymen’ all. Unshaken by the fissures revealed in the Ilbert Bill controversy and imagining a future like the past, they endeavoured to secure the economic interests of empire, establish secure borders, and provide a government of limited responsibilities. Curzon, as viceroy from 1899 to 1905, by his driven brilliance in seeking those very same ends, precipitated a public furor that energized the till then quiescent Indian National Congress, which was to lead India to independence. The succeeding decade was one of public action and government response, including, under Minto as viceroy (1906–10), a modest expansion of Indian participation in governing councils. Through the First World War, however, the Indian role in governing was limited to providing manpower almost exclusively at the lower levels of government, to service in the army, and to consultation on the part of loyal elites. This continuity with the earlier colonial period sat uneasily on a society experiencing change in every dimension of social, political, and cultural life, while increasingly convinced that imperial rule did not further India's interests.
Biographical notes
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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8 - Congress Raj: Democracy and Development, 1950–1989
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Hammered out during intense debates in a constituent assembly which sat from 1947 to 1949, India's constitution established a set of principles and institutions that have governed the country's political life up to the present. Under it, as Nehru sought to create a ‘modern’ free India, the country decisively repudiated much of its colonial heritage. Although remaining a member of the Commonwealth, India was proclaimed a republic, thus ending its allegiance to the British Crown, when the constitution was inaugurated. That date, 26 January, known as Republic Day, with a massive parade in New Delhi, has remained a major focus for India's celebration of its nationhood. Rejecting the imperial vice-regal style of government associated with the Raj, the new India nevertheless sought inspiration in domestic British political practice. The constitution put in place a Westminster style of government, with a parliament comprising two houses, and a prime minister selected by the majority party in the lower house, called the Lok Sabha or House of the People. Nehru took up the position of prime minister, while the president, installed in the old vice-regal palace, acted, like the sovereign in Britain, as titular head of state. The old colonial separate electorates, with their divisive tendencies, were in similar fashion abolished in favour of single member constituencies, modelled on those in Britain itself, open to all.
Elements of the old colonial style of governance nevertheless persisted under the new order. Some 200 articles of the Government of India Act of 1935, for instance, were incorporated into the new constitution. The federal structure, in which power was shared between the centre and the former provinces, now become states, remained intact. So too, significantly, did the provision of the 1935 Act which awarded the provincial governor, and president, imperial-style power to set aside elected ministries in times of emergency. These powers were often employed in independent India to intimidate recalcitrant state governments, and, in one exceptional instance, to facilitate a period of authoritarian ‘emergency’ rule throughout the country. In addition, the administrative structure of the Indian Civil Service, renamed the Indian Administrative Service, remained in place. This ‘steel frame’, its British members replaced by Indians trained in the same spirit of impartial governance, was seen, in the tumultuous years after independence, as a necessary bulwark of stability for the new government.
6 - The Crisis of the Colonial Order, 1919–1939
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Summary
The year 1919 was a watershed in the modern history of India. Nothing was the same afterwards. By its end the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, in prospect since the previous year, were enacted. While the reforms withheld swaraj, the ‘self-rule’ increasingly demanded by nationalists, they foreshadowed a period when Indians would determine their own fate. The year, however, also brought the repressive Rowlatt bills and the catastrophe of the Amritsar massacre. For many, if not most, Indians the reforms had become a poisoned chalice. They chose instead a novel course of political action, that of ‘non-violent non-cooperation’, and a new leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, only recently returned from twenty years in South Africa. Gandhi would endure as a lasting symbol of moral leadership for the entire world community.
Reform and Repression
In August 1917 Edwin Montagu announced that the objective of British rule in India would be the ‘gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. This declaration decisively repudiated the old ‘durbar’ model of Indian politics. India would instead follow the path already chalked out by the white-settler dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Inevitably, too, it meant that, rather than disdaining the educated as an unrepresentative minority, the British would repose in them the confidence due future leaders of India. These men were, Montagu averred, in a telling comment on the declaration, ‘intellectually our children’, who had ‘imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them’. Britain, however, retained the right to set the pace of reform, which was to be slow and measured, a boon, as the British saw it, to be conferred upon the Indians as they qualified for its benefits.
3 - The East India Company Raj, 1772–1850
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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In 1772, determined at last to put an end to the chaos and fiscal disorder its intervention had precipitated in Bengal, the Company's directors appointed Warren Hastings, a man with a distinguished record of diplomatic and commercial service in India, as the first governor-general of the company's Indian territories. Subordinating the other presidencies to a new capital established in Calcutta, Hastings set about the task of creating an ordered system of government for British India. Hastings's thirteen years at the helm of government were far from untroubled. Indeed, throughout his years in office he had to contend with a divided council in Calcutta whose majority opposed his every move, while after his return to England his actions were made the subject of an embittered impeachment trial in the House of Commons. As a spectacle, for Hastings was ultimately acquitted, the trial dominated British public life for years. Nevertheless, Hastings laid an enduring foundation for the British Raj in India. This chapter will begin by examining the structures of governance established by Hastings, and his successor Lord Cornwallis (1785–93), in British-ruled Bengal. It will then ask how and why the British went on to conquer the entire Indian subcontinent in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it will conclude by assessing the relationships that grew up between what was known as the ‘Company Bahadur’, as though it were a Mughal grandee, and its Indian subjects in the years up to 1850.
Foundation of Colonial Rule
When Hastings took office, the East India Company's agents knew nothing about India apart from the requirements of trade, and they almost never ventured outside their coastal enclaves. With rare exceptions, among them Hastings himself, they knew no Indian languages. Within the existing British Empire, furthermore, rule over a vast indigenous population such as that of India was unprecedented. With the partial exception of Ireland, Britain's previous imperial expansion, in the West Indies and North America, had involved the dispossession of the native peoples in favour of settlers from Europe and Africa. Hence, as they confronted their new responsibilities in India, the British found themselves sailing in wholly uncharted waters. Their difficulties were further enhanced by the reluctance of the Company's agents in India to abandon their profitable trading activities for the uncertain advantages of government.
Index
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Bibliographic essay
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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1 - Sultans, Mughals, and Pre-Colonial Indian Society
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Imagine a time traveller standing in Mughal Delhi, amidst the splendor of the emperor Shah Jahan's (r. 1627–58) elegant, riverside city, in the year 1707 (plate 1.1). News had come of the death of Shah Jahan's long-ruling son, Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) in the distant Deccan, where he had been engaged in arduously extending his vast empire. The traveller, understandably wondering what the death of a mighty monarch would mean, might first have looked back in time a century, say to the death of Shah, Jahan's grandfather, Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Had he done so, he would have seen the key institutions in place that had made the Mughals, in the intervening century, the most powerful empire the subcontinent had ever known. It was far greater in population, wealth, and power than the contemporaneous Turko-Mongol empires with which the Mughals shared so much: the Persian Safavids and the Ottoman Turks. The Mughal population in 1700 may have been 100 million, five times that of the Ottomans, almost twenty that of the Safavids. Given the trajectory of continuity and growth that had taken place in the seventeenth century, our time traveller at the turn of the eighteenth century might legitimately have imagined a Mughal future to match the glorious past.
But if, Janus-faced, the traveller then looked ahead a century, say to 1803, he would have found not continuity but extraordinary change. He would have seen an empire existing only in name amidst a landscape of competing regional powers. Among these regional states was one which, in 1707 only a minor European trading body operating from coastal enclaves, was now transformed into a governing body based in the rich, eastern province of Bengal. The Mughal emperor, though still a symbolic overlord, was now confined to the area around Delhi, himself prey to Afghans, the western Deccan-based Marathas, and, in 1803, placed under the control of that very English Company which, as this new century turned, had lately come to a vision of creating an empire itself.
Preface to the third edition
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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The first edition of A Concise History of India appeared in 2001, and covered events up to the end of the twentieth century in 2000. A second edition, titled A Concise History of Modern India, to more accurately reflect its coverage, appeared in 2006. That edition took the story of India up to 2005 and included the displacement of the BJP government by the Congress under Manmohan Singh the previous year. We are immensely grateful for the enthusiastic response this book has received over the last ten years from teachers, colleagues, and students. Although not meant as a textbook, to our pleasant surprise, A Concise History of Modern India has been widely adopted in college and university courses on South Asia.
The current third edition has left intact the material in Chapters 1 through 8, up to 1989. We revised these chapters extensively for the second edition, incorporating new perspectives and new research into our narrative. Even though a number of important studies have appeared over the last several years covering the colonial and early national periods, not to mention the eighteenth century, we did not consider revision necessary at this point. Chapter 9, however, and the Epilogue, had become seriously outdated and, to be useful, required a comprehensive revision amounting to a complete reorganization. The current Chapter 9 covers the twenty-year period from 1990 to 2010 as one continuous narrative. An attempt has been made, furthermore, to reorganize the chapter in a thematic rather than wholly chronological fashion. Its two major sections assess successively the changing nature of India's politics, with special attention given to the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the growth and consequences of economic liberalization over the twenty years since the coming into office in 1991 of the Narasimha Rao government. We reflect in particular on a troubling economic polarization, with growing affluence in the cities but profound disadvantage for others. Among the most depressed are the largely tribal populations of interior central and eastern India, where there has been endemic violence in recent years. The chapter concludes with a look at the fascinating question of the rivalry between India and China, the two Asian ‘giants’, as the locus of global economic power shifts eastward. In this section we have relied substantially on the writing of such experts as the distinguished economist Amartya Sen.
Glossary
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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Illustrations
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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9 - Democratic India at the Turn of the Millennium: Prosperity, Poverty, Power
- Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
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We are a free and sovereign people today and we have rid ourselves of the burden of the past. We look at the world with clear and friendly eyes and at the future with faith and confidence.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, broadcast from New Delhi, 15 August 1947The hopeful words of any nation's founding fathers are likely to be read with some degree of irony decades later. If the words of the founding fathers at times rang hollow, they also, in fact, predicted many successes, not least India's proud claim to be the world's largest democracy (Plate 9.1). By the turn of the millennium, more than a dozen general elections and hundreds of state elections had produced a high degree of politicization extending to those long outside the political system. In 1997, at the conclusion of free India's first half-century, K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005), Dalit by birth, was sworn in as the country's president, a powerful symbol of the progress and aspirations of ‘untouchables’. The role of president, importantly, had already earlier on three occasions been assumed by a Muslim and, most poignantly, at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination, by a Sikh. The Supreme Court's activism – for example, indicting top government and political leaders for bribery and corruption as well as favouring public-interest litigation – strengthened the effective exercise of civil liberties. India's press continued to be renowned for its independence and vitality. Economic liberalization had stimulated the growth of a prospering urban middle class and brought about for India a major role in the global software industry. ‘Bollywood’ films and a culture increasingly open to the larger world, together with India's traditional role as a site of tourism and a producer of the arts, wisdom, and handicrafts, delighted ever-increasing numbers of consumers worldwide.
Yet the country continued to be weighed down by seemingly intractable poverty, in the countryside and in urban slums alike. The millennial years were also marked by substantial violence directed against Muslims as well as others, among them Christians, tribals, and Dalits. In 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu militants was followed by an anti-Muslim pogrom that left at least a thousand people dead; an orchestrated campaign of even greater violence followed a decade later in Gujarat.
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