The British in India

 

On 1 January 1877, Queen Victoria took the title of Empress of India. She owed her Indian Empire to the activities of the East India Company, a private trading organization which began in 1600, to trade in the East India. The company needed trading stations in the countries with which it traded, such as Guangzhou in China, or Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in India. Gradually, there footholds on the Indian sub-continent were expanded, as the officials of the Company used bribes to exploit the greed of the rajahs and petty prices who ruled the different territories of feudal India.

In general, the East India Company pioneered the principle of indirect rule. The Indian princes were left to rule their own territories, but the company felt free to interfere, whenever it thought necessary. The company formed its own army to protect these friendly governments.

Slowly, the British staked out acclaim to the whole of the sub-continent. In 1784, the British Government appointed a Governor General to have overall control of the activities of the East India Company, and those of the numerous British nationals who flocked to India to seek their fortunes.

The British way of life.

Few of the British made their homes here, as in Australia or Canada. They made little effort to assimilate their lifestyle into the culture of Indian people, preferring instead to bring Britain to India. Balls, picnics, fox-hunting and tea parties reminded them of ‘home’ English became the official language, not Hindi. But, in so doing, they frequently offended the Indian people, with their ignorance of Indian culture and the customs and rituals of its main religions.

The India Mutiny

Opposition to the Britain presence festered, and ten erupted in the Indian Mutiny in 1857, Sepoys near Delhi mutinied after being told to use cartridges in their rifles which they believed had been greased with pig fate (which offended the Moslem) and cow fat (which offended the Hindus). Resentment against the British and the East India Company, had been building up for years. Needless to say, modern weapons quelled the Mutiny, but with much loss of life and brutal savagery on both side.

Progress

India was then a country of about 150 million people, a figure which doubled in the next fifty years. The British authorities made a genuine attempt to bring the benefits of Western technology to India in the late nineteenth century.

By 1919, there were 660,000 kilometres of railway line throughout India – twice the length of the railway system in Britain and nearly as a that in Russia. Hospital, clinics, schools and universities were opened. Indian students like Gandhi and Nehru, studied in Britain.

But there was still enormous poverty and frequent famine, despite western technology – the dams, irrigation schemes and the newly built factories. Many India’s wanted a say in their country future. some were prepared to move slowly. 1885 the India National Congress was founded by moderates, proud of the new India and it undoubted progress at the hands of the British Raj, but they felt it unfair that many of the senior administrative posts in the India’s government were given to Europeans not Indians. They wanted to be more closely involved with the British not to replace them.