History Aditi Maan

PREFACE
“In pursuit of perfection” is the motto of VIPS. To achieve this goal, Law School,
Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, under the guidance of Dr. S. C. Vats,
Chairman, VIPS, an eminent educationist and philanthropist, focuses of each and every
aspect and process including methodology and pedagogy required to impart education.
The Case study method is one of the essential pedagogies in legal education. The reason is
contemporary law is not only outcome of the legal statutes, but also of cases decided by the
courts. Statutes and text books do provide insight into the law; however, application and
applicability of law may differ from case to case. The courts provide additional clarifications
and interpretations of enacted legislations on the laws based on precedents and other related
sources of law. At times the courts need to see into the overseas judgments, as well, to find
out solution to legal problem. Therefore, there is a need to study the cases to understand
various scenarios under which a law may be applied.
Considering the significance of case study, Vivekananda School of Law and Legal Studies,
VIPS has come up with a Case Study Manual Series on all subjects of contemporary
importance. Much thought has been put into selection of most important cases along with the
relevant material. The contents are primarily based on the syllabus of universities. he cases
selected are the one which represent the development of law. The work is divided into four to
five chapters, having following points, namely:
Introduction: An introduction is tracing out the theoretical and/or theoretical

background, relevant statutes and contemporary issues related to the subject.
I. At a glance
It will help readers to understand the significant aspects of the theme/topic of the
chapter.
II. Decided cases and material

This part of chapter will give selective paragraphs of cases decided by the courts. It
will also cover the material relating to the chapter.
III. Practice exercise/Model questions

The questions will be suggestive on the points to think on. It will help to open up
the issues to be discussed or researched further.
Case Study Manual Series will be helpful for students and academicians, as also for
voracious readers who wish to trace the development of law through decided cases. It is also
helpful for the aspirants of competitive examinations, such as Civil services and Judicial
services. Above all, it is useful for every curious person, who wishes to know the evolution
and development of law through cases.
We would like to thank Dr. S. C. Vats, Chairman, VIPS and entire Management of VIPS
who have encouraged and given opportunity to law faculty members to come up with the
Case Study Manual on various important subjects.
Special appreciation to Ms. Niketa Singh, Research Associate, VSLLS, Ms. Gauri Gupta,
Assistant Professor, Ms. Chitwan, Teaching Associate who has meticulously work to give
final shape to this work. The quality services rendered by Mr. Mukesh Sachdeva, Library
–in- Charge of VSLLS, VIPS also need special mention.
Dr. Rashmi Salpekar

Professor and Dean
Vivekananda School of Law and Legal Studies (VSLLS)
Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies (VIPS)
Indian Legal History
BRIEF INTRODUCTION
The subject of legal history is largely based on the Indian history of modern period
and primarily focuses on origin and making of the legal system during the colonial
period. The pragmatic reason behind focussing on the British period is that the existing
judicial system is mainly based on the institutions set up during this period. The
roots of any existing institution lie deeply embedded in the past and can be traced by
understanding the historical processes that led to its evolvement. Thus, to comprehend
the present legal system of India, it is imperative that one acquires knowledge of its
origin and development in the course of time.
India as a country has long history of over five thousand years. Since ancient times,
the legal system has evolved with its own distinctive characteristics. Prior to the
advent of Muslims, the legal system or the legal texts was principally based on religious
concepts and doctrines. The initial legal texts were based on Shruti and Smriti literature
that dealt with the concept of Dharma according to the Varna system. The system of
law and justice, as was followed in the ancient times, varied for people belonging to
different classes based on their social status in the Varna order. The traditional texts
which expound the classical Hindu Law are the Dharmashastras, which are believed
to have been composed during the sixth century BCE, and the Smritis. The Manusmriti
is foremost among the ancient legal text on Dharma. The Indian jurisprudence
continued to grow for centuries even after the later Smritis were composed, through
numerous commentaries and digests which were not mere explanations of earlier
texts but embodied substantial development of traditional law. How effective these
commentaries have been can be easily seen from the way the commentaries of
Vijnyanesvara (Mitaksara) and Jimutavahana (Dayabhaga) hold relevance till today
for Hindu succession law. With the establishment of Delhi Sultanate, the Islamic
law based on Shariat, became the law of the state in criminal matters whereas for
civil matters, the personal laws of the people were considered. Like Hindu law, the
Islamic law based on Quran, Hadis, Ijmas and Qiyas, immense and complex in nature
as there existed several schools with varied interpretations. This situation continued
during the Mughal period as well.
With the coming of British, the religious inclinations of the legal system began to
change and there was more visible uniformity in the application of law in India.
This compilation commences with the origin of the East India Company through
the Charter of 1600 and then traces its journey from a trading company to a political
power. It gives a brief historical background of the political conditions existing at
the time of arrival of Britishers in India. Beginning with Battle of Plassey which is
considered to be a turning point in Indian history, it further explores the process by
which the British were able to establish their rule, initially in Bengal, and then their
eventual spread in the rest of the Indian subcontinent.
With the establishment of British rule in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa after the Battle of
Buxar, the East India Company became the virtual ruler and gradually started
expanding its territories to the rest of Indian subcontinent. With the growing political
Indian Legal History
power and area, it was crucial for the company to assume legal power as well.
Initially, British provided some space for the usages and customs of the indigenous
communities. The personal laws of Hindus and Muslims, as they developed under
British, reflect the attitudes, policies and measure adopted by the British rulers. The
early period of Company’s rule also had people who had genuine interest in the
indigenous law and translated several Indian literary works in English. For instance,
‘Colebrook’s Digest’ is an English version of the enunciation of Hindu law by a
Pandit of that time. Eventually, gradual changes were introduced in the legal system
to bring uniformity of law, which eventually led to introduction of English law.
Therefore, this section will highlight the journey, significance and relevance of the
British charters, regulations and Acts that eventually paved the way for the writing
of the Constitution of India and the establishment of the Indian legal system.
This compilation also includes certain landmark cases like, the Trial of Raja Nand
Kumar, Patna Case, Cossijurah Case and Kamaluddin Case that shed a light on the
conflict of jurisdiction between the courts of the Company and the courts representing
the British Crown. These cases also give a deep insight into the procedure of trial
under law during this time. For the law students, it is fundamental to grab the vital
elements of the legal system, and the codification of law as it originated under the
English East India Company and later on developed under the British Crown.
This compilation is categorised into four Units. The first and the second Units trace
the legislative journey starting from the Charter of 1600 till the later developments
in law-making when the British government officially took over in 1858. This part
will discuss in detail all the legal changes which were introduced to modify the
existing structure in different parts of British-India. A special focus shall also be on
the contributions of individual Governor-Generals such as Cornwallis, Warren
Hastings and William Bentick in introducing legal reforms.
The third and fourth Units begin with the establishment of the High Courts in India
under the Indian Council Act of 1861 and ends with the partition of India followed
by the accession of princely kingdoms and reorganisation of Indian states. These
units will deal with the political situation of India during the freedom struggle, the
national independence movement and the role of Gandhi in India’s Independence.
These units further explore the causes and consequences of partition of India in two
nations and the phases of communalism that led to it. The compilation and
presentation of the third and fourth Units is however different, as it includes several
articles based on different approaches written by various scholars and historians.
The idea behind it is to make the students aware of kind of historical literature
available on a certain topic and to give them a push towards developing their own
understanding by critically analysing those articles. The topics such as role of Gandhiji
in India’s freedom struggle or gender in modern times have remained the most
contested subjects within the academic circles as well as on public platforms.
*******
I / Indian Legal History
INDIAN LEGAL HISTORY
(Paper Code: LL.B. 106)
Text Books:
1. M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal History, Wadhwa & Co., Nagpur, 2003
(6th Edn.).
2. V. D. Kulshrehtha and V.M. Gandhi, Landmarks of Indian Legal and
Constitutional History, Eastern Book Company, Kurukshetra, 2005.
3. M. P. Singh, Outlines of Indian Legal History, Universal Law Publishing
Co., 2010.
4. S. S. Shilwant, Indian Legal and Constitutional History, University Book
House, 2019.
5. Granville Austin, The Making of Indian Constitution, Oxford University Press,
1999
6. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest
Democracy, Macmillan, 2007.
7. Bipan Chandra, Mridula & Aditya Mukherjee, India since Independence,
Penguin, 2008.
UNIT I- EARLY DEVELOPMENTS (1600-1836)

This Unit focuses on early legal system which was established by the British East
India Company in Surat, Madras, Bombay and Bengal. It focuses on the causes and
consequences of the judicial system which was set up, with special emphasis on the
role of Governor-Generals in establishing it. The unit also highlights the defects of
the legal system by discussing the landmark cases.
1. The English East India Company: Provisions of Administration of

East India Company and Justice in Early Royal Charter (1600 and 1661)
1.1 Charter of 1600
1.2 Charter of 1661
2. Organisational set-up of the English Company’s Factories

or Settlements in India
2.1 Administration of Justice in Surat (1613to 1687)
2.2 Administration of Justice and Development of Courts
at Madras (1639 to 1726)
II / Indian Legal History
2.3 Administration of Justice in Bombay (1668 to 1726)
2.4 Administration of Justice in Calcutta (1690 to 1726)
3. Administration of Justice and the Development of Court and

Judicial Institutions in the Presidency Towns of the East India
Company during the Period of (1726 to 1773)
3.1 Mayor’s Court and the Governors-in-Council
Merits and Demerits of the Charter of 1726
3.2 The Charter of the Supreme Court , 1774
Constitution of the Supreme Court, Power of a Court of Equity,
Jurisdictional Function and Powers, Merits & Demerits of Supreme Court,
Working of Supreme Court in Calcutta
4. The Regulating Act of 1773 & The Act of Settlement , 1781

4.1 The Circumstances leading to passing of Regulating Act , 1773
Provisions of the Regulating Act, 1773, Defects of Regulating Act, 1773,
Establishment of Supreme Court in Madras and Bombay
4.2 The Circumstances leading to Passing of Regulating Act, 1781
Objects or purpose of the Settlement, 1781, Main Provisions,
Merits & Defects of the Settlement Act
5. Landmark Cases:
5.1 Raja Nand Kumar Trial (1775)
5.2 Kamaluddin Trial ( 1775)
5.3 Patna Trial (1777-1779)
5.4 Cossijurah Trial (1779-1780)
6. Beginning of Adalat System in Bengal

6.1 Warren Hastings’ Plan of 1772 and the Adalat system of Courts;
Reforms made under the Plan of 1774 and the
Reorganisation of Adalats in 1780
6.2 Judicial Measures of Lord Cornwallis: 1787, 1790 and 1793
6.3 Judicial Reforms of Lord Bentinck
III / Indian Legal History
UNIT II- EVOLUTION OF LAW AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS
In continuity with the first unit, this unit mentions the changes which were introduced
in the existing legal system of Hindus and Muslims. The unit also deals with the
changes which occurred after Britain took over the political reins of India from East
India Company following the mutiny of 1857. It also gives a detailed study of the
legal institutions such as High Courts which were established.
7. Development of Personal Laws of Hindus and Mohammedans

Introduction, Determination of Personal Laws and Difficulty of English Judges,
Legislature of Hindu & Muslim Law
8. Development of Criminal Law

Ancient Hindu Criminal Law, Early Muslim Criminal Law,
Classification of Offences & Punishments
9. Development of Civil Law: Mofussil

Bengal Scheme, the Charter Act of 1813, Concept of Justice, Equity and
Good Conscience, Law applicable to Non-Hindus and Non- Muslims
10. Codification of Laws: 1833-1882

Emergence of the idea of need for an All-India Legislature
10.1Relevant Provisions of the Charter Act, 1833
All India Legislature, Law Member & Law Commission
10.2First Law Commission
10.3Second Law Commission
11. The Indian Council Act, 1861

Provisions of Indian Council Act, 1861,
Central Legislative Council – Its Composition, Powers and Functions
12. Establishment of High Court

12.1The High Court Act, 1861
Constitution, Jurisdiction (Civil, Criminal, Admiralty, Testamentary,
Inter-state and Matrimonial), Exercise of Jurisdiction by Single Judge or
by Division Courts, Power of Superintendence
IV / Indian Legal History
13. The Privy Council
Introduction & History of Privy Council, Advantages and Disadvantages of
Jurisdiction of the Privy Council over the Courts in India
13.1Establishment of Federal Court
Establishment, Appointment of Judges, Qualifications & Jurisdiction
Abolition of Federal Court
UNIT III- THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENTS AND

FRAMING OF INDIAN CONSTITUTION
The Unit emphasizes on the developments that took place from the Government of
India Act, 1909 till the time when Constitution of India came into force. It gives a
detailed discussion on the federal structure of the Indian Constitution.
14. The Indian Council Act, 1909

The Minto-Morley Reforms & Provisions of the Act
15. The Government of India Act, 1919

Montague- Chelmsford Reforms, Salient Feature of the Act,
Setting of Bicameral System of Legislature at the Centre,
The Council of States (Upper House), the Legislative Assembly (Lower House),
Powers of Central Legislature & Dyarchy in India
16. The Government of India Act, 1935

16.1Federalism under the Government of India Act, 1935
16.2Main Provisions of the Government of India Act , 1935
Federal Government, Power of Governor-General under the Act,
Division of Power, Dyarchy at the Centre, Bicameral Federal Legislature &
Establishment of Federal Court
 Article: Bool Chand, Federal Court in India, 1937, The Indian Journal of
Political Science, Vol. 4,
No. 4 (April—June, 1943), pp. 354-362
V / Indian Legal History
UNIT IV- MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY INDIA
This Unit consists of selective topics from Modern Indian History such as phases of
communalism which led to the Partition of India. Most significantly, it focuses on
the freedom movement and role of Gandhiji in it. It further discusses concepts like
‘Colonialism’ and ‘Imperialism’. The Unit also elaborates on the significant topics
like notions of Gender and Justice since ancient times.
17. Colonialism and Imperialism: Stages

17.1Permanent Settlement in Bengal
Articles:
 P. J. Marshall, Early British Imperialism in India, Past & Present,
No. 106 (Feb., 1985), pp. 164-169
 Aditya Mukherjea, The Return of the Colonial in Indian Economic
History: The Last Phase of Colonialism in India, Social Scientist, Vol. 36,
No. 3/4 (Mar. - Apr., 2008), pp. 3-44
18. Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements

18.1Gandhi as a National Figure and his Role in the
Freedom Struggle
Articles:
 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Gandhi’s Swaraj, Economic and Political Weekly,
Vol. 44, No. 50 (December 12-18, 2009), pp. 34-39.
 S. K. Chaube, Gandhi and the Indian Freedom Movement, The Indian
Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 4, Special Issue on ‘The Indian
National Congress: A Century in Perspective’
(October-December 1985), pp. 430-437.
 Irfan Habib, Gandhi and the National Movement, Social Scientist,
Vol. 23, No. 4/6 (Apr. - Jun., 1995), pp. 3-15
18.2Partition: Politics and Communalism
Articles:
 David Gilmartin, The Historiography of India’s Partition: Between
Civilization and Modernity, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 74,
No. 1 (February) 2015: 23–41.
 Chandni Saxena, Dimensions and Dynamics of Violence during
Partition of India, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress,
Vol. 74 (2013), pp. 909-920
VI / Indian Legal History
 Ian Copland, The Princely States, the Muslim League, and
the Partition of India in 1947, The International History Review,
Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 38-69
18.3Accession of Princely States and Reorganisation of States
Article:
 Phool Kumar Sharma, Integration of Princely States and the
Reorganisation of States in India, The Indian Journal of Political Science,
Vol. 28, No. 4 (October-December 1967), pp. 236-241
18.4Changing notions of Justice and Gender from
Ancient to Modern times
Article:
 Kumkum Roy, Gender and Early Textual Traditions (Proceeding), Nehru
Memorial Library, 2015
*******
1 / Indian Legal History
India before the arrival of British
Background of the Establishment of British Power in Bengal:

British came to India as traders, seeking trade privileges from the then ruling power
of India, Mughals. Indian commodities were immensely popular in overseas markets
such as, spices, gold, silk, pearls etc., and this made the trade in Indian commodities
very beneficial for the merchants. The sea route to India had already been discovered
by Vasco da Gama in the year 1498, which made India accessible to the European
powers. Besides British, French and Portuguese, Danes and Dutch also came to India
for trading purpose. British got the permission to establish their first factory in Surat
by a royal Mughal firman in 1612. Later, they set up their factories in Bombay, Madras
and Calcutta also.
Battle of Plassey (1757) and Battle of Buxar (1764):
Battle of Plassey is considered as the turning point of Indian History. It was the
battle between forces of Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-daula and English East India
company in Palashi (Plassey) near Calcutta. The reason behind the war was that
the Nawab stopped the Company from extending the fortification of their factory.
Robert Clive, the British commander, bribed Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of
the Nawab and thus, in the battle field, the Nawab did not get any supporting
forces, resulting in his defeat.
Before the battle, Nawab was able to defeat the forces of British and as a punishment,
stuffed the soldiers in a dungeon at Fort William for a night. According to one survivor,
John Holwell, 123 people died out of 146 due to suffocation and heat exhaustion. It
became famous as ‘Black Hole incident’. The soldiers who ran way got help from
British forces who were stationed in Madras. Robert Clive, the commander of British
forces, used his diplomacy and shrewdness to merge all the allies of Nawab Siraj-
ud-Daula to his side.
The traitors of the battle were Mir Jafar (who became first titular Nawab under
British), Jagat Seth, (a Marwari Banker), Manik Chand (a financer), Omi Chand
(officer in Calcutta), Rai Durlabh (treasurer) and Ghaseeti Begum (maternal aunt of
the Nawab). It was the treachery of these people that led to the defeat of Nawab
Siraj-ud-Daula. After the battle, Mir Jafar was declared as Nawab of Bengal on
certain conditions.
When differences emerged between British and the new Nawab, Mir Jafar, he was
removed and Mir Qasim was made the Nawab of Bengal. With time, Mir Qasim
realised the wicked intentions of British and thus, after combining the forces of Bengal
with the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam
II, fought Britishers.
The combined forces of three rulers could not defeat British, resulting in direct
annexation of Bengal.With the conquest of Bengal, the first phase of British conquest
of India was completed. British became virtual rulers of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
Most of the remaining North Indian rulers were now dependent on them. After
conquering Bengal, British now desired to conquer the entire sub-continent
The three major powers in India who resisted British were- Haider Ali and son Tipu
Sultan in Mysore, Marathas and Nizam of Hyderabad. British, again through
diplomacy and tactics (Divide and Rule Policy), were not only able to eliminate
these three forces but also ousted their only European competition, the French.
THE ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY: ORIGIN
The first East India Company was incorporated in England under a charter granted
by Queen Elizabeth on 31st December, 1600. Its official title was ‘the Governor and
Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’. The company had
the exclusive rights to trade in parts of Asia, Africa and America. No other British
subject or merchant could trade in this area without the permission of the company.
Salient Features of the Charter of 1600:
a.) The Charter issued by the Queen to the company was given for 14 years and
could be extended for another 15 years if the company was not threatening and
causing any issues for the British Crown and its subjects;
b.) The company was managed by ‘Court of Directors’. The members of the
company annually elected a Governor and 24 directors to manage the affairs of
the company. The Court of the company could make laws, orders and ordinances
for the ‘good governance of the company and its employees’ and ‘for continuance
of the trade’;
c.) The laws, penalties and punishments should not be contrary to the British
Law. The punishments could only be mild such as fines, forfeitures or
imprisonment. No capital sentence could be given by the company’s Court. The
legislative power was primarily intended to permit only minor legislation to the
company so as to enable it to regulate its own business and maintain discipline
among its servants. In 1623, King James I granted more power to the company
to issue commissions to its Presidents or Chief Officers in its settlements
authorizing them to punish offences committed on land by the company’s
servants. This commission, thus, granted the company the power to inflict
punishment to its servants, both on seas and on the Indian soil, to enforce
discipline.
Merger of the Company:
Another company, the second East India Company, was given exclusive trading
rights with India under the Charter of 1698 by William III. In 1709, under an award,
both these companies, the first and the second East India Companies, were united
and thus it became ‘The East India Company’.
The Charter of 16611:
The need for this Charter was felt since the Company wanted to expand its legal
jurisdiction as it was becoming difficult for them to handle the subjects of the company
with limited power. It, thus, requested the Council of State in England for grant of
1
M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History , (Nagpur: Lexis Nexis) 2012
powers to their Presidents and Councils in India in order to enforce discipline in all
Englishmen resident within their jurisdiction. Thus, in 1661 Charles II granted a
new Charter to the company authorizing the governor and council of each factory
to judge all persons under them, in all civil and criminal cases according to the laws
of England.
Salient Features of the Charter of 1661:
The two main features of the Charter were:
a.) The company was empowered to appoint a Governor and the Council at its
factories; and
b.) The Governor and Council were authorized to judge all persons belonging to
or living under the company in civil and criminal cases according to the laws of
England and to execute judgments accordingly. In places where there was no
Governor, the Chief Factor and the Council were to send offenders either to the
place having the Governor and Council or to England, to be punished.
In regard to the Indians, the Charter placed them under the English Law and did
not reserve their own laws and customs. The Charter indicated clearly that the
company was no longer merely a trading concern but was on its way to becoming a
territorial power as well.
Establishment of Factories:
a.) Surat: Surat, since ancient times, has been an important trading centre owing to
its proximity to the sea. It was an important commercial centre, an international
port as well as a populous town. These features attracted British for whom the sea
was the only means of communication. A factory was a place consisting of offices,
residences for company’s employees and spacious warehouses for storage of goods.
In the year 1612 Englishmen succeeded in establishing their factory in Surat with
the permission of the local Mughal Governor.
Later, Englishmen felt that they need more permanency for their factory in Surat
and thus, King James I sent an ambassador Sir Thomas Roe who succeeded in getting
a firman from the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, in 1615. It granted certain privileges to
the British, one of them being, that British could live according to their own religion
and laws in India. Also, the President of the factory could settle the disputes, but in
a dispute between an Englishman and Indian, the matter would be settled by the
local native authorities. Besides these, the Mughal governors and Qazis and Muftis
were also asked to provide speedy justice to the Englishmen and protect them from
all kinds of injuries and oppressions.
Judicial Arrangements in Surat Factory:2
a.) Administration was vested in the President and Council who were appointed
by the Company. All decisions in the Council meeting were taken by the majority
of votes. No veto power was given to the president.
2
M. P. Singh, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (New Delhi: Universal Law Publishing)
2006.
b.) In the area of law and justice, Englishmen in Surat were under Dual System
of Law, i.e., English Law and Indian Law. Main responsibility of the Englishmen
at Surat was to govern themselves and not to care for the Indians who had their
own local courts. No regular tribunal was created.
The President and the Council were wielding the judicial power. The quality of
justice was not very high as the President and councillors were traders and not
experts of law. Englishmen had no respect for established the judicial system.
The Surat settlement of the Company remained in prominence until 1617. Later, the
seat of the President and Council was shifted to Bombay and thus, Surat lost its
importance.
b) Madras: Madras was founded by Francis Day in 1639 on a land granted to him
by a Hindu Raja. A fort named St. George was established there by the British. The
Raja had granted full power and authority to the Company. There was a small
village called Madraspatnam adjacent to the fort. Many Indians moved to this area
due to thriving trade and commerce there. Gradually, this village grew in size and
came to be known as ‘Black Town’ as most of the inhabitants were Indians. Inside
the fort lived British and thus, it came to be known as the ‘White Town’. Later, both
the towns jointly came to be known as ‘Madras’.
The Legal System of Madras:
The Legal system that existed in Madras until the year 1726 can be divided into
three phases:
1. First Stage (1639-1665):
Madras earlier was an agency subordinate to Surat. The Chief Officer here was
called Agent, who administered the affairs of the company with the help of the
Council. The Agent and Council were responsible for the ‘White Town’ but they
could not decide serious offences; only minor disputes could be resolved by them.
The Choultry Court /Native court was for the ‘Black Town’. Its head was the
village headman known as ‘Adigar’. This court could only decide small civil and
criminal cases. No other court was created for trial of those civil and criminal
cases which fell beyond the competency of the Choultry Court. The flaw in this
arrangement was that no specific and regular procedure existed to deal with the
matters.
2. Second Stage (1665 to 1686):
On the basis of the Charter of 1661, the company raised the status of Madras to a
Presidency and appointed a Governor and the Council who could also work as
Court. In 1678, the Governor and the Council resolved that they would sit as a
court on two days in a week to administer justice in all cases, civil and criminal,
according to the Laws of England, with the help of a Jury of twelve members. This
court was called the High Court of Judicature. This court also heard the appeals
against the decisions of the Choultry Court. Similarly, Choultry
Court was also reorganized and was empowered to take cognizance of small
matters.
3. Third Stage- (1686 to 1726):
The reason for introducing the third stage was that the crimes were increasing
and occurred more frequently on the ships. Thus, it was decided to have a court
having the jurisdiction to decide the maritime cases which took place during the
sea voyage. In 1683, Charles II granted a Charter to the company authorizing it to
establish one or more courts at such place or places as it might direct.
Admiralty Court was thus established with three members, out of which one had to
be a person learned in civil law and other two were merchants appointed by the
company. The Court was to handle the cases of trespassing, injuries committed at
the sea and cases of forfeiture and seizures of ships and goods which traded within
the company’s monopoly area. It was to decide cases according to the rules of equity
and good conscience and the laws and customs of merchants.
In 1686, a Court of Admiralty was started in Madras. In consisted of three civil
servants who were members of the Governor’s Council. In 1687, a lawyer-member
with the designation of Judge-Advocate was appointed to this court. This court
decided all cases- civil, criminal and maritime. Criminal cases were decided with
the help of a jury. For the first time, a professional lawyer was there to administer
justice and the executive gave up the judicial functions in favor of the Admiralty
Court. By 1696, the court lost its importance as the members were either corrupt or
non-experts of law. Thus, by 1704 the court ceased to work regularly.
Corporation and Mayor’s Court- In 1687, the East India Company decided to establish
a Corporation in Madras whose task was to provide a representative local
government, impose local taxes and impart speedier justice.
The first corporation in Madras was established in 1688. It had one Mayor, twelve
Alderman and Burgesses whose number ranged from 60 to 120. The tenure of office
of the Mayor was to be of one year and he was to be elected every year by the
Aldermen and Burgesses, from amongst the Aldermen themselves. The Mayor could
be removed from the office if he has been incompetent. Only an Englishman could
hold the Mayor’s office. A reserve power was vested in the Governor and Council to
remove any Mayor, Recorder, Alderman or Burgess and to appoint anyone in the
vacancy so caused.
Features of the Mayor’s Court:
The Mayor and the three Aldermen were to be known as Justices of Peace. The
Mayor and Aldermen were to form a Court of Record, known as Mayor’s Court
which was authorized to try all civil and criminal cases. It could inflict punishment
in the form of fine, imprisonment and corporal punishment. The lawyer member
was called the ‘Recorder’ who was appointed by the Mayor and aldermen for helping
them decide the important cases. The court used the jury for deciding criminal cases,
not civil cases. It also granted probates, wills and letters of administration of property
of the deceased persons. The appeals in some matters from the Mayor’s court would
go to the Admirality Court. Other peculiar feature was that no death penalty was
given to any Englishman. There was no specific law which was laid down that
could be applied by this court.
Choultry Court- After the establishment of Mayor’s Court, the Choultry Court lost
its importance. Its jurisdiction was now limited to only petty criminal cases. In civil
matters, it could hear the cases of the value of 2 pagodas (currency) only. The few
defects that emerged in the arrangement of the legal system of Madras were:
a) that there was absence of a proper judicial system;
b) the laws were uncertain and there were very severe form of punishments
which were given; and
c) the trials which were held were generally unfair and there was also a lack
of basic facilities in the prisons.
c.) Bombay: The Island of Bombay was under the Portuguese who acquired it from
Sultan Bahadur, King of Gujarat in 1534 by cession. In 1661, the Portuguese King
gave it to Charles II as a dowry gift after Charles II married his sister Princess
Catherine. Since at that time Bombay was a small place with less population, Charles
II gave it to the English East India Company at the annual rent of ten pounds.
Bombay initially was placed under the Deputy Governor and Council and remained
under the presidency at Surat until 1726. The Charter of 1668 empowered the
company to make laws for the good government of the island, and to impose penalties,
fines and even imprisonment and death. The company was also authorized to create
courts to judge all persons and all actions
1. First Stage (1668-1683):
The main architect of the judicial system in Bombay was Gerald Aungier, the Governor
of Surat factory who is considered as ‘true founder of Bombay’. Bombay was initially
divided into two divisions. Each division had a court with five judges. Some Indian
judges were also appointed. The customs officer of each division was to be the
president of the respective court. The court was authorized to decide cases of small
thefts and all civil actions involving a subject matter of nearly one hundred and fifty
rupees. The Deputy-Governor and Council were to constitute a superior court, which
would hear appeals from the divisional courts and try all civil and criminal cases
lying beyond their scope such as felony, capital etc. Thus, the Deputy Governor’s
court enjoyed original as well as appellate jurisdiction. It conducted all trials with
the help of Jury.
In 1672, English law became the law of the Island and three types of courts were
established.
Court of Judicature- dealt with all civil and criminal cases as well as probate and
testament matters. It was composed of one judge and a jury. For criminal justice,
Bombay was divided into four geographical sections. Each section had one Justice of
Peace.
Court of Conscience- which was set up for quick and summary justice decided only
small civil and criminal cases under one judge.
Court of Appeals-appeals against the Court of Judicature went to Deputy Governor
and Council.
2. Second Stage 1684-1690:
Court of Admiralty was set up in 1684. It took cognizance of all civil and criminal
cases, in addition to admiralty and maritime cases falling within the ambit of the
Charter of 1683.
For almost 30 years the island was occupied by Mughal Admiral Siddi Yakub who
fought British East India Company. In 1690, the company sent envoys to Aurangzeb’s
camp to plead for a pardon. The cause was that one Mughal ship which was carrying
pilgrims to Mecca was captured by the British pirate. Later, the British got the
permission to continue their trade.
3. Third Stage 1718-1726:
After nearly thirty years, a court appeared again in Bombay in 1718. It consisted of
a Chief Justice and nine judges out of which five were British and four were Indians
who represented the principal communities on the island, i.e. Hindus, Muslims,
Christians, Parsis and Portuguese. The Chief Justice and a few of the English judges
were members of the Governor’s Council. The court was authorized to decide all
cases- civil, criminal and testamentary. It administered justice according to law,
equity and good conscience and the Company’s rules and ordinances; it was required
to pay due regard to caste customs, Company’s orders and known laws of England.
Appeals from the court went to the Governor and Council. No provision was made
for jury trial. The court was given wide powers for execution of its decrees.
The Indian judges did not enjoy an equal status with the British judges. They acted
more like an assessor than full-fledged judges. The court sat once a week and decided
all sorts of cases. It was at once a civil, criminal, military and a prerogative court. Its
proceedings were quick and inexpensive and it administered justice in a
commonsensical, rough and ready manner. It was not bound by any technical rules,
law or precedent. There were no lawyers to argue the case, no codes, no reports and
no law books.
The major work of the court lay in the area of criminal justice. Treason, rape, murder,
manslaughter were capital offences.
Rama Kamati’s Case on the then Prevailing Judicial System:
Rama Kamati was a wealthy and influential Hindu of Bombay who had stood by
the company for over thirty years. He was arrested on the charges of corresponding
with a pirate chief, Angria, who was giving trouble to the British. There was no
conclusive evidence against him except a round-about story by a witness that a
dancing girl had told him that Angria himself has told her that Rama Kamati has
written to him- a piece of hearsay evidence. Today, this kind of piece of hearsay
evidence would not be accepted by any court. Rama’s servant was tortured to extort
a statement implicating his master. Some forged letters purported to have been written
by Rama to Angira were also produced. Rama was held guilty; he was sentenced to
perpetual imprisonment and the whole of his property was confiscated. The charge
against Rama was drawn by the Governor and Council and his trial was held before
an ad hoc tribunal. The prosecutors were also the judges of the case. After the trial,
Rama’s property was auctioned. After Rama’s death, it was conclusively established
that he was innocent and that the whole trial was a plot based on lies, forgeries and
fabrications to which the Governor himself was a party. Thus, profound injustice
was committed in this case.3
The judicial system in this form was continued to function till it was superseded by
a new judicial system under the Charter of 1726.
The Charter of 1726:4
Before 1726, the system that was established by the Company was hardly satisfactory
as there was no uniformity. The company was finding it difficult to cope with the
problems that arose due to extended establishments. The area under the company
was continuously expanding in terms of territory.The Charter of 1726 introduced
uniformity of approach in this respect as in each Presidency town, similar judicial
institutions were established. In the petition to the King for a Charter, the Company
stated the three Presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay had increased
very much in respect of trade, commerce and population, and that there was a great
want of proper and competent power and authority for more speedy and effectual
administration of civil and criminal justice. The Charter established civil and criminal
courts in the Presidency towns which derived their authority not from the company
but from the British Crown. These courts could, therefore, be designated as the royal
courts in the true sense of the term.
The advantage of having royal courts in India was that their decisions were as
authoritative as those of the courts in England because the source of authority for
both the courts was the same, viz., the Crown, who was regarded as the fountain of
justice. Further, the Charter of 1726 initiated the system of appeals from the courts
in India to the Privy Council in England, and thus, was established a bridge between
3
M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Nagpur: Lexis Nexis) 2012.
4
V. . Kulshreshtha, Landmarks in Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Lucknow: Eastern Book
Company) 2015.
the English and the Indian Legal Systems. A channel for the reception of the English
law in India was thus created and this resulted in the English law making a deep
impact on, and profoundly influencing, the Indian law in the course of time.
The Charter of 1726 established a local legislature in each Presidency town, and,
thus, the locus of legislature was shifted from England to India. This was an important
development as it now became possible to make laws consistent with local needs.
Causes: The Company’s courts did not have the power to grant probates. In the
cases where there was no executor of the deceased in India and if he had died
intestate (meaning if he had died without a will or deed) then the council would
directly auction the property and deposited the money to company’s treasury. Thus,
the heirs started taking legal actions against the company in the courts of England,
because of which the company had to shell out huge amount of money to fight the
cases and also to pay the compensation in lost cases. Thus, they demanded more
power in such matters. Earlier, the company would seize the property of covenanted
servants. Such seizures could be disputed by the company officer’s against the
company in the court of England. Thus, to avoid such litigation and travelling all
the way to England, it wanted the establishment of courts recognized by the English
courts.
Besides, there was an absence of proper authority to deal with the discipline and
crimes by the military persons. Thus, Mayor’s Court was established under the
Charter of 1726:
Salient Features of Mayor’s Court:
a.) Supersede all the existing courts in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta;
b.) Each Presidency Town was to have a Corporation consisting of a Mayor and
nine aldermen, out of which seven including the Mayor had to be natural born
British subjects and remaining two could be subjects of any prince or state in
amity with the Great Britain;
c.) Aldermen were elected from among the leading inhabitants of the settlement to
hold office for life;
d.) Mayor was elected from among the Aldermen and their appointment was not in
the hands of Governor and Council;
e.) The Court was declared as the Court of Record and had the power to decide all
the civil suits and to grant probates of wills and letters of administration;
f.) The Charter did not mention the law applied by this court. It simply stated,
“according to Justice and right”;
g.) Appeals against the Court went to Governor and Council. A second appeal of
higher value cases were to be made to the King-in-Council in England; and
h.) The whole tenor of these provisions was to make the Corporation an autonomous
body, to a large extent, free from the control of the executive.
Establishment of the Court of Governor and Council:
a.) Charter of 1726 constituted a Court of Record consisting of the Governor and
Council to hear civil appeals against the Mayor’s court and to decide criminal
cases;
b.) The legislative power given to the Governor and Council- to make laws, rules
and regulations for the good governance of the company but the laws should
not be contrary to the rules of England;
c.) A Sherrif having a jurisdiction within the Presidency Town and for ten miles
around was to be chosen annually by the Governor and Council. The Sherrif
was to serve the processes of the Court, was to bring into Court all persons
complained of, to hold them to bail or confine them; and
d.) The criminal jurisdiction in each Presidency Town was vested in the Governor
and five members of the Council. Each of them individually was to be a Justice of
the Peace and was to act in the same manner, and to have the same powers, as
the Justices of the Peace of England.
Merits of the Charter:
a.) First time Crown’s court was established in India and it created a uniform legal
system in the presidencies. New judicial system was regular and definite;
b.) For the first time the jurisdiction of the King-in-Council was extended to India;
and
c.) It created a legislature in each presidency with the power of making necessary
laws.
Thus, the provisions of Charter were implemented quickly and new courts (Mayor’s
Court) started functioning in all three presidencies (Bombay, Madras and Calcutta)
However, soon problems started emerging as the Mayor’s court was the Court that
represented British Government, whereas Governor and Council represented the
East India Company. Thus, a lot of disputes started erupting between these two
courts.
Reasons:
a.) Mayor wanted to exercise judicial independence but the Governor-in-Council
wanted it to be subordinate to them;
b.) It was not clear that the matters of natives were within the jurisdiction of this
court or not.
c.) The disputes arose regarding the oath taking as well. Hindus wanted to use Gita
but the court insisted in taking the oath of the temple.
d.) Mayor’s Court annoyed the natives by applying the principles of English Law to
them without any regard to their personal laws and customs.
e.) The Governor and Council used to hear the appeals against the Mayor’s Court.
Torriano Case:
In a case where Torriano, secretary to the government filed a civil suit against Naish,
the Mayor, the Mayor’s Court held that the Mayor was immune from legal action in
the court. Sometime later, it was also revealed that the relations between Naish, the
Mayor, and the Governor had become tense due to their personal rivalry, jealousy
and hatred against each other. In 1734, when Naish was re-elected as Mayor, the
Governor of Madras refused to allow him to take oath of office on the plea that the
re-election of the Mayor was not permitted by the provisions of the Charter. As a
result of this a new Mayor was elected by the Corporation. Though a new member
occupied the office, the relations with the Governor did not improve. It shows that
the causes of conflict between the two were deep rooted.
Regulation Act of 1773:5
After the Battle of Plassey and Buxar the riches of the company’s servants increased.
The Company’s employees exploited the people and amassed wealth and returned
to England. A realization was dawning on the politicians that the Company was
not merely a trading company but has assumed the character of a political power.
From 1767, it was also required to pay a tribute of four lakh pounds every year to
the British exchequer in consideration of its retaining its territorial acquisitions and
revenues. According to Illbert, “This was the state’s share of the Indian spoil.” The
servants had a right to carry private trade. Thus, they acquired great fortunes and
were called ‘Naboobs’ by Britishers.
In England, these people led a completely luxurious life and publically displayed
their wealth. This new wealth acquired by the company’s servants made them
purchase seats in the House of Commons and thus, offended the landed aristocracy.
This made public opinion in England slowly crystalize in favor of parliamentary
intervention in Company’s affairs.
British Parliament wanted more control over a trading company which was more
interested in its own wealth than the welfare of the nation or its people. The immediate
cause was the company’s financial breakdown. The company asked the British
government for a loan of one million pounds. The British Government decided to
appoint a Select Committee and a Secret Committee, appointed by the House of
Commons.
On the basis of the suggestion of the committees, the Parliament enacted the
Regulating Act, 1773 to remove the evils of the prevailing system. The Act modified
the constitution of the Company; subjected it, to some extent, to the control of the
5
M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Nagpur: Lexis Nexis) 2012.
British Government and Parliament; reorganized the Calcutta Government, and
established a Supreme Court at Calcutta. With the passing of this Act, the era of
royal charters gave place to the era of parliamentary enactments.
The Act had three primary objectives:
a.) To reform the constitution of East India Company. The term of the Directors
was increased from one year to four years and a provision was made for electing
one-fourth of the Directors every year on rotation-basis. The Directors were
required to lay before the Treasury, all correspondence from India relating to
revenues and before a Secretary of State everything dealing with the civil and
military affairs of the government in India.
b.) To reform the company’s government in India, it reorganised the structure of
the Calcutta Government. It appointed a Governor-General and a Council of
four members and vested in them “the whole civil and military government” of
the Calcutta presidency.
c.) To provide solutions against the oppression of the company’s servants.
Provisions of the Charter:
a.) Governor-General and Council: In place of Governor and Council, a Governor-
General and Council consisting of four Councillors was appointed at Calcutta.
The decisions of the Council were taken by majority.
b.) Powers and duties of the council: The entire civil and military government, including
the management and governance of all territorial acquisitions and revenues, of
the presidency of Calcutta and the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was to
be governed by the Governor-General and Council.
c.) Control of Madras and Bombay: The government of the presidencies of Madras
and Bombay were put under the control of the Governor-General and Council.
However, the subordinate Presidencies could commence war or negotiate peace
without the consent of the Calcutta Presidency if there was such imminent
necessity as would render postponement of war dangerous, or if the Presidencies
received orders directly from the Court of Directors. The subordinate presidencies
were required to transmit regularly to the Governor-General, information
regarding all transactions relating to the government, revenues, or interests of
the Company.
d.) These presidencies could not commence peace or declare war with any Indian
king without the permission of Governor-General and council.
Legal Powers of the Council:
The Governor-General and Council could make rules and regulations for good
governance but conditions were:
a.) The rules should not be contrary to the laws of England.
b.) Laws will not be valid and effective unless registered and published in the Supreme
Court.
c.) The rules and regulations will be removed by the King-in-Council if someone
has registered an application against it within two months of its coming into
existence.
d.) The Governor-General and Council were required to send the copies of the laws
to the Secretary of England.
 The Supreme Court- Section 13 of this act made a detailed provision for the
establishment of the Supreme Court of Calcutta.
 Provisions on presents and private trade- The Governor-General, members of
the Council, judges of the Supreme Court and officers engaged in collection of
revenue were prohibited from receiving presents or engaging in private trade.
 Jurisdiction of King’s Bench was extended over to the Governor-General,
Councilor, Judges, Company servants etc., in India in case they committed any
crime.
The Supreme Court in Calcutta (1774):6
Establishment of the Supreme Court is also a landmark in the history. First, Supreme
Court was established in Fort William, i.e., in Calcutta. Later on, it was established
in Madras and Bombay. The Supreme Court of Judicature at Calcutta was created
in lieu of the Mayor’s Court, functioning there under the Charter of 1753. The Act
empowered the Crown to establish the Supreme Court at Calcutta by a royal Charter.
The Act specified the lines on which this Charter was to be based. The Court was to
consist of a Chief Justice and three puisne judges to be appointed by the Crown and
holding office during its pleasure. Only a Barrister of at least five years standing
could be appointed as a judge.
The Court was to be called a ‘Court of Record’. The Supreme Court was to enjoy a
very wide jurisdiction. It was authorized to administer justice in civil cases. It was
authorized to administer justice in criminal cases in the character of a ‘Court of
Oyer and Terminer and Goal Delivery’ for Calcutta, the factory of Fort William and
the factories subordinate thereto. It was to use grand jury as well as petty jury. The
Court was further empowered to exercise Admiralty and Ecclesiastical jurisdiction
(i.e. relating to property of deceased Britishers).
Jurisdiction of the Court extended to all civil matters relating to all persons, arising
within the presidency of Calcutta. Beyond the Presidency limits and within the
provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the Supreme Court had only limited personal
jurisdiction. The jurisdiction was restricted to a few defined categories of persons,
like:
6
For Details See, M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Nagpur: Lexis Nexis) 2012
and V. Kulshreshtha, Landmarks in Indian Legal and Constitutional History , (Lucknow: Eastern Book
Company) 2015.
Civil Jurisdiction:
1.) The East India Company;
2.) The Mayor and the Aldermen of Calcutta;
3.) Any British citizen who hold the property within the provinces of Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa;
4.) The executors and administrators of the persons mentioned above;
5.) Any other person who during the time of filing a suit, or, who was present
during the time when incident occurred , was directly or indirectly in the services
of the company or the Mayor, aldermen etc., of Calcutta;
6.) Any person who has already given in writing that any matter exceeding five
hundred will be decided by the Supreme Court.
Equity Jurisdiction- The Supreme Court had the same jurisdiction as that of High
Chancery of Great Britain (equity means balance, if there is no settled law then the
court would give out a balanced justice).
Criminal Jurisdiction- The Supreme Court jurisdiction extended to all British subjects
residing in Calcutta and within the territory of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Only the
British people and their servants and persons employed with the company were
covered under this jurisdiction. Other natives were not subjected to the jurisdiction
of the Supreme Court.
Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction- It could grant probates of will to the British subjects
within the territories of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and also letters of administration
for the goods, chattels and for other effects to the British subjects dying intestate. It
was also empowered to appoint guardians and keepers for infants and insane persons
and their estates in accordance with the rules prevalent in England.
Admiralty Jurisdiction- In its capacity as a Court of Admiralty for the territories of
Bengal, Bihar and Orissa it could try cases, civil and maritime, and all crimes
committed upon vessels, ships and ferries and high seas and off-shores with the
help of petty jury consisting of British Subjects residing in Calcutta
Other Powers of the Supreme Court:
a.) The Supreme Court was a court of record. It had the power to punish for its
contempt. Its justices were appointed Justices of Peace throughout the three
provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and were given the same jurisdiction and
authority as the judges of the King’s Bench in England.
b.) The Court also had the power to issue writs to Courts and officers subordinate to
it, which included the Court of Collector, Sheriffs etc.
c.) Appeals against the decisions of the Supreme Court could be filed before the
King-in-Council in all civil cases valued for 1000 pagodas or more. The Supreme
Court was to consist of both the Common Law and the Equity Jurisdictions. In
this respect, the Supreme Court can be regarded as an improvement even on the
judicial system of England, where the Common Law and the Equity, constituted
two separate, distinct and independent jurisdiction. The Supreme Court may even
be regarded as the precursor of the Judicature Act of 1873, by which the Common
law and Equity came to be administered by one and the same court in England.
Sir Elijah Impey was the first Chief Justice along with two other puisne judges of
the Supreme Court. It was the first British Court in India and was fully independent
of the control of Company’s government. The subjection of all British Subjects to its
jurisdiction ensured the rule of law.
Problems that emerged:
a.) Relations between the Supreme Court, and the Governor-General and Council
became strained due to some ambiguities in the provisions of the regulating
Charter. The Supreme Court wanted to entertain matters against the Governor-
General and his Council while the latter would defy the authority of the Supreme
Court.
b.) The Supreme Court was declared ineligible to hear and try any indictment or
information against the Governor-General or any member of the Council, except
treason and felony.
c.) East India Company got the right to collect the revenue (Diwani functions) from
Bengal, after they defeated the Nawab in the Battle of Buxar. The position of the
Governor-General and Council with the Supreme Court in relation to the exercise
of their Diwani functions was not clear. The government took the stand in the
management of Diwani functions. For the purpose of collection of land revenue,
it was free from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court for any of his acts. The
Supreme Court, however, took the stand that though it would not interfere in
“ordering the management” of Diwani, it could interfere in all cases of oppression
or violence that took place in the course of collection of revenue.
d.) The relationship between the Company’s courts in the Moffussil area7 and the
Supreme Court was not clear. Whether the Company’s courts were subordinate
to the Supreme Court or whether the Supreme Court can issue writs or entertain
appeals against the orders of Company’s court? The jurisdiction of the Supreme
Court was not clearly defined with respect to territory outside the presidency
limits of Calcutta. The Supreme Court would issue summons to witnesses
irrespective of the fact that they lived outside the Presidency limits and did not
believe that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the court.
e.) Several terms like “British subjects”, “Subjects of his Majesty” etc., were not clear.
7
Moffussil area- The region of India outside the three East India Company capitals of Bombay,
Calcutta and Madras; parts of a country outside an urban centre; the rural areas.
f.) The judges of the Supreme Court had the same authority as the judges of the
King’s Bench of England and thus, they started issuing writs beyond the presidency
of Calcutta which the people, particularly the British who had previously escaped
jurisdiction of all other courts, resented.
g.) The Act did not make any provisions about the law which the Supreme Court
had to apply in the proceedings before it. Although it applied, the English law,
the extent of its application was not clear.
h.) The jurisdiction of the Supreme Court was not about the natives. Although the
natives living outside the Presidency limits of Calcutta were not within its
jurisdiction, if any proceedings were started by any one against a native, he had
to appear before the court to plead the lack of jurisdiction. For this purpose, a
person had to travel long distances to come to Calcutta.
i.) Position of natives living within the presidency limits of Calcutta was also not
clear.
j.) The Supreme Court applied the law of England in criminal matters which was
very harsh and severe. For example, capital punishment was awarded for crimes
like, robbery.
Thus, the dispute over the jurisdiction matters became apparent in the cases and
trials which occurred during this time.
Trial of Nand Kumar: A Judicial Murder:8
Raja Nand Kumar, who held a high position under the Nawab and Company, made
allegations of corruption and bribery against the previous Governor-General Warren
Hastings in 1775. Just a few days later Raja Nand Kumar was tried by the Supreme
Court, on a charge of forgery brought against him by an Indian, Mohan Prasad. The
court found him guilty of the offence of forgery and sentenced him to death under
an Act of1728 of the British Parliament. The sentence of death was duly executed.
The forgery alleged was to have been committed in 1770. The trial started on 8th
June, 1775 and lasted until the morning of 16th June, 1775 when the Court condemned
Nand Kumar to death.
Two major legal issues that arose in the case were:
i.) whether Nand Kumar was under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and
ii.) whether the Act of British Parliament which made forgery a capital offence, and
under which Nand Kumar was indicted and tried, extended to India?
Many English historians expressed the view that Nand Kumar was tried and
executed by Justice Impey at the instance of Hastings.
“Men will never agree”, P.E. Roberts writes, “as to the meaning of this somewhat
mysterious sequence of events, for the key to them lies in the ambiguous and doubtful
8
https:// www.scribd.com/doc/19702765/Judicial-Murder-case-Raja-Nand-Kr, retrieved on 21st
January, 2019.
region of secret motives and desires. The incident created an extraordinary impression
and it was naturally believed for a long time that Nand Kumar had the penalty of
death nominally for forgery, but really for having dared to accuse the governor
general.”
Those who accuse Impey and Warren Hastings allege that Hastings first tried to
ruin Nand Kumar on a conspiracy charge but after realizing that it did not implicate
Nand Kumar directly, he got him capitally indicted on a charge of forgery preferred
ostensibly by Mohan Prasad. Nand Kumar’s trial has always been looked upon with
suspicion. Macualay, Mill, and a host of other historians have accused Chief Justice
Impey of committing a judicial murder.
It has been suggested that Warren Hastings conspired with Impey to put Nand
Kumar out of Hastings’ way and thus served as a willing tool to gratify the governor
general. Two of the strongest circumstances against Impey were his friendship with
Hastings and the commencement of Nand Kumar’s trial within a few days of his
accusing the governor general. The way the trial was conducted also raised strong
doubts about the court’s impartiality and bona fides. Nand Kumar had presented a
petition to the Council of the following effect which was translated into English
after his execution and is cited by Stephen:
For the fault of representing at this time a just fact which for the interest of the
king and the relief of the people in a small degree made known, many English
gentlemen have become my enemies and having no other means to conceal their
own action, deeming of destruction of the utmost expediency for themselves,
revived an old affair of Mohan Prasad’s which had formerly been repeatedly
found to be false; and the governor knowing Mohan Prasad to be a notorious
liar, turned him out of his house, and themselves becoming his aiders and abettors
and Lord Impey and other Justices have tried me by the English laws, which are
contrary to the customs of this country, in which there was never any such
administration of justice before, and taking the evidence of my enemies in proof
of my crime, have condemned me to death. But by my death the King’s justice
will let the actions of no person remain concealed; and now that the hour of
death approaches I shall not for the sake of this world be regardless of the next,
but represent the gentlemen of the council. The forgery of the bond of which I
am accused never proceeded from me. If I am unjustly out to death, I will with
my family demand justice in the next life. They put me to death out of enmity
and from partiality to the gentlemen who have betrayed their trust, and in this
case the thread of life being cut. I in my last moment again request that you
gentlemen will write my case particularly to the just King of England.
But the prayer was unheard and respite was not granted by the council. According
to Lord Macualay,
Impey acted unjustly in refusing respite to Nandkumar; Hastings, three or four
years later, described Impey as the man to whose support he was at one time
indebted for the safety of his fortune, honour and reputation.
These words may safely be taken to refer to Impey’s assistance in Nandkumar’s
trial.
Beveridge points out that the judges, jury and the counsels were all foreigners, all
unacquainted with the language of the witnesses and Nand Kumar himself. The
interpreter, through whom the trial was conducted, was not very proficient in the
Bengali language. Moreover he points out that the defence counsel was not a barrister
and so depended on the Chief Justice for his position and thus could not take an
independent line lest Impey should feel offended. Beveridge definitely asserts that
there is a strong circumstantial evidence that Hastings was the real prosecutor. The
trial was unfairly conducted, the judges’ examination of the witnesses was inquisitorial
and minute, and the Chief Justice hanged Nand Kumar in order to serve a political
purpose when the forgery was not conclusively proved.
Beveridge expresses his resentment in the vigorous words,
What I and every honest man who knows the facts blame Impey for, is
that he allowed himself to be prejudiced by his partiality for Hastings, and his
hatred of the majority and that he hanged Nandkumar in order that peculators
in general, and his friends and patron Warren Hastings in particular might be
safe.
However, contrary to all the above views, Stephen, who had made a detailed study
of Nand Kumar’s trial, justifies the conduct of both Impey and Warren Hastings. He
states:
Mohan Prasad was the real substantial prosecutor of Nand Kumar and that
Hastings had nothing to do with the prosecution and that there was not any
conspiracy or understanding between Hastings and Impey in relation to Nand
Kumar or in relation to his trial or execution.
He supports his views by saying that the trial was held by four judges and 12 jury
men all of whom could not have been in conspiracy against Nand Kumar.
Dr. B. N. Pandey has taken views similar to those of Stephens’ and has supported
Impey’s decision by which the English Act of 1728 was extended to India. Opinions
are thus varied as to the nature of the trial. Macualay, Mill, Beveridge, Roberts have
condemned the trial as a mockery of law whereas Stephens and Dr. B. N. Pandey
have found the trial to not be obnoxious. Finally, P.E. Roberts is of the opinion that:
Even if we hold it established that there was no judicial murder, there was
certainly something equivalent to miscarriage of justice. For that, however, the
Supreme Court, in the first instance, Hastings ’opponents on the council
subsequently, were mainly responsible. Thus it has been rightly called as a “judicial
murder.What is most significant to note here is the fact that forgery has never
been a capital offence in our country. Nand Kumar could not have been executed
on the charge of forgery had his trial been conducted under India’s own law.
Not only the charges were not proved satisfactorily, Raja Nand Kumar had been
tried under an imported law by twelve members of the Jury all of whom were
foreigners and had absolutely no knowledge of Indian laws. Even enlightened
Englishmen called Nand Kumar’s execution a judicial murder. It is rightly said
that the British came to India not to help Indians but to help themselves.
Patna Case:9
The Patna Case is one of the most interesting cases in Indian Legal History. It occurred
in 1777 and highlights the drawbacks of the system of judicial administration. This
case brought into the light the involving conflict and dissatisfaction among the
Supreme Court and the Governor and Council.
Shahbaz Beg Khan belonged to Kabul and came to India and joined a company
Army and then he got retired. After that he earned wealth and settled at Patna and
married Nadirah Begum. Later, he called his nephew Bahadur beg from Kabul to
live with him. He also communicated his desire to adopt Bahadur Beg as his son and
make him the heir of his property. But before he could give fulfil his wish, he died in
1776.
Shahbaz Beg left impressive property behind him which led to dispute of property
between his wife and the nephew. Each one of them claimed the whole property of
the deceased. Bahadur Beg filed a petition in the Provincial Council at Patna and
asserted the rightful ownership of property being the adopted son of the deceased.
He also requested the court to protect the property from being abused by the widow
of the deceased. Nadirah Begum, on the other hand, asserted her claim to the said
property on the basis of three documents are: Dower: Deed (Meharnama), Gift –
Deed (Hibanama), Acknowledgment (Ikrarnama).
The Provincial Court of Patna directed that Kazi and Mufti set up a stock of the
property and gather and seal it till any official order was issued. These native law
officers were also to report to the Court about the separate claims of the parties after
ascertaining the facts of the case. In accordance with the Provincial Council’s orders,
the Kazi and Mufti went to the house of the deceased and gathered the property
and took stock of it. During the investigation they abused Nadirah Begum as a result
of which, she left the house and took shelter in a “Durgah”.
The methodology followed by the law officers in this case was most irregular. After
conducting an inquiry in the case they deferred their report to the Patna Council.
On the basis of evidence, the Kazi reported that widow’s agent (counsel) had
neglected to deliver the dower deed in this manner. Also, there was nothing invalidate
to the attestations of Bahadur Beg that the sum of Rs.1200/- as dower was already
9
N. V. Paranjape, Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Allahabad: Central Law Agency) 2006.
paid by the deceased to Nadirah Begum during his life-time. As far as other
documents are concerned, namely, the gift-deed and acknowledgment-deed, the
law-officers recommended that they were invalid being forged and, therefore, the
property of the deceased should be divided into four shares, out of which three
should be given to Bahadur Beg as adoptive son, and the fourth part should be given
to Nadirah Begum in accordance with the Mohammedan law of succession.
The Provincial Council of Patna acknowledged the report of the Kazi and Mufti and
requested the division of the property in the manner suggested by them. Aggrieved
by the decision of the Provincial Council, Nadirah Begum filed a case in the Supreme
Court against Bahadur Beg, Kazi and Mufti for assault, false imprisonment and
coercively entering into her house and other injuries and alleged damages to the
chorus of rupees six lakhs.
There were majorly two issues in this case. Firstly, whether Bahadur Beg, who lived
outside Calcutta was under the jurisdiction of Supreme Court or not? Secondly,
whether the law officers could be indicted for their acts done in their capacity as
officers of the government?
The court censured the way in which the Kazi and Mufti had represented the reality.
No normal preliminary hearing was held and witnesses had not been analysed on
oath. Thus, the Supreme Court granted damages of Rupees 3 Lakhs to Nadirah
Begum.
An impartial examination of the case demonstrates that gross anomalies happened
during the trial. The law officers were there to just elucidate the law and should not
have analysed the witnesses themselves as this was supposed to be done by the
judge. This case also uncovered the shortcomings of the legal hierarchy, especially
that of the Sadar Diwani Adalat at Calcutta in light of the fact that the Governor
General and the Council who constituted the court barely performed legal work.
This case dealt with a situation in which the officials were authorized by the court
of law to investigate into the matter of Nadirah Begum and Bahadur Beg to find out
the documents and other related information. However, during this procedure the
officials i.e, Kazi and Mufti behaved badly with Nadirah Begum while entering her
house. Accordingly, the Supreme Court gave the judgement in favour of Nadirah
Begum and these officials were charged with the punishment of imprisonment along
with a fine of Rs. 3 Lakhs to her.
Kamaluddin Case:10
This case represents the first open difference of opinion between the court and the
government over the question of the Court’s control of Diwani functions. Kamaluddin
was an ostensible holder of a salt farm at Hijili, on behalf of Kantababu, who was
the real farmer. In 1775, Kamaluddin was committed on the ground of arrears of
10
M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Nagpur: Lexis Nexis) 2012, p. 81.
revenue due from him, the claim of which he disputed. It was customary to take bail
in such cases but no bail was taken in his case. He approached the Supreme Court
for a writ of Habeas Corpus. The court held that in cases of disputed accounts, the
defendant should be held to bail till the inquiry into his obligation to pay has been
completed.
It, therefore, directed the chief of the council to accept bail for Kamaluddin’s
appearance in the Diwani court and not to take him into custody again. The
Government regarded the Court order as an encroachment on the Company’s Diwani
rights. The Diwani rights, the council contended, were vested in the Governor-General
and Council solely and the Court’s order in releasing Kamaluddin amounted to
exceeding its jurisdiction which was against law. Three members of the Council
suggested that the Court’s order should not be recognised and obeyed. This suggestion
could not be translated into practice because Governor-General Warren Hastings
did not support defiance of the Court’s order. It appears that sometime later,
Kamaluddin was arrested again and he again obtained writ of habeas corpus from
the Court and he was finally discharged by the Court. Chief Justice Impey in a letter
to the Court of Directors justified Court’s action on two grounds: firstly, in a case of
this nature, it had been the usual practice for the Revenue Council to take bail and
so the Court gave the direction for taking bail; secondly, it had been the established
practice to demand rent from the under-tenant before demanding, much less
imprisoning the farmer and the Court’s order was consistent with this practice.
Impey maintained that the Court had intervened to prevent the Company’s officers
“Under colour of legal proceedings and of being guilty of most aggravated injustice”.
He asserted that every person was entitled to the protection of English Law from the
oppressions of the collectors or any other officers of the government, and in the
instant case the court had simply compelled the revenue officers to act in conformity
with the established customs and usages of revenue collection. The Court did not
desire to interfere with the “ordering and management” of the revenues, but the
collection of revenue was a different matter. Impey asserted that the Court would
be guilty of breach of trust if it refused to take cognisance of violence and oppressions
used in the collection of revenue.
CONCLUSION:
The case of Kamaluddin was an eye opener disclosing defective provisions of the
regulating act due to which not only the Supreme Court and the Council came into
conflict but it also created a gulf between the governor-general Warren Hastings
and three members of the council, who constituted the majority
Cossijurah Case:
The Cossijurah Case illustrates another aspect of administration of the Company in
India. This case is known for the fact that it brought out the defects in the Charter
which created the Supreme Court at Calcutta. The Charter did not demarcate either
the jurisdiction of the Court or the position of the Governor-General-in-Council. As
a result of this confusion, there were occasions, when the Supreme Court issued
writ of capias against the directions of the Council. In the Cossijurah Case, the
confrontation between Supreme Court and the Council became evident. This case
in brief is as follows:
One Zamindar, the Rajah of Cossijurah was heavily indebted to Cossinaut Baboo.
When Cossinaut requested for the return of his money, the Zamindar showed
reluctance by making one excuse or the other. The Baboo therefore approached the
Revenue Board where also his efforts brought no result. Finally, he sued the Rajah in
the Supreme Court at Calcutta. In his affidavit he stated that the Rajah was in the
service of the Company having been employed in the collection of revenue. The
affidavit also stated that the Rajah was subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme
Court. The Supreme Court issued a notice to the Rajah directing him to appear
before the Court. In the meantime the matter was referred to the Council at Calcutta
which referred the matter to the Advocate-General for his advice on the point whether
the Zamindar was amenable to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The Advocate-
General advised that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction over the Zamindar.
Thereupon the Governor-General-in-Council issued instructions to all the farmers
and landholders that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court
and that they could ignore the process of the Court.
The Rajah of Cossijurah had gone into hiding to avoid the process of the Supreme
Court. The Supreme Court issued another notice to the Rajah who did not pay any
attention to it in view of the instructions from the Governor-General-in-Council. In
fact, the men of the Zamindar drove away the Sheriff and other officers who had
come to arrest the Zamindar on a writ of capias. Thereupon, the Supreme Court
issued another writ for the confiscation of the property of the Rajah. The Court sent
the Sheriff along with some armed constables.
The Council also came into motion; it decided to protect the Zamindar. Accordingly
it despatched a much larger armed force to prevent the arrest of the Zamindar. In
the meantime, the Sheriff and officers caught hold of the Zamindar physically,
assaulted him, insulted the ladies, and did many acts of sacrilege in respect of the
idols of the gods placed in a room. By that time the Commander of the army, which
had been despatched already, reached the spot under the orders of the Governor-
General-in-Council. He arrested the Sheriff and his men and took them to Calcutta,
where they were released. Thereafter, the Supreme Court issued a writ for the arrest
of the Commander. This writ was also prevented by a similar show of armed force.
When all efforts to recover his money failed, Cossijurah decided to file a suit against
the members of the Council. Accordingly he brought an action against the Governor-
General and the other members of the Council in the Supreme Court. The Governor-
General and his Councillors appeared in the Court in the first instance. Soon they
discovered that the plaintiff had brought an action against them in their official
capacity. They then decided not to appear before the Court.
The Council issued instructions to all the Zamindars, landholders and the persons
residing outside Calcutta not to pay any attention to the process of the Court and
that in the case the Supreme Court persisted in issuing writs against them, the Council
would protect them.
The show down between the Supreme Court and the Council brought out the inherent
weaknesses and defects in the Regulating Act which did not specify the areas and
the persons which were under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The language
of the Act was vague enough for giving rise to conflicting interpretations. These
defects, however, were removed to a great extent by the passing of the Act of
Settlement of 1781.
Act of Settlement, 1781:11
Owing to the conflicts between the Supreme Court and the Supreme Council (i.e.,
Governor-General and Council), the conditions of civil and judicial administration
in the country became intolerable. The court was disliked by the natives also. The
procedure, language, law and everything connected with the Court were a mystery
to them. No longer could things be allowed to continue like this. To set things right,
Parliament had to intervene. In 1781, it passed an Act, known as the ‘Act of
Settlement’. The Act was passed after a thorough inquiry by the Select Committee of
the House of Commons for the administration of justice in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
The Preamble of the Act of 1781 showed that the contest between the Court and the
Council had been won by the later.
The Act laid down that Governor General and Council of Bengal, shall not be
subjected, either jointly or severally, to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Fort
William in Bengal for any act done by them in their public capacity only and while
acting as Governor General and Council. In this way, the Government was rendered
immune from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. This provision, no doubt, was
the result of the Cossijurah Case where contempt proceedings were sought to be
taken against the Governor-General and Council in writing.
The Act in its second section declared that no person would be held responsible by
the Court, either civilly or criminally, for acts done by him in pursuance of an order
of the Governor-General and Council in writing. Section 8 restricted the jurisdiction
of the Court in a very vital respect. It was laid down that the Supreme Court shall
not have or exercise any jurisdiction in any matter concerning the revenue. Section
9 declared that no person was to be subjected to the jurisdiction of the Supreme
Court on account of his being a landowner, landholder, farmer of land etc.
Section 10 laid down that no native person employed by the Company, or the
Governor General and Council or by any British subject, was to be subjected to the
11
S. S. Shilwant, Indian Legal and Constitutional History, (Jaipur: Univeristy Book House) 2019.
jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in the matters of inheritance succession or contract,
except in actions for crime, tort and in civil actions.
Section 17 declared in specific terms that the Supreme Court of Judicature ‘shall
have full power and authority to hear and determine all manner of actions and
suits’ against the inhabitants of Calcutta. It was further provided that all matters
arising out of inheritance and succession to land and goods, and all matters of
‘contract and dealing between parties, shall be determined, in the case of
Mohammedans, by the laws and usages of Mohammedans and in the case of Gentoos,
by the laws and usages of Gentoos’. It was further provided that where only one of
the Parties shall be a Mohammedans or Gentoos, the Supreme Court would apply
‘laws and usages of the defendant’. Thus, Supreme Court was to apply three systems
of law viz., English Law, Hindu Law and Muslim Law.
Section 21 was very important in so far as the Sadar Diwani Adalat now accorded
recognition as a court to hear and determine appeals and references from the country
courts in civil cases. The status of the Sadar Diwani Adalat became co-equal with
that of the Supreme Court as both were backed by parliamentary legislation and
from both appeals went to the Privy Council.
Section 22 authorised the Sadar Diwan iAdalat to hear and determine all offences,
abuses and extortions committed in the collection of revenue. Section 24 was
suggested directly by the Patna Case with a view to make the judges and the law
officers of the Company’s courts safe in the discharge of their duties in the office.
Section 25 prescribed the process according to which an action could be brought in
the Supreme Court against a judicial officer or the Magistrate of the Company, for
any corrupt act.
The Act of 1781 did not stop here. As we know under the Regulating Act 1773, the
Governor-General and Council was to have legislative powers for the town of
Calcutta, subject to the control of the Supreme Court. The laws passed by the
Governor General and Council under this provision had to be reasonable and
consistent with the laws of England and had to be registered with the Supreme
Court.
Section 23, however, conferred for the first time legislative power on the Governor-
General and Council for the purpose of making laws for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
The Section laid down that within six months of the Regulations having been passed,
their copies were to be transmitted to the Court of Directors and to one of his Majesty’s
secretaries of state. His Majesty in Council might disallow or amend the Regulations
so passed within a period of two years. The Governor and General thus came to
have two different legislative powers. One, under the Regulating Act of 1773 for
Calcutta and second from the Act of Settlement of 1781 for the provinces of Bengal,
Bihar and Orissa.
Thus, the Act of Settlement, 1781 was substantially in favour of Governor-General
in Council and against the Supreme Court on all counts.
Judicial Plan of Warren Hastings:
The Company expanded its political activities and brought new territories
surrounding the Presidency towns under its control. This territory came to be known
as the “mofussil” in contradistinction to the “Presidency Towns”. The first territorial
acquisition by the Company consisted of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Here the first
Adalat system was started in 1772 which in course of time, was modified, improved
and refined. Later, encouraged by the success of the Adalat system, it was also
introduced in the Provinces of Madras and Bombay.
In 1765, the affairs of the Company in Bengal took a significant turn. The nominal
Mughal emperor, Shah Alam granted to the company the Diwani rights of Bengal,
Bihar and Orissa. The company agreed to pay annually 26 lakhs of rupees to the
emperor and was to retain whatever surplus might be left out of the revenue collected.
Under the Mughal administrative system, the government in the province, then
known as the Subah, was conducted by two high dignitaries, i.e. the Nawab and
the Diwan. The Nawab or Nazim was the head of the government and military, and
also supervised the administration of Criminal justice. Being head of the government
and military, he was also responsible for the maintenance of law and order. Thus,
Nawab was the head of ‘Nizamat’.
The Diwan who stood next to the Nawab in rank, headed the Diwani which
comprised of the functions of collecting revenue and deciding civil and revenue
cases. Both the officers, Nazim and Diwan were appointed by the Central
Government i.e., the Mughal Governor. Thus, in 1765 the office of Diwani was
granted to the Company, and it comprised of two functions namely: the collection
of land revenue and administration of civil and revenue justice. A system of dual
government commenced in Bengal. The Company assumed responsibility for military,
revenue collection and civil and revenue justice. Criminal justice was left to the
supervision of the Deputy Nawab and its expenses were to be borne out from the
Nawab’s allowance.
Execution of the Diwani Functions:
The Company did not at once take over the execution of the Diwani functions after
the grant. It did not employ its own servants to discharge these functions. Instead, it
appointed two Indian officers at Patna, and the actual administration of the Diwani,
was left in their hands. They supervised the collection of land revenue and the
dispensation of justice in civil as well as revenue matters. The Company’s directors
suspected misappropriation on the part of the Indian officers. To reap full advantage
of the Diwani, the Company decided in 1772 to ‘stand forth as Diwan’, and to take
over the entire care and management of the Diwani functions and discharge them
directly through the agency of its own servants.
The Directors did not issue any directions by which their decision to stand forth as
Diwan was to be implemented. Thus, the Directors delegated the full responsibility
to create an administrative set up with the Company’s servants as the pivot, on
Warren Hastings. It was out of this situation that the fabric of a new judicial system
in the Mofussil was to be woven i.e., Adalat System in the Mofussil of Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa, beyond the presidency town of Calutta.
The Judicial Plan of 1772:
Warren Hasting’s administrative plan of 1772 was devised with a district as a unit.
Bengal, Bihar and Orissa were divided into a number of districts. In each district, an
English servant of the Company was appointed as the Collector who was to be
responsible for the collection of land revenue and had judicial affairs to attend as
well. The Judicial Plan of 1772 was based on the ancient and traditional division of
authority between Nawab and Diwan. It chief features were as follows:
Mofussil Diwani Adalat:
A Moffusil Diwani Adalat was established in each district with the Collector as the
judge. The Adalat was authorised to hear and decide all civil causes including real
and personal property, inheritance, cast, marriage, debts, disputed accounts,
contracts, partnerships and demands of rent. In all suits, the laws of Koran with
regard to Mohammadans and those of the ‘Shaster’ with respect to the Hindus were
to be applied.
Therefore, to make the system workable and to enable the collector judge
(Englishman) to decide cases according to the Indian laws, native law officers, Kazis
and Pandits, were appointed to expound the laws.
Small Cause Adalat:
Provision was made for disputes upto rupees 10 to be decided finally by the Head
farmer of the parganah.
Mofussil Fauzdari Adalat:
A Mofussil Fauzdari Adalat was established in each district to try all kinds of criminal
cases. The Adalat consisted of the Muslim law officers, Kazi, Mufti and Maulvies.
The Maulvies were to expound the Muslim law of crimes; the Kazi and Mufti were
to give Fatwa (order of sentence) and render judgement accordingly.
The collector was required to exercise a general supervision over the Adalat. He
could not finally determine cases involving sentences of death, or forfeiture of property
of the accused; proceedings of such cases had to be submitted to the Sadar Nizamat
Adalat for final orders.
Sadar Diwani Adalat:
Over and above the Moffusil Adalat, the Sadar Diwani Adalat was established at
Calcutta. The Sadar Diwani Adalat consisted of the Governor and members of the
Council. It was to hear appeals from the Moffusil Diwani Adalats in cases of over
five hundred rupees. Appeals were to be filed in the Adalat within two months
from the date of the decree given by the Mofussil Adalat. The Governor and Council
exercised a supervisory control on the proceedings of the Sadar Nizamat Adalat.
Sadar Nizamat Adalat:
The Sadar Nizamat Adalat, consisting of an Indian Judge appointed by Nawab
known as the Daroga-i-Adalat who was assisted by the Chief Kazi, Chief Mufti and
three Moulvies, was situated at Calcutta. The functions of the Adalat were to revise
the proceedings of the Mofussil Nizamat Adalat and approve the sentences of death
and forfeiture of property. In case of a death sentence, the death warrant was
prepared by the Adalat and was signed by the Nawab as head of Nizamat.
All Adalats were required to maintain proper registers and records, then district
Adalats were to transmit abstracts of their proceedings to the Sadar Adalats.
The Plan of 1774:
The collectors enjoyed the privilege of carrying out their private trade. Under these
circumstances, there was every possibility that the collectors uncontrolled from any
check would monopolise the trade.
Civil Justice: In this plan, the collectors were recalled from the districts. An Indian
officer, called Diwan or Amil, was appointed in each district in place of the Collector.
The provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa were divided into six divisions, with their
headquarters being at Calcutta, Burdwan, Murshidabad, Dinajpore, Decca and
Patna. Each division thus comprised of several districts. In each of these divisions, a
small council consisting of four or five English covenanted servants of the Company
was appointed, known as the “Provincial Council” and its main function was
collection of revenue in the Division and to provide justice in revenue cases.
Thus, the Council was to be known as “Provincial Court of Appeal”. It was authorised
to hear appeals in all cases decided by the Amils. In all cases, over Rs. 1000 in value,
a further appeal was to lie from the Provincial Court of Appeal to the Sadar Diwani
Adalat.
Criminal Justice: Warren Hastings shifted the Sadar Nizamat Adalat from Calcutta
to Murshidabad. The supervision over the district criminal courts manned by the
Muslim Law officers also came to an end.
The Plan of 1780:
Warren Hastings formulated a new plan, its basic feature was separation between
the revenue and judicial functions which was promulgated in 1780. The salient
features of the new plan were:
In each of the six divisions i.e., Calcutta, Murshidabad, Burdwan, Dacca, Dinajpore
and Patna, in which the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa had been divided
in 1774, a Court of Diwani Adalat (i.e., a court of civil jurisdiction) was established.
Each of the six new Diwani Adalats were to be presided over by an Englishman, a
covenanted servant of the company. He was to be known as “Superintendent of the
Mofussil Diwani Adalat”. After 1780 Plan, the Provincial Councils were to confine
themselves only to revenue functions.
The Diwani Adalat was empowered to decide all civil cases like inheritance, property,
contract etc. The Superintendent of the Diwani Adalat could refer small cases to
some Zamindar or public officer residing near the parties’ place of residence. The
Adalat was authorised to decide even the cases of inheritance and succession to
Zamindars which till now had fallen within the purview of the Governor General
and Council.
In 1780, the Governor-General and Council divested themselves of the charge of the
Sadar Diwani Adalat and appointed Sir Elijah Impey, the then Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, as its sole judge. This step was taken mainly on the initiative of
Warren Hastings. In 1781, the Patna case revealed that the Sadar Diwani Adalat
functioned very irregularity and ineffectively. To make the Sadar Adalat more lively
and active institution, Impey was appointed as its sole judge. Its functions, powers
and jurisdiction were more clearly defined. The Sadar Diwani Adalt was to perform
the following functions:
Appellate Jurisdiction: The primary function of the Court (Sadar Diwani Adalat)
was to hear appeals from the lower courts in all cases where the subject matter
involved was over one thousand rupees in value.
Original Jurisdiction: The court was authorised to try and determine any cause or
matter of civil nature referred to it by the Governor General and Council.
Control and Superintendence: The Sadar Court was to exercise control and supervision
over the lower Diwani Adalats. Impey compiled a comprehensive civil procedure
code for the guidance of the Sadar Adalat and the Mofussil Diwani Adalats. It was
the first code of civil procedure to be prepared in India. The code contained ‘ninety
five clauses’.
Since, Impey’s appointment in Sadar Diwani Adalat was viewed as disfavour in
England, unfortunately he was called from India to England and this Adalat lapsed
again.
Reforms in Criminal Judicature:
In 1774, the Supreme Court of Judicature was established at Calcutta. It consisted of
a Muslim Judge, with the tilte of Daroga, who was assisted by the Mohammedan
Law officers Kazi, Mufti and Maulvies. Its functioning was supervised by the
Governor-General, Warren Hastings. In 1774, the Supreme Court of Judicature was
established at Calcutta. Apprehending interference from the Supreme Court into
the affairs of the Sadar Nizamat Adalat, the Government of Calcutta decided to
change its venue. In 1775, therefore, the Sadar Nizamat Adalat was shifted from
Calcutta to Murshidabad and was placed directly under the charge of the Nawab.
The Naib Nawab, Mohd. Reza Khan was to look after the working of the Sadar
Nizamat Adalat. In 1775, therefore, the whole of the Criminal Judicature in the
country lapsed into the hands of Reza Khan.
His supervision over the working of the criminal courts was very weak and ineffective.
Innocent persons were punished wheras the guilty escaped with impunity. In 1781,
Hastings directed his attention to this sorry state of affairs and introduced the
following reforms in the sphere of criminal law and justice:
The Plan of 1781:
Hastings devised the machinery to arrest and apprehend criminals and bring them
to the criminal courts for trials. For this purpose, the judges of the Mofussil Diwani
Adalats were appointed as Magistrates also. They were to arrest all those persons
who were suspected of having committed crimes, and were to send them for their
trial at the nearest Moffusil Fauzdari Adalat. No Magistrate was to have any judicial
powers i.e., he could not try the accused himself. Thus, the Magistrates were given
the police duty only. The step was expected to promote law and order in the
countryside.
The Moffusil Fauzdari courts were to transmit monthly reports showing the number
of persons in actual confinement, persons arrested, persons released, transmitted by
the Sadar Nizamat Adalat, which continued to sit at Murshidabad. The head of this
new department at the capital was to be a covenanted servant of the Company and
was known as the ‘Remembrancer of Criminal Courts’. Warren Hastings left India
in 1785.
Judicial Plan under Lord Cornwallis:
Lord Cornwallis reached India in 1786 and stayed here till 1793. He was the first to
put into practice the important principles of ‘Rule of Law’ and administration
according to Law. He introduced reforms in three phases in the years: 1787, 1790
and 1793.
The Judicial Scheme of 1780, introduced during the time of Governor-General Warren
Hastings, had two functions- revenue and judicial. Many high officials of the
Company thought that the amalgamation of the two functions would result in
efficiency, simplicity and would also bring down the cost of administration. The
Court of Directors of the East India Company instructed Lord Cornwallis to unite
the revenue and judicial organisations. The key note of this plan was economy. Sir
John Shore said:
Natives had always lived under the arbitrary and despotic form of
Government and therefore, the form of British Courts should also be despotic.
The Scheme of 1787:
a.) The number of districts was reduced from 36 to 23. In each district, an
Englishman, a covenanted servant of the Company, was appointed as the
Collector.
b.) The Collector was to collect revenue. He also decided all civil cases on revenue.
c.) The Collector was to act as judge in the Moffusil Diwani Adalat and thus,
administer justice in civil cases to common man.
d.) The Collector was also to act as the Magistrate in the district. It was his duty to
arrest and apprehend criminals in the district and to send them to the nearest
Mofussil Nizamat Adalat for trial, if the case was not of petty nature. Cornwallis
in 1787 authorised the Magistrates to hear and determine all complaints for petty
offences and to punish the same by Corporal punishment, not exceeding 15 strokes
or imprisonment not exceeding 15 days.
e.) The Regulation of 1787 laid down that the Collector should keep his revenue
functions confined to the Revenue Court, to be known as ‘Mal Adalat’. The
Collector was to discharge his judicial functions in civil cases in the Court of
‘Mofussil Diwani Adalat’. The Collector was also to act as a ‘Magistrate’.
f.) The Board of Revenue, located at Calcutta, was to hear and decide appeals from
the decisions of the Collector in his Mal Adalat. A further appeal from the Board
of Revenue lay to the Governor-General in Councils on the executive side.
g.) Appeals from the Mofussil Diwani Adalat, in all cases where the subject-matter
exceeded Rs. 1000/- in value, lay to the Sardar Diwani Adalat. Decisions of the
Sadar Diwani Adalat were to be final, except in cases where subject matter valuing
5000 pounds or over was involved. In all such cases, further appeal lay to the
King-In-Council, under the provision of the Act of Settlement, 1781.
h.) The Sadar Diwani Adalat was to consist of the Governor-General and members
of his Council. They were to be assisted by the Chief Kazi, Chief Mufti and two
Maulvies and Pandits to expound the native laws i.e., Muslim and Hindu.
i.) A subordinate officer, known as the Registrar, was appointed to provide aid and
assistance to the Collector in the discharge of his judicial functions in the Moffusil
Diwani Adalat.
With this arrangement, the Collector in the district became very powerful as he was
the Judge, Magistrate as well as the Collector. The scheme of 1787 was a retrograde
step, a swinging back of the pendulum, as compared to 1781, when a progressive
step had been taken in relation to separation of powers between the judicial and the
executive functions.
The Scheme of 1790:
The most important step taken to infuse vitality in the criminal judicature of the
country was to remove the Sadar Nizamat Adalat from Murshidabad to Calcutta.
The Nawab was divested of his control over this court. Henceforth, this court, like
the Sadar Diwani Adalat, was to consist of the Governor-General and Members of
the Council as Judges. In the discharge of their functions in the Sadar Nizamat
Adalat, the Governor General and Council were to be assisted by the Chief Kazi of
the province and two Muftis, who were to expound law applicable to the
circumstances of the case. The decision in the Sadar Court were to be regulated by
the Anglo-Mohammadan law i.e., Muslim Law as modified by the Regulations of
the Governor-General in Council.
The Sadar Nizamat Adalat was to meet at least once every week. A regular diary of
its proceedings, were to be maintained. Lord Cornwallis appreciated this fact fully
and so he reformed the lower courts also. The former Fauzdari Adalats presided
over by the Muslim law officers were abolished and new courts, known as Courts of
Circuits, were established in their place. All distrcits in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa
were arranged into four divisions of Patna, Calutta, Murshidabad and Dacca. A
Court of Circuit consisting of company’s two covenanted servants was established
in each division to try all criminal cases.
The Circuit Court was not stationary but a moving court. It was to proceed from
district to district within the division trying persons accused of criminal offences. It
was to be assisted by Muslim Law officers, Kazi and Mufti. A security of tenure was
given to these law officers, unlike the one they had enjoyed before. They were to be
nominated by the Governor-General-in-Council. It was laid down that the Kazis
and Muftis could not be removed from their posts except by the orders of Governor-
General-in-Council, on proof of his satisfaction of their having been incapable or
having been guilty of misconduct.
The proceedings and records of all those cases, where the sentences of death or
perpetual imprisonment were to be inflicted, or where the judges of the Court
disapproved of the Fatwa proposed by the native law officers, were to be reported
to the Sadar Nizamat Adalat, which was to award the final sentence.
The lowest rung of the ladder of the criminal judicature were the Magistrates in the
districts. The Collector in each district was to act as a Magistrates also. He was to
examine the complainant, the accused (not on oath), and other persons having
knowledge of the crime. If the Magistrate found the suspicion against the suspect
wholly unfounded, he was to discharge him. If the offence committed turned out to
be petty, the Magistrate could himself award the sentence of corporal punishment
not exceeding 15 rattans or 15 days imprisonment. If the crime appeared to be serious,
the accused was to be tried by the Court of Circuit when it visited the district next
time. The Magistrate was to give a public notice in his district, of the time of arrival
of the Court of Circuit, and require all complainants, witnesses and the accused
released on bail, to attend when the Court arrived. The Magistrate was to give public
notice in his district, of the time of arrival of the Court of Circuit. He was also suppose
to make a report to the Sadar Nizamat Adalat specifying the names of the persons
apprehended by him, dates of their apprehension, and orders passed thereon. The
office of the Remembrancer created during Hastings regime was now abolished.
Reforms in Criminal Law:
All Nizamat Adalats were to decide cases according to Mohammedan law of crimes
as modified by the plan of Cornwallis to make the law more reasonable and humane.
Following changes were introduced in criminal law:
a.) For determining punishment ‘intention’ must be seen instead of ‘manner or
instruments’ by which the offence was committed. This change bears much
importance because the ‘intention’ is the first and foremost aspect seen in the
offences defined in the Indian Penal code.
b.) The relatives of the murdered persons could not pardon the accused.
c.) In case of murder, refusal by the relative to prosecute the accused or non
appearance of the relative in the court in proceedings resulting into acquittal as a
rule existing previously was abrogated in 1792.
d.) In 1791, the punishment of mutilation of limbs was abolished and in place of it
provision was made for imprisonment and hard labour.
e.) Crimes of forgery and perjury were taken very seriously and hence recommended
to be punished by branding on forehead in addition to the ordinary punishment.
The Scheme of 1793 (Cornwallis Code of 48 Regulations):
Separation of Executive and Judiciary:
The policy of separating the two functions was put into practice by the scheme of
1793. Accordingly, the regulation II of 1793 made inter-alia the following provisions:
a.) The Collector was to be responsible only for the collection of revenue payable to
the Government. He thus, became merely an administrative officer.
b.) The Courts of ‘Mal Adalat’ or revenue courts were to be abolished. The trial of
suits which up to this time had been cognizable in those courts as well as all
judicial powers that heretofore vested in the Collectors of the revenue were to be
transferred to the Courts of Diwani Adalat. Revenue cases became triable like
ordinary civil cases in ordinary civil courts.
Executive subjected to Judicial Control:
The Collectors and all executive officials were made amenable to the Diwani Adalats
for their acts; they were to be personally liable for violations of the regulations and
could be required to pay damages to the injured party.
British Subjects v. The Company’s Courts:
The British subjects most of whom were merchants and traders reside for commercial
purposes in the interior of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, beyond Calcutta, could recover
their claims against the native inhabitants easily and inexpensively by filling their
cases in the local Diwani Adalats. But on the other hand, the native inhabitants of
these areas had no such reciprocal means to obtain redress against the British subjects
against whom cases could be filed only in the Supreme Court at Calcutta.
To redeem this inequitable situation, the Diwani Adalat of Muffasil area were
authorised to entertain suits by natives against British subjects involving costs up to
Rs.500 only in case where British subjects were residing at a distance more than 10
miles from Calcutta.
Moffusil Diwani Adalats Reorganised:
The Mofussil Diwani Adalats under the collector had not been functioning properly.
A Diwani Adalat was instituted in each district and in each of the three cities of
Patna, Murshidabad and Dacca. It was to be superintended by a Company’s
covenanted civil servant. The Moffusil Adalat was authorised to take cognisance of
all civil and revenue cases. But, it was not to interfere with criminal cases. The scheme
of application of various laws was to be same as had been finalised in 1781.
Four Courts of Appeal:
Keeping in view the above situation, four courts of appeal were instituted namely:
Provincial Courts of Appeal having seats at Patna, Dacca, Calcutta and
Murshidabad. Each court was to consist of three of Company’s English covenanted
servants, out of which two were to make a quorum.
Functions of Sadar Diwani Adalat:
It was to hear appeals from the Provincial Courts of Appeal in all cases involving a
subject matter exceeding one thousand rupees. Its decisions were to be final, except
that a further appeal could be taken to the King-in-Council in cases of value of more
than five thousand pounds. The Sadar Diwani Adalat was given the functions of
supervision and inspection over the lower Adalats. In this respect, the powers of the
Sadar Adalat were to be:
i.) It might receive any original suit or complaint cognisable by a Mofussil Diwani
Adalat if the particular Mofussil Adalat had refused or omitted to proceed with
the case.
ii.) It could direct the Provincial Court of Appeal to receive and proceed with an
appeal cognisable by it, if it had omitted or refused to do the needful.
iii.) It was authorised to receive charges of corruption against the judges of the
Mofussil Diwani Adalats and the Provincial Court of Appeal. It could either try
the charges itself, or it might issue a special commission to three or more judges
of other Provincial Courts to try the charge, if it was against a judge of a Provinical
Court of Appeal; or order a Provincial Court of Appeal to try it if it happened to
be against the judge of a Mofussil Diwani Adalat.
Subordinate Civil Judicature:
No effort had been made to organise the subordinate judiciary in the districts, and
the whole judicial business of a district had been concentrated in one Moffusil Diwani
Adalat. The parties had thus to undergo much expense and inconvenience.
Court Fees Abolished:
Before 1793, court fees ranging between 2% to 5% in proportion to the cause of
action had to be paid by a person instituting a suit. Cornwallis took a radical step of
abolishing the Court fees.
Criminal Judicature:
The scheme of criminal judicature introduced in 1790 was left intact subject only to
a few changes made in 1793. These changes became necessary to achieve co-ordination
between the schemes of criminal and civil judicature. These were the following
modifications:
a.) In 1790, collectors were to act as Magistrates. But the policy adopted in 1793
deprived the collectors of judicial power, and keept them merely as an executive
officer. Magisterial functions were now transferred to the judges of the Mofussil
Diwani Adalats.
b.) The judicial powers of the magistrates were re-defined. Petty offences could
be punished by them by awarding imprisonment of up to 15 days or by imposing
a fine of up to Rs. 100.
c.) The practice hitherto had been for the suitors either to plead their own cause
personally or appoint agents. These agents could either be their servants or
dependants, or those who followed the profession of a vakeel.
Legal Profession:
The Sadar Diwani Adalat was to admit as many pleaders as were necessary to
plead the cause of the litigants in various Adalats. The Sadar Adalat was to grant,
sunnuds to the pleaders. The persons of good character, liberal education and versed
in the knowledge of Hindu Law and Mohammaden Law were admitted to the
profession. The Sadar Diwani Adalat could fine him, dismiss him or allow him to
resume his practice in cases of misbehaviour alleged to have been committed by
pleaders. To protect the clients from being exploited by the vakeels, it was laid down
that they were not to realise their fees directly from their clients; the courts were to
collect their fees as a part of the decree passed by them and pay to vakeels later on.
Scheme of 1793 also provided the liberty of institution of suits against government
in case of violation of regulation and laws. Hence, a citizen could file the suit against
the government.
Native Law Officers:
The scheme of 1793 provided that all native law officers i.e., Pandits, Kazis, Muftis
etc. belonging to the various courts were to be appointed by the Governor-General-
in-Council. Persons well versed in law and of unblemished moral character were to
be appointed as law officers, who were to take an oath on appointment.
Legislative Methods and the “Form of Regulation”:
A regulation was to contain a preamble reciting the reasons for its enactment. Every
regulation was to be divided into sections and where necessary, a section could be
divided into clauses. All regulations enacted in a year, were to be recorded in the
judicial department and then numbered, printed and published. The regulations
enacted during a year were to be bound in volumes; a sufficient number of these
volumes were to be sent to the courts and other functionaries.
Permanent Settlement of Bengal:
Since 1765, the major concern of East India Company was to collect as much revenue
as possible. Agriculture was the main basis of the economy and the source of income.
Several land revenue experiments were introduced in haste to maximise collection.
Native officials were given supervisory authority over them. The corruption as well
as lack of understanding of the social situation led to complete disorganisation of
the agrarian economy and society in the Diwani provinces. Warren Hastings, adopted
the policy of removal of Indians altogether from the administration of revenue and
make the British the sole collector of the resources of the provinces.
In 1784, Lord Cornwallis was sent to India with the specific instructions to streamline
the revenue administration. Cornwallis with the help of John Shore introduced it.
He realised that the existing system in the country needed improvement as agriculture
was not producing enough regular surplus that the company had hoped for.
Company trade also suffered because silk and cotton industry were mainly agriculture
based.
In order to improve the situation, the Company thought of fixing the revenue
collection permanently. This idea of fixing revenue went into the making of the
Permanent Settlement of 1793 which introduced in Bengal, the policy of “assessment
forever”.
The main characteristics were:
a.) It reduced the amount of corruption on the part of officials who were collectors.
b.) Landlord could invest money in improving the land.
c.) It increased production and enhanced income.
d.) Company would get its taxes regularly.
By 1790, the Company’s administration retained some Zamindars and replaced
others by new revenue farmers. Zamindars were expected to invest for the
improvement of agriculture if their property rights were secured. It was easier to
collect revenue from a small number of Zamindars than from innumerable peasants.
Thus, payment of revenue determined Zamindar’s rights over the land: Firstly, he
was the owner of land, secondly, he could sell, mortgage and transfer it and thirdly,
it could be inherited by his heirs.
But failure to pay revenue would lead to the confiscation of the Zamindari by the
government. Thus, this was the creation of private property in land. Peasants’
customary occupancy rights were ignored and their status was reduced to the position
of tenants. The condition of the actual cultivators declined under the permanent
settlement.
Judicial Plan of Lord William Bentick:
William Bentick became the Governor-General in 1828 and remained so until 1835.
During this time he made several reforms. He is considered next to Lord Cornwallis
in the area of basic reforms.
Establishment of Sadar Diwani and Sadar Nizamat Adalats of Allahabad:
By Regulation VI of 1831 he established Sadar Diwani and Sadar Nizamat Adalats
at Allahabad vesting the same powers as to the ones in Calcutta. These Adalats
started to work from January 1, 1832. The territorial jurisdiction of the new Adalats
extended to Benaras province and other areas including district of Meerut,
Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Bulandshar. This reform gave relief to the people
living far away from Calcutta.
Criminal Administration of Justice:
a.) Abolition of Circuit Courts- Circuit courts were abolished in 1829 and their
jurisdiction was conferred upon Commissioners.
b.) Establishment of the Court of Commissioner- By Regulation no. 1 of 1829, the
jurisdiction exercised so far by Circuit Court was transferred to the Commissioner
who was called ‘Commissioner of Revenue of Circuit’. He exercised the power of
superintendence and control over the Magistrates, police, collectors and other
revenue officers. The entire area was divided into divisions and for each division
a Commissioner was under the control of the Sadar Nizamat Adalat regarding
judicial functions and under the control of Board of Revenue regarding revenue
functions.
c.) Establishment of the Court of District and Sessions Judge. One Division consisted
of many districts. In each district, Diwani Adalat was working. By Regulation
VII of 1831, the Government was authorised to invest the additional duty of
Sessions to District Diwani Adalat. When the Judge discharged duties in District
Diwani Adalat, he was called the District Judge dealing with civil matters. When
the same judge would sit in sessions (generally once in a month) he was called
Sessions Judge dealing with criminal matters.
d.) Establishment of Court of ‘Collector-Magistrate’.
e.) More participation of Indians in Criminal Administration of Justice.
By regulation of 1831 the Magistrates were authorised to refer any criminal case to
Sadar Ameen or Principal Sadar Ameen for investigation. In 1832, these Indian
officers (Sadar Ameen, Principal Sadar Ameen) were given the powers to award
punishment of one month imprisonment with hard labour and corporal punishment
up to 30 rattans. More provisions were framed to give participation to Indians as
assessors and jurors in the criminal trials.
Civil Administration of Justice:
a.) Status of Munsif and Sadar Ameens was increased. By regulation V of 1831 the
jurisdiction of the Munsifs were increased up to Rs. 300. Regular salary was
provided in place of old system of Commission.
b.) Creation of the Court of Principal Sadar Ameen. An Indian officer was appointed
as the Principal Sadar Ameen by the Governor-General in Council. His jurisdiction
was raised from Rs. 1000 to Rs.5000 in civil cases, referred by the District Diwani
Adalat. The Principal Sadar Ameen could hear appeals also against the decisions
of the Munsifs and SadarAmeens. Appeals against the decision of Principal Sadar
Ameen could go to Diwani Adalat and further appeal could go to Sadar Diwani
Adalat in some special cases only.
c.) Registrar’s judicial powers abolished.
d.) Abolition of Provincial Court of Appeals. By Regulation 11 of 1833, the Governor
General in Council was empowered to abolish all the Provincial Court of Appeal
excepting none, hence the same were abolished in that year. Their jurisdiction
was given to Diwani Adalats with the provision of appointing Additional District
Judge if deemed necessary to help the court in speedy disposal.
e.) Introduction of Jury system in judicial system. Regulation VI of 1832 empowered
the Governor-General in C ouncil to authorise the judge of Diwani Adalat to
receive the help of jury while dealing civil cases. Undoubtedly, the Indians also
got the opportunity to share the judicial functions by way of jury.
Revenue Administration of Justice:
Drastic change was effected by empowering the Collector with vast judicial powers.
By Regulation VIII of 1831 the Collectors were conferred the Judicial powers erstwhile
exercised by the Diwani Adalat to entertain and try summarily all claims relating to
arrears of rent or their exactions (i.e., revenue matters). He also empowered to execute
all the decrees and orders passes by him. Now the Diwani Adalat, Principal Sadar
Ameen, Sadar Munsif had only revising powers according to their respective
pecuniary jurisdiction against the decision of the Collector.
Government v. Purtab:
In 1816, in the course of a robbery with violence, four villagers were murdered. The
suspects absconded and a proclamation was issued by Nizamat Adalat under
Regulation IX of 1808 calling upon them to surrender within a named period. After
this period expired, in 1821, the defendants were apprehended, tried in the Circuit
Court for murder and sentenced to death.
Regulation IX provided a proclamation that a person who failed to give himself up
within the prescribed period could be tried only for contumacy and that it was only
if he were acquitted on that charge that he could be brought to trial for the offence
for which he had proclaimed. When, therefore, the proceedings of the murder trial
came before the Nizamat Adalat for confirmation that the Chief Judge (Leycester)
directed that the defendants be put on trial for contumacy in not having complied
with the terms of the proclamation. This was done, they were found guilty and
sentenced to transportation for life, subject to confirmation by Nizamat Adalat.
Out of the five judges, Smith J and the third judge agreed that the original offence
was outside the ambit of Regulation IX of 1908. The proclamation was illegal and
the defendant should, therefore, be acquitted. The chief Judge held the conviction
legal while the fifth judge held the charge as proved but gave no opinion on legality
of the proclamation. The fourth judge held the proclamation legal and the conviction
proper. It was pointed out by Smith J. that the validity of proclamation was not
considered by the Chief Judge and the fifth judge, and unless they agreed with the
fourth judge in holding the proclamation as legal, the conviction on the contumacy
charge could not be upheld.
Courtney Smith managed to show the recorded minutes to the Chief Judge before
the charge was prepared for signature. However, the Chief Judge declared the
proclamation to be legal but the fifth judge thought it to be illegal and to this the
second judge re-joined. He could now point out that three out of five judges were of
the opinion that the proclamation was illegal and that the contumacy trial must be
quashed. The chief and the fourth judge, however, adhered to their opinion and
Courtney Smith recorded yet a further minute remark that as all the judges had
now expressed their opinions on the legality of the proclamation “there can be no
reason for further delay in issuing a sentence which three judges out of five approve”.
It appears that the prisoners were accordingly acquitted in the contumacy charge
because the court proceeded to consider the conviction on the murder charge before
it. Judge Smith opined that a trial de novo on that charge was unnecessary and the
other judges agreed with him. Conviction was therefore affirmed but in the
circumstances the death sentence was replaced by one of imprisonment for life.
Development of Personal laws in India:
Personal laws had their sanctity since Mughal period which remained so during the
British period and even today they have sustained their existence. Warren Hastings
was the supporter of the policy of applying personal laws to both Hindus and
Muslims. In his opinion it would be a great evil to impose on the Indian people a
foreign legal system. The aim of the British Government was to preserve the laws for
Hindus and Muslims according to the Shastras and Quran. However, English law
officers were ignorant about Hindi and Arabic language. Also, the amount of literature
of Hindu Law was vast and often conflicted as it represented different strata of
civilization of social growth. The Hindu literature consisted of Smritis, Shrutis,
commentaries, etc. In many respects, commentaries differed from the Smritis because
they were of much later age. The great difficulty faced by a judge in the process of
ascertaining Hindu law was to choose between the conflicting texts which could
answer all questions pertaining to different matters.
Realising these issues, Warren Hastings made available to them the assistance of
native law officers, i.e., Pandits and Qazis. This experiment initially remained confined
to Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and later expanded to areas which were under the
company’s rule. Gradually, British officers gained confidence and were no more
dependent on native law officers. Also, the judges had no confidence in the integrity
and loyalty of these native officers.
In course of time, Hasting’s policy of preserving the indigenous Indian laws came to
be increasingly appreciated. The personal law of the Hindus governs the areas of
marriage, adoption, joint family, property, etc. Similarly, the Muslim law governs
the Muslims in the same matters. According to U.C. Sarkar:
They began with the policy of non-interference and generally allowed the then
existent system of law to prevail; but gradually they began to assert themselves
being, of course backed by a strong fraction of the public opinion.
Because many courts were presided by English judges and they had to decide the
disputes involving Hindu and Muslim law. Therefore, there was necessity of
authoritative works, well compiled in English language. The Governor-General
Warren Hastings did this commendable job for the first time. At his instance, a code
of Hindu Law was prepared in 1775 with the active help of ten Brahmins of Bengal.
The original text of the Hindu code was prepared in Sanskrit language under the
title of ‘Vivadarnata Setu’, or the ‘Bridge across the ocean of Litigation’. This code
was translated in Persian language and later on it was translated into English
Language by Halheid which was known as Code of Gentoo laws or the Gentoo code
applicable to Hindus. This code “must be considered as the only work of kind wherein
the genuine principles of the ‘Gentoo’ jurisprudence are made public”. The code
devoted to topics like, law of Contracts. For example, it had chapters on topics as
debt, deposits, sale and property.
In the area of Mohammedan Law, he got translation of ‘Futwa-i-Alamgiri, a work
in Persian language prepared under the authority of Aurangzeb. He also got
translation of ‘Hedaya’ into Persian. The Hedaya or guide was also held in high
esteem by the Muslims. The work, being in the Arabic language, was completed as
late as twelfth century. It was translated first in the Persian language by learned
Maulvies, and then Charles Hamilton translated it into English. The four volumes of
this work appeared in London in 1791. It is continuously cited by the Bench and the
Bar, both.
Justice Jones of the Supreme Court of Calcutta also prepared the work on
Mohammedan Law of Succession. ‘Al Sivajiyan’, a work on inheritance was selected
for this purpose as it was regarded as an authoritative work in all Mohammedan
countries that followed the system of Abu Hanifa. Justice Jones also published his
‘Institutes of the Hindu Law’, the ordinances of Manu in 1794. He was desirous to
prepare ‘Digest of Hindu Law’ but it remained incomplete due to his sudden death
which was ultimately completed by Pandit Jagannath. The same was translated in
English by Colebrooke.
Later on, many other works were produced. Sir Francis Macnaughtan prepared
‘Considerations upon Hindu Law’ in 1824. Sir William Hay Macnaughtan prepared
‘Principles and Precedents of Mohammedan law’ in 1825. Other works included
Myne’s ‘Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage’ in 1887 and Neil Daille’s ‘Treatise on the
Law of Inheritance’ which was applicable to Muslims. In addition to the above,
other works were also published by native and foreign writers which had conflicting
versions due to non-acquaintance with the native languages, local customs and
usages.
Thus, the development of personal laws continued throughout the English period.
The legislation, adjudication, and legal works undoubtedly contributed much. Many
orthodox or unreasonable laws were removed and silent areas were filled up. After
independence of the country, these laws were compiled and rationalised.
Development of Criminal Laws:12
The Muslim system of criminal law and justice, had gained ground sufficiently in
India when the Britishers came to India. During the Mughal period it had become
systematic, and, was applicable in the Muslim ruled areas in India.
Sources: The primary source of Muslim law was the Koran. Koran was the word of
the Allah. Ijma & Qiyas were the others sources. The nature, purpose and mode of
punishment under Muslim Law may be grouped into four:
i) Retaliation (Kisa) (‘life for life, limb for limb’);
ii) Blood money (Diya) (Unintentional killing), money compensation;
iii) Fixed penalties (Hadd) (Limits of Punishment prescribed); and
iv) Discretionary (Tazeer) (Judge’s discretion).
The Principle of Retaliation was applied to cases of wilful homicide and of grave
maiming and wounding. It gave to the injured person or next of kin the right of
making like injury to the culprit. Killing by way of retaliation was to be done with a
12
M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History (Nagpur: Lexis Nexis) 2012.
sword or with any other similar weapon. From the beginning, this was the general
mode of execution of justice in the territories under the control of the East India
Company. Where the person murdered was a descendent of the killer, there was no
provision for retaliation. The second was the blood money. This was payable for
other unintentional killings. The fund was to be exacted from the wrong-doer himself.
In other cases, he and his family or associates were liable. ‘Hadd’ which translates
to ‘limit’ was applied to the fixed penalties for certain offences.
The quantity and quality of punishment were fixed for certain offences and could
not be altered or modified. The judge had no discretion in the matter, e.g., the
punishment for illicit intercourse was stoning or whipping; for falsely accusing a
married woman of adultery or for wine drinking, it was whipping; for theft it was
cutting of the hands; and for various types of robbery, it was mutilation or death.
Under the Principles of Tazeer, the kind and amount of punishments were entirely
within the discretion of the judge. The punishment was public exposure, corporal
punishment, exile, boxing on the ear, imprisonment or humiliating treatment. Warren
Hastings commented – “law as barbarous in construction and contrary to the first
principle of civil society.”
Muslim criminal law was based on ‘Hedaya’ and ‘Fatawa Alamgiri’. Sometimes,
these contained contrary principles of opposing Hanafi Schools. This resulted in
uncertainty on Hanafi Law. In addition, this law of crimes in some aspects suffered
from other glaring defects like the absence of the principles of natural justice.
Crimes were divided into:
1) Crimes against God e.g., adultery, drunkenness etc.
2) Crimes against man e.g., murder, robbery etc.
Muslim Law granted a privilege to the sons to pardon the murderer of their parents
or kinsman. This encouraged many potential killers to commit homicide on slightest
provocations leading to human life became cheap.
Among Hindus, Brahmin murderers escaped punishment because the relatives of
the deceased person did not like to incur any sin by demanding retaliation against
the offender Brahmin.
The whole Muslim law of homicide was very complicated, technical & obscure.
Punishments like, mutilation and stoning to death were cruel and inhuman. The
law of criminal procedure and law of evidence were highly technical, primitive and
irrational, e.g., evidence of one Muslim was equivalent to that of two non-Muslims,
and evidence of two women was equal to that of one man.
As far as the judiciary was concerned:
a.) the King was the highest judicial authority & formed the highest court. He
decided cases in the Court Hall called Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of private audience);
b.) Kazi was appointed by the King. He decided cases falling under Muslim
personal law. He held his court proceedings in public;
c). Governors & Diwans at provincial level, Faujdars at district level, Amins at
Pargana level & Kotwal in towns were deciding secular cases; and
d). Diwani (revenue) Adalats decided civil cases and Nizamat Adalats decided
criminal cases.
The British Government employed the process of gradually reforming the Muslim
law so as to make it a fit instrument for administration of criminal justice in India.
The reforms were introduced in the form of regulations, based generally upon English
law principles. Lord Cornwallis, in 1790, divested the Kazi of any authority over
Nizamat. In 1791, the government abolished punishment of mutilation and
substituted imprisonment and hard labour in its place. General principles on which
criminal justice should be administered were introduced in the Cornwallis Code
1793.
In 1833, Lord Macaulay moved the House of Commons to codify the criminal law
for the whole of India. The first law commission was appointed with Lord Macaulay
as its Chairman. It submitted its draft to the Governor-General in 1837. This was
circulated to the judges and law advisers. It was revised by another Commission. It
was finally passed by the Legislative Council in 1860 which is the Indian Penal
Code. In 1861, the Criminal Procedure Code was passed. These two together repealed
the then prevailing Hindu & Muslim Criminal Laws and Procedures.
English Law administered in Mufassils:
The Hastings Judicial plan of 1772 expressly provided that the natives would be
excluded from the application of English law unless and until they voluntarily
consented to be adjudged by it for settling their disputes. This principle was followed
in the administration of civil justice in Mufassils of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It was
the first attempt by the company’s administration to introduce a definite system of
law in the Mufassils. The plan provided that the suits relating to inheritance, marriage,
caste and other religious institutions were to be decided according to the laws of
Quran with respect to Muslims and laws of Shastras with respect to Gentoos (Hindus).
The Maulvies and Pandits were to expound the law in such cases and assist the
English judge in passing decrees. However, the Hastings Plan of 1772 did not provide
for the rules to be followed in civil suits of persons other than those expressly
mentioned. Therefore, in 1781, Sir Elijah Impey, the judge of Sadar Diwani Adalat
at Calcutta added the word ‘succession’ to the word ‘inheritance’ and prescribed
that “in all those cases for which no specific directions are hereby given, the courts
were to act according to justice, equity and good conscience.” This provision was
also extended to all Diwani Adalats functioning in the Mofussils of Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa.
Warren Hastings in his judicial plan, had deliberately rejected the idea of complete
application of English law in India on the plea that its rigid imposition was contrary
to the customs and traditions of the natives and repugnant to the conditions of the
country. The usages, customs, and institutions of indigenous people could not be
overlooked and the law to be followed was to be agreeable as closely as possible to
the personal laws of the inhabitants.
That apart, the development of the English law having been on altogether different
footings than the indigenous laws of natives, its rigid application in India was not
desirable. The Indian traditions, usages and customs were radically different from
those of England; therefore, Hastings wisely thought of the unsuitability of the
application of unmodified English law to Indian cases and granted liberty to the
natives to be governed by their own personal laws in certain matters of civil justice.
Subsequently, when Lord Cornwallis assumed the reigns of the Company’s
Government, he realised that the existing scheme of judicial administration was far
from satisfactory and the existing laws needed to be reduced in the form of digested
code which would be acceptable to the tenets and beliefs of Muslims and Hindus.
Therefore, he brought out a set of regulations which was called the Cornwallis Code
of 1793, Regulation XLI of the code provided that the matters relating to succession,
inheritance, marriage, caste, religion, were to be disposed of according to Hindu or
Mohammedan laws if the parties happened to be Hindu or Mohammedan,
respectively. Similar provisions were extended to the province of Benaras in 1793
and United Provinces in 1802. While both these laws were based on religion, they
greatly differed in usages and customs. Within the Muslim community itself there
were two different sects, namely, the Shia and Sunni who followed different laws.
Likewise Mitakshara and Dyaybhaga schools of Hindus followed different family
laws despite their common origin from the Shastras.
Regulation XI of 1793 annulled the custom of single heir succession called
‘impartibility’ on the ground that it was repugnant to both Hindu and Mohammedan
laws.
In 1827, a further modification was made regarding applicability of the personal
laws of natives. It was provided that in case the parties to a suit belonged to different
religious pursuits, then the law of the defendant would apply and in absence of any
specific law or usage, the principles of equity, justice and good conscience would be
applied for deciding the case. Thus, the most notable feature of the Cornwallis Code
was that it placed both Hindus and Muslims on equal footings thereby bringing to
an end the superiority of Mohammedan law which dominated the Indian scene due
to prolonged Mughal rule in India.
In cases where the parties were neither Muslims nor Hindus, the courts generally
applied the law of the country of the origin of the parties except where they
voluntarily agreed to place themselves under the English Law. The disputes relating
to inheritance, arising among the Indian Christians were generally decided according
to the usage of the parties as indicated by their ancestors and predecessors. However,
the European British subjects residing in the Mofussils were governed by the English
law in their civil matters.
Concept of Justice, Equity and Good Conscience:13
The concept of justice, equity and good conscience has played an important role in
the introduction of English law in India especially in Mofussils. The maxim was not
defined properly but it was usually taken to mean discretion of the judges. In 1772,
Warren Hastings prepared a judicial plan, known as Warren Hastings Plan of 1772.
By this plan the system of Adalats was introduced in the territory of Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa. In each district a court called Mofussil Diwani Adalat was established.
The appeals from this court were to be heard by the superior court called Sadar
Diwani Adalat, where the value of the suit was more than Rs. 500. Besides, in each
district a Mofussil Faujdari Adalat was established to decide criminal cases according
to Muslim criminal law. The appeals from the Mufassil Faujdari Adalat were to be
heard by the Sadar Nizamat Adalat. The cases of inheritance, marriage, caste and
other religious usages and institutions were to be decided by the Mufassil Diwani
Adalat according to the law of Shariat with regard to the Mohammedans and the
laws of the Shastras with respect to the Hindus.
The personal laws of Hindus and Muslims were safeguarded, but the personal laws
were to be applied only in respect of a few matters and it was not made clear under
this plan as to what law to be applied by these courts in respect of other matters.
Besides, the facility of using personal laws was allowed only to Hindus and Muslims
in the territory of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It was not made clear under the plan as
to what law was to be applied to the persons other than Hindus and Muslims. In
1781, Sir Elijah Impey, for the guidance of the Sadar Diwani Adalat and the Mufassil
Diwani Adalats, compiled a Civil Procedure Code which was promulgated by the
council in the form of regulation. The provision was made that in all cases for which
no specific direction were given, the judges of the Sadar Diwani Adalt and Mofussil
Adalats were to act according to the justice, equity and good conscience. During the
period when Lord Cornwallis was the Governor-General, by regulations it was made
clear that in cases coming within the jurisdiction of the Zilla and city courts or the
Provincial Courts of Appeal or the Sadar Diwani Adalat for which no specific rule
was in existence, the judges were to act according to justice, equity and good
conscience. For non-Hindus and non-Muslims residing in the territories of Bengal,
Bihar and Orissa, no law was prescribed and therefore, the cases pertaining to them
were decided by the judges according to justice, equity and good conscience.
In Madras, by Regulation II of 1802 it was made clear that in cases coming within
the jurisdiction of the Zilla Courts for which no specific rule was in existence, the
judges were to act according to justice, equity and good conscience.
13
Kailash Rai, Indian Legal and Constitutional History (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Agency) 1993.
In Bombay Regulation IV of the Elphinstone Code, 1827 made provision that if the
Acts of British Parliament, Regulations made by the Government of Bombay, the
usages of the country and the law of defendant would not provide guidance as to
the law to be applied in the case before the court, the courts would decide the case
according to ‘Justice, equity and good conscience’.
In the beginning the maxim of ‘justice, equity and good conscience’ was taken to
mean discretion of judges and it was expected that the discretion would be exercised
by the judges in a manner which seemed to them doing substantial justice to the
parties. The judges, in the exercise of their discretion, applied Hindu Law where the
parties were Hindu and Muslim law, where the parties were Muslims in may cases
in which they were not bound to apply such law.
Later on, and specially after the establishment of the High Court in 1862, the maxim
of ‘justice, equity and good conscience’ was taken to mean the rules of the English
law as far as applicable to Indian situations. The judges of the High Courts were
barristers and trained under the English law. Consequently, whenever they got the
opportunity to decide a case according to ‘justice, equity and good conscience’ they
used it to decide a case on the basis of English law. It was natural for an Englishman
to interpret the words ‘justice, equity and good conscience’ to mean such rules and
principles of English law as he happened to know and considered applicable to the
case. The Act of Settlement, 1781, recognised the Sadar Diwani Adalat as a court to
hear appeals from the decisions of the Mufassil Courts in civil cases. It also made
provision that the appeals against the judgement of the Mufassil Courts in civil
cases. It also made provision that the appeals against the judgments of the Sadar
Diwani Adalat might be presented to the King-in-Council (i.e., the Privy Council) if
the value of the suit was 5000 pound or more.
The judges of the Privy Council interpreted this maxim as meaning the rules of
English Law so far as applicable to Indian conditions. In Waghela Rajsanji v. Sheikh
Masluddin14, Lord Hobshouse expressed the view that this maxim had been generally
interpreted to mean “the rules of English Law if found applicable to Indian Society
and circumstances.” The Privy Council thus introduced the English law in Mufassil
also. The Privy Council, as it appears from the above discussion, has played an
important role in the introduction of English law in India.
The doctrine of justice, equity and good conscience allowed discretion to the judges
in deciding the cases. The discretion of one judge was often found to differ from the
discretion of another judge. On account of it, diversity and uncertainty developed in
the field of law. The codification of the Indian law was the only remedy for removing
these evils.
14
See, Varden Seth Sam v. Luckpathy Royjee Lallah 9 MÎA 303; Waghela Rajsanji v. Sheikh Masluddin , 14 IÂ.89;
Dada v. Babaji, 2 Bom.H.C.36, p. 96. cited from Kailash Rai, Indian Legal and Constitutional History.
The Charter of 1833:15
The commercial and political privileges of the Company which were granted to it by
the Act of 1813 were to terminate in 1833. It was necessary for the Company to
approach the Parliament for the renewal of its Charter for the term of next twenty
years. This was the period when the doctrine of laissez faire had become the cardinal
principle of economic policy in Britain and economists were striving hard to free the
trade from all restrictions and monopolies. On the political plane, the wave of
Benthamite liberalism influenced the minds of politicians and law-reformers. At
that time Macaulay was in Parliament and was the Secretary to the Board of Control
and James Mill was the examiner of the Indian correspondence in India House. It
was under these circumstances that Parliament took up the question of renewal of
the Company’s Charter.
The Charter made many vital alterations in the legislative system of India. In the
first place, it created in real sense an ‘All India Legislature’ having authority to make
laws and regulations for all territories falling under the government of the company
at the time.
This wide legislative power was, however, subject to some exceptions. It could not
in any way alter the provisions of the Charter Act of 1833 itself. Neither could it
change the Mutiny Acts nor could it alter the provisions of any Act of Parliament to
be passed after 1833. Likewise, Council was not eligible to legislate so as to affect the
prerogative of the crown, or the authority of the Parliament, or the constitution of
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Directions were given to the Governor-General-in-Council that the Council shall
forthwith repeal all laws and regulations so disallowed by the new codified
legislations. The copies of such codified legislations were to be sent to the ‘Court of
Directors’.
The laws and regulations of the Legislative Council were to be of the same force and
effect as any Act of the Parliament. The powers of legislation were vested in the
Governor-General-in-Council. The Council, besides the Governor-General was to
have four ordinary members out of whom one was to be a ‘law member’. The three
ordinary members were to be appointed by the Court of Directors from amongst
persons who had been the servants of the Company for at least ten years. The Law
members were to be appointed by the Court of Directors from amongst the persons
who had not been the servants of the Company. The Law member was not entitled
to sit or vote in the Council except at meetings for making laws and regulations, in
other words, law member had no right to sit and vote in administrative meetings of
the Governor-General in Council.
All legislative power in the country had been thus centralised and concentrated in
one body that is the Governor General in Council at Calcutta. The Charter Act took
certain steps towards securing a uniform and simple system in India. Section 53
15
N. V. Paranjee, Indian Legal and Constitutional History (Allahabad: Central Law Agency) 2006.
provided that the Governor- General in Council should, as soon as he feels convenient,
to issue a commission to such persons as he shall think fit. These persons were to
constitute the Indian Law Commission. They were not to exceed five at one time.
The commissioners were required to inquire fully into the jurisdiction, powers and
rules of the existing courts of justice.
Besides the changes affected by the Act in the powers and working of the Company’s
home government and its central government in British India and the Presidencies,
certain other important reforms were also introduced. They were as follows:
a.) The Act provided that the natives of India would be freely allowed to
participate in the administration of the country without any restrictions as to
descent, color, caste, creed or religion;16
b.) The Act required the Governor-General-in-Council to initiate necessary steps
to abolish slavery and ameliorate the condition of slaves. He was expected to
prepare a draft on this subject and submit it to the Court of Directors;
c.) The Act of 1833 also increased the number of Bishopries to three and made
the Bishop of Calcutta, the Metropolitan Bishop of India; and
d.) The Act also contained provisions regarding the training of civil servants for
Indians at the Company’s College at Haileybury and regulated admissions to
that College.
First Law Commission (1834-43):
In pursuance of the provisions of the Charter Act of 1833, the First Law Commission
came to be appointed in 1834. The Commission consisted of the following members:
Lord Macaulay, J. M. Macleod, G. W. Anderson, F. Millet. The other three members
of the Commission were from amongst the civil servants of the Company
representing the three presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. The
Commission met for the first time in 1834. Under instructions from the Governor-
General-in-Council, the first law Commission under the guidance of Macaulay (Law
Member) proceeded with the work of drafting the Indian Penal Code. The draft of
the Penal Code, which was mainly the work of Macaulay, was submitted to the
Government in 1837. It could not be immediately enacted into a code. It had to wait
for nearly a quarter of a century before it became law.
Lex Loci Report: Great obscurity engulfed the question of civil law which could
determine the rights of other communities such as, Christians, Anglo-Indian,
Armenians, etc. residing in the Muffasil. The attention of the first Law Commission
was directed to this question in 1837. The remedy proposed by the Commission was
that an Act should be passed making the substantive law of England, the Law of the
land (Lex Loci). On May 22, 1840, the Commission, by following the above
recommendation, submitted a draft of the Lex Loci Act. Its main provisions were:
a.) Only so much of the law of England was proposed to be applied as to suit the
people of India and that which was not consistent with any Regulation or Act of
the Indian legislature;
b.) It was not to apply to any person professing any religion other than the Christian
religion in matters of marriage, divorce or adoption;
c.) No Act of Parliament passed since 1726 was to be applied unless the Act was
specially extended to the Muffasil in India;
d.) The Muffasil courts could adjudicate upon the legal rights and modify the same
whenever equity and good conscience, required, in the same way as they had
been doing heretofore in the case of British subjects;
e.) The distinction maintained by the English law between the real property and
personal property would not be applicable in the Mufassil. All immovable
properties in the Mufassil were to be regulated in the same way as the personal
property in England;
f.) The distinction maintained by the English law between the succession of the
immovable property of the deceased which followed the law of the place, where
the property was situated and succession to movable property of the deceased
which followed the law of the place of the domicile of the deceased, was not to
be affected;
g.) Appeals from the courts in the Mufassil, in all matters decided under the Lex
Loci Act, were to lie to the Supreme Court concerned instead of the Sadar Diwani
Adalat;
h.) Nothing in the Act was to apply to a Hindu or a Mohammedan, or to his property,
unless he had renounced his religion and had adopted any other religion;
j.) No Hindu or Mohammedan, by renouncing his religion, was to lose any rights or
property or deprive any other person of any rights or property;
k.) So much of the Hindu or Mohammedan law which inflicted forfeiture of rights
and property of any person in case of renouncing his religion or who had been
excluded from the communion of any of those religion, could not be enforced in
the Company’s Courts.
l.) In any cases falling within the above clauses, it appeared to the court of trial that
the application of the principles would outrage the feelings of any party, the
court was to submit the case to the court of appeal which was to decide whether
the provisions were to be applied or not, with what modifications and what, if
any compensation, was to be given to a party for loss sustained by him.
The Second Law Commission:17
The Second law Commission which was appointed on 29th November, 1853 in
England, consisted of members having knowledge of English and Indian laws and
also of social conditions. It consisted of leading lawyers of England and a few persons
17
For details read, M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History (Nagpur:Lexis Nexis)
2012.
who had intimate knowledge of the Indian laws, and those who were personally
associated with the work of the First Law Commission. It was to examine and consider
the recommendations of the First Law Commission in relation to the reforms of the
judicial establishments, judicial procedure and laws of India. The Second Law
Commission functioned till the middle of 1856, as its life was fixed statutorily for
three years. During the tenure, the Commission submitted four reports.
The very first task assigned to the Commission by the Board of Commissioners for
India was to take into consideration, the preliminary measures which would be
necessary for amalgamating the Sadar Adalats and the Supreme Courts at each
presidency.
The majority of the Commission made the following recommendations for the law
reforms:
a.) That a substantive civil law for the whole of India is needed;
b.) The English law should be made the basis of such law;
c.) The personal laws of Hindus and Mohammedans should not be codified in this
regard; and
d.) Some other exceptions for the codification of certain aspects of law with respect
to some people and some localities could be made according to the needs and
requirements.
The Commission submitted a plan for the amalgamation of the Supreme Court at
Fort William in Bengal with the Sadar Diwani and Nizamat Adalats. It also
recommended simple and uniform Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedures applicable
to the High Court to be so formed as well as to all inferior courts within the limits of
its jurisdiction. The basic recommendation of the commission was to constitute a
single tribunal, which for the sake of distinction was called the High Court, in place
of the Supreme Court and the Sadar courts.
In the third report, the Commission prepared the plan for the north-western Provinces
in order to install a judicial system and procedure which would be uniform to the
system recommended for Bengal.
The fourth report was devoted to the preparation of a similar plan for the Presidencies
of Bombay and Madras.
In all three reports, a common pattern was recommended for the High Courts and
this part of the reports was effectuated in 1861. The codes of Civil and Criminal
Procedures were enacted by the Indian Legislature in 1859 and 1861, respectively.
*******
UNIT I- HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The dawn of a new era in the constitutional development of India began with the
transfer of power from the East India Company to the British Crown in 1858. The
Government of India Act, 1858 introduced many constitutional changes of far-reach-
ing consequences and became famous as an Act for the better governance of India.
The period from 1858 to 1947 was an era of direct government by the British Crown.
Some major policy decisions which were taken during this period played an impor-
tant role in shaping and moulding the future constitutional development of India.
Three phases of development during this period may be stated as:
a.) the growth of representative institutions;
b.) self-governing institutions; and
c.) dominion status.
The national opinion and political situation in India were greatly influenced by the
reactions of the forces of British imperialism, nationalism and communalism. Some
acts of the British Parliament which were solely responsible for the growth of the
above stated phases and which led to the transition are discussed below:
The Indian Council Act, 186118:
It was realised by the British in 1857 that most of the trouble faced by them could be
avoided if means to take the concerns of Indians into account were employed. The
Indian feelings were similar in this regard. Montague and Lord Chelmsford also
concluded that the terrible events of the war of independence:
brought home to men’s minds the dangers arising from the entire exclusion of Indi-
ans from association with the legislation of their country.
Sir Charles Wood, in his speech in the House of Commons on 6th June 1861 aptly
remarked:
It would be folly to shut our eyes to the increasing difficulties of our position in India
and it is an additional reason why we should make the earliest endeavour to put out
all institutions on the soundest possible foundations.
The steps taken to centralise legislation under the Charter Acts of 1833 and 1853
were considered inadequate to meet the demands of a country like India. It was
realised as necessary by the British statesmen to take non-officials Indians and Euro-
peans in the Legislative Councils of the country, “with a view of obtaining timely
understanding of the feelings and sentiments of the members of the outside public
concerning measures proposed to be taken by government”.
18
V. D. Kulshreshtha, Landmarks in Indian Legal and Constitutional History (Lucknow: Eastern Book
Company) 2016.
Provisions of the Act:
a.) Reconstitution of Executive Council- The Act of 1861 reconstituted the Executive
Council of the Governor General and the Act provided that it shall be appointed by
the Secretary of State for India. Out of the remaining two members, one was to be a
Law Member and the other, a Finance Member of the Council.
b.) Governor General’s powers increased- The Act of 1861 increased the powers of
the Governor-General and he was authorised to act alone in all matters except law-
making of the Council. He was also empowered to appoint a President to preside
over the meeting of the Council in his absence.
c.) Indians associated with law-making- For this purpose of law making, the Act
empowered the Governor- General to enlarge his Council by adding not less than 6
and not more than 12 members. Not less than one half of the members were to be
non-officials (some of them Indians) appointed for a term of two years. Thus, Indi-
ans were first of all associated with law-making. The new Legislative Council was
authorised to make laws for all people- Indians, Britishers and foreigners and for all
the courts of justice and public servants within the territories of British India. Cer-
tain limitations were placed on the power of the Central Legislature regarding the
subjects like the Charter Act of 1853.
d.) Governor-General’s power to issue ordinances- It was made compulsory to se-
cure assent of the Governor-General on every enactment passed by the Legislative
Council. The Governor-General was empowered to decline his assent or to withhold
or to reserve any Act for Her Majesty’s sanction. The Governor-General was also
empowered to issue ordinances independently which were to remain in force for six
months unless disallowed by the Crown. In the meantime, the Legislative Council
was authorised to pass an Act on that subject.
e.) Restrictions on provincial Council’s powers- The Act also restored the legislative
powers of the provincial legislature of Bombay and Madras. For the purpose of making
laws, the Executive Council of a Governor was enlarged by an addition of not less
than four and not more than eight members for a term of two years. These members
were to be non-officials. A Provincial Council was empowered to enact laws for the
province only but it was not authorised to pass laws on subjects of national impor-
tance.
Thus, the Act of 1861 laid down the foundation of the legislative system as is seen in
India even today.
Indian High Courts Act, 186119:
In 1852, it was urged upon the Parliamentary Committee for East Indian affairs,
that it was desirable that the Supreme Court and the Sadar Adalats in each presi-
19
For details read- https://archive.org/stream/indiancouncilsac00grearich indiancouncilsac00grearich_djvu.txt,
retrieved on 20th February, 2019. Also, V. . Kulshreshtha, Landmarks in Indian Legal and Constitutional History
(Lucknow: Eastern Book Company) 2015.
dency should be consolidated, to combine the legal learning and the judicial experi-
ence of the English Barristers. Moreover, with Lord Dalhousie’s conquests and an-
nexations, the Company could not match the responsibilities increased. There was
mal-administration on wide scale and this led to repugnance in the people of India
towards foreign rule. And the First War of Independence in 1857 by the Indians
made political change inevitable, which resulted in the Crown’s assumption of the
entire sovereignty of British India and Parliament’s direct responsibility for its gov-
ernment. This required the complete overhauling of the judicial system too. As a
result, the Indian High Courts Act, 1861 was passed on 6th August 1861.
The Act of 1861 empowered the crown to establish, by letters patent, High Courts of
Judicature at Calcutta (for the Bengal division of Presidency of Fort William), Ma-
dras and Bombay, abolishing the Supreme Courts and the courts of Sadar Diwani
Adalat and Sadar Nizamat (Faujdari) Adalat. The jurisdiction and powers of the
High Courts were to be fixed by letters patent. The crown was also empowered to
establish a High Court in the North-Western provinces.
Sections 2 and 3 of the Act made provisions for number of judges, their qualifica-
tions and their tenure.
Each High Court was to have supervisory power over all the courts which were
subjected to its appellate jurisdiction. The high court was also governing the power
to call for returns, to transfer any suit or appeal from one court to another and to
make general rules. Her majesty could, through grant of letters patent, enlarge their
jurisdictions.
High Court of Judicature:
a.) Jurisdiction and powers- the jurisdiction of this court was ordinary original civil
jurisdiction. The Act 15 of 1919 defined its limits. The jurisdiction of the small cause
court was distinct and separate. In addition, it was empowered to try and deter-
mine as a court of extraordinary original jurisdiction, any suit falling within the
jurisdiction of any court within or without Bengal but subject to its superinten-
dence.
b.) Procedure- As regards to the procedure, the High Court was given the power to
make rules and orders to regulate all proceedings (civil and criminal) which were
brought before it. An attempt was made to bring uniformity to the rules of proce-
dure of all High Courts and subordinate courts.
An appeal in any matter, not being of criminal jurisdiction, from the decision of the
High Court was allowed to the Privy Council, provided that the sum or matter in
issue was of the value of not less than Rs. 10,000. The High Court was also empow-
ered to certify that the case was a fit one for appeal to the Privy Council.
For nearly eighty years, two separate and parallel systems of courts continued to
work in Presidencies and the Mofussil areas, they were:
a.) the Royal Courts or crown’s court, and
b.) the Adalats of the company.
The sources of power and authority of these courts were different. Their jurisdic-
tions were vague and ill-defined and this confusion brought about several conflicts
which may be compared with the conflicts of the common law courts and the Chan-
cery Courts in England during 17th century. There, the Judicature Acts of 1873 and
1875 brought about the fusion of the two systems of administration of justice with-
out affecting the nature of the substantive rights at law and in equity. In India, the
fusion of the two systems of administration of justice, the Supreme Courts and Sadar
Diwani Adalats, brought about by the Indian High Courts Act, 1861 was a major
and significant step towards the process of the evolution of High Courts. This sig-
nificant measure had the following apparent advantages:
a.) The number of courts was decreased;
b.) The dual control came to an end;
c.) High Court supervised the lower courts;
d.) The quality of work of the lower courts improved;
e.) Efficiency of the judges improved;
f.) Procedures were simplified;
g.) Appellate procedure also became uniform; and
h.) The clash and the conflicts between the two systems gradually decreased and
there emerged simplicity and efficiency.
Privy Council in England20:
The Normans ruled over England through Curia Regis (in England, after the Norman
Conquest, William continued to summon Witan. It gradually transformed its char-
acter and it became Curia Regis, the feudal counterpart of the Curia Ducis of
Normandy) which was a sort of Supreme Feudal Council of Normans to control the
administration of England. Out of the Curia, gradually two distinct bodies, namely,
the Magnum Concilium, the larger council and the Curia Regis, the smaller council
emerged. The smaller council consisted of some high officials of the state, members
of the Regis household and certain important clerks chosen by the crown.
Out of them, Magnum Concillium was to deal with executive matters whereas Cu-
ria Regis performed judicial functions. The Curia Regis was a small body consisting
of high officials of the State, members of the Royal household and certain clerks
chosen by the Crown itself. Their duty was to advice the King in matters of legisla-
tion and administration and to deliver justice. In fact, the Curia Regis acted as a
final Appellate Court for England and English Empire. Gradually, the Curia Regis
20
V. D. Kulshreshtha, Outlines of Legal and Constitutional History (Lucknow: Eastern Book Company) 2015.
came to be considered as the advisory body of the King performing most of the vital
functions in the field of judicial administration.
Finally, during the regime of Henry II, there was a tremendous increase in the Judi-
cial Functions of Curia Regis and it lead to the formation of two different Common
Law courts in England.
They were:
a.) King-in-Parliament i.e., Court of House of Lords, and
b.) King-in-Counsel i.e., Court of Privy Council.
The former became the highest court of appeal for the courts in England while the
later acted as the highest Court of Appeal for all British possessions and settlements
beyond the seas. In this way, the Privy Council was established during the middle of
16th century. It thus acted as the advisory body of the King with regard to the
affairs of the State. Headquarter of the Privy Council were at London and its pow-
ers were implemented through the means of royal proclamations, orders, instruc-
tions, etc.
Composition of Privy Council:
As far as India is considered, the Privy Council acted as an appellate body from
1726 onwards with the establishment of Mayor’s Court in India. Earlier, the Privy
Council used to do its work by means of a system of committees and sub-commit-
tees. However, the committees did not have permanent existence and membership
and most members were the persons with little judicial experience. Naturally, it
affected the administration of justice. In 1828, Lord Bourgham criticized such a
constitution of Privy Council keeping in view the extent and importance of its ap-
pellate jurisdiction. Subsequently, in 1830 he became the Lord Chancellor and dur-
ing his regime, the British Parliament enacted the Judicial Committee Act, 1833 in
order to reform the constitution of Privy Council. In this way, the official constitu-
tion of the Privy Council was on 14th August, 1833 by the Act of the Parliament.
The Act empowered the Privy Council to hear appeals from the courts in British
Colonies as per the provisions of the Act. Accordingly under this Act, the quorum of
judicial committee of Privy Council was fixed to be four. It composed of Lord Presi-
dent, Lord Chancellor and other Chancellors holding judicial offices. This quorum
was reduced to three in 1843. The recommendations to the Crown were given by
the majority of the quorum. Thereafter, by means of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act,
1908 this membership of the judicial committee was extended. It also empowered
His majesty to appoint certain members, though not exceeding two. These members
were nothing but the judges of High Court in British India. Thus some of the mem-
bers of the Privy Council were the persons well-versed in Indian laws.
Appeals from Courts in India to the Privy Council:
This can be discussed under the following sub-headings-
a.) Charters of 1726 and 1753:
In the Indian Legal History, the Charter of 1726 granted the right to appeal from the
courts in India to Privy Council. The said Charter established three Mayor’s Courts
at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. The provision was made as to first appeal from
the decisions of Mayor’s Court to the Governor-in-Council in respective provinces
and the second appeal from to the Privy Council in England. On the other hand, the
Charter of 1753 which re-established the Mayor’s Courts reaffirmed the said provi-
sions of appeal to Privy Council from Mayor’s Courts.
b.) The Regulating Act, 1773:
This Act empowered the Crown to issue a Charter for establishment of Supreme
Court at Calcutta. Thus, the Charter of 1774 was issued by the Crown to establish a
Supreme Court at Calcutta and abolish the respective Mayor’s Court.
Section 30 of this Charter granted a right to appeal from the decisions of Supreme
Court to Privy Council in Civil matters if following two conditions were satisfied:
i) where the amount involved exceed 1000 pagodas, and
ii) Where the appeal is filled within six month from the date of decision.
In the same way, the Act of 1797 replaced the Mayor’s Court at Madras and Bombay
with the Recorders Court and provided for direct appeals from these Courts to the
Privy Council. Thus, the right to appeal from King’s Court to Privy Council was
well recognized. Besides this, there were Company’s Court i.e., Sadar Diwani Adalat
and Sadar Nizamat Adalat. They also recognized the right to appeal to the Privy
Council from their decisions. Accordingly, the Act of Settlements, 1781 provided for
right to appeal from Sadar Diwani Adalat at Calcutta in Civil matters.
c.) Appeals to Privy Council from High Courts:
Under the Indian High Courts Act, 1861 the high courts were established in three
Provinces. It was the amalgamation of King’s Courts and Company’s Courts. This
Act provided for the right to appeal from High Courts to Privy Council with respect
to all of its decisions, except in Criminal matters. In addition to this, there was a
provision of Special leave to Appeal in certain cases, so certified by the High Courts.
d.) Appeals from Federal Court in India to Privy Council:
The Government of India Act, 1935 provided for the establishment of Federal Court
in India. The Federal Court was given exclusive original jurisdiction to decide dis-
putes between the Centre and the constituent units. The provision was made for
filing of appeals from High Courts to the Federal Court and from Federal Court to
the Privy Council. The Federal Court also had the jurisdiction to grant Special Leave
to Appeal and for such appeals a certificate of the High Court was essential.
e.) Abolition of jurisdiction of Privy Council:
In 1933, a white paper was issued by the British Government for establishment of
the Supreme Court in India so as to hear appeal from Indian high courts. It was the
first step in restricting the jurisdiction of Privy Council. After Indian independence,
the Federal Court Enlargement of Jurisdiction Act, 1948 was passed. This Act en-
larged the appellate jurisdiction of Federal Court and also abolished the old system
of filing direct appeals from the High Court to the Privy Council with or without
Special Leave. Finally in 1949, the Abolition of Privy Council Jurisdiction Act was
passed by the Indian Government. This Act, accordingly, abolished the jurisdiction
of Privy Council to entertain new appeals and petitions as well as to dispose of any
pending appeals and petitions. It also provided for transfer of all cases filed before
Privy Council to the Federal Court in India. All powers of the Privy Council regard-
ing appeals from the High Court were transferred to the Federal Court.
Thereafter, with the commencement of the Constitution of India in 1950, the Su-
preme Court has been established and is serving as the Apex Court for all purposes
in India. It hears appeals from all the High Courts and Subordinate Courts. With
this, the appellate jurisdiction of the Privy Council finally came to an end.
Role of Privy Council:
The Privy Council has contributed a lot towards development of Indian legal sys-
tem. It served a cause of justice for more than two hundred years for Indian courts
before independence. As far as the judicial institution is concerned, the Privy Coun-
cil was a unique and unparalleled institution among all the courts round the world.
It set the task of ascertaining the law, formulating legal principles, moulding and
shaping the substantive laws in India. It also helped in introducing the concept of
‘Rule of Law’, on which we have setup the whole philosophy of our ‘Democratic
Constitution’. Besides, the Privy Council also lead to the introduction of Common
Law in India, which forms the basis of almost all present Indian laws.
The contribution of Privy Council towards personal laws like Hindu Law and Mus-
lim Law is also noteworthy. It acted as a channel through which English legal con-
cepts came to be assimilated with the body and fabric of the Indian law. It always
insisted on the maintenance of the highest standards of just judicial procedure, es-
pecially in the field if criminal justice. In this way; the decisions of Privy Council
have enriched the Indian jurisprudence in many respects. Its contribution to the
statute law, personal laws, and commercial laws is of great importance. Thus, dur-
ing the period of 1726-1949 and specifically after 1833 onwards, the Privy Council
has played a magnificent role in making a unique contribution to Indian laws and
the Indian legal system. The fundamental principles of laws as laid down by the
Privy Council are considered as path finder for the Indian courts till today.
At present also, the Privy Council commands a great respect among Indian lawyers,
judges as well as Indian public. Some of the principles laid down by the Privy Coun-
cil are still followed by the Supreme Court of India. The views taken by the Privy
Council are binding on the High Courts in India until the Supreme Court decides
otherwise. One of such instance can be given in the form of ‘principle of absolute
liability’ as propounded by the Supreme Court in the historic Oleum Gas Leak Case.
Thus, as a whole, the contribution of Privy Council is considered as remarkable for
the development of Indian legal system and Indian judicial administration. It has
played a great unifying role in shaping divergent laws in India.
Drawbacks of Privy Council:
In spite this contribution of Privy Council, it suffered from the following drawbacks:
a.) For long, it was staffed by Englishmen only, having no knowledge of Indian
laws;
b.) The location of the Privy Council was in England, far away for common man in
India;
c.) The subjection to the jurisdiction to foreign judicial institution was considered as
a symbol of slavery; and
d.) All this put the poor man in India in difficult situations for seeking justice.
Indian Council Act of 1909 (Morley- Minto Reforms): Main Features21:
Morley-Minto Reforms was another name for the Indian Council Act of 1909, which
was named after the Secretary of State and the Viceroy. It was instituted to placate
the moderates. According to this Act, the membership of the central and provincial
legislative councils was enlarged. However, the number of elected members in these
councils was less than half of their total membership. It may also be remembered
that the elected members were not elected by the people but by landlords,
organizations, traders, industrialists, universities and local bodies. The British also
introduced communal electorates as a part of these reforms. This was meant to create
disunity between Hindus and Muslims. Some seats in the councils were reserved for
Muslims to be elected by Muslim voters.
By this, the British hoped to cut off Muslims from the nationalist movement by treating
them as apart from the rest of the nation. They told the Muslims that their interests
were separate from those of other Indians. To weaken the national independence
movement, the British began to consistently follow a policy of promoting
communalism in India. The growth of communalism had serious consequences for
the unity of the Indian people and the struggle for freedom. The Congress at its
session in the year 1909 welcomed these reforms but strongly opposed the creation
of separate electorates on the basis of religion.
The Morley-Minto reforms did not introduce any significant change in the powers
of the councils. They did not mark and advance towards the establishment of a
20
Part of the information is taken from https://www.scribd.com/document/277780193/Government-of-India-Act-
1909-Minto-Morley-Reforms, retrieved on 30thJanuary, 2019
representative government, much less Swaraj. In fact, the Secretary of State frankly
declared that he had absolutely no intention of introducing a Parliamentary form of
government. The autocratic form of government that had been introduced after the
revolt of 1857 remained unchanged even after the Morley-Minto reforms.
The only change was that the government started appointing some Indians of its
choice to certain high positions. Satyendra Prasad Sinha, who later became Lord
Sinha, was the first Indian to be made a member of the Governor-General’s executive
council. Later he was made a governor of a province- the only Indian to occupy
such a high office during the entire period of British rule. In 1911, he was presented
at an Imperial Darbar that was held at Delhi at where British King, George V, and
his queen were also present. The Darbar was also attended by Indian princes who
displayed their loyalty to the British crown. Two important announcements were
made on the occasion. One was the annulment of the partition of Bengal which had
been affected in 1905. The other was the shifting of the capital of British India from
Calcutta to Delhi.
Features of the Act:
a.) It considerably increased the size of the legislative councils, both central and
provincial. The number of members in the Central Legislative Council was raised
from 16 to 60. The number of members in the provincial legislative councils was
not uniform.
b.) It retained official majority in the Central Legislative Council but allowed the
provincial legislative councils to have non-official majority.
c.) It enlarged the deliberative functions of the legislative councils at both the levels.
For example, members were allowed to ask supplementary questions, move
resolutions on the budget, and so on.
d.) It provided (for the first time) for the association of Indians with the executive
councils of the Viceroy and Governors. Satyendra Prasad Sinha became the first
Indian to join the Viceroy’s Executive Council. He was appointed as the law
member.
e.) It introduced a system for communal representation of Muslims by accepting the
concept of ‘separate electorate’. Under this, the Muslim members were to be elected
only by Muslim voters. Thus, the Act legalised communalism and Lord Minto
came to be known as the Father of Communal Electorate.
f.) It also provided for the separate representation of presidency corporations,
chambers of commerce, universities and zamindars.
Indian Council Act of 1909 was enacted to placate the moderates and disseminate
the Muslims from National Movement by granting them a separate electorate.
Government of India Act, 1919 (Montague-Chelmsford Reforms):22
The Secretary of State, Montagu, introduced a Bill in the British Parliament which
became the Indian Act of 1919. The Act laid down in its Preamble, the aim of British
which was to institute a responsible government in India as an integral part of British
Empire. The responsible government was to be capable of progressive realization
through the increasing association of the Indians in every branch of administration.
The sovereignty of the British Parliament over India was asserted by the Act. There
took place a lot of changes in the Central as well as in the Provincial administration
after the introduction of this Act.
The Secretary of State for India who used to be paid out of the Indian revenue was
now to be paid by the British Exchequer. Some of the functions of the Secretary were
entrusted to the High Commissioner for India who was to be appointed and paid by
the Government of India. The control of the Secretary of State was also reduced in
the sphere of Provincial administration.
The Act increased the number of Indians in the Governor-General’s Executive Council
to three in a Council of total eight members. The Indian members were entrusted
with departments like law, education, labour, health and industries. The new scheme
of the government envisaged a division of subjects into Central List and Provincial
List.
The subjects of national importance such as Foreign Affairs, Defence, Political
Relations, Posts and Telegraphs, Public debt, Communications, Civil and Criminal
Laws and Procedure etc. were included in the Central List, while others like Public
Health, Local Self Government, Education, Medical Administration, Land Revenue
Administration, Water Supply, Famine Relief, Agriculture and Law and Order were
included in the Provincial List.
The Act set up a bicameral legislature in the Centre. Two Houses, Council of State
and Central Legislative Assembly were established instead of one House in the Centre.
The Legislative Assembly was constituted of 145 members- 41 to be nominated and
104 were to be elected. Of the 41 nominated members, 25 members were officials
and 16 non-officials. Of the 104 elected members, 52 were to be returned by the
general constituencies, 32 by the Communal Constituencies (30 by Muslims and 2
by the Sikhs) and 20 by the special constituencies (7 by landlords, 9 by Europeans
and 4 by Indian Commercial Houses).
The tenure of the Assembly was fixed for a period of three years but it could be
extended by the Governor-General. The first speaker of the Assembly was to be
nominated by the government while the subsequent speakers were to be elected by
the members of the Assembly. The Central Legislative Assembly could legislate for
the whole of British India, for the Indian subjects and servants of the government,
22
https://www.scribd.com/doc/128144255/Government-of-India-Act-1919, retrieved on 15th February, 2019.
whether inside or outside the country. It could amend or repeal any law existing in
the country with the prior approval of the Governor-General.
The members of the Legislative Assembly were given the right to move resolutions
and motions for adjournment of the house to consider urgent questions of public
importance immediately. They had the right to ask questions and supplementary
short-notice questions could also be asked. The members enjoyed the right to freedom
of speech.
However there were certain restrictions imposed on the legislatures. In certain cases
like: amendment or repeal of an existing law or an ordinance of the Governor General;
foreign relations and the relations with the Indian States; discipline or maintenance
of military, naval and air forces; public debt and public revenue; and religion, religious
rites and usages of the people, previous sanction of the Governor General was required
for the introduction of a bill.
Further if the Governor General felt that any bill or a part of it affects the safety and
tranquillity of British India, or any part thereof, he could prevent its consideration.
If on the advice of the Governor General, the legislature refused to pass a law the
Governor General could pass it himself subject to the sanction of the Crown.
He could make and promulgate ordinances in cases of emergency which could last
for six months and which had the same force of law as passed by the legislature.
With regard to the Budget, it was laid down in the Act that the Government would
submit proposals for appropriation in the shape of demands for grant in the
Legislative Assembly. The franchise of both the houses was restricted and differed
in different provinces. In case of Council of State, voters must have either have an
annual income of not less than Rs. 10,000 or paid land revenue of Rs. 750.
The qualification of the voters for the Legislative Assembly were either the payment
of municipal taxes amounting to not less than Rs. 15 to Rs. 20 per annum, or
occupation or ownership of a house of the rental value of Rs. 180 or assessment to
income-tax on an annual income of not less than Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 5,000 or assessment
to land revenue for Rs. 50 to Rs. 150 per year varying from province to province. The
Governor-General was given the power to summon, prorogue and dissolve the
chambers. He had the right of addressing the members of the two houses.
The most significant changes made by the Act of 1919 were in the field of Provincial
administration. The Act introduced, what is called Dyarchy, in the Provinces. Under
this system, the subjects to be dealt with by the Provincial government were divided
into two parts: ‘Reserved’ and ‘Transferred’ subjects. The Governor was entrusted
with the power to administer the reserved subjects with the help of the members of
the Executive Council who were nominated by him and who were not responsible
to the legislatures.
The ‘Transferred Subjects’ were administered by the Governor with the help of the
Ministers appointed by him from among the elected members of the legislatures.
The rights of interference enjoyed by the Secretary of State in Council and the
Governor-General in Council were restricted. The ‘Reserved Subjects’ were: Land
Revenue, Famine Relief, Justice, Police, Pensions, Criminal, Printing Presses, Irrigation
and Water ways, Mines, Factories, Industrial Disputes, Motor Vehicles, Electricity,
Gas Boilers, Labour Welfare, Minor Ports and Public Services, etc.
In the ‘Transferred Subjects’, the ministers advised the Governors in respect of
Education, Libraries, Museums, Local Self Governments, Medical Relief, Public Health
and Sanitation, Agriculture, Cooperative Societies, Veterinary, Fisheries, Public Works,
Excise, Industries, Weights and Measures, Control of Public Entertainments, Religious
and Charitable Endowments, etc.
The Governor could deal with each minister individually. On matters of allocation
of funds, there was joint consultation between the ‘Reserved’ and the ‘Transferred’
subjects of the government. The direct system of election was introduced for the
Provincial Councils. High property qualifications, the communal and class electorates
and special weightage to certain communities were fixed for the Provincial franchise.
The same old communal electorate system was maintained that hurt the sentiments
of Gandhi. This Act came at the wrong time and thus could not attract the members
of the Congress.
This appeared to Gandhi as ‘Satanic’. The introduction of the Dyarchy system in the
Provinces created complicated situation in the sphere of administration in the
Provinces. The Dyarchy was a cumbersome, complex, confused system having no
legal basis and was foredoomed to failure.
The main features of the reforms were as follows:
(i) Provincial Government—Introduction of Dyarchy:
Executive:
a.) Dyarchy, i.e., rule of two—executive councillors and popular ministers—was
introduced. The governor was to be the executive head in the province.
b.) Subjects were divided into two lists: “reserved” which included subjects such as
law and order, finance, land revenue, irrigation, etc. and “transferred” subjects
such as education, health, local government, industry, agriculture, excise, etc.
The “reserved” subjects were to be administered by the Governor through his
Executive Council of bureaucrats, and the “transferred” subjects were to be
administered by ministers nominated from among the elected members of the
legislative council.
c.) The ministers were to be responsible to the legislature and had to resign if a no-
confidence motion was passed against them by the legislature, while the executive
councillors were not to be responsible to the legislature.
d.) In case of failure of constitutional machinery in the province the governor could
take over the administration of “transferred” subjects also.
e.) The secretary of state and the governor-general could interfere in respect of
“reserved” subjects while in respect of the “transferred” subjects, the scope for
their interference was restricted.
Legislature:
a.) Provincial Legislative Councils were further expanded—70% of the members
were to be elected.
b.) The system of communal and class electorates was further consolidated.
c.) Women were also given the right to vote.
d.) The Legislative Councils could initiate legislation but the Governor’s assent was
required. The Governor could veto bills and issue ordinances.
e.) The Legislative Councils could reject the budget but the Governor could restore
it, if necessary.
f.) The legislators enjoyed freedom of speech.
(ii) Central Government—Still Without Responsible Government:
Executive:
a.) The Governor-General was to be the chief executive authority.
b.) There were to be two lists for administration—central and provincial.
c.) In the Viceroy’s Executive Council of eight members, three were to be Indians.
d.) The Governor-General retained full control over the “reserved” subjects in the
provinces.
e.) The Governor-General could restore cuts in grants, certify bills rejected by the
Central Legislature and issue ordinances.
Legislature:
a.) A bicameral arrangement was introduced. The lower house or Central Legislative
Assembly would consist of 144 members (41 nominated and 103 elected—52
General, 30 Muslims, 2 Sikhs, 20 Special) and the upper house or Council of State
would have 60 members (26 nominated and 34 elected—20 General, 10 Muslims,
3 Europeans and 1 Sikh).
b.) The Council of State had a tenure of 5 years and had only male members, while
the Central Legislative Assembly had a tenure of 3 years.
c.) The legislators could ask questions and pass adjournment motions and vote a
part of the budget, but 75% of the budget was still not votable.
d.) Some Indians found their way into important committees including finance.
Drawbacks:
a.) Franchise was very limited.
b.) At the centre, the legislature had no control over the Governor-General and his
Executive Council.
c.) At the Centre, the division of subjects was not found to be satisfactory.
d.) Allocation of seats for Central Legislature to provinces was based on ‘importance’
of provinces. For instance, Punjab’s military importance and Bombay’s commercial
importance led to the allocation of more seats to these two provinces.
e.) At the level of provinces, division of subjects and parallel administration of two
parts was irrational and hence unworkable.
f.) The provincial ministers had no control over finances and the bureaucrats, leading
to constant friction between the two. Ministers were often not consulted on
important matters too; in fact, they could be overruled by the Governor on any
matter that the latter considered special. On the home government (in Britain)
front, the Government of India Act, 1919 made an important change with respect
to the Secretary of State who was henceforth to be paid out of the British exchequer.
Congress’ Reaction:
The Congress met at a special session in August 1918 at Bombay under Hasan Imam’s
presidency and declared the reforms to be “disappointing” and “unsatisfactory”
and demanded effective self-government instead.
Rowlatt Act:
While, on the one hand, the Government dangled the carrot of constitutional reforms,
on the other hand, it decided to arm itself with extraordinary powers to suppress
any discordant voices against the reforms. In March 1919, it passed the Rowlatt Act
even though every single Indian member of the Central Legislative Council opposed
it.
This Act authorised the Government to imprison any person without trial and
conviction in a court of law, thus enabling the Government to suspend the right of
habeas corpus which had been the foundation of civil liberties in Britain.
Government of India Act, 1935:23
After the conclusion of the Third Round Table Conference in London, a white paper
was issued in March 1933 giving details of the basis of the working of the new
Constitution of India. Among the principal sources, from which the Act drew its
materials, were the Simon Commission Report, the report of the All-Parties
Conference (the Nehru Report), the theme of the discussions of three Round Table
Conferences, the White Papers, the Joint Select Committee Report and the Lothian
Report. This lengthy Act of India was piloted in the House of Commons by the
Secretary of State for India, Sir Samuel Hoare in February 1935. It became the
Government of India Act on 2nd August, 1935.
23
http://www.historydiscussion.net/articles/main-provisions-of-the-indian-act-of-1935-anditsachievements/2605,
retrieved on 2nd February, 2019.
This Act established a “Federation of India” made up of British India Provinces
(Governor’s Province and Commissioner’s Province) and Indian states which might
accede to be united. In the case where states accession to the Federation was
voluntary, the Federation could not be established until:
a.) A number of states, the rulers whereof were entitled to choose not less than
half of the 104 eats of the Council of state, and
b.) The aggregate population whereof amounted to at least one half of the total
population of all the Indian States had acceded to the Federation. The terms on
which a state joined the Federation were to be laid down in the Instrument of
Accession.
The Federal Executive:
Dyarchy, rejected by the Simon Commission, was provided for in the Federal
Executive. Defence, External Affairs, Ecclesiastical Affairs and the administration
of the Tribal Areas were reserved in the hands of the Governor-General to be
administered by him with the assistance of maximum of three Councillors to be
appointed by him. The other federal subjects would be administered by the Governor-
General with the assistance and advice of the Council of Ministers (not more than
ten) to be appointed by him and to hold office during his (Governor-General) pleasure
and to be responsible to the Federal Legislature.
The Governor-General had special responsibilities regarding certain specified subjects.
For example, in respect of prevention of any grave menace to the peace and
tranquillity of India or any part thereof in respect of these subjects he had the full
freedom to accept or reject the advice of the Ministers. The position of the Council of
Ministers was only ornamental rather than of any practical use.
The Federal Legislature:
The Federal Legislature was constituted of two Houses, the Council of State and the
Federal Assembly. The Council of State was to be a permanent body with one-third
of its membership being vacated and renewed triennially. It was to consist of 156
elected members of British India and not more than 104 from the Indian states (to be
nominated by the rulers concerned).
The Federal Assembly whose duration was fixed for five years was to consist of 250
representatives of British India and not more than 125 members from the Indian
states. The members to the Federal Assembly were to be elected indirectly by the
members of the Provincial Legislative Assemblies through the system of “proportional
representation with the single transferable vote”. The members from the states were
to be nominated by the rulers.
Residuary legislative powers were vested in the Governor-General in the matter of
the enlistment of subjects either in the Federal legislative list or the Provincial legislative
list or the concurrent legislative list. The powers of the legislature were ‘cribbed,
cabined and confined.’ The Federal legislature was not allowed to deal with the
laws affecting the British sovereign, or the royal family, or matters concerning the
Army Act, the Air Force Act or laws for the amendment to the 1935 Act.
Discriminatory legislation against British commercial, or other interests, was banned.
Besides there were many subjects of importance on which legislation could not be
initiated without the previous sanction of the Governor-General. Any rejected items
of the budget could be placed, by the direction of the Governor-General before the
Council of State. In case of difference between two houses, the Governor-General
could summon a joint sitting and even if a Bill was passed by both the houses he
could veto the Bill and return it back for reconsideration or reserve it for his Majesty’s
consideration.
The main feature of the Act of 1935 was the provision for the responsible Government
with safeguards. The Act made the Governor-General the pivot of the entire
Constitution. The Governor-General acted in three different ways or capacities.
Normally he was to act on the advice of his ministers. He had the right to act on his
individual judgment as well. His special responsibility was to safeguard the financial
stability and credit of India, the maintenance of law and order, and the protection
of the minorities and the public servants were some other duties of the Governor-
General. A Federal Court was established and it was given exclusive original
jurisdiction in disputes between the Federation the Provinces and the states joining
the Federation.
The States’ accession to the Federation was voluntary. The terms on which a state
joined the ‘Federation of India’ were to be laid down in an instrument of accession.
The rights and obligations of the British Crown in respect of the Indian states were
to remain unaffected and were left in charge of the Crown Representative. It was
permissible to combine the office of Governor-General and Crown Representative in
the same person.
Both, the Federal legislature and the state legislatures were given their own quota of
representation. But the members from the state legislature were not selected by the
election method. In spite of such wide ranging provisions, the Princes of the Native
States however refuse to join the Federation. They were alarmed by the changing
situation in the country caused by the rapid spread of the national independence
movement.
They apprehended that achievement of “democratic freedom” by the people of British
India would undermine the autocratic rule in their own state. They also feared that
accession to the Federation would bring them under the authority of the Federal
Government of India with respect to some essential matters.
Provincial Autonomy:
As in the case of the Federation, the Executive authority of a province was vested in
a Governor appointed to represent the Crown in the province. His position was
largely modelled on the Governor-General. The administration of the Provincial affairs
was to be ordinarily carried on by a Council of Ministers appointed by the Governor
from among the elected members of the Provincial legislature and they were
responsible to him only. The ministers held office so long as they enjoyed the pleasure
of the Governor.
The Governor not only acted as the constitutional head of the province acting on the
advice of the Council of Ministers, he had some special responsibilities regarding the
maintenance of peace or tranquillity of the province also. In the discharge of his
special responsibilities, he was authorized to act in several matters in his discretion
without consulting his ministers and to give his individual judgment. In that case,
he was to only consider the advice of the Council of Ministers. The Governor had
enormous powers which included many legislative powers as well as over non-
votable items comprising about 40% of the budget. He could, by a proclamation,
take the entire or partial government of the province into his own hand.
Provincial Legislature:
The constitution of the Provincial legislature varied from province-to-province. In
the Provincial Assemblies, all members were directly elected by the people. In provinces
like Madras, Bombay, Bengal, U.P., Bihar and Assam there was bicameral legislature
consisting of a Legislative Council and a Legislative Assembly and in each of these
Legislative Councils, the Governor had the power to nominate some members.
There were 50 seats in North-West Frontier Province, 60 each in Orissa and Sindh,
108 in Assam, 112 in Central Provinces, 152 in Bihar, 175 each in the Punjab and
Bombay, 215 in Madras, 228 in the United Provinces and 250 in Bengal. The separatist
system of representation by religious communities and other groups was a prominent
feature of the Act of 1935. The electoral procedure was governed by the Communal
award of the British Government as modified by the Poona Pact in respect of
Scheduled Castes.
Under this arrangement, seats in the legislatures were divided among various
communities and groups besides there being separate constituencies for Muslims,
Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Sikhs, Indian Christians, etc. Some of the general seats
were reserved for Scheduled Castes as well. This method of Communal award of
the British Government accentuated the Communal disharmony in the country which
paved the way for the eventual partition of India. The Act of 1935 created general
disappointment of all political parties. With innumerable checks restrictions,
reservations and safeguards, the new Act was still far away from even a reasonable
measure of self-Government. The status of India was now “gradually gravitating
towards that of dominion” from a dependent colony.
The Congress President Dr. Rajendra Prasad criticized the absence of any provision
for “automatic growth of development of self-government.” He further said that “it
will be a kind of federation in which unabashed autocracy will seat entrenched in
one-third of India and peep in every now and then to strangle popular will in the
remaining two- thirds.” The Muslim League led by Jinnah also rejected the Federal
Scheme describing it as “a device to withhold responsibility at the Centre.” The Act
was introduced as a political solution of the problems in order to safeguard the
British financial interests in India.
The British Government failed miserable to overcome the opposition of the Indian
National Congress, the Muslim League and the Princes against the Federal Scheme.
As a result, the Federal Scheme was withheld, except for the establishment of the
Federal Court and the Provincial Scheme was introduced on 1st April, 1937 causing
a drastic change in the pattern of provincial politics. Madan Mohan Malaviya said
that, “the statue had somewhat a democratic appearance outwardly but it is
absolutely hollow from inside.”
But whatever its limitation, the Act of 1935 marked a decisive turning point in India’s
constitutional history. Parliamentary institutions, even if in a weakened form, formed
the part of the framework of the new governmental set-up. The operative part of
this Act however remained in force till 15th August, 1947 when it was amended by
Independence of India Act, 1947.
Congress Ministries:
With the end of the Civil Disobedience Movement, many Congressmen began to
consider the practicability of working along the lines of the now defunct Swaraj
party. Finally the Congress decided to contest the coming elections to be held under
the new Act. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was in the favour of contesting the elections
but not of taking part in any provincial government. A Parliamentary Board was set
up by the Congress to deal with the matters concerning the elections.
Nehru however made it clear that he was not keen on Congress forming ministries
but to carry the message of the Congress to the millions of voters and to those who
had been disfranchised, so as to acquaint them with their future programme and
policy. But in the election held in 1937, the Congress swept the polls as far as general
or predominantly Hindu seats were concerned. Congress ministries were formed in
seven out of eleven provinces. On 18th March, 1937 the All India Congress Committee
adopted a resolution and directed the Congress Ministers of different provinces.
The declared Congress policy was to combat the new Act and end it. Nehru reiterated
that in the event of any demand of the people being turned down by the British
Government, the Congress members of the legislatures should work inside and outside
the legislatures for putting an end to the new constitution. This would inevitably
lead to a “deadlocks with the British Government and bring out still further the
inherent antagonism between British imperialism and Indian nationalism and expose
the autocratic and undemocratic nature of the new constitution.”
The Muslim League had obtained a large number of seats reserved for Muslims. The
League’s offer to form coalition ministries in the provinces was turned down by the
Congress which resulted in making the gap wider between the two political parties.
Following this, Jinnah publicly proclaimed that the Congress had done nothing for
the Muslims in India. Addressing the Lucknow Session of the Muslim League in
October, 1937, Jinnah said:
The present leadership of the Congress especially during the last ten years has
been responsible for alienating the Musalmans of India more and more by
pursuing a policy which is exclusively Hindu and since they have formed the
Governments in six provinces where they are in a majority. They have by their
words, deeds and programme shown more and more that the Musalmans cannot
expect any justice or fair-play at their hands.
Thus, from the “classes” Jinnah went to the “masses with the cry of Islam in danger.”
He accused the Congress of killing “every hope of Hindu-Muslim settlement in the
royal fashion of fascism and blamed Gandhiji for destroying the ideal with which
the Congress was started. Jinnah said:
He (Gandhi) is the one man responsible for turning the Congress into an
instrument for the revival of Hinduism. His idea is to revive Hindu religion and
establish Hindu Raj in the Country.
These type of statements of Jinnah forced the Indian politics to be bipolarized.
In spite of the hostile attitude of the British Governors of the Provinces, the
bureaucracy and the Muslim League, the Congress Ministries in eight provinces out
of eleven took up radical measures for the welfare of the people. Greater attention
was paid to villages, to agriculture, to college education and to industries. Reform of
educational system, introduction of primary education, reformation of jails and
enforcement of prohibition were taken up.
Abolition of salt tax and of repressive laws came under active consideration. No
distinction was made between communities, high caste and low caste in the Congress’
administration. In this regard, Gandhiji observed:
...that a vast opportunity is at the disposal of the ministers in terms of the
Congress’ objectives of complete Independence, if only they are honest, selfless,
industrious, vigilant, and solicitous for the true welfare of the starving millions.
But the Congress Ministers were destined to be short-lived and their work was also
criticized by the British Governors and the Muslim League. In these conditions, there
came a great shock by the declaration of the Second World War. It altered the
situation in a dramatic manner and forced the Congress towards a revolutionary
path.
During the period of war, Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru were in the favour of
supporting the British Government for the only reason that it was a struggle between
‘Fascism’ and ‘Democracy’. But the Congress’ policy was that no co-operation was
possible unless its demand that “India must be declared an Independent nation and
present application must be given to this status to the large possible extent” was
met. This idea of opposition to the British Government was projected by Subhash
Chandra Bose. He believed that “only after the defeat and breaking up of the British
Empire could India hope to be free.” Due to the vital issues involved, the Congress
appointed a War Sub-Committee with Jawaharlal Nehru as the head to give
leadership to the Congress in this regard.
In October, 1939, the Congress refusing to be hood winked, demanded “that India
must be declared an independent nation and present application must be given to
this status to the largest possible extent.” To this demand, the Viceroy Linlithgow
replied on October 17, 1939 in a lengthy statement, the essence of which was that
the entire constitutional scheme would be re-opened and re-examined after the war
and during the continuance of the hostilities a consultative group, on which all the
diverse interests and communities of India would be represented, would be
constituted to aid the Viceroy in the Conduct of the War.
The Congress immediately declared the statement as evasive and unsatisfactory.
Gandhiji declared “The Congress had asked for bread and it had got stone, the
Congress will have to go to wilderness.” On 22nd October, 1939 the Congress Working
Committee after declaring the Viceroy’s statement unsatisfactory declared “that in
the circumstances the Committee cannot possibly give any support to Great Britain
for it would amount to an endorsement of the imperialist policy which the Congress
has always sought to end.” The resolution further asked the Congress Ministries to
resign, which they did forthwith. The Governors immediately proclaimed emergency
due to which the Constitution could not work and thus they assumed all the powers
of administration in their respective provinces. However, the non-Congress Ministries
continued.
The bureaucracy was happy to see the Congress out of power and Muhammad Ali
Jinnah asked the Muslim League to celebrate it as the “Day of Deliverance.”
Communalism was encouraged to the maximum extent even by the government.
The resignation of Congress Ministries impaired the war-effort of the Government
of India and in return the Government demonstrated to the World that the Congress,
the largest representative political organisation of India, was not co-operating the
British Government in the prosecution of the War. Linlithgow tried his best to belittle
the character and objectives of the Congress and to encourage the Muslim League.
This naturally drove him to pamper the Muslim League leader Jinnah and other
political personalities of the Indian sub-continent. This directly prompted the Muslim
League to pitch the demand high with the assurance that they will be considered.
The Congress, tired of the verbosity of the Viceroy, put forward its demand for a
Constituent Assembly as the only solution to India’s problems, both Constitutional
and Communal. Jinnah immediately felt foul of the suggestion and, assured of the
backing of the Government, began a series of attacks describing it as chimerical.
In a letter Jinnah said to the Viceroy on 23rd February, 1940 that the Government
should not make any commitment with regard to the future Constitution of India or
any interim settlement with any other party without the approval of the League.
The Viceroy’s relation with the League annoyed the Congress as an index of the old
policy of “Divide and Rule”. The Viceroy promised to determine the future
Constitution of India on the lines most satisfactory to all parties concerned.
Status of Women in India:24
In ancient India, though patriarchal system was highly prevalent, women enjoyed a
position of respect and reverence. Several inscriptions make references to the status
of women with respect to the freedom to make liberal gifts to religious institutions
like temples and dharmasalas, not merely for the welfare of heads of the families but
for their parents as well.
Women held very important position in ancient Indian society. There are evidences
to suggest that women power destroyed kingdoms and mighty rulers. Elango
Adigal’s ‘Sillapaddikaram’ mentioned that Madurai, the capital of Pandyas was
burnt, when Pandyan ruler Nedunchezhiyan killed a woman’s husband by mistake.
Veda Vyasa’s Mahabharata tells the story of the fall of Kauravas because they
humiliated Draupadi. Valmiki’s Ramayana is also about the annihilation of Ravana
when he abducted and tried to marry Sita forcibly. The plethora of Goddesses in
ancient period were created to instil respect for women. Ardhanareshwar (God is
half-man and half-woman) was highly worshipped. Women were allowed to have
multiple husbands. They could even leave their husbands.
In the Vedic society, women participated in religious ceremonies and tribal assemblies.
There is no seclusion of women from domestic and social affairs but they were
dependent on their male relatives throughout their lives. The system of Sati existed
among the Aryans in the earlier period. The hymns of the Rig Veda, the Atharva
Veda show that it was still customary for the widow to lay symbolically by the side
of her husband’s corpse on the funeral. Forced child marriages were unknown.
Women could choose their husbands through a type of marriage called Swayamvara.
In this, potential grooms assembled at the bride’s house and the bride selected her
spouse. Instances of Swayamvara ceremony can be found in epics, the Ramayana
and the Mahabharata. This continued even in the later period in high caste families.
As the time passed the position of women underwent changes in all spheres of life.
In the Vedic period, women lost their political rights of attending assemblies. Child
marriages also came into existence. According to the Aitareya Brahmana, a daughter
has been described as a source of misery. Atharva Veda also deplores the birth of
daughters. Yet, certain matrilineal elements are discernible in this period also. The
importance assigned to the wives of the Raja in the RajasuyaYaga has been regarded
as an indication of matrilineal influence. The Vamsavalis or genealogies of teachers
24
http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/8105/10 10_chapter%202.pdf, retrieved on 15th January, 2019.
attached to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in which many seers bear metronymics,
indicate their importance. There are references to women seers like Gagri and
Maitreyi. However during this period, we see a growing tendency to stratify the
Indian society along gender lines. The position of women gradually deteriorated as
the Vedic ideals of unity and equality began to fade off through the passage of time.
During the period of Smritis, women were bracketed with the Sudras and were
denied the right to study the Vedas, to utter Vedic mantras and to perform Vedic
rites. Marriage or domestic life became compulsory for women and unquestioning
devotion to husband was their only duty. During the Mauryan period, Brahamanical
literature was particularly severe in the treatment of women and assigned them a
very low status in the society. Buddhist texts on the other hand were much more
considerate in treating them. Megasthenes testifies to the growing practice of
polygamy, employment of women as palace guards, bodyguards to the kings, spies
etc., permission of widow remarriage and divorce. Thus the position of women though
inferior was not as bad as it came to be in the later ages.
Since women and property are bracketed together in several references in the epics,
Smritis and Puranas, women came to be regarded as a sort of property. She could be
given away or loaned as any item of property. This was the attitude of a typical
patriarchal society based on private property. The Brahmanical law did not allow
any proprietary rights to women; the provision for stridhana is of a very limited
nature and does not extend beyond the wife’s rights to jewels, ornaments and presents
made to her at the time of her marriage. The practice of using veils by women of
high caste families was in vogue. In South India also the position of women
deteriorated. Remarriage of widows was generally not favoured. Their positions
were very bad as they had to shave their heads, discard all their ornaments and eat
only plain food that too once in a day and wear white clothes. If anyone goes out on
some work, and faced a widow, it was considered to be bad omen. They are generally
not invited to witness any social functions such as marriage, naming of a child, etc.,
except to render domestic labour.
Women of higher status- Agra Varnas were given higher education while a common
housewife received limited education. Nevertheless, she was very well acquainted
with social morals and worldly affairs. Women were able to win the heart of their
husbands, through absolute devotion, commanded respect from children and
received the affection of elders. Because of these laudable qualities woman was
considered as the goddess of prosperity of the family.
This brighter aspect of the high status of women in ancient India explains only one
side. However, the other side of the picture of women was not so rosy. Several
inscriptions and references in literature make it clear that polygamy, particularly
among the kings, nobles, rich and high caste men were not uncommon. Polygamy
apart, maintaining concubines was considered a social status. The temple dancers
played an important part in promoting fine arts like dance and many inscriptions
attest to the fact that the temple dancers enjoyed a position of respect in the society.
Social status and general respect apart, women of the early and medieval Andhra
enjoyed freedom to a considerable extent. Women were trusted and respected in all
walks of life.
Status of Indian Women and the role of Legislation:
Position of women in society is the index of the standard of social organisation. In
ancient India, woman enjoyed equal status with man in all fields of life. She received
the same education like man, many Hindu religious books like Vedas, Upanishads,
Ramayana, Mahabharata have mentioned the names of several women who were
great scholars, poets and philosophers of the time. Wife was regarded as ‘Ardhangini’
which means she is half of her husband. An unmarried man was considered to be
an incomplete man. All religious ceremonies were performed by the husband along
with the wife.
But in the medieval period, the status of women went down considerably. She was
considered to be inferior to man. Decline in the status of women in Indian society
begins with the Muslim rule in India: customs of pardha, sati, child marriage,
restrictions on widow re-marriage and prevalence of joint family system have been
the factors responsible for the injustice meted out to women.
The position of women in modem India has changed considerably. Her position in
modern India is equal to that of men, socially, economically, educationally, politically
and legally. Her sufferings from Sati, Child Marriage, temple prostitution, no longer
exist.
Today women have the right to receive education, inherit and own property and
participate in public life. She has become economically independent. She can seek
employment anywhere and remains a free individual. She enjoys the equal status
with man in all spheres of life.
Several factors like women’s education, reform movements, women’s participation
in politics and many social legislations are responsible for the changes in the day-to-
day life of women in today’s India, some of the important statutory legislations to
improve the position of women are:
 The Hindu Widow Re-marriage Act of 1856
 The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929
 The Hindu Women Right to Property Act of 1937
 The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955
 The Hindu Succession Act of 1956
 The Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls Act of 1956-57, and
 The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961.
Modern Period:
In the modem period, the status of Indian women can be studied in two distinct
periods, the British rule, i.e., Pre-Independent India and the Post-Independent India.
The British Rule in the 18th century brought in some degree of political orderliness,
but the social structure, customs and practices remained unchanged. It was mainly
during the 19th century that the reform movement undertaken by the enlightened
thinkers and leaders of Indian society like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who understood
the importance of women’s participation that the status of Indian women started
changing for the better. Though initially, all the leaders were men, women gradually
came into the scene and played their role not only in changing history but also the
society as a whole, through their efforts in different areas such as education, politics
and freedom movement. Mrs. Annie Besant, Dr. Sarojini Naidu, Kamladevi
Chattopadhyay, Mrs. Nellie Sengupta, Durgabai Deshmukh and many others gave
a change and betterment.
Indian women actively participated in the freedom movement to highlight the
importance of the elevation of the status of the Indian women. The founding of the
Indian National Congress in 1885 and Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent movement
not only led to the political emancipation but also was a step in the direction for
social reconstruction. Women took equal initiative and participated in all types of
struggle for national freedom, i.e., non-violent movement advocated by Mahatma
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress as well. Women’s enthusiasm in
participating in the armed revolution helped Netaji Subash Chandra Bose set up the
Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the Indian National Army. Women’s participation in the
freedom movement was very extensive. Smt. Kasturba Gandhi, Madam Bhikaji Cama,
Sarla Devi, Muthu Lakshmi Reddy, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sucheta Kriplani, Durga Bai
Deshmukh, Priti Lata Waddedar, Captain Lakshmi and Janaki Davar of INA,
Jahanara Shahnawaz, Randhabai Subbarayan, etc., are only a few out of the many.
Growing Need for Women Empowerment:
Throughout history and in many societies including India, gender inequality was a
part and parcel of an accepted male dominated culture. Atrocities and discrimination
are the two major problems, which the women face in the contemporary India. The
traditional mentality assumes that women are mainly confined to the household
activities like “kitchen and kids”. They have been considered as the sex object and
inferior to men in different spheres of life. The ‘Sati Pratha’, ‘Pardah System’, ‘Child
Marriage’, ‘Dowry System’, etc., have been some forms of atrocities that have been
committed on women.
Even after six decades of Indian Independence, women are still one of the most
powerless and marginalised sections of Indian Society. The 2001 Census shows that
the sex ratio for India is 933, which is lowest in the world. Percentage of female
literacy is 54.16 (2001 Census) as against the male literacy of 75.85 per cent. In
India, women’s representation in Parliament and in the State Assemblies has never
been beyond eight and 10 per cent, respectively. Most of the working women remain
outside the organised sector. Violence against women is on the rise.
The principle of gender equality is enshrined under the Indian Constitution in its
Preamble, Fundamental Rights, Fundamental Duties and Directive Principles. The
Constitution not only grants equality to women, but also empowers the state to
adopt measures of positive discrimination in favour of women. The 73rd and 74th
Amendments (1993) to the Constitution of India provided for reservation of seats in
the local bodies of Panchayats and Muncipalities for women. Another Constitutional
Amendment (84th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1998) reserving 33 per cent seats
in Parliament and State Legislature is still in the pipeline. It is still a distant dream.
Parliament passed various legislations to safeguard Constitutional Rights to women.
These legislative measures include, the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, The Hindu
Succession Act, 1971, Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, Child Marriage Restraint Act,
1976, Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act, 1986 and finally Pre-natal Diagnostic
Technique (Regulation and Prevention of Measure) Act, 1994, etc. Apart from these,
various welfare measures have been taken up by the Government from time to time
to empower women. They are Mahila Samriddhi Yojana (1993), the Rashtriya Mahila
Kosh (1992-93), Indira MahilaYojana (1995), Development of Women and Children
in Rural Areas Plan (1997) and Balika Samriddhi Yojana (1997). On 12th July 2001,
the Mahila Samriddhi Yojana and Indira MahilaYojana have been merged into the
integrated self-help group programme called Swayam Siddha. The Government of
India in 1953 established a Central Social Welfare Board with a nation-wide
programme for grants-in-aid for women, children and underprivileged group. A
separate department of women and child development was set up at the Centre in
1985 to give a distinct identity and provide a nodal point on matters relating to
women development. The National Commission for Women was created by an Act
of Parliament in 1992. Besides these, India has also ratified various International
conventions that grant various rights to women.
*******
RELEVANT MATERIAL
THE WORKING OF THE INDIAN FEDERAL COURT

BY
DR. BOOL CHAND, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Politics, Benares Hindu University.
Sir Maurice Gwyer’s appointment as Chief Justice of India was announced in

February, 1937, the creation of the Federal Court having been decided upon as the
first step in the establish-ment of an all-India federation. The appointment gave
universal satisfaction. The first Chief Justice of the Federal Court would be called
upon not merely to interpret the Government of India Act, 1935, with the drafting
of which incidentally Sir Maurice Gwyer had been quite intimately connected, but
also to organise the procedure, lay down healthy traditions so as to enable an effective
development of this India’s highest tribunal, and as Mr. (now Sir) W. P. Spens, who
has appropriately enough been de-signated as Sir Maurice Gwyer’s successor in the
office of the Chief Justice, said in a speech in the House of Commons, to establish
canons of independence of the judiciary from executive influence in India. These
tasks Sir Maurice Gwyer could be expected to perform in a highly adequate manner,
both by reason of his learning and scholarship and by his legal and practical
adminis-trative experience. He had edited Anson’s Law of Contract as also Law
and Custom of the Constitution, and was eminently fami-liar with the latest
developments in legal theory and acquainted with the most urgent problems of legal
administration. After practising as a barrister for more than ten years, he had held
office as Solicitor and Legal Adviser to the Ministry of Health from 1919 to 1926,
and as H. M. Procurator-General and Solicitor to the Treasury from 1926 to 1933,
and had thus acquired a real understanding of how the administrative mind works
and could be depended upon to afford in his role as Chief Justice a real ‘insurance
against what has been correctly described as the ad-ministrative risk.’
These expectations became all the more firmly held when at the opening of the
Federal Court in December, 1937 Sir Maurice Gwyer observed that he had no doubt
that “the Federal Court can make unique and perhaps even a decisive contribution
towards the evolution of India into a great and ordered nation, a link between the
East and the West, but with a policy and civilisation all its own.” He promised (1)
that at the hands of the Federal Court the rights of the individuals, would be treated
with no less con-sideration than the rights of the State, (2) that in the interpretation
of the Constitution Act, the Federal Court would discharge its duty not in any spirit
of legal formalism but with full regard to the fact that the constitution was a living
and breathing organism containing within itself the seeds of future growth and
development, and (3) that the Federal Court would not be averse to the enlargement
of its jurisdiction. He indeed described the Federal Court as “sympathetic to all but
allied to none.” The history of the Federal Court under his regime has truly been the
story of the fulfilment of these promises.
Definition of the Jurisdiction of the Federal Court
It may be mentioned that as constituted under the Govern-ment of India Act, 1935,
the Federal Court is neither as competent nor as powerful as the supreme courts in
other federal constitu-tions; it is meant neither to be a regular court of appeal from
the Provincial High Courts nor to replace the Privy Council. The limits of its initial
jurisdiction, laid down in Sec. 204 of the Act, provide for exclusive jurisdiction in
any dispute between the Federation, the Provinces and the Federal States, if and so
far as the dispute involves any question (whether of law or fact) on which the existence
of a legal right depends. ‘Legal right’ has been interpreted somewhat liberally by the
Federal Court1 in the in-terest of the enlargement of its jurisdiction. Still the original
jurisdiction of the Federal Court remains distressingly limited compared, for instance,
with that of the High Court of Australia. Further, the judgments of the Indian Federal
Court are meant to be merely declaratory, that is to say, although they are binding
on all courts, they need not involve any consequential relief, for the Federal Court
has not been invested with the power to enforce its decisions. But the doubts
occasioned by this position have been completely set at rest by the observations of
the Chief Justice in his judgment in the United Provinces v. the Governor-General,2
that il would be greatly surprising if a subordinate statutory body dis-regard a
pronouncement of a Federal Court, and much more so if the Central Government
did not take all necessary steps to see that subordinate bodies over which it is able to
exercise a sub-stantial measure of control obeyed the law as laid down by that Court.
As an appellate court the Federal Court hears appeals from decisions of the High
Courts, if the High Court certifies that the case involves a substantial question of law
as to the interpretation of the Government of India Act, 1935, or any Order in Council
made thereunder. In the several cases that came before the Federal Court under this
appellate jurisdiction, Sir Maurice Gwyer took the opportunity of resolving certain
doubtful matters of pro-cedure and the conflict of powers. Thus (1) in Hori Ram
Singh v. the Crown3 he ruled that appeals from the decisions of the High Courts
may relate to criminal as well as civil cases, and also that when the certificate
permitting appeal has once been granted by the High Court, the matter is at large
and the appellant is not restricted in arguing the appeal to the constitutional issues
alone; (2) in Shyam Kant Lai v. Ram Bhajan Singh 4 it was stated that the Federal
Court can in the exercise of its appellate powers not only allow or dismiss an appeal
presented before it but may also remit a case to the High Court with the direction
that in the place of the judgment or decree of the High Court may be substi-tuted its
own judgment, decree or order, and further that in passing upon an appeal the
Federal Court can, in a similar way to the other courts in India,5 take notice of
1
See 1939 II M.L J. Supp. 1.
2
1939 II M.L.J. Supp. 1. at p. 9.
3
1939 II M.L.J. Supp. 23.
4
1939 II M.L.J. Supp. 45.
5
See Sec. 107 and order 41 (rule 33) of the Civil Procedure Code.
subsequent events or the state of law obtaining at the time of hearing the appeal by
the Federal Court, including any legislation lawfully passed subsequent to the order
of the High Court appealed against; (3) in Lakhpatram v. Behari Lai Misir6 it was
recognised that in case of refusal of certificate by the High Court, the Federal Court
has no inherent jurisdiction either to go into the merits of the refusal by the High
Court or to grant any special leave to appeal, but that the refusal of certificate by the
High Court does not deprive a litigant of his right to appeal to Privy Council; and (4)
in Pashupati Bharati v. Secretary of State7 it was ruled that when a certificate to
appeal to the Federal Court has once been obtained, there can be no direct appeal to
the Privy Council either with or without special leave.
In the above two judgments the Federal Court settled the ticklish question of appeals
to the Federal Court and the Privy Council. But in another set of judgments the
Chief Justice also solved the problem of appeals from the decisions of the Federal
Court to the Privy Council. Under Sec. 208(b) of the Government of India Act, 1935,
appeals from the decisions of the Federal Court in the exercise of its appellate
jurisdiction may lie to the Privy Council by leave of the Federal Court or by special
leave of His Majesty in Council; but in the several applications that came before the
Federal Court for leave of appeal to the Privy Council, the Chief Justice has clearly
stated his view that the Federal Court will not be disposed to grant leave to appeal
save in cases of very real importance. In one of his judgments8 he took particular
note of the Australian practice regarding appeals to the Privy Council, and
significantly stated that the Federal Court has not as yet the wide jurisdiction of the
High Court of Australia, nor does India, whatever her hopes may be, yet possess the
same political status as the Australian Commonwealth. But this Court is the first
court sitting on Indian soil whose jurisdiction, limited though it may be at present,
extends to the whole of British India. Its establish-ment marks a new stage in India’s
constitutional evolu-tion. It is not subordinate to any other Court; and it is plain that
this conception of its status was present in the minds of those who framed the present
constitution when they gave to the Court itself the right to say whether it would
permit any cases which came before it on appeal to be reviewed elsewhere. The
ancient prerogative right of H.M. to grant special leave, though it has now been
made statutory by Sec. 208(b), does not affect this aspect of the matter.
Those who are familiar with the aspirations of Indian nationalist thought regarding
appeals to the Privy Council will at once appreciate the nobility and sympathetic
nature of the spirit which led to these observations of the Chief Justice; and he further
reinforced his observations by the argument that “on general grounds of public policy
litigation in the form of appeals to several courts should be restricted rather than
extended.”
6
1939 F.C.B 42
7
1939 F.L.J. 1
8
Megh Raj v. Allah Ralhia (1942 II M.LJ. 797, at p. 799)
Advisory Capacity
The Indian Federal Court also acts in an advisory capacity on a reference made to it
by the Governor-General on any question of public importance which has arisen or
is likely to arise. This provision for advisory jurisdiction of the Federal Court may be
helpful in preventing unnecessary delay and litigation. During its brief active life of
four years the Federal Court has already pronounced on several references, but
practically all of them related to the validity or interpretation of legislative enactments
of either the Central or the Provincial legislatures. Although no such difficulty has
so far arisen, there is a possibility that the exercise of advisory jurisdiction may at
times cause embarrass-ment to the Federal Court. The embarrassment may be of a
purely legal character, for the reference may relate to a question of law in the abstract
without regard to any actual controversy, so that an answer given on a hypothetical
question may to some extent be liable to prejudice the rights of private litigants in a
future litigation; or it may be of a political character, for the reference may possibly
be in relation to an inconvenient political or administrative controversy, which the
Governor-General may have merely made to escape the responsibility of acting in
his discre-tion. Since situations like these did not arise during the regime of Sir Maurice
Gwyer, it may be quite idle to speculate in what manner he would have acted in
such a situation; but it is pre-sumable that he would have taken such an opportunity
to establish a real tradition of independence of the judiciary from any kind of
executive influence. Such a presumption seems warranted by his admirable award
on the famous Rajkot dispute, where a conflict between the Ruler of the State and a
leader of the Indian National Congress as regards the proper interpretation of an
agreement between the two on the nature of the reforms to be introduced in the
State had led to the intervention of the Paramount Power and a reference to Sir
Maurice Gwyer by the Crown Representative. That award won for Sir Maurice
Gwyer the justified confidence of all parties in the country, and it gave a welcome
impression that the Chief Justice of India was quite prepared in the interests of
justice to disregard the wishes of the ruling power.
Judicial Interpretation of the Constitution
Sir Maurjce Gwyer has during his regime laid down the basic principles of
interpretation of the Indian Constitution Act. In doing so he was careful to omit
some of the significant defects in the canons of historical method of judicial
interpretation as operative in Western countries. Sir Maurice Gwyer has been always
insistent that the nature and problems of Indian federation must be understood in
its own context and in view of its own needs, and not by reference to Canadian,
Australian or American decisions. In his speech at the opening of the Federal Court,
he said that the decisions of Canadian and Australian courts are not binding on
India, still less those of U.S.A., although they are all entitled to consideration and
respect. Words and phrases, he said, “take colour from the context and bear different,
senses” in the different Constitution Acts, and therefore analogies drawn from the
existing federations can never be conclusive or authoritative. It may be mentioned
that the emphatic mention of this by the Chief Justice may have good results, for it
may enable the evolution of more liberal rules of judicial interpretation so as to
further the principle of responsibility which has been but faintly admitted in the
Government of India, Act, 1935.
In regard to the rules of construction applicable to the Indian Constitution Act, Sir
Maurice Gwyer stated in the C.P. Sales Tax case9 that the meaning and intention of
Parliament should be ascertained from the language of the Statute itself, unconcerned
with the motives of Parliament, the expediency of legislation passed, or any
considerations of policy which actuated the passing of such legislation, but that the
language should be interpreted “ in a broad and liberal spirit and not in a narrow
and pedantic manner, with regard to the fact that the constitution is a living and
organic thing entitled to be construed ut res magis vdleat quam pereat.” Sir Maurice
Gwyer was quite willing to admit that in determining, what he called, “ the real
substance of the Act and not merely what it says “ the terms of the Act may have to
be considered in accompaniment with contemporary history, the existing laws and
the facts and circumstances at the time it was framed. Implicit in his observations
was an agreement with the Privy Council in a case like Edwards v. A. G. for Canada,10
where it was admitted that it would be absurd to apply rules of inter-pretation
applicable to a penal or taxing statute to an Act designed to regulate a parish, or to
apply such or similar rules without discrimination or sense of propriety to a Statute
such as the Constitution Act, intended to ensure the peace, order, good govern-ment
and progress in general of a Colony or Dominion. The aim of the Court should be 4
to illustrate and illumine ‘ the full import of the general words used in the Statute
and to give the powers conferred therein the widest amplitude permissible.
Applying his technique of interpretation to the difficult task of ascertaining the
distribution of powers between the Central and Provincial legislatures, Sir Maurice
Gwyer observed that “the primary duty of a court is to map out the respective
territories of the competing authorities on a reasonable and logical basis, bearing
always in mind that it could not be the intention of the legislature that there should
be a conflict between them, and to reconcile any apparent conflict between the
competing authorities by reading together the sections conferring that authority
and placing such a construction on the whole as would make it harmonise with the
general scheme of the Act and its method of differentiation between the functions
and powers of the Centre and the Provinces.” An unqualified grant of power standing
by itself may be construed in a wide sense, but when it is qualified by other express
provisions in the same Act the implications of the context have to be looked to.
When a general power and a particular power, said the Chief Justice, came into
conflict, the general power should not be so construed as to make a nullity of the
9
1939 I, M.L J. Supp 1.
10
1930 A.C. 124 See also James v. Commonwealth of Australia (1936 A.C, 578); and British Coal Corporation v.
King (1935 A.C. 500).
particular power conferred by the same Act and operating in the same field, but the
former should be read in a more restricted sense so as to give effect to the latter in its
ordinary and natural meaning, even if the general power be conferred upon the
Federal and the parti-cular power on the Provincial legislature. The Chief Justice
said in another connection that a construction which would deprive a province of
an immense field of taxation in which the Central or Federal Government does not
wish to compete seriously, ought to be avoided if possible. But at the same time “ the
possibility or the probability of the revenues of one of the Governments diminishing
by the adoption of an interpretation can be no ground for discarding it, especially
when the language of the statute admits of no ambiguity or doubt.”
An Exposition of the Offence of Sedition
In laying down his principles of interpretation, Sir MaUrice Gwyer was, it would be
clear, inspired by an ideal of the Federal Court as a real6 guardian and interpreter of
the constitution.’ He was never oblivious of the great role which the judiciary can
play in enabling a universal enjoyment of popular freedom and his 6 inarticulate
major premiss’ was always in favour of balanced progress. He expressed his view
again and again in his several convocation addresses at the Universities and revealed
it in his illuminating exposition of the offence of sedition in the case of Niharendu
Dutta Mazumdar. 11
The words by which the offence of sedition is defined in the Indian Penal Code—’ to
bring into hatred and contempt or to excite disaffection towards His Majesty or the
Crown Represen-tative or the Government established by law in British India or in
any part of His Majesty’s dominions’ – have been generally construed by the courts
in India literally, even to the point of interpreting disaffection as want of affection.
Indeed, from the cases in the various courts, one would imagine that the law of
India intended to place the Government upon a pedestal to be worshipped by the
people without demur. For the first time, Sir Maurice Gwyer’s judgment provides a
rational and realistic approach to the matter. Sedition is made an offence, the Chief
Justice argues, not in the interest of a group of persons who constitute the government
for the time being, nor in the interest of the permanence of the prevailing system, but
in public interest. That interest lies in the maintenance of order, which is the first
and most fundamental duty of every Government. “It is to this aspect of the functions
of Government that in our opinion the offence of sedition is related. It is the answer
of the Government to those who, for the purpose of attacking or subverting it, seek
to disturb its tranquillity, to create public disturbance and to promote disorder, or
who incite others to do so. This is not made an offence in order to minister to the
wounded vanity of Govern-ments, but because where Government and law cease to
be obeyed, because no respect is felt any longer for them, only anarchy can follow...
Public disorder, or the reasonable anticipation or likelihood of public disorder, is
thus the gist of the offence.”
11
1942 F.C.R. 1.
Such definition of sedition clearly implies that the standard of what is sedition must
vary with the times. Acts or words which might easily lead to disorder or insurrection
in less settled times would prove totally ineffective when society is more firmly
estab-lished and may even prove ridiculous as instruments of subvert-ing the State.
The Chief Justice put this in a classical form when he stated that there will always be
borderline cases when the line between what is lawful and what is unlawful is hard
to define; but we believe that if the essential principles which we have sought to
enunciate above are borne in mind and if the courts, as we have suggested, assume
in part the function of jurymen when they hear these cases, they will generally be
able to come to a decision not only in- harmony with the true principles of the law
but also not obnoxious to commonsense and the circumstances of the times. And in
holding the scales evenly between Government and citizens they will be forgetful
neither of the obligations of the one towards the public at large nor of the individual
and private rights of the other; for the preservation of order is a thing in which all
citizens have an interest no less than in the maintenance of freedom of speech and
the right to criticise all matters of public interest.
Sir Maurice Gwyer’s Achievements
This living pronouncement on the implications of the offence of sedition provides
merely a specimen of Sir Maurice Gwyer’s judgments as Chief Justice. His judgments
are all marked by a clear and firm statement of the essential facts, an accurate
know-ledge of case-law, that breadth of outlook which comes of com-plete mastery
of a system of law as a system, and a power of interpretation which springs from a
grasp of the foundations of law. The expression is always simple and direct, and
although no show as such is ever made of learning, the judgments are in-variably
masterpieces, being the product of great technical ability and a thorough command
of the subject.
Besides the value of his own judgments, the tenure of Sir Maurice Gwyer as Chief
Justice has been marked by at least two other distinctive achievements. By his own
dignified and honour-able bearing, by his insistent emphasis upon the need for
honesty and professional conduct, and not least by his organisation of the Federal
Court bar upon the English model, with its division be-tween advocates and agents,
a division which necessarily enhances the status of the advocate, he has made an
incalculable contribu-tion to the improvement of tone of the legal profession in India.
Secondly, in his role as Chief Justice he gave a new and broader view of the judicial
function; and in doing so he has inevitably enhanced the position and prestige of the
Federal Court over which he so majestically presided. By his habit of associating
with all, at the same time retaining that isolation which is the mark of a truly judical
mind, by his desire to sympathise with all but ally himself with none, he won for
himself the respect and admiration of all; and so well did he identify himself with
the Court over which he presided that he has helped to establish the Federal Court
12
Haines: The American Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy, p 171.
in the affections of the people. It may be men-tioned that the way of a federal court
to popularity is not always an easy one. Even the Supreme Court of America had a
rather slow progress to its position of respect and prominence, ‘often marked by
reverses which tended to check the confidence of the people in the highest federal
tribunal.’12 If the Indian Federal Court has within its brief life of five years succeeded
in securing itself in public confidence, this in so small measure is due to the personal
eminence and assiduous efforts of Sir Maurice Gwyer.
*******
DEBATE
EARLY BRITISH IMPERIALISM IN INDIA by P. J. Marshall
In his “Trade and Empire in Awadh, 1765-1804”, Rudrangshu Mukherjee has taken
a theme which I explored in an article published in 1975 in Modern Asian Studies.1
In substance Mukherjee accepts the account of growing British economic penetration
of Awadh during the later eighteenth century which I offered in that article. He is,
however, sharply critical of my scepticism about whether firm links can be established
between economic penetration and the decision to annex large parts of Awadh which
was taken by the Marquess Wellesley in 1801. For Mukherjee the links are clear, and
he suspects that my inability to see them arises from a “naive” commitment to “the
pathetic myth of the White Man’s Burden”.2
In part Mukherjee’s confidence seems to rest on propositions which he regards as
being beyond discussion: “... under colonialism trade and the flag are always
interrelated”. “Colonialism” has “its pressures and priorities”, its “economic
imperatives”.3 Those who ask what was the nature of this “trade” or what were the
“pressures” and “imperatives” in this particular case are told that from the 1780s
the needs of a “period of mercantile domination” in the British economy gave way
to the “priorities of a nation in the processes of the Industrial Revolution”.4 Put more
concretely, British “priorities” in India had shifted from “mercantile” dealing in
manufactured Indian cotton piece goods to the acquisition of raw materials for the
new industries. The seizure of territory in Awadh reflected these new “priorities”.
So ancient a stereotype can only be sustained by disregarding most recent writing about
the British economy. An annual increase in output per head of about 1 per cent for the
years 1780-1800 was revolutionary in implication, but much of the economy was not
fundamentally changed as yet.5 The assumption that something called the Industrial
Revolution had transformed Britain’s interests all over the world in the early decades of
the nineteenth century, let alone by 1801, is one that scholars seeking the metropolitan
roots of British expansion now generally treat with caution. For instance, Cain and
Hopkins have recently written: “in assessing the metropolitan econ-omy we reject the
assumption that the industrial revolution provided Britain with an automatic route to
economic supremacy and world influence. The rise of modern manufacturing was a
more protracted process than current theories of imperialism suppose . . .”.6
* I am grateful to Partha Chatterjee for his help in revising an earlier draft.
1
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, “Trade and Empire in Awadh, 1765-1804", Past and Present, no. 94 (Feb.
1982), pp. 85-102; P. J. Marshall, “Economic and Political Expansion: The Case of Oudh”, Mod. Asian
Studies, ix (1975), pp. 465-82.
2
Mukherjee, “Trade and Empire in Awadh“, p. 90.
3
Ibid., pp. 90, 89, 99.
4
Ibid., p. 94.
5
P. Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959, 2nd edn. (London, 1967), p. 280.
6
P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750-1914“,
Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxiii (1980), p. 465; see also D. C. M. Piatt, “The National Economy and
British Imperial Expansion before 1914“, Jl. Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., ii (1973-4), pp. 4-10.
To detect pressures from early industrialization filtered to India through the East
India Company’s monopoly would require a much more sensitive instrument than
any Mukherjee deploys. The sup-posed switch from manufactured goods to raw
materials is not such an instrument. Indeed such a switch had not occurred by 1801.
British interest in Indian piece-goods had not declined. Stimulated by peace in Europe,
a last boom in Indian piece-goods was taking place. In the year after the annexation
there was frenzied buying of Awadh piece-goods by private merchants. “Such were
the accounts from home . . . , and in such estimation were Oude cloths said to be,
that every piece of cloth manufactured in the Vizier’s dominions [the unannexed
part of Awadh] and in the districts lately ceded to us by His Highness, was purchased
indiscriminately”.7 Piece-goods were easily the largest part of the “investment”
planned by the Company for the first two years of its rule over its new provinces.8
Most of the raw cotton either grown in Awadh or in transit through Awadh to
Bengal from the Maratha provinces was to be made up into piece-goods in Bengal; it
was not re-exported as a raw material.9
According to Mukherjee, raw cotton and indigo were the raw materials which
Wellesley wished to control for the East India Com-pany by his annexations in
Awadh. Mukherjee supports his case for supposing that the Company coveted the
indigo of Awadh by totally distorting the only piece of evidence which he cites. He
tries to make the directors of the Company write in a dispatch of 28 August 1800
that political regulation in Awadh is necessary to maintain exports of cheap Awadh
indigo for British industry.10 The dispatch says nothing of the kind; in fact it says
precisely the opposite. The directors wish to protect Bengal indigo from the
competition of cheap but inferior indigo grown in Awadh. They therefore order
that such a duty be imposed on the Company’s frontier “as will tend to discourage
the importation from that quarter”. Incidentally they make it clear that their primary
concern is with their traditional re-export trade to Europe rather than with meeting
the needs of British industry.11
Mukherjee is on rather firmer ground when he deals with raw cotton. Except in
years of unusually high demand (1809 was one such) or when the war of 1812 was
disrupting American supplies, India did not become a major source of cotton for
7
Cited in Marshall, “Economic and Political Expansion“, p. 476.
8
In 1802/3 out of a total investment of Rs. 1,275,000, Rs. 910,000 were allocated to piece-goods,
compared with Rs. 200,000 for raw cotton: India Office Records, London, Home Miscellaneous, 583,
p. 39. In 1803/4 the total was Rs. 1,212,500 of which piece-goods took up Rs. 863,251, raw cotton Rs.
191,375: Brit. Lib., Add. MS. 13434, fo. 39.
9
In 1803/4, 875,460 maunds of raw cotton were said to have been imported into Bengal from “the
upper provinces“. At 82 lbs. per maund, that amounts to 71,787,720 lbs. Re-exports to China, by far
the largest market, were only assessed at 13,680,800 lbs. for the same year. India Office Records,
Bengal Commercial Reports, range 174, vol. 14, fos. 20, 62.
10
11
Reports and Documents Connected with the Proceedings of the East-India Company in Regard to the
Culture and Manufacture of Cotton-Wool, Raw Silk and Indigo in India (London, 1836), pt. 3, pp. 57-8.
Britain in the early nineteenth century. In those years when Indian exports to Britain
were of some significance, cotton from Calcutta (the outlet for the Ceded Provinces)
played a part, but it was usually a subordinate part to the cotton of Bombay.12 Raw
cotton from the Ceded Provinces was, however, exported from Calcutta to China in
considerable quantities. Such a trade has nothing to do with the Industrial
Revol-ution:13 concern to balance purchases in China with Indian exports and thus
to eliminate shipments of British bullion to China was as old as the expansion of the
tea trade far back in the eighteenth century. Nor does there appear to be evidence to
support the assertion that the desire to obtain Awadh cotton for China was one of
“the reasons why Awadh was brought into the ambit of colonialism”.14 Once the
annexation has been accomplished, some of Wellesley’s subordinates began to try to
give some commercial respectability to what the governor-general had done by
anticipating benefits from exporting Awadh cotton to China. The directors welcomed
this development, stating in 1804 that they intended to make cotton from Awadh “a
regular branch of trade to Canton”.15 Exports on the Company’s behalf remained,
however, very limited until the 1820s, although private merchants quickly built up
quite a considerable trade. “Bengal” cotton, if always shipped in smaller quantities
than that from the west coast, became a component of India’s exports to China.16
Bengal cotton was generally held to be inferior to that from Bombay, only selling
well when the Chinese crop in inland districts failed. Thus trade in Bengal cotton
was commonly regarded as speculative and uncertain.17 To call such a trade an
“imperative of colonialism” seems extreme.
Attempts to relate British expansion in India to the metropolitan economy are certainly
worth making. What has come in other contexts to be called the “peripheral”
explanation of imperialism is not necess-arily a sufficient explanation. Nevertheless
it is extremely difficult to identify diverse and sometimes conflicting elements in the
British presence in eighteenth-century India with economic forces at home. The East
India Company’s monopoly was still intact. It was under pressure from other interests,
and such pressures might be given some support by the national government, but in
general its pattern of trading remained very conservative, or “mercantile” in
Mukherjee’s sense. Nor can the British private traders resident in India, for all the
vigour of their enterprise, be regarded as outriders for the new British industries.
THey dealt in very much the same range of com-modities as the Company did.
12
M. M. Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 1780-1815 (Manchester, 1967), pp. 99, 102-3.
Calcutta’s exports to Britain are listed in Return of the Quantity of Cotton Wool Exported from the
British Possessions in India, Parliamentary Papers, 1847 [194], xli, p. 72.
13
Cf. Mukherjee, “Trade and Empire in Awadh“, p. 96 n.
14
Ibid., p. 99.
15
Brit. Lib., Add. MS. 13434, fo. 123.
16
Bengal’s and Bombay’s exports are listed in Return of the Quantity of Cotton Wool Exported from the
British Possessions in India, pp. 73, 81. For the Company’s Bengal exports, see ibid., p. 86.
17
M. Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 79-80; L. Dermigny, La
Chine et I’occident: le commerce a Canton au XVIII esiecle, 1719-1833, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964), iii, pp. 1289-91.
Ministers at home were in direct contact with the governor-general in India, but
there is nothing to suggest that they were secretly urging him to seize territory in
Awadh for economic or any other reasons.18
Wellesley indeed needed no prompting to pursue an aggressive forward policy, but
commercial calculations were alien to him. He despised “commercial prejudice and
the eager desire of temporary mercantile advantage”. “Duties of sovereignty must”,
in his view, “be deemed paramount to mercantile interests, prejudices and profits”.19
He operated in an economic context, which my article attempted to describe, but
the pressures on him were neither coherent enough nor strong enough to amount to
“imperatives”. Hence “the mind of the governor-general” was given a relatively
free rein. That I consider Wellesley’s designs on Awadh to have been “altruistic” is
Mukherjee’s gloss on my article;20 it is neither what I wrote nor what I believe. What
Wellesley wrote in such abundance about altruism was no doubt specious.
Commercial motives, which he never men-tioned, are equally inappropriate. Within
the spectrum of what Mukherjee calls the “politico-strategic argument”21 there are,
how-ever, a number of cogent possibilities; a combination of these probably provides
the explanation for the annexation. Wellesley wrote a great deal about the need for
greater security for Awadh’s payments for British troops. He later prided himself on
having gained “territorial security” for payments due from the Company’s
“subsidiary” allies, “instead of depending on the precarious power, and imperfect
admin-istration of an Indian government”.22 He presumably calculated the possibilities
of levying much more than the old Awadh subsidy from direct British administration
of the Ceded Provinces. To argue, as Mukherjee does, that any supposed threat to
British payments from Awadh was largely a consequence of British interference
with the Wazir’s government is to make a fair point, but it is not the kind of point
that would have influenced Wellesley even if he had recognized it.23 Beyond more
secure and perhaps increased payments, Wellesley wrote of “political advantages”
from the territory he proposed to take, especially in the Doab.24 He implied that
these “advantages” were a better defensive system, but a recent assessment has seen
him as seeking “a suitable base from which to try to overpower the Maratha
18
See the private correspondence of Dundas and Wellesley in Two Views of British India: The Private
Correspondence of Mr Dundas and Lord Wellesley, 1798-1801, ed. E. Ingram (Bath, 1970). Mukherjee
seems to believe that Wellesley was given verbal instructions to seize territory by ministers before
he left Britain. This has recently been questioned by E. Ingram, Commitment to Empire: Prophecies
of the Great Gamein Asia, 1797-1800 (Oxford, 1981), p. 124. Even if some generalized encouragement
was given, his correspondence suggests that nothing was specifically said about Awadh. Cf.
Mukherjee, “Trade and Empire in Awadh“, pp. 89-90.
19
The Despatches, Minutes and Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley during his Administration
in India, ed. Montgomery Martin, 5 vols. (London, 1836-7), iii, pp. 194, 202.
20
21
Ibid., p. 100.
22
Despatches, Minutes and Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley, ed. Martin, iii, p. 526.
23
24
Despatches, Minutes and Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley, ed. Martin, ii, p. 427.
Confederacy” and eventually to impose his will on most of India.25 A jaundiced
contemporary with long service in Awadh saw “the desire of fame” as Wellesley’s
“ruling passion, and it is unsatiable”.26 As a blanket term the Industrial Revolution
explains relatively little about British expansion in general at the end of the eighteenth
century; it tells us very little indeed about the actions of such a man.
*******
25
Ingram, Commitment to Empire, pp. 274-5.
26
William Palmer to Warren Hastings, 10 Oct. 1802: Brit. Lib., Add. MS. 29178, fo. 278.
The Return of the Colonial in Indian Economic History: The

Last Phase of Colonialism in India- Dr. Aditya Mukherjee
I am extremely thankful to the Executive Council of the Indian Congress which has
spearheaded the promotion of scientific, secular and anti-imperialist history in this
country for over seventy years. This is one reason why Indian historiography is one
of the most advanced among the erstwhile colonial countries. However, this is not
to say that the communal and colonial trends actively promoted during the colonial
period have died out. These trends have periodically resurfaced and acquired some
influence even after independence. There is thus the need to constantly contend
with these trends so that the civilisational values promoted so painstakingly by our
national liberation struggle are preserved and furthered.
I have in this address in a small way tried to contribute to this effort by questioning
the resurgence of the colonial trend in the writing of economic history of the colonial
period. Paradoxically, it was in the sphere of the economic impact of colonialism
that colonialism was first critiqued effectively. Also, the economic critique of
colonialism, relative to other critiques of colonialism, was the first to be widely
accepted. Yet the colonial point of view in this area has again resurfaced, as for
example in the recent work of Tirthankar Roy. I will very briefly go over the broad
contours of some of the thinking on colonialism and its economic impact since the
mid nineteenth century and then focus on a critique of how colonialism in its last
phase has been perceived by historians with a colonial perspective.
I may add that I feel humbled at occupying this position, the sectional president-
ship of the Congress, which has been held by my teachers and mentors some of
whom are present here today. The nineteenth century saw a rich debate on the
impact of colonialism on the colony. Two journalistic pieces written by Karl Marx in
1853 for the New York Daily Tribune on British rule in India raised some key issues
concerned with this debate which are of relevance even today. Marx in these articles
wrote about the “destructive” and the “regenerative” role of colonialism. He saw in
the very process of destruction by colonialism of the pre-colonial Indian society,
there generative role of colonialism, as it opened up the possibility of growth of
capitalism and industrialisation in the colony. This was because Marx, on the basis
of information then available to him, erroneously characterized Indian society as a
‘changeless’ ‘Asiatic society’ which needed to be destroyed, even though the process
was painful, before any social progress could occur. Further, along with the
destruction of the old ‘Asiatic’ order he expected that new elements introduced by
British rule, such as electric telegraph, railways, steam navigation, private property
in land, western education, free press, political unification, etc., would create the
conditions for the evolution of a modern western type of society. As he put it:
England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other
regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material
foundations of Western society in India.
The hope was that colonialism would lead to the ‘mirror image’ of capitalism being
produced in the colony. This position of Marx led to much controversy and misuse
subsequently. This was because Marx’s overall position in these articles and especially
his position as it emerged shortly after writing these articles in the enormous corpus
of work produced by him was not fully appreciated.
Before one looks at the complex position taken by Marx over time it is significant to
note that the modern Indian intelligentsia in the first half of the nineteenth century
had a perspective similar to that which Marx was to state later in his 1853 articles.
For instance, Raja Rammohan Roy, the father of Modern India, described British
rule as the gift of divine providence not because he was comprador or a lackey of the
British but because he saw British rule as creating the conditions for the
modernization of the Indian economy, polity, etc., much in the manner reflected in
the position taken by Marx. It appeared to be the wisdom of the time. Indeed, it is for
this reason that the Indian modern intelligentsia did not support the 1857 revolt
against the British, which they feared would lead to a throwback to the pre-colonial
order. Marx, too, had doubts about the progressive potential of the revolt.
However the Indian intelligentsia was to soon (by the late 1860s) abandon this position
and over the second half of the nineteenth century began to see colonialism not as
the harbinger of or route to capitalist modernization but as the chief obstacle to the
transition to capitalism in India, an understanding which was to lead them to
demand the overthrow of British rule. In fact, the Indian early nationalists were
among the first in the world, decades before Hobson, Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg, to
evolve a multi- 4 pronged, detailed and sophisticated critique of colonialism. The
remarkable achievement of the Indian early nationalists in this respect is perhaps
still not adequately appreciated among scholars in India and remains virtually ignored
globally despite the definitive and monumental work on the early nationalists
produced by Prof. Bipan Chandra as early as the 1960s.
In the context of the change in perception of the Indian intelligentsia regarding
British rule it is very important to look at Marx’s 1853 position carefully and
particularly to note how it evolved over time. (It would be interesting to investigate
evidence of one being influenced by the other as their thinking on several aspects
moved on similar lines). It must be noted that when Marx talked of the ‘regenerative’
role of British rule he was conscious that only the conditions of regeneration were
being created under British rule and not regeneration itself. He was talking of a
potential which had not yet emerged from the ruin brought on by British rule which
he often described so graphically. He wrote, in June 18-53:
England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any
symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no
gain of a new one imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery
of the Hindoo and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, ... from the whole of its
past history.
In fact a few months later in his August 1853 article where he talked of the
“destructive” and “regenerative” role he was still talking of England having to “fulfill”
this “double mission” in India (i.e., it was yet to happen) so that certain “new
elements” were introduced in Indian society which would enable it to move on the
path of social progress. However, Marx with remarkable prescience (much before
the modern National liberation struggle in India took root) was simultaneously
anticipating the need for the overthrow of colonialism if India was to actually reap
the benefits of the “new elements” that British colonialism was to engender. As he
put it:
The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered
among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling
classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus
themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke
altogether.
Marx suggests that British rule, or the onslaught of British capitalism on the Indian
colony would “neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the
mass of the people”, which would depend on “not only the development of
productive powers, but of their appropriation by the people” presumably possible
only with the overthrow of British rule. Yet he says “what they (British rulers) will
not fail to do is lay down the material premises for both” albeit at the cost of
“dragging... people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation”.
The question still remains that while Indians may not have been able to reap the
fruits of the “new elements” that would lead to the “development of productive
powers” till it achieved national liberation but did British rule create the “the material
premises” for both the processes so that one could “safely expect to see, at a more or
less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country”, India?
That colonialism would create the conditions for its overthrow is understandable
but did it lay the “material foundations” for the development of productive powers?
The answer to this question assumes importance not only to decide what view to
take of colonialism as a whole but also in explaining certain positive developments
in the late colonial period (in India) and particularly after the overthrow of
colonialism. As we shall see later it would involve seeing these developments either
as the result of colonialism, though much restricted or delayed by it, or as a result of
the break from colonialism. The central theme of this address will be to argue the
latter.
It appears to me that Marx began very quickly to distance himself from the position
that colonialism, however “swinish”, would introduce elements which would lead
to the growth of productive powers and capitalism in the colony.
It is significant that Marx never used the characterization of the ‘regenerative’ effect
of colonialism after his August 1853 article, not even in articles written later that
year. He clearly was moving towards a different position on colonialism especially
after he and Engels studied a concrete colonial situation closely, that of Ireland. In
fact, in his later writings, including in Capital Vol. 1 (1867), he began to emphasise
the destructive role of colonialism and identify some of the key structural features
which the capitalism-colonialism interface was leading to which were not conducive
to the growth of capitalism in the colony though it helped the growth of capitalism
in the metropolis or the colonising country. He clearly saw the unrequited transfer
of capital from the colony to the metropolis in various forms, what the early
nationalists called the ‘drain’, as a “bleeding process” ruinous to the colony but
critical to the process of primitive accumulation and therefore to the transition to
and growth of industrial capitalism in the metropolitan countries. He now saw the
Railways as “useless to the Hindus”, and therefore counted the dividend paid for
the railways, like the military and civilian expenses which involved remittances out
of India, as all constituting part of the drain or the “bleeding process”.
He notes that an unequal international division of labour was emerging, “a division
suited to the requirements of the chief centres of modern industry” converting “one
part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of z production, for supplying the
other part which remains a chiefly industrial field”. As is well known, the Ricardian
theory of comparative advantage was used to perpetuate this division of labour, a
division which led to growing productivity differences between the industrialised
and non-industrialised societies. Marx was perhaps the first to be able to see that
apart from the fact that British industry benefited from the denial of industrial
development to India there was a not so obvious surplus appropriation in favour of
Britain involved in the trade between the two countries even in this so called free
trade as opposed to the monopoly trade or trade involving non-economic coercion
typical of the earlier mercantile phase of colonialism. He saw the ‘unequal exchange’
involved in trade between countries with different productivity levels with the high
productivity country exchanging commodities with less labour input for commodities
from the low productivity country which had a much higher labour input, though
the commodities exchanged had the same monetary/market value. The process of
keeping India un-industrialised benefited British industry but simultaneously
strengthened the process of surplus appropriation through “unequal exchange”.
Each process reinforced the other.
British agrarian policies were also no longer seen by Marx as producing private
property in land but “caricatures” of it. He no longer saw the potential of capitalism
emerging in agriculture in these societies through this intervention.
Here we see seeds of the understanding that the “new elements” that emerged as a
result of the impact of colonialism, because they came in a colonial form, they were
incapable of having a regenerative effect on the colony. Hence Marx increasingly
emphasised the necessity of the overthrow of colonialism, a position taken further
within the Marxist tradition by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and others.
The critique of colonialism was sophisticated further in many dimensions as the
later stages of colonialism unfolded themselves and their impact could be studied.
Major advances were made in analyzing the political economy of colonialism after
the Second World War with the writings of Paul Baran and Balandier in the 1950s
and later, in the late 1960s and 1970s by the Dependency theorists, neo-Marxist
world system analysts and others like Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Nicos Poulantzas,
Immanuel Wallerstein, Ernesto Laclau, Hamza Alavi and Bipan Chandra, to name
just a few.
[Since the early 1980s however, an alternate motley stream occupied by post
modernism, ‘post-colonial’ culture studies, subaltern studies, etc., has partially (and
I hope temporarily) hijacked (fortunately as yet essentially among sections of first
world academia) the mainstream debate on the political economy of imperialism.
The focus has shifted from the political economy of imperialism to its ‘representation’.
The nationalist response, including of massive long drawn popular movements, is
also characterized (and thus virtually dismissed) as either being part of the ‘colonial
discourse’ or ‘elite’ or ‘official’! This setback to the study of colonialism and nationalism
has paradoxically occurred through scholarly intervention in the name of the ‘people’,
the oppressed without a ‘voice’, by scholars who, largely have, at least in the Indian
case, shifted base to the First World or appear to aspire to do so. As Arif Dirlik asks:
“When exactly... does the post-colonial begin?” and goes on to answer, “When Third
World intellectuals have arrived in First world academe.” A critique of this stream,
however, is outside the scope of this address.]
Bipan Chandra in his seminal work “Colonialism and Modernisation” delivered as
a presidential address to this very Congress in 1970, thirty seven years ago, argued
that colonialism did not lead to capitalist modernization, neither did it create certain
conditions in that direction, i.e., it was not as if it led to ‘partial’ or ‘restricted’
modernization or that it had some “residual” benefits, despite the overall exploitative
character, which- could be of some advantage after independence. He, along with
Hamza Alavi, made a strong plea for seeing colonialism neither as semi-capitalist or
backward capitalist nor as an amalgam of ‘traditional’ pre-capitalist and ‘modern’
capitalist features but as a distinct colonial structure. As Bipan Chandra put it,
colonialism “is a well-structured ‘whole’, a distinct social formation (system) or sub-
formation (sub-system) in which the basic control of the economy and society is in
the hands of a foreign capitalist class which functions in the colony (or semi-colony)
through a dependent and subservient economic, social, political, and intellectual
structure whose forms can vary with the changing conditions of the historical
development of capitalism as a world-wide system.” Further he argued that the
new colonial social framework that came into being which included “not only the
economy but also the patterns of social, political, administrative and cultural life...
was stagnant and decaying as it was being born”, i.e., had no ‘regenerative’ potential.
Many of the features that a colonial economy demonstrated, though they appeared
to be capitalist, within the colonial framework, they performed completely different
and distinctly colonial roles. For example, a colonial situation could witness, as it
did in India, a high degree of commercialization (or generalized commodity
production), rapid growth in transport and communications, close integration with
the world market and a high degree of ‘potential investible surplus’ raised from
within the economy — all features associated with capitalist development. Yet in
the colonial context all these developments led to capitalist development in the
metropolis but further colonial structuring in the colony. It ended up, to use Tilak’s
expressive phrase, g “decorating another’s wife”, and one may add, while disfiguring
one’s own.
In the Indian colonial economy, which was forcibly internally disarticulated and
extroverted, the above changes did not stimulate internal inter-sectoral exchanges
between Indian agriculture and Indian industry, or between Indian consumer goods
industry and capital goods industry. The circuit of commodity circulation was
completed via the metropolis where colonial agriculture was linked to metropolitan
industry, or colonial consumer goods industry (if and when it was allowed to develop)
with metropolitan capital goods industry; the multiplier effects of these exchanges
were thus transmitted abroad. Similarly, the surplus generated in the colonial
economy did not lead to extended reproduction through investment (the key feature
which distinguishes capitalism from pre-capitalist modes of production) thus raising
the organic composition of capital and productivity to a higher level on a significant
scale within the indigenous economy, but facilitated this process in the metropolis.
Traditional irtisanal industry was destroyed, (i.e., a process of de-industrialization
occurred in a country which was the world’s largest exporter of textiles in the pre-
colonial era) and not replaced with modern capital intensive industry on a significant
scale.
Capitalism did not grow in agriculture either. Commodity production in agriculture
was in response to a “forced commercialization” to primarily meet the colonial state’s
revenue demands and not with a capitalist rationality, i.e., to earn profit for
investment. Typically, agriculture witnessed a high degree of differentiation but it
did not lead to capitalist farming through extended reproduction. The petty mode
of production was perpetuated in agriculture with the large estates being let out to
tenants with small holdings who continued to cultivate at more or less the same
traditional levels of technology. Moreover, agricultural output and exports, even
when they grew, they remained articulated with metropolitan industrial and other
needs.
The basic point was that colonialism had to be viewed and evaluated as an overall
structure. Growth in one or the other sector of the economy or society could not be
evaluated as ‘partial’ development (to be offset against the lack of such growth in
another sector) if that sectoral growth was instrumental in creating the colonial
structuring which led to overall stagnation and even decline. This was an
understanding arrived at by Marx and Engels in their study of the Irish colonial
situation as it was by the early nationalists in the case of India. The development of
railways, foreign trade, telegraph, agrarian transformation, a colonial civil service,
etc., occurred in a manner that they became critical instruments in converting the
pre-capitalist and sometimes emerging capitalist societies into a stillborn colonial
structure. The very instruments of the subversion of modern capitalist development
in favour of colonial structuring cannot be treated as the ‘residual’ or ‘partial’ benefits
of colonialism, a fallacy which unfortunately creeps into the thought of otherwise
staunch liberal nationalists at the highest level and even some Marxists. The
opportunity cost of failing to use the same resources, (which created the instruments
for colonial purposes) alternatively, often over - centuries of colonial domination and
of having to undo the colonial structuring after freedom was won, is mind boggling.
If colonialism was not leading to ‘partial’ modernization, if it was not ‘transitional’
to modernization, but was structuring-in backwardness, then moving temporally
further on the colonial path would not bring the colony closer to modernization.
Only a break from it would. The colonial path and the capitalist path are not even
like parallel paths which do not ever meet, they are actually divergent paths. The
more a society moved on the colonial path the more the colonial distortions would
be structured-in and the more difficult it would be to make the transition to
independent capitalist or for that matter socialist development. The ‘built-in
depressors’, to use an apt term attributed to Daniel Thorner, that colonialism created
would get heavier and the task of independent development that much more
challenging.
It was not only the task of un-structuring the colonial economic structure which
was the challenge before the countries politically liberated from colonialism. The
task of ‘de-colonizing’ the non-economic institutions spawned by colonialism like
the colonial bureaucracy, judiciary, police, education system, etc., were to prove
equally daunting. Sixty years after independence, India is still struggling to decolonize
these institutions. As we will see later we still have textbooks taught in our schools
and major universities such as the recent Oxford Economic History of India by
Tirthankar Roy, which argues a blatant colonial position which would have
embarrassed many British Governor-Generals and Viceroys. While it is
understandable that Niall Ferguson, the no-holds-barred open defender of British
imperialism, should find Roy’s work praiseworthy; what is surprising is that scholars
such as Ramachandra Guha and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, whom one would not
suspect of harbouring colonial sentiments, echo that view. Decolonization of the
mind is indeed a long and tortuous process.
II
The colonial argument has a long ancestry. Being the argument emanating from the
more ‘successful’/rich and powerful part of the globe, even though it was the
argument of the ruling elite, it found takers among the oppressed as well. Its influence
varied depending on the intellectual and political strength of the anti-imperialist
movement at different points of time.
Since the nineteenth century British colonial officials as well as some I q intellectuals put
up a spirited defense of colonialism. They argued that British colonialism brought law
and order and modern transport and communications, led to growth of foreign trade
and integrated the colony with the global market, brought in resources to India through
British investments (drain was persistently denied), made major changes in property
rights in agriculture and improved irrigation, all factors leading to unprecedented
economic development in India. The “white man’s burden” or the “civilizing mission”
did not end there. Indians had to be retrieved from their ‘barbaric’ and ‘hideous’ conditions
through gradually training them for self government as well! Further, the inhibiting
factors in Indian development were, it was argued, over-population, shortage of capital,
Indian social customs, social institutions, values and habits like lack of ambition, apathy,
thriftlessness, spending extravagantly on marriages, and also India’s geographical
weaknesses and climatic conditions. The negatives, in other words, involved looking
within and not at colonialism.
The early Indian nationalists, consisting of some of the best minds of that era, over
nearly half a century of intense intellectual activity, questioned each one of the colonial
claims and, as I pointed out earlier, created a sophisticated critique of imperialism.
Through books based on years of research, articles, newspapers, legislative assemblies,
the British parliament, public meetings and numerous such forums they argued their
position. Their success was that the essential elements of their thought became the
common sense wisdom of the time and provided the basic structure of the economic
understanding of colonialism not only to the Indian national movement but to the
planners and academics after independence.
A major resurgence of the colonial position regarding the Indian experience of colonialism
occurred in academia with the writings of Morris D. Morris in the early 1960s, and the
publication of the voluminous Cambridge Economic History Vol. 2 in the early 1980s. A
robust challenge emerged with Bipan Chandra, Toru Matsui, Tapan Raychaudhuri,
Irfan Habib, and others writing detailed critiques and by a number of research works
such as that of A. K. Bannerji, Basudev Chatterji, Sunanda Sen, Michael Kidron, George
Blyn, Utsa Patnaik, S. Sivasubramonian, R.W. Goldsmith, A.I. Levkovsky, V.B. Singh,
Debdas Bannerjee (to name just a few) and the seminal work of A. K. Bagchi. The
colonial position on the economic front however continued, particularly regarding an
interpretation of the 18th century, leading to an interesting debate.
However, while most of the pro-colonial works since independence reiterated the
colonial position regarding only some aspects of the economy the recent work of
Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, mentioned above, tries to present,
somewhat in a ‘made easy’ style, the colonial position in its entirety covering all
aspects of the colonial economy. Roy laments that in the “average Indian’s sense of
history”, “colonialism” was seen as “responsible... for... underdevelopment”. (The
‘guilt’ of the early nationalists in creating this ‘sense’ is evident). He wants us to
“take leave of (such) generalizations” and “step into history”, a history which then
he proceeds to outline, doing little better than sketch the average colonialist’s sense
of history. It is not possible to do here a detailed critique of Roy’s work as it would
involve going over the entire colonial position. He has reiterated almost all the
arguments of the British civil servants and Viceroys about the benefits of British rule
and the causes of lack of growth in India that are summarized above and has ignored
or summarily dismissed the rich anti-colonial discourse that evolved over more than
a century. (Given below in the footnote are some examples of Roy’s position.) I shall
in this address limit myself to a more modest and limited task.
III
This address will focus on the last phase of colonialism in India particularly since the
First World War. The period saw some growth of indigenous industry and a substantial
growth of the indigenous capitalist class. Apart from this the period witnessed several
other ‘positive’ developments which diverge from the classical colonial pattern that had
got established in India. This has led to one group of colonial writers seeing these as the
result of colonialism and its policies, which created conditions for rapid economic advance
later. Morris D. Morris too sees the period after 1914 as one during which “rather
substantial structural modifications occurred” when “the base was laid for a renewed
upward surge after independence”; unfortunately, despite all the “growth benefits of
nineteenth century” the “nineteenth century as a period was too brief to achieve all the
structural changes needed to provide the preconditions for an industrial revolution.”
The implication in their writings is that the impetus of the changes during 1914-1947
remained colonial and post Independence India could just build on them, without
involving any fundamental break from colonialism. Other colonial scholars see this period
as one of ‘decolonization’ where colonialism was gradually pulling out, handing over to
Indian interests. Some even see this period as one where England was being exploited by
India!441 shall question this range of colonial views.
Before I do a critique of the colonial view of this period I shall, however, first take a
detour and in some detail enumerate what the positive developments that occurred
in this period were and then go on to show how these developments were not a
result of colonialism or of a process of decolonization.
First, it is generally undisputed that a major development in the Indian colonial
economy in the twentieth century was the initiation of a rapid phase of import
substitution in most of the major consumer goods industries and certain intermediate
and capital goods industries like textiles, sugar, matches, soap, cement, paper, glass,
sulphuric acid and other basic chemicals, magnesium chloride, tinplate, and iron
and steel. (See table 1). This process,
Table 1: Sea-Borne Imports Into British India, 1900-1945.
I II III IV
1900-01 1920-21 1936-37 1944-45
Cotton Piece-goods 2003 1510 764 5
(million yards)
Sugar (thousand tons) - 344 23 nil
(net imports-17)a
Soap (thousand cwt.) - 313 48 3
Matches (thousand - 12399 55 During war imports rise due
gross boxes (By 1938-39, 95% of to shortages. No figures
total consumption available for 1944-45.
met indigenously)
Cement (thousand 165 [1914] 131 51 5 [1940-41] Insignificant in
tons) 1944-45, being l/5th of 1940-41
in value terms at current
prices.
Paper & Pasteboard 7,30 3,94 26.1
(Rs. Lakhs)
Iron and Steel 286 712 363
(thousand tons)
Source: Columns II, III and IV from S. Subramanian and P.W.R. Homfray, Recent
Social and Economic Trends in India, Government of India, New Delhi ,1946, pp.48-
49 and 6-8. Column 1 from A.K. Bagchi, Private Investment.. .op.cit., pp.238, 295
and 354.
a - See Rajat Ray, Industrialization in India, Delhi, 1979, p.138. By 1937 India had
started exporting sugar. Note: Up to 1936-37, figures included Burma.
a reversal of the general nineteenth century colonial trend began in the early twentieth
century, picked up by the First World War and the twenties, got a major push in the
thirties and during the Second World War, and took a quantum leap at a qualitatively
different level in the years following independence. In any case, by 1939, India was
more or less self-sufficient in her major consumer goods requirements. Most
important, the bulk of this process was occurring under the aegis of independent
indigenous capital.
Second, apart from import substitution, there was a growing tendency towards
inward orientation, with indigenous producers, who were earlier producing for
export, shifting towards the home market. Also, the link between agriculture and
indigenous industry began to grow, reversing the earlier trend where the former
was increasingly linked to metropolitan industry. A good example of this process
was the cotton textile industry, the most important industry in India at that time. In
the early decades of the twentieth century the cotton mill industry in Bombay was
beginning to shift from export of yarn to the far-east (particularly China) to production
of yarn and cloth for the domestic market. Also other textile centres in the interior
areas, such as Ahmedabd, Cawnpore and Coimbatore, which grew faster than
Bombay in this period, produced yarn and cloth mainly for the domestic market.
Further, as the textile industry in India grew due to rapid import to substitution, it
began to pick up an increasing proportion of the domestic raw cotton production.
The growing inward orientation was also a result of the traditional export oriented
industries like jute stagnating in this period, while the domestic market oriented
industries like cotton textiles, sugar and iron and steel registering relatively quicker
growth rates.
Third, reflecting the changes discussed above, India’s total volume of international
trade, which had grown stupendously in the nineteenth century, when India became
a typical outward oriented colonial economy, began to decline after World War I.
Simultaneously, her internal trade began to grow, in some areas quite dramatically.
For example, between 1920 and 1939, the volume of internal trade in sugar increased
by three times, in cotton piece goods, iron and steel, raw hide and skins and cement
(1933 to 1939) it nearly doubled and in tanned hides and skins and leather it increased
by eight times. It may be noted that the spurt in Indian industrial growth in this
period was not linked to growth in international trade (one of the so called benefits
of colonial rule, see f.n. 38) but to growth in internal trade.
Fourth, there occurred in this period a rapid shift of traditional ‘pre-capitalist’
accumulations in trade, usury and landlordism to industry, again reversing the earlier
pattern of such accumulations being diverted to landlordism a process of ‘re-
feudalisation’. While many of the princes financed big industry, a lot of trading-
usury capital went into small enterprises. This shift occurred partially because the
two world wars and the Depression (as well as the fall in world demand for Indian
primary products) reduced the traditional opportunities for investment in trade,
indigenous banking, usury and landlordism. The same factors combined with the
fact that the colonial state was forced to raise tariff duties on imports created
opportunities for indigenous industrial investment (more on this later).
Fifth, as compared to the pre-World War I period, in the post-war period upto 1945
there was a gradual but consistent shift in the pattern of foreign trade with the
proportion of manufactured goods in total exports showing a significant increase
and in total imports showing an even more significant decrease. Conversely, the
proportion of raw materials in total exports showed 14 a definite decrease and the
proportion of raw materials and capital goods (as opposed to consumer goods) in
total imports showed a comparative increase. There was here a tendency, however
hesitant, towards the reversal of India’s traditional colonial pattern of foreign trade,
though the pattern still remained largely colonial till independence. The example of
sugar illustrates aspects of the new tendency. The import of sugar (a manufactured
consumer good) fell dramatically in the inter-war period leading to the
commencement of exports by 1937 (see table 1). On the other hand, the value of
imports of sugar machinery shot up from Rs. 1.75 m. in 1920-21 to Rs. 87 m. in 1932-
33, at constant prices.
Sixth, contrary to traditional belief, the actual net inflow of foreign capital to India
was never very large and virtually insignificant in the form of industrial investments.
Most foreign capital in the twentieth century came in the form of loans to meet the
balance of payment deficits caused in no small measure by unilateral transfers made
to the metropolis in the form of home- charges and debt servicing or interest charges
and dividends accruing due to earlier foreign loans and investments. In fact, if one
pitted outflows on current account due to interest, dividends and home charges
against net inflow due to foreign borrowing on the capital accounts, one would find
that there was an outflow of capital from India virtually throughout the colonial
period and certainly since World War I. However, even if one considers only the
flows in the capital account, then also it is evident that foreign capital inflow fell off
after the spurt of the early 1920s, and, by the early 1930s, Indian repayments and
repatriation of foreign debt and earlier foreign investments exceeded fresh
investments, i.e., there was a net outflow of foreign capital. The process of repatriation
which began in the early ‘30s picked up after 1935, and, with the onset of World
War II, both repatriation of sterling public debt and retirement of private foreign
loans and investment increased rapidly.
In fact, during World War II, when Britain made large war purchases in India,
India ceased to be a debtor country and by 1946 had accumulated as credit against
Britain a whopping sterling balance of nearly Rs. 17,000 million. Further, the
dependence on the London money market for Indian government borrowing was
also reduced dramatically after having peaked in the mid-1930s. While in 1934
sterling debt (or external debt) represented nearly 43 per cent of India’s total public
debt, by 1945 sterling debt accounted for only 4 per cent, i.e., 96 per cent of the
public debt was raised internally. Further, for a variety of reasons, areas where
traditional foreign capital (European controlled business in India where a large part
of the investments were internally raised) dominated, e.g., plantations, jute and
foreign trade, underwent a relative stagnation after the First World War. Also, a
dual process of repatriation of foreign capital from these sectors and of Indianisation
of ownership (and gradually control) in them set in. On the other hand, the intrusion
of the new type of foreign capital in the form of direct investments by multinational
corporations during the twenties and thirties, remained very small till
independence, especially when compared to the rapid growth of indigenous enterprise
in this period. For example, ~5 between 1921 and 1938 the net foreign industrial
investment was worth £17 m., while the new investment in Indian industry was
estimated to be £144 m.
Also, between 1914-1947 the paid up capital of rupee companies (or companies
registered in India) grew more than twice as fast as the increase in the paid up
capital of sterling companies. In fact between 1929 and 1947 the paid up capital of
rupee companies doubled while that of sterling companies stagnated showing an
actual decline after the peak reached in 1932-33. Foreign direct investments, however,
did increase considerably after independence but they were kept under strict control
and were not allowed to acquire a dominant position either in the overall economy
or in most of the critical sectors of the economy.
Last, between 1914 and 1947, the Indian capitalist class, through a process of
economic and political struggle, and taking advantage of the two wars and the
Great Depression as well as the specific crisis faced by British imperialism during
these years, was able to significantly increase its hold over the Indian economy vis-
^-vis foreign capital. This was achieved chiefly through the following three processes:
(a) by entering new areas almost exclusively and accounting for the overwhelming
proportion of the new investments made after the 1920s, e.g., in sugar, cement,
paper, heavy chemicals, iron and steel, etc., (b) by edging out or encroaching upon
in greater or smaller degree the various traditional areas of European influence and
dominance, e.g., banking, life-insurance, jute, textiles, partially shipping, foreign
trade, coal, and tea, (c) through a faster growth, in terms of investment and output,
in economic sectors and geographical regions where Indian capital dominated, as
opposed to those where European interests were dominant, e.g., cotton vs. jute,
Bombay and other interior regions vs. Bengal and the metropolitan centres, home
market-oriented industries vs. export- oriented industries like jute, plantations, etc.,
internal trade vs. foreign trade, and so on.
Thus before independence itself Indian capital had acquired considerable control
over the domestic market. Rough estimates suggest that about 72-73 per cent of the
domestic market was controlled by indigenous enterprise at the eve of independence.
In the financial sphere also, where, earlier, European capital was supreme, the Indian
capitalists made massive inroads. While in 1914 foreign banks held 70 per cent <?f
the deposits, by 1937 they held 57 per cent, and by 1947 a mere 17 per cent, i.e., 83
per cent of the deposits were in | £ Indian banks.
The various factors listed above suggest that what are considered to be some of the
typical disarticulating features of an extroverted colonial economy were, to an extent,
however hesitatingly, getting reversed, even within the overarching colonial
structure. First, there was a growing tendency towards surplus value being
appropriated through extended reproduction in the colony, and it was being
accumulated and invested by an independent indigenous bourgeoisie, albeit within
the constraints of a colonial economy. Second, there was a growing tendency towards
indigenous industry being articulated with indigenous agriculture and the home
market. Thus the typical colonial feature of the colony’s agriculture and its home
market being articulated with metropolitan industry was showing a decline. Third,
the hold of foreign capital was declining; and the indigenous bourgeoisie had
gradually acquired a dominating position in the indigenous production sphere as
well as in the home market. Last, the colonial economy, like the indigenous
bourgeoisie, had acquired a minimal strength and bargaining position vis-&- vis the
metropolitan centre. For example, the economy instead of being weighed down by a
huge debt enjoyed large foreign exchange balances by the end of W.W. II, and the
colonial bourgeoisie was able to bargain effectively while associating with foreign
capital in setting up enterprises, or while negotiating trade agreements with Britain.
IV
The question now was: how to understand these positive changes? As mentioned
earlier the colonial view was to see these changes as the beneficial result of colonialism
or as the result of imperialism voluntarily pulling out. Colonial scholars have focused
on the increasing import substitution in consumer goods industry in India (see Table
1) and the sharp decline in the British market in India, particularly in cotton textiles,
to basically argue that Britain was now 4surrendering its interests in India in favour
of Indian industrial interests. The 1919 ‘Fiscal Autonomy Convention’ was described
as “a British self-denying ordinance”71 which led to the “deliberate surrender of the
largest export market in the world for a staple British manufacture.” The fact that in
the changed circumstances since the First World War India was able to achieve a
somewhat better bargain in the trade agreements of the 1930s (the Ottawa
Agreement, 1932, the Mody-Lees Pact, 1934 and the Indo- British Trade Agreements
of 1935 and 1939), compared to the total surrender to British industrial and financial
interests earlier, was interpreted as “the clever and powerful Indians (having) forced
a disadvantageous trade treaty upon the weak and inept English.” The 1939
agreement was described by Drummond as: “a ‘capitulation’ % the sort of thing
which Marxists tell us the evil imperialist Western governments force on the weak
and helpless countries of the Third World. But in this case, as at Ottawa...it was
Britain who had capitulated, sacrificing most of her preferential advantages.... The
reader is left to ask himself who was exploiting whom.”
It was further argued that not only was Britain not exploiting India but it was actually
encouraging Indian industrialization. The fact that India still did not industrialize
was because the Indian entrepreneur was incapable of taking advantage of the
government initiative, it was just not upto taking on the immense challenge.
Also, somewhat like what Tirthankar Roy was to echo later, Dewey accused Marxists
and nationalists of being simplistic and indulging in “a conspiracy theory of imperialist
exploitation”. He accused them of ascribing “Indian tariff policy to a single dominant
determinant, principally the Lancashire cotton lobby...” and not recognizing the
“remarkable metamorphosis” that had occurred since the First World War, where
“the power-struggles within the India Office and the Government of India were
resolved in favour of factions allied with the Bombay mill owners, while the factions
allied with Lancashire were reduced to virtual impotence.” It was said, “in the 1870s
the Secretary of State allied with Lancashire against the Government of India, while
in the years after 1917 the Government of India aligned itself with Indian nationalists
against the India Office....” In their battle with the Secretary of State the Government
of India’s “alliance with the nominal nationalist enemies” proved useful as did “the
public opinion they helped manufacture” and the “upsurge of political unrest in
India.” It seems some ‘manufactured’ political unrest by the ‘nominal nationalist
enemies’ was still necessary despite the assertion that “an important attribute of
sovereignty had passed from England to India, twenty-five years before
independence”. A.D.D. Gordon argued a similar position saying that the Government
of India was influenced by the Home government on the one hand and the fiscal
demands of the local business interests on the other, with the government of India
increasingly giving in to the latter, ‘nurturing’ Indian industrialists rather than
industrialists of Britain. Subsequent events, it was claimed, were to “illustrate this
point” as with the “granting of independence” in 1947, manufacturing industry
was to grow from “strength to strength”. Evident again is the tendency to see
continuity between developments since the First World War and those after
independence and the failure to understand the decisive structural break that 1947
represented in the political economy of the colonial situation in India.
While all this is bad economic history it is even worse political history. It goes one
step further backwards from the so called “Cambridge School”, which saw Indian
nationalism as a ‘tamasha’ ‘manufactured’ by the Indian elite, and argues the early
nineteenth century Whig or liberal imperialist position, which saw the role of British
rule as gradually training Indians for self-government. It was now the Government
of India which was helping to ‘manufacture’ nationalist opposition! The colonial
people are robbed even of their own liberation struggle. With elements of ‘sovereignty’
already being passed on to India with Government help one is left wondering what
the Gandhian mass movement phase of the Indian national movement, between
World War I and 1947, costing tens of thousands of lives and involving untold
sacrifices by millions, was all about.
V
In my understanding, there is a completely different explanation for the developments
in the twentieth century, particularly between World War I and 1947. Instead of
decolonization, what this period witnessed was not only the continuation of colonial
exploitation (though in an altered form) but its blatant intensification in many respects
at great cost to the Indian economy and its people.
Britain did not after World War I abandon its most important market for textiles in
India, so ruthlessly captured in the nineteenth century, as a result of their now
giving in to Indian industrial interests or merely due to Indian nationalist pressure.
Britain was forced to concede substantially her imperial industrial interest in the
colonial market in favour of imperial financial interest, i.e., using the colony as a
source of capital through unrequited remittance or ‘drain’. It was a switch from one
imperial interest to another, not a switch from imperial to Indian national interest.
The tussle between the two imperial interests had already surfaced by the late
nineteenth century when the Government of India was facing some difficulty in
raising the revenue necessary for meeting the sterling remittance requirements. The
Government of India, unable economically and politically to raise the required revenue
from any other source like land revenue, salt tax, etc., was keen to levy some revenue
duties on Indian imports (not protective duties) which the Secretary of State under
pressure from British textile manufacturing interests was adamant in not allowing.
It is important to note that Government of India was not bending to national interest
but was only trying to facilitate remittance and ‘drain’, a critical imperial financial
interest. Eventually, in the 1890s the dilemma was resolved, expectedly at India’s
cost, by levying revenue duties on imports along with countervailing excise duties of
the same amount on Indian manufacture of textiles to avoid even a semblance of
any protection to Indian industry.
The dilemma of adjusting the two imperial interests, of finance and industry, followed
a somewhat different trajectory in the twentieth century, particularly since 1914.
British financial demands on India increased manifold since W.W. I. For example,
Home Charges increased from approximately £ 20 million in 1913-14 to £ 32 million
in 1924-25. Military expenditure doubled from £5 million to £ 10 million and interest
charges on external public debt increased from about £ 6 million to £ 14.3 million
between 1913-14 and 1934-5. In 1917 India supplied goods worth £ 100 million
without any payment and in 1918 decided to make another gift of £ 45 million to the
British war effort. During World War II defence expenditure increased by over nine
times, from about Rs.50 crores in 1939-40 to Rs.458 crores in 1944. The proportion
of the total expenditure of the Central Government accounted for by the Defence
Services (an expenditure Tirthankar Roy fully approves) was about 55 per cent in
1920-21 rising to 75 > per cent by the end of World War II. Far from decolonizing,
retaining India had become even more critical for Britain.
The huge rise in India’s sterling ‘obligations’ or ‘commitments’ (often used as an
euphemism for, if not denial of drain) or the ‘external drain’ required large increases
in the revenues raised by Government of India or the ‘internal drain’ in order to pay
for the external drain. Again, the only possible area where revenue could be increased
substantially was customs revenue, which primarily meant import duties. Thus
between 1901-05 and 1936-37 while the total revenue raised by Government of India
more than doubled, customs alone met about 72 per cent of the increase in total
revenue. Customs which had overtaken land revenue as the principal source of
revenue by 1921 - 25 was thus critical in the maintenance of the rapidly increasing
remittances of the Government of India on account of home charges, military
expenditure, etc.
The import duties on cotton goods had gone up from 3.5 per cent in the 1890s to 25
per cent for British cotton goods in 1931. (Duty on non-British, mainly Japanese
goods had risen to 75 per cent by 1933). The countervailing excise of 3.5 per cent
levied in 1896 however could not be increased in the changed political circumstances
with a powerful anti-imperialist mass movement having come up in the meantime.
Significantly, this change in scenario was not seen by the British government as the
surrender of imperial interest, even if that may have been the view of some imperialist
scholars. Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for India, quite conscious of the crucial
role played by import duties in maintaining imperial interests, argued against the
Lancashire agitation for removal of cotton duties. Apart from the “disastrous”
political consequences such a course of action would produce, he urged that it must
be recognized that “the present level of tariff on British cotton goods” was necessary
for revenue purposes for “without this revenue India would be unable to discharge
its financial obligations in this country 20 and provide for military expenditure.”
Maintenance of remittance from India to Britain at any cost became the centre piece
of British economic policy in this period for yet another reason. Britain, having lost
its industrial supremacy in the world (first in consumer goods and later in capital
goods as well) by the end of the nineteenth century and particularly by the beginning
of the twentieth century, was increasingly emerging as the major financial centre of
the world with the pound sterling as its foundation - a position that Britain was able
to maintain till W.W.II to a large extent with the aid of India, by manipulating
blatantly her currency, exchange and budgetary’ and financial policy.
It is small wonder, then, that finance was one portfolio the British refused to part
with (even in the limited sense of appointing an Indian of their choice to the Viceroy’s
Executive Council) till the very end, i.e., till the formation of the Interim Government
in 1946. Several other economic portfolios such as those of commerce, industry,
planning and development, and supply were given to Indian members long before
that. Even when the colonial Government set up the Reserve Bank of India in 1935,
it was barely given any autonomy, with the British government insisting on “the last
word” on financial matters. The bank, seen as an instrument for safeguarding imperial
financial interests, was not to be allowed to be misused by Indians who “like a
spoilt, willful, naughty child” would instantly want to use it to demand financial
responsibility.
An India Office document of December 1930, marked ‘secret’ and called “The Position
of the Secretary of State in Relation to Indian Finance,” brings out clearly some of
the reasons for the crucial importance attached to the issue of finance by the British.
It was stated that about 60 per cent of the Indian Government’s budget, i.e., about £
60 million out of £ 100 million, was absorbed by military expenditure, sterling debt
charges and liabilities in respect of salaries and pensions for officials for which the
Secretary of State was responsible. Of this, defence expenditure alone absorbed 45
per cent of the central revenues. When such a large proportion of the revenue was
earmarked for charges for which the Secretary of State was responsible, it was pointed
out that “it is hardly open to doubt that Parliament should retain the power to
secure that its obligations are duly honoured”. Since the “revenues from which these
commitments must be met are collected in rupees”, and the ‘commitments’ were in
sterling, it was “incumbent” upon the Secretary of State to see “that currency and
exchange are being so managed” as to “permit of the remittances of the requisite
funds from India to London”. Also, he had to ensure that the revenue and expenditure
of the Government of India were balanced. In other words, the Secretary of State
needed the “power to impose on the Indian Executive such measures as are needed
to provide the funds and to facilitate their transfer... from India to London. Some
decolonization! Before I go on to outline other aspects of the fiscal and monetary
policy followed by Britain in this period to meet its growing imperial financial interests,
it must be noted that the rising tariffs did not mean that Britain was ready to withdraw
from trying to maintain its industrial interest in the colonial market, i.e., decolonize
even in this limited sense. While it is true that British exports to India were shrinking
rapidly since W.W.I, (except in chemicals where they increased) India still remained,
as late as 1938, the largest single market for British exports of cotton piece-goods as
it did for general machinery and other items. The Indian market though shrinking
was thus far from redundant, on the contrary its importance increased as British
share in world trade kept declining. Basudev Chatterjee has ably demonstrated how
Lancashire was desperate to hang on to the Indian market and Britain tried to ensure
that it did, as much as the new circumstances would permit. By introducing the
principle of Imperial Preference at Ottawa and through the various trade agreements
of the 1930s Britain was making a last ditch effort to retain as much of the Indian
market as was possible at a time when Britain was no longer able to compete
effectively with other countries in various commodities, such as Japan in cotton
textiles. There were however limits to how much imperial preference could be given
to British goods as it could lead to retaliation by other countries, which in turn
would affect Indian exports. This could not be permitted as India had to generate an
export surplus at any cost so that the smooth flow of remittance to Britain could be
sustained as imperial financial interests would not countenance any interruption in
that process.
It is to ensure that India remained a constant source of capital to Britain through
remittances, during a period when Britain just flitted from one crisis to the other
(especially the two world wars and the depression), that the most gross use of imperial
authority was made to turn the instruments of economic policy in her favour and
against Indian interest.
To the great agitation of Indian nationalist opinion, the colonial government, in
order to “manage” the currency and exchange in such a manner that the process of
raising revenue in India and its remittance to Britain remained undisturbed, constantly
followed a deflationary policy in India, including by severely contracting the currency
in circulation, in order to push up the exchange value of the Rupee which it tried to
keep at Is. 6d. by virtual decree. A fiscal and monetary deflationary policy including
severe cuts in Government capital expenditure was followed even during the
Depression years, severely aggravating its negative consequences.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the situation in India changed drastically.
World prices, especially those of primary produce, plummeted 22 and India’s export
earnings collapsed. With agricultural prices being so low, the Government was unable
to collect full revenue. Also, with the fall in export earnings, there was great difficulty
in securing remittance to meet India’s sterling obligations or the Home Charges.
With both revenue and remittance in jeopardy, the colonial Government was in the
throes of a major financial crisis. Under continuous pressure from London, the
Government of India sought to ease remittance by resorting to severe deflation,
contracting currency repeatedly, causing havoc in the Indian economy, especially
in the money market.
A total breakdown of the remittance mechanism was averted by the massive export
of gold from India that the government encouraged in this period. The gold exports
were crucial in compensating for the drastic drop in India’s export surplus on
commodity transactions. Between 1931-32 and 1938-39, on an average, more than
half (about 55 per cent) of the total visible (positive) balance of trade (i.e. balance of
transactions in merchandise and treasure) was met through the net exports of
treasure, with the exports of gold increasing sharply in years when the commodity
balance of trade was particularly low. For example, in 1932-33, gold exports
constituted about 95 per cent of the total visible positive balance of trade. Clearly
remittance had to be maintained at all costs, if the export surplus in commodities
(necessary to convert the rupee revenues into remittance) fell short it was made up
through export of gold.
Apart from the role of gold exports in India’s maintaining a smooth flow of remittance
of the ‘sterling obligations’ or the Home Charges as well as the other invisibles such
as profits, dividends and interests earned on foreign investments, it played another
critical role for British interests at home. At a time when Britain was facing a balance
of payment crisis it played a major part in strengthening the value of sterling vis-a-
vis gold and other currencies.
It was small wonder then that the gold export from India was one issue on which
the British home government remained very firm, though many countries including
Britain were following an opposite strategy themselves. It appears that the Governor
of the Reserve Bank of India, Osborne Smith, had to resign partially because of his
taking a position on this question which was far too independent of the India Office
and the Finance Department. He took a position similar to the nationalist demand
for devaluation of the rupee to prevent outflow of hoarded gold from India.
However the blatant and cynical manner in which Britain used Indian finances for
its own benefit during the Second World War was breathtaking in its audacity. It
puts paid to any notion of imperialism withdrawing or decolonisation having occurred
till the bitter end of colonial rule. Britain took massive forced loans from India
(popularly called the Sterling Balance) of about Rs. 17,000 million (estimated at
seventeen times the annual revenue of the Government of India and one-fifth of
Britain’s gross national product in 1947) at a time when over three million Indians
died of famine!
The Sterling Balances got accumulated as a result of the “large purchases of goods
and services...made by the British Government, in India”, against sterling bills or
securities placed in reserve in London. For these large exports of goods and services,
India, thus, received no “tangible quid pro quo” other than “I.O.U.s of His Majesty’s
Government”. The procedure was similar to that adopted during World War I - the
Reserve Bank of India expanded currency or issued notes against its sterling holdings
held in reserve in London to pay for the British war purchases in India. The rapid
expansion of currency that occurred as a result (the total notes issued increased by
nearly four times between 1939 and 1944) combined with the fact that large quantities
of goods and services were made available to England for which no goods or services
came back to India in return, led to severe shortages and a runaway inflation. What
was shocking was that this policy could be pursued at a time when famine conditions
prevailed in India. To cap it all, after the War was over, Britain made a serious bid
towards defaulting on repayment of the loans raised at such tremendous cost to
India.
The Second World War also saw British colonialism deny India yet another
opportunity to make an industrial breakthrough an opportunity seized by the ‘White’
colonies. Indian entrepreneurs, who had already in the inter-war years shattered
the bogey of India facing a lack of capital or entrepreneurship, or of Indian capital
being ‘shy’ and unwilling to take risks, by growing rapidly, much faster than foreign
capital in India and venturing into new areas, were poised for a major industrial
push during the Second World War. The persistent efforts of Indian entrepreneurs
to enter frontier areas of industry in India such as automobile, aircraft and locomotive
manufacture, shipbuilding, manufacture of armaments, engineering goods, machine
tools, etc., were smothered by the colonial state using fiscal, monetary and other
instruments of state policy such as the ‘Capital Issues Control’, all in the name of the
“War effort,” but in actuality in deference to imperial interests and even the interest
of the white colonies.
VI
To return to the question of the positive ‘non-colonial’ type of developments since
W.W. I listed in section III, clearly they were not the result of any process of
decolonization because, as I argue above, there was no such process occurring. Neither
were these developments the result of colonialism itself. They were the product of
space wrenched from it. As I have argued earlier it 24 is easily demonstrable that all
the developments listed above, occurred (to list some of the causes) either (a) as a
result of the struggle, political and economic, against imperialism, whether through
the national movement, legislative assemblies, business chambers or directly by
entrepreneurs, as most demonstrably in the case of shipping, or (b) when the grip of
imperialism weakened or loosened due to world factors autonomous of the logic of
the colonial system in the colony, such as the World Wars and the Great Depression,
or (c) when the principal metropolis Britain, lost out in competition to other
metropolitan centres and preferred to permit indigenous enterprise in the colony to
grow rather than allow other foreign powers to capture the colonial market, e.g.,
protection to cotton, iron and steel, matches and sugar was related respectively, to
competition from Japan, Belgium and Germany, Sweden, and Java, a Dutch colony,
or (d) due to the inner contradictions of colonialism itself, e.g., the increasing need
for revenue from the colony to meet imperial financial interests could no more be
met from a by now stagnating or even declining agriculture but had to be met through
revenue tariffs on imports, which provided indigenous manufacture certain amount
of protection against imperial industrial interests. In other words, the specific non-
colonial type of developments in the twentieth century occurred not as a result of
colonialism but in spite of or in opposition to it.
The very limited growth of the positive, non-colonial developments was occurring
in an embryonic form in the hostile womb of colonialism whose continuation was
making the birth of capitalism in India more and more difficult. The structural
distortions created by colonialism made the future transition to self-sustained growth
much more difficult. It required the overthrow of colonialism, and the ‘un-structuring’
of the colonial structure for India to start its attempt to build independent capitalism
after colonialism for nearly two hundred years ravaged its economy and society and
deprived it of the opportunity of participating in the process of modern industrial
transformation occurring in other parts of the world. Despite the post W.W.I positive
developments the Indian economy till 1947 remained essentially backward and
structurally colonial. The Indian economy at independence was still basically
dependent on a stagnating, low productivity, ‘semi-feudal’ agriculture with modern
industry (in 1950) contributing a mere 6 to 8 per cent of the national income and (in
1951) employing 2.3 per cent of the labour force (in 1946).
What India inherited after two hundred years of colonial ‘benevolence’, which
allegedly gave India the ‘advantages’ of ‘commercialization’, ‘exposure to the world
market’, ‘transport and communication’, ‘a strong state’, ‘western scientific skills’,
etc., benefits that Tirthankar Roy could hardly stop listing, was a very sorry state of
affairs indeed.
As Angus Maddison’s monumental work shows, India was the largest economy of
the world for the entire thousand years of the first millennium accounting for close
to 30 per cent of the world’s GDP. Till as late as the beginning of the eighteenth
century India’s was still the largest economy with about 25 per cent of the world’s
GDP, more than eight times that of the United Kingdom. The decline started soon
after and at the end of nearly two hundred years of colonial rule (during which
Tirthankar Roy claims “colonial India experienced positive economic growth”) India’s
share had been reduced to a mere 4.2 per cent in 1950. It was a few decades before
India could sufficiently shrug off the colonial legacy and begin to gradually claw her
way back into improving her share of the global pie. The impact of colonialism in
human terms was traumatic and all too visible. At independence the average life
expectancy was barely 30 years. The poor obviously died much younger. India was
faced with acute food shortages creating near famine conditions repeatedly in
different areas. The Bengal famine of 1943, just four years before the British left,
claimed more than three million lives. (A great tragedy which Tirthankar Roy
predictably underplays, putting the famine deaths only at “some half a million”, a
figure much lower than even the official famine Inquiry Commission and other
government estimates.) Between 1946-53 about 14 million tons of food grains worth
Rs. 10,000 million had to be imported, seriously affecting India’s planned development
after independence. In 1951, 84 percent of the people (92 percent women) were
illiterate. The legacy of colonialism which Tirthankar Roy misjudged so completely
was anticipated by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, shortly before his death in 1941,
in his inimitable way:
The wheels of fate will some day compel the English to give up their Indian Empire.
What kind of India will they leave behind, what stark misery? When the stream of
their centuries’ administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth will
they leave behind them.
VII
The growth that India witnessed after independence was not all about carrying on
the ‘good’ work started during colonialism. It was a product of a structural break
painstakingly crafted through a multi pronged planned effort — an unique effort of
trying to industrialize and build capitalism with democracy and civil liberties.
Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders were deeply aware that India was experimenting
with a hitherto uncharted path as none of the industrialized countries of the world
had. democracy and civil liberties during the initial period of transition to capitalism
and industrialization. I have evaluated elsewhere the nature of this stupendous effort
since 2£ independence. I will only outline here a brief comparison of some of the
features of the colonial period, especially the period of so called decolonisation and
positive growth since World War I with those of the period after independence. This
may help underline the enormity of the break required, and to a considerable extent
achieved.
The growth of per capita income in India in the colonial period was either zero or
very low, remaining way below that of the independent countries of Europe, USA
and Japan between 1820 and 1913. See table 2. In the last decades of colonial rule
after colonialism had had its fall impact, the per capita income in India actually
declined at an annual rate of -0.22 per cent between 1913-1950. After independence,
on the other hand, it grew at 1.4 per cent in the first couple of decades (about 3
times faster than the best phase, 1870-1913, under colonialism) and much faster at
3.01 per cent in the next 30 years, 1973-2001 (a rate considerably higher than that
achieved by West Europe, USA or Japan) and in the last four years (2003-4 to
2006-7) at an astounding 7 per cent (it was over 8 per cent in 2006-7) comparable
to the explosive rates achieved by Japan (though in very special circumstances)
between 1950-73.
Table 2: Rate of Growth of per capita GDP (annual average compound growth
rates)
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
1820-70 1870-1913 1913-1950 1950-73 1973-2001 2001-2007
France 1.01 1.45 1.12 4.04 1.71
UK 1.26 1.01 0.93 2.42 1.86
USA 1.34 1.82 1.61 2.45 1.86
Japan 0.19 1.48 0.88 8.06 2.14
India 0.00 0.54 -0.22 1.40 3.01 5.65*
* per capita net national product
Source: Column 1 to 5 from Angus Maddison, op. tit., Table 8b, p. 643. Column 6 is
based on Economic Survey, 2006-07, Government of India, New Delhi 2007, and
Aditya Mukherjee, “Indian Economy in the New Millennium,” in Bipan Chandra,
Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence, Penguin,
Delhi, forthcoming, 2008.
Similarly, the colonial period saw a process of de-industrialisation where traditional
industry was largely destroyed and modern industry grew very slowly. Despite the
growth of modern industry since W.W. I, at about 3.8 per cent per annum, it
contributed a mere 6 to 8 per cent of the national product in 1950, having started
from an extremely low level of 4 per cent of national product in 1913. Moreover,
modern industry was yet dominated by consumer goods industry with a near total
and debilitating dependence on the advanced countries for capital goods and
technology. Contrast this with the period after independence. Industry during the
first three plans (1951 -65) grew at 7.1 per cent per annum. More important “the
three-fold increase in aggregate index of industrial production between 1951 and
1969 was the result of a 70 per cent increase in consumer good industries, a
quadrupling of the intermediate goods production and a ten-fold increase in the
output of capital goods.” This pattern of industrial development led to a structural
transformation of the colonial legacy. From a situation where to make any capital
investment, virtually the entire equipment had to be imported (in 1950, India met
nearly 90 per cent of its needs of even machine tools through imports) the share of
imported equipment in the total fixed investment in the form of equipment in India
had come down to 43 per cent in 1960 and a mere > 9 per cent in 1974, whereas the
value of the fixed investment in India increased by about two and a half times over
this period (1960-74). This was a major achievement, and it considerably increased
India’s autonomy from the advanced countries in determining her own rate of capital
accumulation or growth.
Agriculture, the largest sector of the Indian economy, was in a state of ruin under
colonialism. Per-capita agricultural output actually fell at the rate of 0.72 per cent
per year during 1911-1941. Per-capita food grains output fell even more sharply by
1.14 per cent per year, a 29 per cent fall over the period. All crop yields per acre
declined by 0.01 per cent per year between 1891-1946 and again food grain yields
declined more rapidly by 0.18 per cent, and even more sharply by 0.44 per cent per
year between 1921-46. No wonder the food shortages and famine conditions
mentioned above. After independence, a combination of institutional changes (land
reforms) and massive state sponsored technological change transformed this situation.
During the first three plans (leaving out 1965-66, a drought year), Indian agriculture
grew at an annual rate of over 3 per cent, a growth rate more than eight times faster
than the annual growth rate of 0.37 per cent achieved during the half a century
(1891-1946) of the last phase of colonialism in India. The Green Revolution in the
late 1960s maintained a rate of growth ranging from about 2.5 to 3.5 per cent
(primarily through increases in yield) till the mid 1990s.The Green Revolution areas
like Punjab and Haryana did not have any continuities with trends in the colonial
period as Tirthankar Roy, for example, argues. Haryana was largely an extremely
backward area in colonial times and even Punjab showed meager growth rates in
terms of all- crop yields per acre of 0.36 per cent per annum between 1901-1941 by
one estimate and of only 0.06 per cent between 1906-7 and 1941-42 by another. The
highest increases in yield seen in Punjab were in non-food crops of an average of 1
per cent per annum between 1891-1951. In contrast the value 23 productivity of
eleven major crops in Punjab increased between 1950-51 and 1969-70 by 255 per
cent, i.e., an average annual increase of more than 12.5 percent. The huge productivity
difference certainly signifies a structural break.
Table 3: Gross Domestic Capital Formation (GDCF) as percentage of GDP, Public
Expenditure at Current Prices and Public Expenditure as Percentage of GDP 1901-
2006 (All figures are annual averages)
GDCF as % of GDP Public Expenditure Share of Public Expenditure
Rs. Crore (current prices) in GDCF as % of GDP
1901-1913 6.92* 75.4 (1925-30)#
1914-1946 6.75* 41.7 (1930-38)#
1950-1955 9.04 331.8 3.14
1955-1960 13.30 769.6 5.62
1960-1970 14.66 1912.1 6.96
1970-1980 17.63 8003.4 8.19
1980-1990 21.23 26416.9 9.98
2004-2006 32.65
Source: Computed from Economic Survey 2006-07, Government of India, New Delhi,
2007, Tables 1.4 and 1.5, S-6 to S-9.
* Goldsmith, op.cit., Table 1-10, p.20 and Table 2-9, p.80.
# Computed from Rajat K. Ray, Industrialisation in India, OUP, Delhi, 1979, Table
40, p.257.
The rate of capital formation, the key to economic development, occurred at a very
slow pace during the colonial period. India was in fact losing to Britain as drain or
tribute an equal proportion, if not more, of what was invested in India. The drain
has been variously calculated to be between 5 to 10 per cent of her national income.
The average annual rate of capital formation between 1901 to 1913 was 6.92 per
cent of GDP, falling to 6.75 per cent between 1914-46 (see Table 3). Public expenditure,
an important engine of capital formation in backward countries, declined sharply
from Rs. 75.4 crores annually during 1925-1930 to Rs. 41.7 crores during the
Depression years 1930-38, when the opposite needed to be done. The massive cut in
government expenditure along with other deflationary fiscal and monetary policies
greatly exacerbated the negative effects of the Depression on the Indian economy.
The contrast between the colonial and the post independence scenario is evident.
While public expenditure was low and declining during the last decades of colonial
rule the initial forty years of independence (1950-1990) saw it rise by more than
three times (see Table 3, column 2 and 3). Similarly, while the last fifty years or so of
colonial rule (1901-1946) saw the gross capital formation in the economy hover
around 6 to 7 per cent of GDP annually, the first fifty years after independence saw
the rate of capital formation rise consistently and sharply, ending up at a rate of
33.8 per cent in 2005-06 about five times the colonial rate.
There was also a rapid per capita increase in the availability of some of the
infrastructure and social benefits as they grew several times faster than the population
immediately after independence. In 1965-66, as compared to 1950-51, installed
capacity of electricity was 4.5 times higher, number of town and villages electrified
was 14 times higher, hospital beds 2.5 times higher, enrollment in schools was a
little less than 3 times higher and very importantly admission capacity in
technical education (engineering and technology) at the degree and diploma levels
was higher by 6 and 8.5 times, respectively. This when population increased only by
37.3 per cent over the period.
Also, Jawaharlal Nehru and the early Indian planners were acutely aware of India’s
backwardness in science and technology (an area left consciously barren in the
colonial period) and therefore made massive efforts to overcome this shortcoming.
An unprecedented increase occurred in the educational opportunities in science
and technology in the universities and institutes. National expenditure on scientific
research and development kept growing rapidly with each plan. For example, it
increased from Rs. 10 million in 1949 to Rs. 4.5 billion in 1977. Over roughly the
same period the stock of India’s scientific and technical manpower increased more
than 12 times from 190 thousand to 2.32 million. A spectacular growth by any
standards, a growth whose benefits India reaps today as the world moves towards
a ‘knowledge’ society.
The quantum jump in investments, growth rates, improvements in health, education
etc., listed above did not occur because of any dramatic change in India’s “climatic
risks,” “resource endowments,” “hunger for gold,” or tendency to “have sumptuous
marriage feasts,” some of the causes listed by Tirthankar Roy for the Indian economy
stagnating in the colonial period. They occurred because of the concerted effort to
break away from the disabilities created by the colonial structure.
However despite the paradigmatic change since independence India is still faced
with intolerable levels of poverty and backwardness. Undoing the ravages of nearly
two hundred years of colonialism was never going to be an easy task. What is certain,
however, is that the answers to the future challenges would not lie in building on
the continuities with colonialism but on the breaks.
*******
Gandhi’s Swaraj by RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

This essay briefly traces Gandhi’s ideas about Swaraj, their articulation in 1909 in
Hind Swaraj, the quest to actualise these ideas, the turns that history gave to them,
and the journey that made Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi a lonely man in August
1947.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee (rudrangshu@hotmail com) is with The Telegraph, Kolkata.
“I am a man possessed by an idea” - Gandhi to Louis Fischer in 1942.
“I made it [the nation] and I unmade it” - Gandhi to P C Joshi in 1947.
“I don’t want to die a failure. But I may be a failure” - Gandhi to Nirmal Bose in
1947. 1
On the midnight of 14-15 August 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime
minister of India, coined the phrase - “tryst with destiny”- that has become part of
India’s national lexicon, and India erupted in jubilation, Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi was far away from the celebrations. He was in a slum in eastern Calcutta.
When asked by a journalist for a message on the day of India’s independence, he
said it was a day for fasting and prayer.
The Father of the Nation was not present at the birth of the independent Indian
na-tion. On the same day, 15 August 1947, in the city of Karachi someone placed a
fez on Gandhi’s statue.2 The significance of the act is open to interpretation: it could
have been a symbol of unity or a sign of mock-ery. It would not be an exaggeration,
even from just these two pieces of evidence, to suggest that what India had achieved
on 15 August, was not something that Gandhi had visualised as swaraj. By August
1947, he had become India’s prophet outcast.
In this essay I want to trace briefly Gandhi’s ideas about swaraj, his quest to actualise
these ideas and the turns that his-tory gave to them and to his journey that made
him a lonely man in August 1947. Gandhi’s ideas about swaraj were arti-culated
most cogently and most powerfully in that remarkable text called Hind Swaraj,
which he wrote in 1909 in Gujarati and published in English in 1910 in South Africa
after the government of Bombay proscribed the Gujarati version. It was written in
10 days between 13 and 22 November 1909 on board Kildonan Castle, a ship that
Gandhi took to return to South Africa from London. It was written on the ship’s
sta-tionery. Gandhi wrote at a furious pace and when his right hand got tired he
used his left hand. That physical tiredness did not diminish Gandhi’s powers of
concentra-tion was evident from the fact that the manuscript had only 16 lines that
had been deleted and a few words that had been altered.3
The ideas presented in that book grew out of Gandhi’s reflection, his reading and his
experiences in South Africa. It is sig-nificant that when he wrote Hind Swaraj, Gandhi
had not immersed himself in Indi-an society and politics. His experiments in India
still lay in the future. In fact, Hind Swaraj served as the basis of these experi-ments.
Gandhi’s purpose in writing the book was, he wrote, “to serve my country, to find
out the Truth and to follow it”. He also believed that the views he had pre-sented in
the book were held not by him alone but were, in fact, “the views...held by many
Indians not touched by what is known as civilisation”. He asked his rea-ders to
believe him when he said that the views “are also held by thousands of Europeans”.4
Gandhi’s use of the phrase, “what is known as civilisation”, is worth flagging at this
point since I will have occasion to come back to it very soon. Hind Swaraj remained
the touchstone of his be-liefs and actions throughout his life, it was the fountainhead
of his inspiration: he never changed his views on the funda-mental principles he set
out in this text, even though he was open to the possibility of his views being proven
wrong. It is worth noting that Hind Swaraj is the only work that Gandhi himself
translated from Gujarati to English. Even his auto-biography, The Story of My
Experiments with Truth, was translated by his secretary, Mahadev Desai.
Only Way to a Swaraj
In May 1919, just before he embarked on his first major mass movement in India,
Gandhi wrote, commenting on Hind Swaraj, “After years of endeavour to put into
practice the views expressed in the following pages, I feel that the way shown therein
is the only true way to swaraj”.5 And towards the end of his life in October 1945, he
wrote emphatically to Jawaharlal Nehru, “I fully stand by the kind of governance
which I have described in Hind Swaraj.” He went on to add very significantly, “If I
were the only one left who believed in it, I would not be sorry”.6 The clarity of the
exposition and Gandhi’s lifelong commitment to the ideas put forward in it have
made one modern commentator describe the Hind Swaraj as “the point d’ appui
Gandhi’s moral and political thought”.7
This might be the appropriate place to briefly rehearse the views that Gandhi
presented in this text. In a preface to the Gujarati edition of Hind Swaraj written in
1914, Gandhi described himself as “an un-compromising enemy of the present day
civilisation in Europe”.8 It was this un-relenting hostility to European or western
civilisation that is manifest in Hind Swaraj. He was referring to western/European
civilisation when he used the words “what is known as civilisation”. Gandhi believed
that western civilisation was only one in name. In the Hind Swaraj, he launched an
attack on every aspect of western civilisa-tion in order to prove how evil and how
harmful it was. The text also contains Gandhi’s alternative to modern civilisation
and a programme of action and behaviour that Indians must follow to make that
alternative a reality.
Gandhi equated modern civilisation with the western one because the west was the
principal site of all that is consid-ered modern. What he actually attacked was a
particular form of western civilisa-tion, the one that emerged with the Enlightenment
and the Industrial Revolu-tion. A year before writing the Hind Swaraj, he had written,
“Let it be remem-bered that western civilisation is only a hundred years old, or to be
more precise, fifty”.9 Gandhi interpreted the industrial revolution as having brought
about a radi-cal transformation in people’s lives and in people’s attitudes to themselves
and to the world around them. Fundamental to this transformation was the premise
that through Reason and Science human be-ings were capable of mastering nature
and thus fulfilling their desires and wants. This, Gandhi believed, inevitably led to
greed, to competition and finally to vio-lence. Therefore, violence was embedded in
modern civilisation and this made it satanic and immoral. It was not enough to
reject industrialisation; Gandhi made a critique in Hind Swaraj of the entire
inte-llectual scaffolding of modern civilisation -. science, history, political and social
institutions and so on. All that is asso-ciated with modernity and modern civili-sation,
Gandhi repudiated.
Alternative to Modern Civilisation
The alternative to modern civilisation thus had to be located outside its domain and
among people who were untouched by modern civilisation and uninfluenced by it.
It was in this context that India, accord-ing to Gandhi, was uniquely placed since
millions of Indians lived in the villages and were thus not tainted by modernity and
its pernicious features. “Real or genu-ine civilisation”, in contrast to “what is known
as civilisation”, was to be found in the villages of India. In the traditional vil-lage
world of India life was governed by a common morality by which each member
performed his duty. This made it the exact opposite of modern society whose
mem-bers chased their own self-interested and individualistic goals. He said in April
1945, “I know the European mind well enough to know that when it has to choose
be-tween abstract justice and self-interest, it will plump for the latter.”10 The challenge
to modern civilisation in India would have to come from the people who lived in the
villages, the peasantry.11
How was this challenge to be arti-culated? Gandhi was emphatic that it would have
to be non-violent. He gave two reasons for this. One, since the peasantry would be
at the forefront of the resistance, it would be non-violent since the peasants were
essentially non-violent: in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi wrote, “They [the peas-ants] do not
know the use of the sword, and they are not frightened by the use of it by others.”
He believed, “In India, the na-tion at large has generally used passive resistance in
all departments of life”.12 Indians, especially the peasants, are essentially non-violent.
Gandhi wrote, “We cease to cooperate with our rulers when they displease us. This
is passive resistance.”13 Thus modern civilisation in India, represented by British
rule, would be opposed passively, through non-violent means. The second reason that
Gandhi gave was equally important and funda-mental. He said that to oppose modern
civilisation in India through violence would be to Europeanise India or to take it along
the path of modernity. Gandhi’s aim was exactly the opposite. Opposition to British
rule would be non-violent. Gandhi gave a name to this form of struggle, satyagraha.
The term satyagraha has an interesting origin. When Gandhi began his movement
in South Africa, he first used the term pas-sive resistance. As the struggle advanced
Gandhi found “passive resistance” to be inadequate to express the substance of his
movement. It also appeared to him “shameful” that the Indian struggle should be
known only by an English name. A small prize was, therefore, announced in Indian
Opinion to be awarded to the reader who invented the best designation for the new
struggle. Maganlal Gandhi suggest-ed the word sadagraha meaning “firm-ness in a
good cause”. Gandhi liked the word but as it did not fully represent the whole idea,
he changed it to satyagraha, “the force which is born of truth and love or non-
violence”.14
Satyagraha and Swaraj
Gandhi linked satyagraha to swaraj in two ways. In the Gujarati version of Hind
Swaraj, Gandhi used swaraj to denote both self-rule and self-government.15 Swaraj
was an ideal for the individual and for the nation. To be a devotee of satya-graha,
Gandhi said, an individual had to be capable of self-rule: “Swaraj has to be
experienced by each one for himself’.16 Gandhi laid down a code of conduct that
would help individuals attain swaraj. Every individual who chose the path of
satyagraha would learn to regulate his own life by observing perfect chastity, adopting
poverty, following truth and cultivating fearlessness. 17 A satyagrahi, leading a
disciplined and ethical life, would be an exemplar for other individu-als and the
pursuit of such a life on the part of all individuals would be the neces-sary
precondition for swaraj. Swaraj at the individual level where “each person will
become his own ruler”18 would lead to swaraj for the nation.
In Gandhi’s philosophy, swaraj for the nation did not mean merely political
independence from British rule. Swaraj, for Gandhi, was something more
substan-tive, involving the freedom of each indi-vidual to regulate their own lives
without harming one another. Gandhi certainly did not want British rule to be
replaced by another form of rule where western insti-tutions of governance and
civil society would be run by Indians instead of white men. That would be to have
“English rule without the Englishman”. He wrote that such a process “would make
India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but
Englistan. This is not the swaraj I want.”19 Swaraj from Gan-dhi’s perspective would
have to be located not only outside the domain of British po-litical suzerainty but
also beyond the Sa-tanic touch of western civilisation. Gandhi called this alternative
Ramrajya, which he rendered into English as “enlightened an-archy”. The word
anarchy indicated that there would be no state, and the word en-lightened suggested
that society would be composed of disciplined individuals regu-lating their own
lives. Elaborating on this idea he wrote in January 1939,
The power to control national life through national representatives is called
political power. Representatives will become unnec-essary if the national life
becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled. It will then be a state of enlightened
anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler. He will conduct himself
in such a way that his behaviour will not hamper the well-being of his neighbours.
In an ideal state there will be no political in-stitution and therefore no political
power. 20
In Gandhi’s ideal of swaraj there would be complete and continual reciprocity among
and participation by every member of society. He elaborated thus:
Swaraj and Ramrajya are one and the same thing.. .We call a State Ramrajya
when both the ruler and his subjects are straight-forward, when both are pure
in heart, when both are inclined towards self-sacrifice, when both exercise
restraint and self-control while enjoying worldly pleasures, and, when the
relationship between the two is as good as that between father and son. It is
because we have forgotten this that we talk of democracy or the government of
the people. Although this is the age of democracy, I do not know what the word
connotes; however, I would say that democracy exists where the people’s voice
is heard, where love of the people holds a place of prime importance. In my
Ramrajya, however, public opinion cannot be measured by counting of heads or
raising of hands. I would not regard this as a measure of public opinion...The
rishis and munis after doing penance came to the con-clusion that public opinion
is the opinion of people who practise penance and who have the good of the
people at heart.21
This was the ideal or the Utopia, if you like, that Gandhi pursued in his private and
his public life. He admitted in a long letter to Nehru in 1945 that he had indeed
idealised the Indian rural world. He told Nehru,
You will not be able to understand me if you think that I am talking about the
villages of today. My ideal village still exists only in my imagination. After all
every human being lives in the world of his own imagination. In this village of
my dreams the villager will not be dull - he will be all awareness. He will not live
like an animal in filth and darkness. Men and women will live in freedom,
pre-pared to face the whole world. There will be no plague, no cholera and no
smallpox. Nobody will be allowed to be idle or to wallow in luxury. Everyone
will have to do body labour.22
His many experiments with truth were concerned with taking himself and his country
closer to the goal of swaraj. We know from his remarkable autobiography that in his
personal life, he chose to adopt a life of chastity and simplicity. He opted for poverty
since as a barrister-at-law, both in South Africa and in India, he could have lived in
relative affluence in the style of a westernised gentleman. His lifestyle was frugal in
the extreme. Fearlessness or abhaya became a part of Gandhi’s life ever since that
night of 31 May 1893 when he was summarily ejected from a first class carriage of a
train in Maritzburg in Natal, South Africa. Gandhi had self-consciously trained
himself for satyagraha.23
Personal Anguish
The attempt to self-regulate his life and to live it according to his own precepts and
ideals was no easy matter for Gandhi. It often caused him personal anguish and
made him appear cruel and dogmatic to his dear ones, but this did not deter him
from continuing with his experiment to achieve swaraj. Two examples of this an-guish
could perhaps be given here. One concerns the complete alienation of Gan-dhi from
his eldest son Harilal, who took to drink and became a complete wastrel. In early
1915, Harilal wrote a “Half-Open Letter” to his father in which he spelt out what he
thought were the principal rea-sons for their separation and the ensuing bitterness.
Harilal wrote,
Our views about education are the main rea-son for the difference of opinion of
the last 10 years.. .You have suppressed us [sons] in a sophisticated manner...You
have never en-couraged us in any way... You always spoke to us with anger, not
with love...You have made us remain ignorant.. .1 asked to be sent to England.
For a year I cried. I was bewil-dered. You did not lend me your ears...I am married
with four children. I cannot...be-come a recluse.24
Harilal felt that Gandhi had imposed his own views on his children and had thus
hindered their education and devel-opment. The education Harilal referred to was
obviously western education that Gandhi had rejected. The life that Harilal refused
to live was that of one living in an ashram following the vows of chastity and poverty
like a recluse. From this accu-satory letter of his eldest born, Gandhi emerges as a
self-absorbed, if not selfish, individual who was more concerned with his own pursuit
of Truth than with the feelings and lives of his sons. Harilal paid the price of being
the son of a satyagrahi. Yet an unbreakable bond remained in the form of Kasturba,
and Harilal would not let his father forget that the achievements of the Mahatma
had been possible because of the support that Kasturba had provided. There is the
account of a poignant meet-ing of the parents with their eldest son in a railway
station. I quote below from the recollections of Narayan Desai, son of Mahadev,
who witnessed the encounter:
One day when our train stopped at a station on our way back to Wardha, we
heard a cry from the crowd different from the usual: Mata Kasturba Ki Jai (victory
to mother Kasturba).
It was Harilalkaka. He was emaciated... From a pocket of his ragged clothes he
took an orange and said, “Ba, I have brought this for you”. Breaking in, Bapu
said, “Didn’t you bring anything for me?”. “No, nothing for you...All the greatness
you have achieved is only because of Bapu. Don’t forget that!”
No amount of pleading on the part of both parents could persuade Harilal to come
with them. The train left the plat-form. “Amidst the cries of Gandhiji kijai”, Narayan
Desai continues, “we could still hear the faint cry, Mata Kasturba kijai”.25
Harilal, it would seem, wanted to contrast the selflessness of his mother with the
selfishness of his father. One can only imagine the pain that this relationship caused
all three. On Harilal’s life had fallen the shadow of Gandhi’s quest. What is not
known - and is also difficult to conjecture - is if Gandhi felt that his quest for swaraj
had done violence to his son. Harilal was the first victim of Gandhi’s swaraj.26
The other example relates to the death of Kasturba. During the final stage of her last
illness, their youngest son, Devdas, brought penicillin that he had imported, Gandhi
advised against using it on Kasturba. He told Devdas, “Why don’t you trust god?
Why do you wish to drug your mother even on her death bed?” He was not willing
to compromise his position on western medicine even when it meant the death of
his wife. He told one of his close associates, “How God has tested my faith! If I had
allowed you to give her penicillin, it could not have saved her. But it would have
meant bankruptcy of faith on my part.” Yet the decision could not have been easy
for him. At the cremation of Kasturba, he was seen crying, the first time his devoted
disciple Mirabehn (Madeline Slade) had seen him shed tears, and he said, “The best
half of me is dead. What am I going to do now?”27
Swaraj in Gandhi’s Public Life
I turn now to the more public aspects of Gandhi’s life where he tried to implement
his ideas about swaraj. The great mass movements that he launched through the
Congress Party are the obvious embodi-ments of this experiment. Here we find that
Gandhi’s swaraj often stumbled when faced with the hard realities of politics. Again
and again, the energy and enthusi-asm of the people that he mobilised through a
non-violent movement spilled over into militancy. The politics of the people refused
to respect the limits im-posed by Gandhi’s swaraj.28 This often compelled Gandhi to
call off the move-ment or to reduce its pace and momentum. Gandhi would not
compromise on the issue of violence. “Non-violence”, he was to say in his speech at
his first trial in 1923, “is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my
creed”.29 The clash between Gandhi’s creed of non-violence and the politics of popular
protest was best exemplified by what happened in Chauri Chaura in February 1922
during the Non-Cooperation Movement.
On 5 February 1922 in Chauri Chaura, near Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a
crowd of 4,000 Hindus and Muslims attacked a police outpost and burnt alive 22
policemen. The crowd chanted Mahat-ma Gandhi ki jai while it carried out the
carnage. A shocked Gandhi owned re-sponsibility for the violence - he called it “The
Crime of Chauri Chaura”30 - and called off the Non-Cooperation Move-ment. How
did this happen? How could people carry out an act of violence and brutality with
the name of the apostle of non-violence on their lips? The answer lies in the manner
Gandhi’s persona was per-ceived and in the impact of his message.
Gandhi had visited Gorakhpur only once, addressed one meeting there and had
returned to Benares but for months before his arrival, as Shahid Amin has shown in
an outstanding essay, stories and rumours about Gandhi had been circulat-ing about
him in the region.31 All these stories, reported in the local press, were about Gandhi’s
pratap - power or glory. Some related to individuals and families receiving special
boons because they had chosen to follow the Gandhian creed and others to curses
falling on those who defied Gandhi’s orders or tested and opposed his power. Gandhi,
in the eyes of the common people of Gorakhpur, had been cast as the traditional
Hindu holy man and had become the object of wor-ship. Women begged for alms in
his name, and they performed vrat and aradhana (fast and worship) for him. This
percep-tion was not unrelated to Gandhi’s chosen lifestyle and beliefs. In a very
perceptive essay, M N Srinivas noted how Gandhi’s choice to be the renouncer in
the tradi-tional Hindu mould, even though he refused to don the garb of a sanyasi,
was intrinsic to his appeal and to his work.32 His life of abstinence and simplicity
and his continuous emphasis on purity rein-forced this popular image of Gandhi as
the holy man, the Mahatma.
The perception of Gandhi’s pratap also led to seeing him as an alternative source of
authority to the British government.
Shahid Amin has noted that in Gorakhpur peasants spoke of Gandhiji’s swaraj or
Mahatmaji’s swaraj. Gandhi notes bearing a superficial resemblance to the one rupee
note circulated and its non-acceptance as legal tender was interpreted by the peas-ants
as opposition to Gandhi. What did the local peasantry mean by swaraj? They
perceived it, the investigations into the Chauri Chaura incident revealed, “as a
millennium in which taxation would be limited to the collection of small cash
con-tributions or dues in kind from fields and threshing floors, and [in] which the
culti-vators would hold their lands at little more than nominal rents”.33 The peasants
of Gorakhpur had thus reinterpreted Gan-dhi’s swaraj to suit their own world and
its problems. There were other equally sig-nificant features of this reinterpretation.
In the words of Ami,
...there was for the peasant volunteers of Chauri Chaura a transformation in the
spirit of that ubiquitous cry, ‘Gandhi Maharaj ki jai’.. .the jaikar of Gandhi had
become a mili-tant avowal of the organised strength of peasant volunteers, a cry
which mobilised and struck terror in the hearts of waverers and enemies alike.
For the peasants of north India this had ceased in effect to be a Gan-dhian cry; it
was now a cry with which an attack on a market or a thana was an-nounced.
‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’ had, in this context, assumed the function of such
traditional war cries as ‘Jai Mahabir’ or ‘Bam Bam Mahadeo’.. .Thus a ‘jaikar’ of
adoration and adulation had become the rallying cry for direct action. While such
action sought to justify itself by a reference to the Mahatma, the Gandhi of its
rustic protagonists was not as he really was, but as they had thought him up.34
The creed of Gandhi’s Swaraj and the way it was received and interpreted by the
peasants were radically different. Neither Gandhi nor the Congress had any control
over the manner in which the masses decoded the message of the Mahatma. Gandhi
had somewhat anticipated this when he had written in Hind Swaraj, “Those in
whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us”.35 It was thus not
always possible to regulate the masses and to keep the movements within the limits
of satyagraha and non-violence. This tension was embedded in the mass movements
called by Gandhi and thus the paradox of violent acts with the name of Gandhi on
the lips of the actors. Gandhi’s swaraj, in its public dimension, could not quite rid
itself of this baggage and Gandhi for his own inner swaraj often had to en-gage
himself in fasts to cleanse himself of the evil of violence committed by the peo-ple.
Towards the end of his life Gandhi confessed that non-violent resistance against
British rule had not gone quite ac-cording to his plan and vision. He wrote, “People
followed my advice and took to non-violent resistance against the British government
because they wanted to offer some sort of resistance. But their non-violence, I must
confess, was born of their helplessness. Therefore, it was the weapon of the weak”.36
Gandhi’s swaraj became a victim of the mass forces that Gandhi himself unleashed.
Nehru’s Scepticism
It would be simplistic to suggest that the obstacles to Gandhi’s swaraj came only
from the masses and their tendency to turn violent while defying British rule. Criticism
was made and hurdles were erected by people very close to Gandhi. Take the case of
Jawaharlal Nehru. As early as 1936 Nehru had written in his autobiography that
the ideas of Hind Swaraj represented an “utterly wrong and harmful doctrine, and
impossible of achievement”. He added,
Personally, I dislike the praise of poverty and suffering...Nor do I appreciate the
ascetic life as a social ideal...Nor do I appreciate in the least the idealisation of
the ‘simple peas-ant life’. I have almost a horror of it, and in-stead of submitting
to it myself I want to drag out even the peasantry from it, not to urbanisation,
but to the spread of urban cul-tural facilities to rural areas.37
It will not be an exaggeration to say that what Gandhi was rejecting, Nehru was
embracing. If Gandhi considered a civili-sation based on industrial production and
science to be satanic, Nehru was its una-bashed admirer. In The Discovery of India,
he wrote, “There is something very won-derful about the high achievement of sci-ence
and modern technology”.38 He said he was “all for tractors and big machinery and
I am convinced that the rapid indus-trialisation of India is essential to relieve the
pressure on land, to combat poverty and raise standards of living, for defence, and
a variety of other purposes”.39 Nehru underlined the obvious conclusion that “there
is a fundamental difference be-tween his [Gandhi’s] outlook on life gen-erally and
what might be called the mod-ern outlook”.40 But Nehru also noted a more profound
divergence: “Gandhiji”, he noted, “is always thinking in terms of per-sonal salvation
and of sin, while most of us have society’s welfare uppermost in our minds”.41 The
calling of the two men were radically different, if not opposed. This was reflected in
their world views and in the vision they had for India. It surprised no one that as
prime minister of indepen-dent India, Nehru inaugurated a pro-gramme of large-
scale industrialisation in which the State was a principal actor. This was not a project
of which Gandhi would have approved. Within a few years of his death, Gandhi’s
swaraj was nothing more than an idea.
Long before independence, the breach between Gandhi’s swaraj and Nehru’s politics
was becoming apparent. In 1938, Nehru met Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps in
Goodfellows, Cripps’s house in the Cots wolds. This was perhaps the first attempt
to arrive at a negotiated transfer of power in India. At the meeting, Attlee and
Cripps conceded the Congress’ de-mand that India be allowed to decide on its own
constitution through a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage. They,
however, added a significant caveat: election to the constituent assembly would be
subject to minority representation. Another condition was that after the mak-ing of
a constitution, the government of free India would be required to sign a treaty that
would enable Britain to dis-charge her obligations and protect her in-terests for an
interim period of 15 years.42 In this first parley, already some of Gan-dhi’s basic
principles - non-acceptance of minority representation and rejection of British or
western interests - were being surrendered or compromised by none other than his
cup-bearer.
Nehru’s drift away from Gandhi’s swaraj was also evident in the enthusi-asm with
which he went about forming the National Planning Committee in 1938. He was
the chairman of the com-mittee, a post he accepted, he was to recall later, “not
without hesitation and misgiving”. The acceptance came be-cause “the work was
after my own heart and I could not keep out of it”.43 The origi-nal idea behind the
Planning Committee “had been to further industrialisation’^4 since, according to
Nehru, vintage 1946, “It can hardly be challenged that, in the context of the modern
world, no country can be politically or economically inde-pendent. . .unless it is
highly industrialised and has developed its power resources to the utmost”. It followed
that “an attempt to build up a country’s economy largely on the basis of cottage and
small-scale indus-tries is doomed to failure”.45 Thus Nehru favoured industrialisation
over the rural economy. What is equally important is his belief that a country has to
develop its “power resources to the utmost”. Industri-alisation and the development
of “power resources” would be carried out in Nehru’s programme under a strong
and centrali-sing state in a position to allocate and distribute economic resources.
This was not exactly Gandhi’s vision of “enlight-ened anarchy” where the state had
been rendered redundant.46
Drift of Congress from Gandhi
Nor was Nehru alone: the Congress was itself moving away from the main thrust of
Gandhi’s ideas. Nowhere was this more explicit than in the manner in which
Con-gress leaders grasped the poisoned chalice of a negotiated transfer of power
leading to independence with India partitioned. As the second world war drew to a
close, it was clear that the British for their own in-terests would pull out of India.
The time-table and the manner of the withdrawal were open to discussion. The
Congress leadership never challenged this notion of a transfer of power that would
be achieved through parleys across a table. Such an “escape from empire” - one
scholar’s tell-ing phrase - created conditions in which, according to James Grigg, the
finance member of the government of India, “Birla and Bentham [could] hunt
together for quick profits”.47 Gandhi could not see him-self as being part of this
process. Gandhi attended the Congress Working Commit-tee at the end of June 1946.
At the meet-ing, he asked Pyarelal, his secretary, to read out the letter he had written
to Cripps, and left immediately.
Pyarelal writes, “The final phase of ne-gotiations with the Cabinet Mission marked
the beginning of that cleavage between Gandhiji and some of his closest colleagues
which in the final phase of the transfer of power left them facing differ-ent ways”.48
He stayed away from negotia-tions, choosing instead to travel to places affected by
communal violence. On 20 February 1947 - the day Attlee announced in the House
of Commons that the British would leave India latest by June 1948 - Nehru
complained to Gandhi, “You are too far away for consultation and you refuse to
move out of East Bengal”.49 Gandhi’s alternative to the negotiations and his vehement
opposition to the partition of India in any form were clear from his statements. On 2
May 1947, he told three young socialists, Aruna Asaf Ali, Achyut Patwardhan and
Asoka Mehta: “In my opinion, the Congress should in no circum-stance be party to
partition. We should tell the British to quit unconditionally.. .Why should we make
ourselves accessory to what we hold to be evil”?50
Isolation
Gandhi realised his own isolation. In 1946 and 1947, he spoke of how he was left to
plough his lonely furrow, and remarked that his voice was one in the wilderness.51
On one occasion, his comments about his own isolation even seemed to predict what
would happen to him in independent India. In May 1947, he lamented, “Who lis-tens
to me today?...I am being told to retire to the Himalayas. Everybody is eager to
garland my photos and statues. Nobody really wants to follow my advice”.52 At a
prayer meeting on 26 September 1947, he expressed his complete disillusionment
with the path that India was taking under an independent dispensation:
Today I am a back number. I have been told I have no place in the new order,
where we want machines, navy, air force and what not. I can never be party to
that. If you can have the courage to say that you will retain free-dom with the
help of the same force with which you have won it, I am your man.53
Gandhi’s swaraj had been unmade by the men he had made.
On 30 January 1948, he was murdered by a Hindu fanatic who wanted India to be
a strong and powerful Hindu state. Min-utes before he kept his tryst with his
mur-derer, Gandhi had been talking to Patel and had forgotten the time for his
prayer meeting, despite the best efforts of Manu and Abha, his timekeepers as he
affection-ately called them. As he walked to the prayer ground, he chided them, “I
am late by 10 minutes. I hate being late.”54 These were his recorded last words
before he embraced eternity with the name of Rama on his lips. “I hate being late” -
the man who said this moments before his death was perhaps too early for India’s
swaraj.
*******
GANDHI AND THE INDIAN FREEDOM MOVEMENT
S. K. CHAUBE*
Introduction
Gandhi has written and spoken as much as has taken part in active movements. He
has left, a much wider and deeper imprint on the Indian life and thought than any
other freedom fighter of India, if only because of the width and the temporal length
of his operation. Yet, or probably due to these, one may find inconsistency between
his thought and action to such an extent that one of the greatest disciples of Gandhi
would exclaim: ‘He is an extra ordinary paradox. I suppose all outstanding men are
so to some extent.’1
Less charitable comments have been passed on Gandhi. C.R. Das is reported by Bose
to have considered Gandhi an unstable character. ‘According to him, the Mahatma
opens a campaign in a brillliant fashion ; he works it up with unerring skill; he
moves from success to success till he reaches the zenith of his campaign—but after
that he loses his nerve and begins to falter.’2
The noted Indo-British Communist intellectual, R.P. Dutt, wrote in 1948:
Given this understanding that it was not a strategy intended to lead to the victory
of independence, but to find the means in the midst of a formidable revolutionary
wave to maintain the leadership of the mass movement and restraint upon it, it
was a skilful strategy.3
M.N. Roy, in his communist phase, more or less shared the same opinion.4 Subhas
Chandra Bose was himself more understanding:
There is something in Mahatma Gandi which appeals to the mass of the Indian
people. Born in another country he might have been a complete misfit.... In India
it is different.... Wherever he may go, even the poorest of the poor feels that he is
the product of the Indian soil—bone of his bone, fiesh of his flesh.,.. When he
talks to them about Swaraj, he does not dilate upon the virtues of provin-cial
autonomy or federation, he reminds them of the glories of Ram Rajya and they
understand. And when he talks of conquering through love and ahinsa, they are
reminded of Buddha and Mahavira and they accept them.5
*
Professor and Director, Centre for Himalayan Studies, University of North Bengal.
1
Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, (London, Bodly Head, 1958), p. 514.
2
Subhas Chandra Bote, The Indian Struggle 1920-1941 in Netaji: Collected Works (Calcutta, Netaji
Research Bureau, 1981), vol. 2 p. 77.
3
R.P. Dutt, India Today, (Bombay, People’s Publishing House, 1948), p. 341.
4
See the controversy between Nirmal Kumar Bose and V.G. Kulkarni on M.N. Roy’s attack on
Satyagraha in Nirmal Kumar Bose, Studies in Gandhism, (Calcutta, The Indian Associated Publishing
House, 1947), pp. 316-36.
5
Subhas Chandra Bo$e, op. cit., p. 327.
The pre-Gandhian national movement found a platform in the Indian National
Congress which broadly had two wings : the moderate and the extremist. The
Moderates had a firm hope for an equal partnership of Indians in the British Empire
and worked for the evolution of representa-tive institutions that characterized the
British parliamentary system. The extremists were sceptical of British intentions and,
within their fold, around the partition of Bengal in 1905, developed a revolutionary
section. Both these wings were essentially elitist and derived their support from the
middle class literate. Gandhi brought the Indian masses within the nationalist
movement and revolutionized it.
Not that Gandhi’s personal success was outstanding. Gandhi left Congress in 1934-
35, was disgusted with it in 1947 and was murdered by an Indian less than a year
after the independence of India. On the other hand, Congress never formally
disowned him, always used his moral authority during the freedom struggle and
capitalized on his name after Independence.
The Making of a Mahatma
Gandhi chose to call his philosophy ‘satyagraha’—the pursuit of truth which is the
quintessence of human existence. Analysts have found in him both the Western and
the Indian influence. Guy Wint links his ‘passion for Utopias’ with the English and
American philanthropists of the 19th century. ‘Individualism, iconoclasm, the cult
of austerity, the emphasis on self—discipline—these were not of course unknown to
India, but in Gandhi they took the form common to English puritanism’. He derived
his faith in suffering from the Bible. His faith in non-violence was a Jain, rather than
a Hindu, element. His method of gaining his way by spectacular fasts and
organization of life in his Ashram as well as his ambiguous attitude to casts were
regarded to have been drawn from the India tradition.6
Nirmal Kumar Bose could readily think of two samskaras that found expression in
Gandhi’s universal ideas: One derived from ancient Hindu culture and the other,
apparently, from Christianity. To quote Bose, Gandhi’s ‘predilection for forms or
institutions which have endured through ages, in other words, the recognition of
permanency as a quality of Truth, has obviously been derived from his traditional
social equilant. This has led him to a mild form of conservatism, but which has the
redeeming feature of being always subjected to the final tests of reason and universal
morality. Inspite of this, the thin strain of conservatism makes Gandhi a shade more
receptive of old ideas than of those which have not yet been tested by the hand of
time.’
The other samskara which may have resulted from a reaction in his own life against
childhod’s married experiences, or from his early christian associations, is this concept
of sin and the special attitude which he bears towards sensual purity.7
6
Guy Wint, Spotlight of Asia (London, Penguin. 1959), p. 69.
7
Nirmal Kumar Bose, Studies in Gandhism (Calcutta, Indian Associated Publish ing Company Limited,
1947), p. 339.
Gandhi has been regarded by many as a sublime despot, although a skilful strategist.
Everyone connected with Gandhi reports that Gandhi was not only religious, but
also introvert; in times of crisis he was practically incommunicable, sitting with his
spinning wheel face down.
One gets a bit of Gandhi’s mental fabric in the Hind Swaraj Which was written as
early as 1908 when Gandhi was involved in South African politics. There are reasons
for treating the Hind Swaraj as much a mirror of Gandhi’s mind as a Gandhian
blueprint for India8 if only because it was his first complete political thesis.
In the book Gandhi first pays his compliments to Alan Octavian Hume and Sir William
Wedderburn, the two Englishmen responsible for the birth of Congress, and the
moderate Indian leaders. He explicitly states that he is not so much opposed to the
Englishmen as he is to English rule which has degenerated average Englishmen. He
not only calls the British Parliament a sterile prostitute and condemns the Newspapers
as an evil influence upon the people, but regards modern comfort-oriented civilization
as a disease. He regards as the cause of India’s subjection and continued subordination
to England the greed of the Indians. ‘We like their commerce, they please us by their
subtle methods and get what they want from us’.9
Among the evil influences of civilization Gandhi characteristically picks up the
railways, the lawyers and the doctors. Before the introduc-tion of the railways, Indians
had’ natural segregation.’10 Formerly people could travel to holy places only with
difficulty. So only the good people went there. Now the rogues go there. The railways
have fast spread evil. The English could not have ruled the country without the
lawyers and law courts. Instead of settling the disputes between persons the lawyers
aggravate them and thrive on them. Most characteristic of Gandhi, however, was
his condemnation of the doctors, who offer remedy to diseases. Diseases occur
because men indulge in vices. Had there been no doctors, men would not have
indulged in vices and behaved properly.
The whole argument is not only moral, it is personalistic. The ‘unity’ of India resulting
from natural segregation before the introduction of the railways was really a similarity
and mutual coexistence. It can be argued that this is not the scientific conception of
a nation, members of which interact with rather than tolerate, each other. This
toleration is the keynote of his formula for communal harmony.
8
In the preface to the 1938 edition to the Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Mahadev Desai wrote
apologetically : ‘I must confess that in “the urgency of his vision” Gandhiji used rather crude language
about machinery, which if he were revising the book he would himself alter’ Gandhi corrected him
: ‘After the stormy thirty years through which I have since passed, I have seen nothing to make me
alter the views expounded in it\ Shriman Narayan (General Ed.) The Selected works of Mahatma
Gandhi, (Ahmedabad, Navajivan, 1968), Vol. 4.
9
Ibid., p. 126.
10
Ibid., p. 131.
The Political Philosophy of Gandhi
Gandhi himself was opposed to cow slaughter. But he would appeal to the Muslims
at their feet to desist from cow slaughter rather than take a Muslim life. This
philosophy of toleration induced him to accept the formula of separate electorate
for the Muslims, if they so desired of Lord Morley.11 The philosophy of toleration
was, however, not a fetish or a creed in itself with Gandhi. It was a part of a broader
philosophical system called’ahimsa’and defined by him as real love. In essence, this
real love would teach us to hate wrong but not the wrong-doer. It would plead with
the wrong-doer to give up his wrong practice rather than take revenge on him. The
pursuit of this ahimsa needs on the part of its practitioner an indomitable moral
courage that enables him to suffer in the cause of truth.
To Gandhi, attainment of this moral quality is tantamount to the attainment of the
‘swaraj’ or home-rule. In Gandhi’s own language:
1. Real home rule is self-rule or self control.
2. The way to it is passive resistance, that is soul force or love force.
3. In order to exert this force, Swadeshi in every sense is necessary.
4. What we want to do should be done, not because we object to the English or
because we want to retalitatc but because it is our duty to do so. Thus,
supposing that the English remove the salt-tax, restore our money, give the
highest post to Indians, withraw the English troops, we whall certainly not
use the English language, nor many of their industries...I bear no enmity
towards the English, but I do towards their civilization.12
Gandhi turns swaraj into an individualistic concept. It is swaraj when we learn to
rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands...The Swaraj that I wish to
picture is such that, after we have once realized it, we shall endeavour to the end of
our life-time to persuade others to do likewise. But each one for himself. One drowning
man will never save another. Slaves ourselves, it would be a mere pretension to
think of freeing others.13
I underline the two words ‘learn’ and ‘persuade’ to show that swaraj, for Gandhi, is
a personal faculty and that it is not an external condition. In fact, to Gandhi, Swaraj
is the instrument to end the vices of Western civilization manifest in British rule.
Gandhi would accept the English-man in India and when he is freed from his vices
and been sufficiently ‘Indianized*. Thus Gandhi’s philosophy is individualistic in
the sense that it is a guide to individual action. The defect of the philosophical system
lies in the absence of e theory of collective action. Gandhi banks entirely on common
action through individual examples.
11
Ibid., p. 141.
12
Ibid., p. 201.
13
Ibid., p. 155.
Commonality, it may be stressed, is different from communality which rests on a
perception of coraplimentarity and interdependence. Viewed from this angle Gandhi’s
‘ahimsa’ does not necessarily mean real love. It is this deficiency which led G.D.H.
Cole to comment on Hind Swaraj that though Gandhi is as near a man can be to
Swaraj in a personal sense, ‘he has never solved to his own satisfaction, the other
problem—that of finding terms of collaboration that could span the gulf between
man and man, between acting alone and helping others to act in accordance with
their lights, which involves acting with them and as one of them—being at once
one’s self and someone else, one’s self can and must regard and criticize and attempt
to value.14
Gandhi’s Style
Gandhi’s style of work would vindicate this statement. Gandhi regarded his
humiliation in the Natal railway during the South African sejourn (1893) as ‘the
most creative experience’ in life.15 Since his South African experience, Nehru wrote,
‘he had a fixed basis of all his ideas, and his mind is hardly an open mind’.16 During
the Boer War Gandhi collected a batch of volunteers to work in the British ambulance
crops as the subjects must accommodate themselves and accord their support to the
acts of the state.
During World War I he appealed to the Indians to join the British Indian army and
collaborate in the war effort. In an interview with Louis Fischer in 1942 Gandhi
explained: ‘I had just returned from South Africa. I had not yet found my feet. I was
not sure of my ground.17
Yet, encapsulated between the Boer war and the First World War came the
Satyagraha agitation in South Africa. Writing the preface to his Satyagraha in South
Africa (originally in Gujarati) in early April 1924, Gandhi noted the parallels of the
non-cooperation struggle and the South African Satyagraha.18 The South African
Satyagraha had been prompted by the resentment at the British maltreatment of
Indian settlers in South Africa. Gandhi’s trust in the possibility of an ‘equal
partnership of Indians in the British Empire’ had evidently not been eroded. ‘No
matter how often a Satyagrahi is betrayed, he will repose his trust in the adversary
so long as there are no cogent grounds for distrust. Pain to a Satyagrahi is the same
as pleasure.’19
Gandhi himself recorded the process of his initiation in Indian politics.20 It was his
Viramgram experience of 1915 which first brought him into contact with the Indian
14
See Ibid., p. 84.
15
See Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1950), p. 56.
16
Nehru, op. cit, p. 516.
17
Louis Fischer, op. cit., p. 156.
18
M.K. Gandhi ‘Preface’ to Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad, Navijivan Press, 1968), Vol. Ill p.
xiv.
19
M.K. Gandhi. Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 457.
20
M.K. Gandhi, Preface, op. cit., pp. ix-xiv.
peasantry. His success came merely by the declaration of the intention to launch a
Satyagraha. The preparedness for Satyagraha’ gave him another success in 1917 on
the Indian Immigra-tion Act. Next came the Champaran struggle in 1917.
The plight of the share croppers convinced Gandhi of the need to urge upon the
departure of the British.21 Next he intervened in the strike at the Sarabhai Textile
Mills. His first act moved the heart of the friendly owners confirming his faith in the
change of the opponent’s heart through self-suffering. In 1918 he started agitation
against the Rowlatt Act and gave it up in the midst of violence confessing ‘Himalayan
blunder’.
The Gandhi Struggle
The conversion of Gandhi from a moderate believer in equal partner-ship in the
empire into its resolute opponent can possibly be explained in terms of the contrast
between the South African situation at the turn of the last century and the
Champaran situation in the early twentieth century. The British in South Africa
had yet to stabilize themselves when the community of free Indians, that is, those
labourers whose indenture had expired and traders who had come of their own
entered into economic competition with British colonists. The demand for equal
partnership in the empire had a specific meaning in that context. It may be noted
that Gandhi did not fight for the rights of the indentured labourers in Africa. He
assiduosly desisted from venturing into any critical economic struggle. Gandhi
recounts that when the Indian labourers in the north coast went on strike, 1200 of
them went back to complete a work at Mount Edgecombe, when the Indian employees
of Durban Municipality went on strike they exempted the sanitary services from its
scope. A satyagrahi would not inconvenience his adversary. A great march of Indian
Satyagrahis was put off when the European employees of the Union railways went
on strike.22
Several years later Gandhi noted the painful contrast ‘between the happy ending of
the Satyagraha struggle and the present condition of Indians in South Africa’ and
advised the Indians there to resort to Satyagraha.23 Gandhi in the meanwhile realized
the full implications of imperialism. At Champaran he had faced direct economic
exploitation by imperialism. Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation movement was more than
the ‘pure suffereing’ of the South African days. It was a refusal to cooperate with
the nefarions policies of the Empire to make them inoperative. Gandhi took over the
leadership of the nationalist movement in India in 1920, coalesced it with the
Khilafatists and started the non-cooperation movement (NC). Gandhi assured the
country of Swaraj within a year. As Swaraj was still elusive, the AICC, in November
1921, resolved upon ‘mass satyagraha’. Gandhi, however, chose to launch it on a
21
Louis Fischer, op. cit., p. 167.
22
M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 441.
23
See Mites Ranjan Sanyal, ‘Dakshni-Paschim Banglcye Jatiyatavadi Andolan (in Bengaii), Chaturanga
38th year, Kartik-Pous, 1383 B.S. (1976-77 A.D.).
limited scale in Bardoli. When violence broke in Chaura Chauri, he withdrew the
movement.
Gandhi’s coalition with the Khilafatists has been the greatest point held out against
Gandhi. It hardly brought about a lasting union of the two major Cammunities of
India. The movement lost its moral strength when the people of Turkey themselves
overthrew the Caliphet. After Gandhi withdrew the movement on the dictate of his
‘inner voice’ a series of communal riots occured in the country.
In 1923, Gandhi relaxed his non-cooperation to the extent of allowing Congress
Swarajists to enter the legislature but forbidding them to assume office. The Swarajists
could not proceed far and, in the wake of the Simon Commission Report, Gandhi
launched the Civil Disobedience movement (CD). Qualitatively the CD movement
was more advanced then the NC movement. The NC movement meant merely non-
collaboration with evils of British rule (civilization). The CD movement was a
program-me of positive action—resistance to British rule. It enthused the Indian
people more than the NC movement, but was soon reduced into the ‘individual
satyagraha’. The movement fizzled out and Gandhi left Congress for ever when
Congress decided to accept office in 1934. Gandhi led the 1942 ‘quit India’ movement
from outside the Congress.
Conclusion
Gandhi’s expositions in his profuse writings, Hind Swaraj onward, and his style of
work give out the following philosophy, of which political philosophy was a central
component.
The outstanding feature that emerges of Gandhi is an intense indivi-dual with
profound faith in personal ethics. To Gandhi an individual is required to observe
right action irrespective of public approval. For a practising politician this almost
apparent neglect of public appreciation or otherwise is an apparent paradox unless
one remembers that Gandhi expected others to follow him.
The second point about Gandhi’s philosophy is his profound conviction that one
gets nothing without a price. This frank approach to life, given the colonial situation
of the country, gave him a faith in self-sacrifice.
The most positive element in this philosophy was self-reliance accompanied
by self-discipline. Gandhi hated the civilization of the West which had robbed
India of her rich moral strength. Among other things Gandhi was opposed
to the elaborate political institutions that the British had been creating to
strengthen their rule and secure the active participation of the Indians. Gandhi
knew for certain that without the collaboration of Indians British rule could
by no means be entrenched in India. Hence the call to leave government
services, legal professions and government-run educational institutions. The
NCP went down to even the village level challenging the establishment of
the Union Board.
It is misleading to depict Gandhi as a pure anarchist. Gandhi was far from it. He
had a definite set of alternatives of the institutions and values he was challenging.
To the tyranny of Lancashire industry Gandhi’s reply was Indian Textile, hand-
woven or machine-made. To the British official education Gandhi’s answer was
‘national’ and ‘basic’ education which would be production-oriented rather than
office-oriented. To the Union Board Gandhi’s reply was the traditional panchayat.
The ideas of a panchayati raj was an answer to the Western system of parliamentary
democracy.
Gandhi’s emphasis on self-reliance probably made him oblivious of the international
significance of the Quit India movement at the crucial junc-ture of World War II.
Yet Gandhi revealed a most practical and logical mind when he warned Congressmen
in 1947 that they could not take part in a Constituent Assembly summoned by the
British Governor-General and decline to accept the Muslim League on terms of the
Cabinet Mission plan. Gandhi never sincerely believed in the constitutional
revolution.24
*******
24
Shibani Kinkar Chaube, Consituent Assembly of India : Springboard Revolution (New Delhi, People’s
Publishing House, 1973), pp. 120-21.
IRFAN HABIB*
Gandhi and the National Movement**
Professor Patnaik, friends of the SAHMAT organisation, ladies and gentlemen.
I deem it an honour indeed that I should be asked to speak at this function which is
part of observance of Safdar Hashmi’s martyrdom-anniversary. It was thought by
the organisation that the theme should be one worthy of the occasion. And so I was
asked to speak on Mahatma Gandhi and the National Movement. It is a very
important theme, because it is my belief that in the cause of the National Movement
Gandhi occupied a crucially important position. The theme is appropriate, but I’m
not an expert on Gandhi. I have read some of his writings, and I have seen secondary
material on Gandhi, and I have - as many of us have - met people who knew him,
who were his followers or his critics. In any case anyone who is seriously interested
in Indian history must be confronted in his own mind with the nature of the National
Movement, which could be regarded as the greatest creation of the Indian people to
date, and, within the nature of Gandhi’s legacy. I agreed to speak on it, despite my
limitations, because I thought the time has arrived when certain questions with
regard to Gandhiji’s role, and with regard to the National Movement and its nature,
could be profitably raised.
I should like to begin with the embarrassment of my own first encounter with the
problem of assessment of Gandhiji in slightly personal terms. My difficul-ties are not
exceptional. They might have been faced by many who came to the communist
movement during the last phase of the National Movement. With my parents it was
not usual to refer to him as Gandhiji, but only as Mahatmaji; even to refer to him as
Gandhiji was thought of as taking a liberty. It did not mean that my father was not
critical of certain positions taken by Gandhiji: but it meant that whatever the criticism
it was within a framework in which Gandhiji’s total dominance of the National
Movement was accepted as a fact, and although one might differ, one must defer to
Gandhi’s views. From this background, suddenly to come to the references in
communist literature - reading R.P. Dutt’s India Today - about the ‘mascot of the
bourgeoisie’, ‘that general of unbroken disasters’, ‘the Jonah of Revolution’, came as
a personal shock. One attributed this sense of shock to the petty - bourgeois class
psychology to which one belonged, but even this didn’t satisfy; and the dissatisfaction
with such an assessment of Gandhiji persisted.
It later seemed to me while re-reading RP. Dutt that even within RP. Dutt’s attack
on Gandhi there were extremely important concessions - the admission, for example,
that Gandhi alone could enter the house and hearts of the Indian poor, where the
Indian bourgeoisie could never gain entrance. How and why did he have this
*
Centre for Advanced Study in History, AMU, Aligarh.
**
Transcript of a lecture revised by the author, the lecture was organised by SAHMAT and delivered on
December 28, 1994.
particular quality? Any explanation of how Gandhi achieved this rapport with the
Indian poor and with the Indian people as a whole was missing in RP. Dutfs analysis.
I think that subsequent assessments of Gandhiji became difficultbecause of a
particular misconception of its own position in the National Movement by the Left.
The Left not only decried the bourgeois leadership of the National Movement and its
various limitations, but tried to suggest as if the Left movement was parallel to the
National Movement, RP. Dutt, indeed, thought of the working class movement and
the communist movement, as essentially part of the National Movement, in which it
was contesting with the bourgeoisie for leadership. But in certain writings of E.M.S.
Namboodiripad, for example, notably his latest collection of articles on the freedom
struggle which are built upon a reading of Tarachand’s History of the. Freedom
Movement and certain other writings, it seems in fact as if there were three parties
to the struggle - imperialism, bourgeois nationalism, and Marx-isms working class
movement. The subalterns take this to its logical extreme in which the whole National
Movement is seen as an elitist movement. The ‘subaltern’ classes, according to this
theory, consisting of the zamindars and other itiral strata, had an autonomy, and
based on this autonomy they contested for power with imperialism, whereas the
national elite merely benefited from their struggle, and instead of transferring power
to the subal-terns they transferred power to themselves. Therefore, in a sense,
imperialism and nationalism were of the same category, or belonged to the same
class more or less, viz., westernized elite, while the subalterns who carried out the
autonomous struggles, would, as was almost fatally inevitable, lose out. It was on
the basis of their autonomous struggles that the national leadership or National
Movement took power from Britain. This puts the Marxist movement also along
with the elitist nationalist leadership. Then, because you have the term subaltern on
one side, you don’t have the bourgeoisie on the other side, you have elites - and
whether they are imperialist elites or nationalist elites, it doesn’t apparently matter.
The subalterns are so satisfied with their theology that Gandhi is not very relevant to
them, and although we are told by some scholars that subaltern studies have opened
a new vision on Gandhi, I’ve not been blessed with receiving that kind of insight
from them. It seems to me that lumping everyone in one basket of undifferentiated
elites, or very thinly differentiated elites, and treating the subalterns as autonomous,
which means denying the influence of Gandhi on those vast classes of the Indian
poor, is a position no serious historian can adopt. And if you start with this denial,
then, of course, you cannot offer any real perception of Gandhi.
Imperialist historians, or British Government officials during the British period, and
post-Independence British historians thereafter, have always tried to argue that
Gandhi was only a Mahatma to look at from outside; otherwise he was a very clever
politician, a master of manipulation, and that the British in a sense themselves created
the myth of Gandhi with their actions, both constitutional and political. Those who
are familiar with Seal’s work would remember that, according to him, the nationalist
appeal did not acquire any popular support till the elections of 1937, because it was
the Government of India Act 1935 rather than Gandhi’s and other nationalist
mobilisations which gave Indian politicians the necessary impetus to reach out to
the Indian masses. As for those who in the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1930-31,
risked their lives and property for Indian freedom at Gandhi’s call, Judith Brown
has already put them in their place: they were merely Gandhi’s ‘sub-contractors’ or
‘intermediaries’. Their’s was a business enterprise, no real movement. So, not
Gandhism, nor any other strand in the National Movement, Left or any other, but
the constitutional measures of the British government, particularly the Government
of India Act 1935, created that massive nationalist following among the Indian people.
The application of the Namierist method by the Cambridge School -Seal, Judith Brown
and others - results, as has been said about its application to English history, in an
extensive loss of the wood for the trees. I particularly remember the fact that Seal
tells you about Dadabhai Naoroji’s personal financial problems, but you will never
realise from Seal that Dadabhai Naoroji wrote papers over time which, collected
together, became almost the nationalist bible on the economic role of imperialism.
He has no explanation why Dadabhai Naoroji continued to be supported by Bombay
mill-owners even when he supported and urged the passage of industrial labour
legislation. That ideas have a momentum of their own is a fact which the Cambridge
school and its supporters so easily overlook. There are thus obvions imperfections in
their approach to Gandhi on which I need not dilate further with the general
imperialist approach to the National Movement.
We are then favoured also by the psychoanalysis of Gandhi, e.g. undertaken by
Erikson and Kakar, where particularly his relations with his mother are emphasised,
and for some reason Indian culture is itself described as feminine. I have not been
able to see how this gender characterisation of any culture is possible. Such an
approach, which is Eurocentric, and psychological, results in an obvious depreciation
and belittling of Gandhi’s importance.
The literature containing the Gandhian or nationalist adulation of Gandhiji, is
considerable; some of it is also academically important and contains criticism here
and there. Tarachand’s book on the Freedom Movement has certain criticisms for
example, on Gandhi’s role in the Second Round Table Confer-ence. So one can not
dismiss this entire body of literature as mere adulation. But by emphasising Gandhi’s
immense achievement as a person and not relating it, I think, to the social environment
and the historical situation, this body of literature though important (and one must
remember that most of the massive literature on Gandhi comes from this large body
of literature) is not very satisfying to me in its total perception. Partly this is because
its conception of social development is not one which I share. But essentially I think
one has an inward reservation about it, because the focus is so much on Gandhi that
the people of India whom he worked and died for, appear merely as obedient
admirers.
Now with the rather arrogant criticism, for which I apologise, of various historical
interpretations, I would like to go on to my provisional views; and as I describe these
I think the major questions that I pose would basically appear.
First of all, I would argue that Gandhiji’s autobiography My Experiments With Truth
is very important for us. It is so honest that perhaps of all great figures in modern
history Gandhi becomes easily the victim of Freudian psychoanalysis. But while I
would accept every fact that Gandhiji gives of himself, and as he gives it - and of the
most dramatic events he is perhaps the dullest narrator - yet I would argue that he
is perhaps not the best authority or source for our own perception of the genesis of
his thought. For example, he always described himself as a Sanatani Hindu; yet he
did not pray in a temple. (This hesitation to bow before images may have come from
his mother who belonged to a Bhakti sect in which image worship was condemned.)
The basic point is that the serious body of thought that Gandhi first came into contact
with was modern, western thought. It was not traditional Indian thought. It was
after his modern education at Rajkot and at London that he even read the Bhagvad
Gita (in England). While he may have joined a vegetarian society, and might have
come into contact with Theosophists - although one understands that his major
contact with Theosophists, that also of not a long duration, was in South Africa, in
Durban - essentially it was liberal values that Gandhi assimilated when he was in
England. These influences were strong enough for him to go to France when the
centenary celebrations of the French Revolution were taking place. We know that
when he went to South Africa in the early 1890’s to stay there with some small
breaks for twenty-one years, he began reading Ruskin and Tolstoy and other western
thinkers. His criticism of certain features of both western and Indian civilizations
did not come from a reading of modern European writing. I do not think there is in
the entire body of Indian tradition such an emphasis on dignity of labour as he
obtained from, and which he himself attributed to, a reading of Ruskin, whose book
Unto This Last he also translated into Gujarati.
His emphasis on peace, and not war, as means of settling political issues came from
Tolstoy rather than any Indian tradition. In the Indian tradition ahimsa is seen more
as abstaining from taking of life and, therefore, a logical early stage to vegetarianism.
It has not been in traditional Indian thought perceived as a means of carrying out a
revolution. Therefore the essential strands in Gandhi’s own intellectual make-up are
certainly modern, and this is a very important point to remember. Gandhi recognised
the debt he owed to these thinkers. He was too honest a man not to extend this
recognition. But his own belief that these writings merely strengthened, merely
underlined, merely reinforced what was present in his mind, perhaps dormant, from
India’s own tradition, must be doubted.
Now clearly having found this body of thought which appealed to him, which rejected
capitalism, which was the creation of the modern western civilization, which rejected
imperialism that had established itself through war and massacres, Gandhi rejected
western civilization itself nearly wholesale.
This rejection became the starting point for asserting the superiority of Indian
civilization which neither possessed capitalism, nor possessed imperialism. So the
very poverty of Indian civilization in material terms became for Gandhi the ground
for asserting its superiority.
This process was a very complex one, and the complexities, and the contradictions
are apparent in Gandhi’s major work Hind Swaraj, written on a voyage from England
to South Africa in 1909. Already by the time of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s internal
perception of the genesis of his own thought is complete. He reads into the Bhagvad
Gita that, which it seems to one is not there. He reads a message of duty, he reads a
message of dignity of labour, he reads a message of peace. He was similarly to assert
equally unhistorically that the message of peace can be read as strongly in the Quran.
Gandhi’s words often seem much more a restatement of the New Testament than
either of the Bhagvad Gita or the Quran. They are not to be seen as an assertion of
the traditional against modern values. What we get is the assertion of modern values
in traditional garb, a re-reading of Indian culture in a totally a historical way, but
extremely creative fashion. Something of it was there in the Bengal Renaissance, in
Ram Mohun Roy’s appeal to the Upanishads, and in his appeal to certain legal
books which gave inheritance rights to women. In Gandhi’s case the convergence of
statement of modern values in traditional terms was far more complete and far
more extensive, although, for this reason, the contradic-tions within it were also
very glaring.
Gandhi’s reading of Indian culture cannot be justified by any reading of historical
texts. But what he was ascribing to Hinduism or Islam-hisascripticfris to Islam were,
of course, comparatively fewer - were the principles he had in mind with regard to
Hinduism, which led to the remoulding of Hinduism in its present form. One of the
achievements of Gandhi is, I think, that he changed the course of Hinduism or at
least gave a new face to Hinduism, even when all the time he was saying that he
was merely asserting its ancient values. Ultimately, and over a long process, he
would accept a position of traditional Hinduism, only to undermine it; for example
his acceptance first of the varna principle in the Hind Swaraj and then his steady
undermining of it until almost nothing remained of it by the 1940s. Or, his acceptance
first of a special position for women in the house as implied in the Hind Swaraj and
then his undermining of it till in the 1940s he was arguing - I still remember an
interview of a newspaper correspondent with Gandhi in 1945-46 - for the equality
of women. Gandhi clearly said that he not only believed in the equality of men and
women but that women could do all the things that men could do, and men would
not be able to do all the things that women do. The correspondent asked Gandhi
that if ahimsa permitted war, could women be soldiers; and Gandhi said they would
be better soldiers and generals than men. So this was a man who by the 1940s was
not prepared to accept any difference, any disability, in women in relation to men.
May be there are certain statements which militate against this but generally the
tone of Gandhi’s later thought is to reject any kind of inequality between man and
woman.
Then there is his emphasis on monotheism when he was all the time denying this
emphasis. He would say that he was a Sanatani Hindu and on this basis he would
support the movement of the untouchables to enter temples, and yet, unlike today’s
politicians, in his personal life he never gave concession to anything short of
monotheism. Therefore, he tended to make Hinduism more of a monotheistic religion
than even the Arya Samajists with whom he did not agree. He also ascribed to
Hinduism a degree of tolerance which perhaps in its history it had not possessed,
and, therefore, tried to make it a more tolerant religion. In this sense he was perhaps
working on the same lines as his precursors like Ram Mohun Roy and Keshavchandra
Sen and Justice Ranade. Perhaps he was the last of these men: he is greatest of them
undoubtedly. By attributing all his statements to roots in the Indian civilization, and
particularly in Hinduism, he created a picture of Hinduism which made it possible
for its followers to accept modern values. It is a religion which has nothing in common
with the ‘Hindutva’ cult Gandhi’s Ram was God, and his Ram Rajya did not relate
to something that was remotely sectarian. ‘God’s Rule’ would be a better translation
of it. It bore the same sense in which Kabir referred to ram. Clearly then even Gandhi’s
religiosity is based on an extension of humanitarian values and their application to
perhaps the most ancient of all surviving religions, resulting in a vast transformation
of its beliefs. Those who in the 1880s thought that the caste system was basic to
Hinduism, by the year of Gandhi’s death would have been ashamed if anyone were
to refer to it as an essential part of Hinduism. This was the extent of Gandhi’s
achievement in relation to the theological tenets of Hinduism.
My main point here is to assert that Gandhi is a modern thinker. Those of you who
would like to designate thought in class terms, are welcome to call him a bourgeois
thinker. But I would like to remind you of a peculiar idiosyncrasy of Karl Marx,
which Prof. Patnaik may have noticed. When he encounters an economist who has
not thought properly, who is a vulgariser, he always calls him a bourgeois economist.
But as far as the two principal bourgeois econo-mists Adam Smith and Ricardo are
concerned, it is always of their classical political economy that he speaks. I would,
therefore, rather think of Gandhi as a classical modern figure. If still bourgeois, then
not in the sense of a personal classification, but defined by the end to which his
social and political strategy, despite his own subjective intentions was bound to
lead. ‘Bourgeois’ in any case, even as a designation represents no single body of
thought; and I think we are beginning to recognise that socialist proletarian thought
cannot be a single body of consistent thought either. There could be, and were different
strands of classical bourgeois thought - his was one strand. Although Gandhi’s
thought-content was anti-imperialist, and subjectively anti-capitalist (because anti-
industrial), nevertheless since he did not extend his aims to socialism, he essentially
remained within the bourgeois framework.
With regard to the National Movement I think, again, some points need to be stressed.
The National Movement had already begun, already established itself, when Gandhi
entered the political field in South Africa. The founding fathers of the National
Movement had a level of critique of imperialism which one can only admire today.
Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt wrote critiques ot imperialism, which later Marxist
writing largely followed without any major improvement during the British rule.
They underscored the modern imperial-ist exploitation of India. But they underscored
one other important point - that the National Movement can only create a modern
India. There cannot be any going back to Ancient India and, therefore, India did not
only need education, it needed a new ideology. This ideology they sought to create
through various kinds of movements like the Brahma Samaj; and I would like to
recall here that in 1830 Ram Mohun Roy said that India cannot be a nation because
it is divided up among many castes. If India had to be a nation then the caste system
had to be rejected. I think Keshavchandra Sen must be particularly respected because
he extended this view also to the repression of women, and in 1870 propound-ed
the idea that as India reformed itself it would become a nation. So India was not
historically a nation. It was making itself into a nation by rejecting its past as a
divided society, a society divided according to castes and religions. It was making
itself into a nation by rejecting the traditional oppression of women, by absorbing
modern thought and trying to develop a modern capitalist econo-my. The swadeshi
or the development of the internal Indian economy in their minds was directed
towards an industrial capitalist economy, the only kind of advanced economy they
saw functioning around them. Dadabhai Naoroji may have been drawn towards
the socialists because the socialists were anti- imperialists, and he might also have
been drawn to labour legislation, but essentially his notion of the future of India,
and of R.C. Dutt, was what can be called capitalism ‘with a human face’ - in Mr.
Narsimha Rao’s terminology, but with more substance.
The second important thing about Gandhi was his desire to unite the National
Movement with economic struggles. The earlier thinkers among the Moderates had
provided intellectual material. They had shown how India was being exploited by
England, but in their actual politics they acted merely as spokesmen. They made
demands on behalf of the Indian people but they were unable to spread these very
ideas among the masses whose cause they espoused. They spoke of banning exports
of Indian food grains, but there were no demonstrations of hungry famine-stricken
people supporting their de-mands. There was practically no popular mobilisation.
With Gandhi one enters an important phase in the National Movement where
mobilisation for econom-ic demands became a part of the National Movement. It
seems to me that this is an extremely important achievement which is not actually
diminished by the fact that the earlier demands behind such mobilisations were
extremely limited.
Nowhere in the world does a trade union start with the most radical demands. We
always start with the demand, say, that temporary employees be made regular
employees; it is only later that we gain in confidence and begin to make further
demands about pay and promotion. Certainly any trade union which, according to
the wishes of the subalterns and other such radicals, have a strike everyday would
have a very short life in the working class movement. Clearly, the necessarily limited
nature of day-to-day demands and the ability to compromise are an inalienable part
of any serious peasant and working class movement. When we say that Gandhi in
the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 was merely leading rich peasants, this is an
important point to consider. Certainly it should be found out who were mainly
affected; but first of all we ought to recall that Gandhi did not lead them because he
thought they were rich peasants. Second, it was clear that the demands had to be
narrow because without any partial success the Satyagraha would have had a totally
demoralising effect. So also in the Kheda Satyagraha and the Ahmedabad working
class strike. Criticisms that the demands were limited, that compro-mises were entered
into are not very serious criticisms. Even the greatest Marxists would have done the
same. They may perhaps have not gone on hunger strike, but at some stage they
must have compromised. You cannot in one agitation overthrow the landlord system
in India, or the capitalist system in Ahmedabad or the British rule in Champaran or
in Kheda district.
Another important achievement, as I see, in Gandhi is his immediate identification
with the peasantry. He might use religious language for it, which one may deplore,
but the essential point remains that to him peasants were those with whom he
identified himself most. I have been amused to read in Subaltern Studies, Volume I,
an analysis of a document in which Gandhi is supposed to have abandoned the
peasants and made a compromise with the zamindars. Although the subalterns did
not quote R.P. Dutt, the approach here is identical: Gandhi had made a compromise
with zamindars, he had surren-dered to zamindars in 1922, forced the peasant to
retreat and so on. But in interpreting this ‘discourse’ - and these are interpreters
who look very closely at each word, the subalterns forget that when Gandhi used
the word ‘we’ in this document he meant peasants and when he used ‘they’ he
meant the zamindars, thus indicating essentially an element of differentiation from
the zamindars and solidarity with the peasant masses of the country.
Now you can argue that this was false identification, that he was not in fact
representing the peasants’ long term interests. (Let us forget about the tempo-rary
compromise, because as far as compromises are concerned, I have argued that they
are essential in any movement.) Compromises will always be subject to criticism,
but in the long term even when Gandhi was talking about zamindars as trustees, as
custodians of peasants who should be paid rent so that they open schools and
hospitals, he was still raising a fresh issue. First of all, rent could be reduced, a
matter about which Ram Mohun Roy had also written, but very cautiously. For
Gandhi rents could be reduced by peaceful methods, by negotiation, but he was to
be justified only if it was spent on health and education. Why should a zamindar
collect rent if he was not able to enjoy it? This meant that even the idea of trusteeship
brought into question rights of the zamindars in an indirect manner. And one should
also remember that in the 1920s while peasants might rise here and there, the general
situation was not of unrestrained revolt. One cannot xead into the peasant movement
of 1919 - 22 what was the creation of the Left in the 1930s. It would be absurd and
it would be belittling the contribution of the Left and of Gandhi’s own ‘constructive’
programme in the 1920’s and 1930’s to consider peasant con-sciousness in the 1920s
at level with peasant consciousness in the 1930s. Given that position, obviously a
totally hostile attitude to the zamindars would have made the situation for the
National Movement even more complex in the early 1920s. But peasants did come
into the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930. They came to the Civil Disobedience
Movement, in far larger numbers than during non-cooperation where their
participation was relatively scattered and fragmentary. Perhaps class analysis would
show that most of them were rich peasants and small zamindars. But one of the
important facts doesn’t come out well even in Sumit Sarkar. This is that when we
are talking of imprisonment in the civil disobedience of 1930 and are sneering about
the fact that the number of prisoners did not exceed 100,000 even by Congress
estimates, we are again reading into 1930 what is the position in 1994. Imprisonment
in 1930 was not like ‘political’ imprisonment today when going to prison hardly
matters. It is a kind of good certificate for a political career. In fact I know of political
parties who say a local leader is judged by the number of people he can bring in his
trucks to court arrest for one day. I remember an agitation when we had brought
peasants promising them that they would be kept in prison for only one week, and
unfortunately the government kept them in prison for a month. They were not angry
with the government. They were angry with us. But in 1930 prison meant one could
never get employment and could well lose one’s property in the bargain; and
therefore, I am surprised that even 100,000 went into civil disobedience under such
circumstances. Consider losing your land, being thrown out of your family, and if
you look at this, certainly, the peasant participation in the civil disobedience
movement all over India and even in the NWF Province, is an important fact.
This was soon followed by the Karachi Resolution which povided a blue-print for
industrial development of India - which was totally opposed to Gandhi’s views - the
public sector, the government ownership of key indus-tries, working class rights,
and, in rather cautious terms, land to the tiller with some compensation to the
zamindars, universal adult suffrage already prom-ised in the Motilal Committee
Report, equal rights to women, separation of religion from state - every modern
political idea of a bourgeois welfare state is there in the Karachi Resolution. The
basic idea of bourgeois welfare state happens to coincide fairly extensively with the
concept that the communist movement developed of people’s democracy as a first
stage after revolution. Therefore, clearly the Karachi Resolution is an important
platform for the Left also. It united Gandhi with centrist radicals like Nehru and
with the Left. And Gandhi’s acceptance of it, and his position that although the
Karachi Resolution didn’t represent his views, it represented the Congress views
and therefore he would not have any quarrel with the Congress governments which
imple-mented it, must certainly be recognised. This was an important concession,
the work of a person who could lay aside his own views, and accept contrary views,
because the peasants had served the civil disobedience movement and had to have
their reward. The working class had largely kept away and so workers had to be
attracted back to the National Movement. Women had come out to participate, and
they too had to have their share in the future of India. The Karachi Resolution was
a kind of recognition of the requirements of a situation that Gandhi himself had
helped to bring about. And so far as Gandhi allowed this to stand as part of the
Congress programme he must be credited with a very important share in giving to
the Congress, a leftward direction.
Gandhi’s subsequent life, in which it became clear that free India would not be as he
saw it, moved inexorably towards tragedy. He had unleashed forces the direction of
whose movement was so different from what he wanted it to be. I think in this
tragedy one also recognises his greatness, because Gandhi accepted, as I have said,
in the Karachi Resolution and later, the promises that the Congress had made to the
Kisans and to the Trade Unions. Gandhi recognised the direction, while he criticised
it. In one particular respect, in the communal divide which tended to intensify again
from the late 1930’s, Gandhi was constantly on the side of moderation. Gandhihad
not taken the view which the Left adopted in the 1930s that if the National Movement
was to be secular then Hindu or Muslim communalism could have no place within
it. It was an important position, a bold position. But it was not Gandhi’s position.
Tilak before Gandhi had brought the Congress and Muslim League together, on that
classic compromise, the communal electrorate for Muslims in exchange for Muslim
League’s acceptance of Home Rule. My friend Professor Bipan Chandra decries it.
Yet, I think it was one of the notable landmarks in the development of the National
Movement. Gandhi himself invoked Khilafat Committee - Abbas Tyabji was one of
Gandhi’s very close followers. But Gandhi felt the Khilafat Movement would extend
the scope of the National Movement. On this there could always be discussion. Gandhi
felt that he could ally with Muslim communalism or indeed with Hindu communalism
also on particular issues to enlarge the National Movement. Given this argument,
the Khilafat Movement was a logical development of Gandhian strategy.
The criticism of separate electorates, and so on, came more vocally from the Left
than from Gandhi who while standing up for a general electorate was willing to
give concessions. Indeed, in 1931 on all the major points, Jinnah’s demands had
been conceded, but unfortunately Jinnah and the Muslim League now looked to
British imperialism to give them these concessions than to the National Movement.
This is a very important point which some historians miss while they tend to blame
the Congress and the League equally for the course that led ultimately to the partition.
It seems to me again that in the UP Cabinet issue of 1937 it was Nehru and the Left
who took a mote rigid position, than Gandhi and Abul Kalam Azad, who were
willing to induct the Muslim League ministers, perhaps in order to modify the anti-
zamindar edge of Nehru’s supporters. Certainly the people who mismanaged the
UP cabinet formation were not Gandhi’s supporters who were indeed urging a
compro-mise. Subsequently in 1944, C. Rajagopalachari entered into negotiations
with Jinnah and the Desai-Liaqat formula of 1945 conceded parity, that is the very
unfair position that Muslim League which was in a minority should have a parity in
the central cabinet with the Congress. Gandhi went to extremes in giving these and
other concessions, in order to preserve the unity of the country.
Yet the question remains whether Gandhi, in identifying himself with Hindu social
reform and with Hindus generally, antagonised Muslims. This is a question that is
very difficult to answer because clearly if the National Movement was to be allied
with social reform which was so deeply wedded to religion, it could not be separated
entirely from religion. One, to speak within the religious framework for social reform
as Gandhi did, and the other, to reject religion altogether, which is what the Left
did.
One would not know which device would have been more successful given the
Indian situation. But certainly Gandhi adopted the first one: he sincerely adopted it
- he was himself religious. It became clear that one position he had was that of a
Hindu social reformer. Gandhi found it very difficult to speak of social reform to
Muslims, to condemn bigamy, to demand share in inheritance for daughters among
Muslims and so on. If he had emphasised such reform the alienation of the Muslims
from him would have been still greater. And therefore it is not easy to condemn him
on this score. He did all that could be expected of him to do to assert that all religions
were true, but that all religions had some errors. They should exist together. Moving
away from his controver-sial terminology of the late 1930s, he argued by 1947 that
Hindustani was the national language of India in both Devnagri and Urdu scripts.
He was a promoter of equality of Hindi and Urdu as separate forms of that language.
I don’t know how many know that he wrote Urdu also and that his spelling was
fairly correct He didn’t make mistakes in Urdu words, and to my aunt his letters
always ended with ‘Bapu ki dua’. He promoted Hindustani, a language to which
Hindus and Muslims could both respond. By this, and by emphasising monotheism,
he was trying to bring together people of various faiths. He had recitations from
different scriptures, in his ‘prayer’ meetings. Nevertheless it was clear that he was a
Hindu: but if Muslims were not to accept a devout Hindu as their leader, then does
it not mean that they had already in their minds become separatists? Why should a
devout Hindu leader be rejected by Muslims - a Hindu who is saying that they are
like brothers to him, who is. saying that the Muslims’ religion is the Muslims’ business,
who is saying that in the national wealth of India they would have an equal share?
The real question is, why should Muslims feel that way? I am not ready to accept
R.P. Dutt’s position that because Gandhi said that he was a devout Hindu it alienated
the Muslims. When Badshan Khan said he was a devout Muslim, it did not alienate
the Hindus of the North West Frontier. Muslim separatism did not arise, nor Hindu
communalism, for the reason that Gandhi said that he was a devout Hindu. There
are other reasons. There could be two paths to social reform, the Hindu language
framework of Gandhi and the totally secular framework of the Left, but the point is
we can’t judge between them today because it is the Gandhian language which
succeeded; the Left was only marginally in competition in this area.
III
Now I would take up two last questions. One is that of Quit India. I feel certain in
my mind that Gandhi’s decision to give the call of ‘Quit India’ then was a mistake.
The communist party was quite right in opposing this resolu-tion. It was clear that
Gandhi’s perception of the world at that time was not as clear as his perception of
India. It seems to me that he thought the Allies were having a very hard time,in the
war, and therefore this was the time to get concessions. The Left also thought that
the Allies were going to have a very bad time, and therefore if Soviet Russia was to
be saved, this was the time to come to its assistance. Same perception of the world,
but opposite inferences. The whole question is whether a temporary advantage for
India was to guide the National Movement or the future of the world as a whole.
These two opposite strategies were in conflict. Today we know that the Allies position,
although bad, was not so bad as it appeared to Gandhi and his colleagues in the
AICC and to the communist leadership. However, if you read Stalin’s letters, Stalin
was writing to Churchill and Roosevelt that Russia has lost so much territory that it
could be defeated or be so weakened that it could no longer be of any assistance to
the Allies. This was an extremely difficult time, between the offensive on Moscow
and the battle of Stalingrad. There are times when national interest comes into conflict
with larger interests of world peoples, and if the larger interest weighed with the
communist dissenters, I would, even at this time, when it is fashionable to regret it,
hold it to be the right decision. I would also not condemn Gandhi for his position.
The Indians had waited too long and had been patient. Gandhi had described the
Extremists and the Moderates as the patient and the impatient lot, and patience had
now run out for all. But it was clear that Gandhi’s perception of the world situation,
as of the communists, were wrong. The Russian people and the Soviet system was
strong enough to defeat Hitler and this being so the Quit India exercise became
meaningless. Accordingly it is obvious that Gandhi never expected that there would
be a rebellion or a violent agitation: he wanted to tell the British that if you really
want to make peace with Indians, when faced with such continuing Axis Successes,
then you must offer substantive concessions to the Indian Congress leaders. But the
Red Army changed the situation by defeating Hitler at Stalingrad. The result was
that British imperialism did not need to talk with the imprisoned leaders. I do not
think Gandhi was so ignorant of the Indian situation as to have thought that there
would be a rebellion of the Indian people and the situation for the British in the war
would worsen and there would be a compromise.
My last point; I think Gandhi’s ‘finest hours’ were his last months-that when
massacres broke out, Gandhi stood by his principles; and here he could forget the
narrow national interests for the larger cause. If you remember he said in so many
words: ‘I am not for the moment concerned with the massacres in Pakistan. I am
basically concerned with the massacres in Delhi and its neighbourhood therefore, I
am going on hunger strike here. When I succeed here, I would go on hunger strike
there in Pakistan, which is also my country’. The second demand he made was that
India must pay Rs.55 crore to Pakistan. For the Father of a Nation to take a direct
position against his own nation, and in support of another country whose goverment
was showering abuse on him and the entire Indian people, I think that was Gandhi’s
finest act. It was an action for which he ultimately gave his life at the hands of one
of the heroes and precursors of the present Sangh Parivar. It seems to me that there
is a message in this particular action for all serious political movements - a message
that there is a point at which to compromise with principle is fatal. Gandhi’s own
success in stopping the massacres in India was achieved by frontally opposing the
“mainstream” communal perceptions. One must take a position which is right even
if it is opposed to the national “consensus”. How many of us could remember it in
1962 or 1965?
When we had a small war with Pakistan in 1965, our University had a meeting and
our Chancellor said that if he had been young he would have gone to war with the
Indian ja wans. Then we had a compromise at Tashkent and the same Chancellor at
a meeting held thereafter told us it had been a very “foolish war” and in effect
quoted EMS Namboodiripad. One realises that in these national enthusiasms of the
moment, particularly of the kind that we have been through just now over Babri
Masjid, and perhaps we will be going through such moments again and again, it is
extremely important to stick to a principled position and to keep to it. I particularly
wish to say that when SAHMAT adopted a certain position in respect of Ayodhya
and when the Speaker defied all rules of the book, to direct that the SAHMAT
exhibition must be removed from the premises of a public institution, then I think it
was a mark of honour for SAHMAT to be so favoured. What SAHMAT did was
precisely in accordance with what Gandhi had done; and therefore it is fitting today
that while commemorating Safdar Hashmi, we also celebrate Gandhi.
*******
The Historiography of India’s Partition: Between

Civilization and Modernity
DAVID GILMARTIN
More than sixty five years after the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947,
controversy about partition, its causes and its effects, continues. Yet the emphases in
these debates have changed over the years, and it is perhaps time, in the wake of
India’s recent elections, to take stock once again of how these debates have developed
in the last several decades and where they are heading. What gives these
controversies particular significance is that they are not just about that singular
event, but about the whole trajec-tory of India’s modern history, as interpreted
through partition’s lens—engaging academ-ic historians, even as they continue to
be deeply enmeshed in ongoing political conflict in South Asia, and, indeed, in the
world more broadly.
That the interpretation of partition remains a touchstone for narratives of the nation
was clear in the recent election of Narendra Modi as India’s newest prime minister.
While many in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (and Modi himself) sought to portray
his elec-tion campaign as transcending the past, moving beyond the old Nehru-
Gandhi dynasty of the Congress Party to bring to power a government committed
to cutting-edge techno-logical and free market transformations, questions about
Hindu-Muslim relations in India (always inflected by understandings of partition)
remained ever-present in the back-ground. Many critics focused on Modi’s role in
the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat to show his continued grounding in the
sort of communalism that led to India’s traumatic partition violence. But Modi himself
responded with his own partition narrative, blaming Congress itself for the “sin” of
partition, and suggesting that if Sardar Patel rather than the more secular Nehru
had led the Congress at that time, then parti-tion might not have occurred (see
Financial Express 2013). 1 Even as the publicity sur-rounding his invitation to
Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to attend his inauguration signaled his
desire to project a forward-looking image capable of moving beyond partition’s
legacies of conflict, the meanings still attached to partition in fact remain central to
BJP worldviews and deeply influence most views about the place of Muslims in
contemporary India.
Wars over the interpretation (and control) of history – and partition – will almost
cer-tainly continue in coming years (and probably remain the flashpoint for ongoing
1
David Gilmartin (david_gilmartin@ncsu.edu) is Professor of History at North Carolina State University.
This occurred only shortly after Modi had laid the foundation stone for a huge statue of Sardar Patel
in Gujarat, intended to be twice the size of the Statue of Liberty. The finance minister, P. Chadambaran,
however, responded the next day that in fact Sardar Patel had agreed to the par-tition even before
Nehru and Gandhi (Free Press Journal 2013).
conflict that they were during the first BJP period of rule from 1998 to 2004).2 But if
politics in the subcontinent has shaped these debates, so have political developments
in the world more broadly. As Richard Eaton has recently pointed out, interpretations
of partition have carried their own powerful implications for popularized visions of
world history, such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” that have
powerful implications for the con-temporary geopolitics of Islamophobia, not only
in India but in the world more broadly. With partition sometimes portrayed as the
culmination of a civilizational clash between Hinduism and Islam in South Asia
dating back almost a millennium, “Islam” and “Hindu-ism” have themselves become
political actors, shaping history as if they were independent civilizational agents.
“Civilizations,” in such a vision, defined quintessentially by religion, have thus
become, for many, the great actors in the partition drama (Eaton 2014).3
But there is another large-scale drama that often lies behind alternative visions of
par-tition—and one linked to historical debates focusing on the grand, historical
changes asso-ciated not with “civilization,” but with the coming of “modernity.” In
this view, partition’s root causes lay precisely in the very forms of “modern”
knowledge that gave license to the large-scale, “essentializing” cultural visions that
led to the imagining of religions as histor-ical actors at the core of bounded
“civilizations.” Projections of “Hinduism” and “Islam” as distinct, internally coherent
yet mutually opposing systems in fact themselves had their origins, as many historians
have argued, in a vision of “religion” that has far less to do with the longer-term
story of Hindu-Muslim relations in India than with the structures of thought brought
to India by nineteenth-century European thinkers, which deeply shaped British
colonial (and ultimately much Indian) thinking, defining a particular under-standing
of India’s distinctive religious history. And it is commonly argued that it was
pre-cisely this structure of thinking – far more than historically deep-seated
civilizational structures – that ultimately lay behind the subcontinent’s religious
partition in 1947.
No recent book captures more clearly the importance of modernity in transforming
the understandings and meanings of religion than Peter Gottschalk’s Religion, Science
and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (2013). His is not a
book about partition (which is only briefly mentioned), but a book about the ways
modern structures of colonial knowledge (particularly what Gottschalk calls
“scientism”) shaped new forms of religious classifications, creating visions of self-
2
The heightened sensitivity around these issues following Modi’s election was evident in reports less
than two months after his election that Modi had ordered the destruction of a large number of files
relating to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination– an event directly linked to the aftermath of partition.
The government denied that any such Gandhi files were targeted and explained the whole episode
as a matter of cleaning up government offices (see Times of India 2014).
3
Eaton’s comments were prompted by a short essay by Gerald Larson (2014) that appeared to sub-scribe
to this “civilizational” line, and which projected a vision of partition grounded in the almost trans-
historical notion that “Hindu and Muslim religious sensibilities are the antithesis of one another.”
See also the commentaries on this by Peter Gottschalk (2014) and Joya Chatterji (2014).
contained, bounded reli-gions at both the imperial and local levels. Gottschalk shows
the complex significance of this in transforming the meanings of religion in India on
multiple levels, from the village to the institutions of the colonial state (through the
census, separate electorates, etc.). Though the impact of these forms was in some
ways ambiguous and partial, as Gott- schalk shows, their story nevertheless provides
a critical, overarching framework for the history of the religious polarities that
produced partition. Indeed, even without its being directly discussed, the history of
partition looms over the account as a product of these transformations, and their
contradictions – an event that has given them lasting meaning in the subcontinent
(Gottschalk 2013).
To focus on such large-scale narratives as competing frames for grounding studies
of partition is hardly to suggest that most historians would – or have – cast partition’s
story into such bald, un-nuanced form.4 Rather, it is to suggest that such large-scale
historical narratives lurk behind most historical framings of partition, even some of
the most nuanced and sophisticated, and are best brought to the surface. Indeed,
we can find these same overarching frameworks in the opposing justifications and
explanations for partition dating all the way back to the event itself. It has often
been remarked that ex-planations for partition were, from the beginning, closely
linked in India and Pakistan to narratives of nationhood, and this is undoubtedly
true. But national narratives themselves drew sustenance – from the very beginning
– from precisely such efforts to ground and justify the nation within these larger
world-historical framings.
Indeed, these two competing narratives on South Asian history pointing toward
par-tition can be found in their baldest form in the original arguments about partition
put forward by Jinnah and Nehru in the years before and after partition. Muhammad
Ali Jinnah’s two-nation theory projected the argument for Pakistan as one rooted in
a vision of Hinduism and Islam as embodying opposing ways of life – a clash of
civilizations par excellence. Nehru, on the other hand, saw the demand for partition
from a very dif-ferent perspective, but one equally linked to a dynamic vision of the
history of the world tied to the structure of modernity. For him, the driving forces of
modern transformation were science and secularism, which were in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries the most powerful forces transforming the world. But the
progressive effects of these forces on India had been deformed – particularly when it
4
In the case of the “civilizational” narrative, perhaps the most sophisticated and compelling framing
of this argument was first put forward in Ahmad (1964). Ahmad was deeply sensitive to the
com-plexity of relations between Hindus and Muslims, and to the fact that these relations were in no
way predetermined by a unified “Hinduism” or “Islam,” or uniformly hostile. But his larger narrative
was nevertheless one in which the differences were sufficiently strong that Muslims, fearing the loss
of their religious identity through absorption into a deeply Hindu Indian culture, ultimately stressed
their civilizational differences in ways that pointed finally toward the coming of partition. Other
scholars have taken the story of “civilizational” clash in other directions, linking it, for example, to
concepts of civilizational frontiers (see, e.g., Richards 1974). Thanks to Venkat Dhuli- pala for drawing
my attention to this article.
came to religion – by the structure of colonialism itself, through which the British
had manipulated religion and distorted India’s modern development to serve their
own exploitative purposes. Nehru’s ultimate acquiescence in partition was in fact a
product of pragmatic calculation, focused on the necessity of creating a strong secular,
national state to counter these colonial legacies.
PARTITION HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE POSTCOLONIAL MOMENT
Such arguments thus provide a critical backdrop—even today—to partition
histori-ography, but it is useful to begin a short review of the literature with the
1980s, a critical watershed in the development of partition historiography. This was
a time, first in the wake of the break-up of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh
in 1971, and then in the shadow of the Iranian revolution in 1979, of Zia’s attempted
Islamization in Pakistan and of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s,
that thinking about the role of Islam (and Islamic civilization) in the politics of the
modern world began to move in new direc-tions. But it was also a time of internal
political crisis in India. The rapid growth of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, combined
with the outbreak of India’s worst communal violence since partition at the time of
the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assas-sination, had the effect of
fundamentally calling into question Nehru’s old vision of par-tition as a pathology
that development and nationalism would ultimately transcend. And as historians
grappled with these new political realities, new interpretations – and a new historical
interest in partition – began to emerge, building on and reacting to the larger frames
that had shaped views of partition.
These were the years of growing Hindu nationalism in India and the rise of the BJP,
but among secular academic historians, the dominant strand in partition
historiography moved at this time in a very different direction, in part in reaction to
Hindu nationalism, but in part to the growing influence of the subaltern studies
school of scholarship in India and to the broader influence, particularly in the 1990s,
of what was called “postcolonial theory” in the wider academic world. Rejecting
civilizational arguments, these historians continued to see the roots of partition in
the transformations of the colonial era. But, crit-ically, they rejected the old Nehruvian
view that development and nationalism could dis-tance India from its colonial past
and from the causes of partition. To the contrary, these new historians saw
nationalism itself as a product of the same structures of knowledge that Nehru had
seen as producing partition, a far more deep-seated product ofthe structures of
“modern” knowledge that colonialism had brought with it. Indeed, the statist legacies
of Nehruvian nationalism were fully implicated in these structures; little wonder
then that the religious ideas that had produced partition survived in India. On one
level, this inter-pretation thus offered a far bleaker picture for India, and for the fate
of India’s huge Muslim “minority,” than that projected by Nehru. But it led to new
efforts by historians, and not just those of the subaltern school, to remake the meanings
of partition with narra-tives drawn from everyday lives. If there was an antidote to
the interlinked colonial and national narratives that had produced partition’s violence,
this is where it lay.
The most important work on partition among the Subaltern historians in this vein
was probably that produced by Gyanendra Pandey (2001), who wrote powerfully
of the violence accompanying partition, trying to reclaim its meanings for the people
who experienced it. The contrast between nationalist meaning-making on the one
hand, and the lives of the people on the other, was thus the central trope in his
writing. To recover the meaning of partition (or, at times, simply to underscore the
meaningless of partition outside such large state-based narratives), it was necessary,
Pandey argued, to recover the more “malleable, fuzzy, and contextual” forms of
lived community that more fully defined the lives of the people beneath the partition
drama. Given this context, Pandey stressed the responsibility of the historian to overtly
challenge dominant “nationalist” visions, with their emphases on the “objectified,
frozen, and enumerated communities” that the “modernizing” states of the twentieth
century – colonial and na-tional alike – had used to develop their authority (Pandey
2001, 204-5). Not surprisingly, a turn to oral history helped to expand such
perspectives, as reflected most powerfully in the deeply engaged work of Urvashi
Butalia (1998). In exploring both silences and memories, Butalia showed the
complexity of the actual experiences of partition, not only in its immense individual
variation, but perhaps most importantly in the differences of age, gender, class, and
caste. In telling the stories of women, children, and Dalits, Butalia thus probed not
only partition’s violence, but the violence implicit in the imposi-tion of official
narratives on partition’s meanings.
Indeed, her work made clear the difficulty of reducing the experience to fixed,
uni-versal generalizations. This was central also to the pathbreaking work of Ritu
Menon and Kamala Bhasin, whose Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s
Partition (1998) ex-plored the critical role of gender not only in the structure of the
partition violence, but in the reconstruction of subsequent national authority. By
focusing in particular on the attempted “recovery” of women during partition, they
showed not just the tensions between statist narratives and personal experience, but
also the ways that the interactions between these shaped the contours of the world
the partition violence created. Probably the most compelling history in this genre
was Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia
(2007), which recounted the deep-seated impact of partition’s violence and migrations
on the attempted creation of “national” citizens on both sides of the India-Pakistan
border. Tracking the gradual construction of citizenship not only through the
development of passes and passports, but through control over evacuee property,
she shows how contested and uncertain the establishment of territorial nationality
actually was. Zamindar’s account in fact shows dramatically the control over people’s
lives that was inherent in the state rationalities (and essentializing visions of re-ligious
identity) that drove partition. Yet her account also makes clear the ongoing
con-tingencies and tensions that shaped the process, rooted in the multiplicity of
varied human experiences involved. Like Pandey, Zamindar is interested in rescuing
individual experience from a nation constructed through violence and, as Pandey
put it, “the eter-nally fixed collective subject” (Pandey 2001, 204). But she was
concerned not only with the juxtaposition of experience against state-based narratives,
but also with how individ-ual and family agency – and the construction of new
forms of state authority in the years after partition – were deeply intertwined.
Work on the impact of partition – a moment exemplary in twentieth-century history
of the violent consequences of new, modern “borders and boundaries” – has thus
made partition into a critical subject for the development of larger postcolonial theory.
Given its violent place at the beginning of the era of decolonization (linked to a
normative world of bounded nation-states), partition has thus come for many to
exemplify the human costs of the attempted twentieth-century realization of the
“national” idea, its dislocations and vi-olence representing, in the words of one
historian, an important “site of meditation in postcolonial theory” (Sivasundaram
2013,335).5 It has thus been a focus for new direc-tions in literature, film, and art in
the decades since the 1980s, and one easily linked to the larger twentieth-century
history of religious conflicts, ethnic identity-making, and geno-cide, from the Jewish
Holocaust to Rwanda to Bosnia to Palestine.6 This has particularly been the case in
studies of migration, with the history of migration as a trope for the deep
contradictions inherent in processes of boundary fixation that have in actual practice
un-moored millions of people – and with vast human consequences.7 Within India
itself, the story of partition as a trauma defined precisely by its simultaneous settling
and unsettling has been perhaps most clearly traced by Bhaskar Sarkar (2009) in his
history of the influ-ence of partition on film in India. Central to such stories of partition
have been the deconstruction of the great narratives of nationalist becoming that
had shaped earlier history, with a powerful concomitant effort to juxtapose this
with history “from the margins,” from individual experience – as a counterpoint to
the large narrative teleologies with which partition has continued to have such
powerful associations.
5
Sivasundaram’s context is the “partition” of Sri Lanka from India- a separate, very different, and far
more long-term (though not totally unrelated) South Asian partition, which he argues did not
become such a site.
6
There is a large amount of literature here, but for a recent overview see Kabir (2014), who also links
the literature on partition to the later emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. A recent work on perhaps
the most important literary figure who illuminated par tition’s human costs, Saadat Hasan Manto, is
Jalal (2013). The new importance of partition is inspiring new directions in art, is illustrated by the
recent exhibit called Lines of Control, curated by Hammad Nasar and mounted in London and
Karachi, and then in larger form in the United States with other twentieth-century partitions included
(see Dadi and Nasar 2012, especially Dadi 2012 and Ramaswamy 2012).
7
There are a number of important works to mention here; to cite only some of the most important:
Ansari (2005), Chatterji (term patterns of migration into an era of boundary-making of which partition
was a symbolic lynchpin, see Amrith (2013).2007), Roy (2012), and Talbot (2006). An example of a
work not focused on partition, but detailing shifting long.
SEARCHING FOR PARTITION’S CAUSES
And yet, perhaps ironically, one result of this powerful trend in partition
historiogra-phy has been to push scholars away from a larger engagement with
partition’s causes. The projection of a vision of partition as rooted in the emergence
of fixed boundaries of iden-tity associated with modernity, in both its colonial and
national forms, remains an implicit backdrop to the boundary-making and violence
of partition in virtually all these narra-tives. But the relationship of this to popular
agency has remained far more complex – and politically loaded – when it is applied
to the events leading up to partition.8 With the everyday agency of the people in
most postcolonial literature cast as the antithesis of the statist boundary-making
that produced partition’s violence, where could historians find space for popular
agency in the actual making of partition? If subaltern historians, such as Pandey,
have noted the powerful role of colonial knowledge in shaping the new forms of
religious conflict, or “communalism,” that provided a critical backdrop to partition
in late colonial India, they have at the same time been hesitant to buy into the common
Nehruvian dismissal of such communalism as a manifestation simply of primitive
passions, a colonial deformation of the progressive narrative of secular nation-alism
(see Pandey 1990). Yet, for obvious political reasons, they have also been extremely
wary of turning the history of communalism itself into a story of popular agency, for
that might simply provide fodder for right-wing Hindu nationalists with their own
erasures of popular agency in the name of essentialized religious – and civilizational–
identities.9
None of this is to suggest that historians have been inattentive to the actual story of
shifting religious ideas under British rule at both popular and elite levels – and to the
powerful and complex currents of religious reform and reimagining that marked
the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries. Quite to the contrary, there is now a very
8
Pandey’s far greater interest in the consequences of partition, and the varied meanings it took on in
memory, than in partition’s causes, was suggested by his providing a chapter in his book effectively
summarizing the complex arguments about the events leading to partition in 1947, but then adding
in a footnote, “this ‘summary’ is intended for the reader who feels handicapped because of unfamiliarity
with the subcontinent and sub-continental politics in the last years of British rule. Those familiar
with the main lines of that history may wish to move directly to chapter 3" (Pandey 2001, 20), as if the
causes of partition were totally ancillary to a discussion of its impact, which is his main concern. As
Joya Chatterji put it effectively in describing such attitudes, the new works “tended to replicate,
somewhat uncritically, their subjects’ representation of themselves as innocent and passive victims
of events beyond their control. Never directly addressing questions of why and how partition
occurred (and adding little, therefore, to our understanding of those questions),” she notes, “this
school implicitly identified ‘statist’, nationalist and imperial leaders and their policies as the cause
of the personal human tragedies attendant on partition” (Chatterji 2009, 215).
9
One can see the dynamics here though not directly in writing on the historical causes of partition in
the more recent controversies surrounding works that have taken seriously the agency of women
associated with right-wing religious positions (see, e.g., Iqtidar 2011; Mahmood 2005). Such issues
have also shaped controversies on women and Hindu nationalism, and have been explored by
Amrita Basu and others (see, e.g., Jeffery and Basu 1998).
large body of historical research on changing forms of religious thinking and
organization in colonial India, with an emphasis both on the complex and often
mediated impact of colonial knowledge structures on these processes, and on their
highly contextualized character. Historians and scholars of religion in South Asia
have explored with great sophistication the wide variety of religious and cultural
movements shaped by the transformations ex-perienced by India under colonial
rule, tracing interactions of such movements with new systems of law; with the
spread of new networks of print, publication, and travel; and with new structures
of colonial politics. But, strikingly, most historians have shied away from drawing
straight lines from the history of religious reform and revivalism to the grand acts of
state-making that defined partition. Indeed, there has been a tendency instead among
secular-minded academic historians to turn the avoidance of such “teleologies” in
India’s religious history, that is, of narratives leading toward partition, into a scholarly
virtue.10 If one were to characterize a dominant strand in historical writing on the
immediate coming of partition it would instead focus on the politics of elite conflict
in late colonial India in the 1930s and 1940s, and to the elite manipulation of religion
(and popular pol-itics) as the central key to partition’s coming. Though there have
certainly been some exceptions to this, particularly for writing on Bengal (see, e.g.,
Hashmi 1992), popular religion has generally remained in studies of partition’s causes
an important but little-explored backdrop to such elite maneuvering. Such an
emphasis has taken many forms. Most prominently, the growth of the Muslim League
has been widely projected as a vehicle of elite Muslims (both landlords and those
with sharif background) seeking to protect their interests as colonial devolution went
forward.11 Whether driven by their own preoccupations with religion as a deeply
held idiom of order, or by their calculated, instrumental use of religion to manipulate
the masses, the movement for Pakistan in such arguments arose largely from elite
political machinations, and only took on the character of a popular movement in its
10
Though speculative leaps between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious conflict
and the coming of partition (or the coming of Muslim “separatism”) were at one time common,
more recent historical works have tended to stress contingency, and the avoidance of teleologies.
Still, there is a substantial amount of literature that stresses the hardening of religious boundaries
that resulted from the wide range of religious reform movements marking the last century of
colonial rule, movements fedby the expanding world of polemics and print under the colonial
regime. For one of the most compelling of these (on the Sikhs), see Oberoi (1994). In recent years,
however, there have also been a number of important works suggesting the ways that modern print
culture, rather than simply spurring bounded communal visions, could also encourage other forms
of cross-cutting, non-communal (or “secular”) identities. Important works in this genre include
Datla (2013), Green (2012), and Mir (2010). Green (2012) stresses the ways that modern economies of
print encouraged multiple forms of religious identity, and not simply the boundary-conscious
forms of reformist Islam. None of these works suggest, however (since this is not their focus), how
these arguments relate to the causes of partition.
11
In its most extreme form, the argument that the Muslim League and the Pakistan movement were
driven by elite material interests has been used to deny any significant role for religious ideology
at all (see, e.g., Alavi 1986).
final, climactic stages.12 Similar argu-ments have shaped historical discussions of
the role of Hindu communalism in partition as well, often linked to the protection of
high-caste interests. This has particularly marked argument on the demands by
Bengali and Punjabi Hindus for the partition of those provinces once the decision to
create Pakistan had been accepted, with “Hindu” unity and “Hindu” interests
mobilized as a frame to protect dominant elite positions (see Chatterji 1994).13
Such historical work has been important. The emphasis on elite politics has had its
own, considerable scholarly value, most particularly for moving the study of partition
out of the realm of “Hindu-Muslim conflict” broadly defined, and grounding it instead
in the politics of particular – times and places a critical historical agenda. A focus on
elites has in fact helped to tie the politics leading to partition to analyses of the
political structures of late colonial India more broadly, emphasizing the shifting
structures of al-liances and conflicts among local elites of different sorts, and the
shifting bonds linking them, largely through patronage structures, both to the state
and to networks of clients. Such networks and connections were particularly
important in the context of elec-tions, which became an important structural feature
of British Indian politics in the years after 1919, and particularly after 1937. As
election studies have shown, whatever the broader contexts for the religious conflicts
leading to partition, structures of local politics, and the connections of local patronage,
rivalry, and alliance, remained important to vir-tually all politics in India, even in
the run-up to partition.14 Indeed, this perspective points toward the importance of
understanding the politics of elections more broadly in analyzing partition’s coming.
Moreover, a focus on elite negotiations has helped to link the literature on partition
to the larger, comparative literature on the worldwide transitions represented by
decolo-nization. The comparative analysis of the roles of elites in processes of
decolonization has in fact provided a critical frame for understanding how
decolonization took significantly different forms in different contexts, an important
element in the comparative study also of violence as a critical element in the end of
empire.15 Studies of the relationships of elites to the state and to networks of clients
have also shaped the comparative analysis of distinctive British approaches to cultural
12
Paul Brass has written a range of books analyzing the determinative importance of elite/state
structures in communal conflict and violence (e.g., Brass 2003). For the view that Muslim elites have
responded to a normative moral framework in emphasizing the preeminence of Muslim community
in politics, see Shaikh (1989). A few historians have seen this elite conflict in terms of the unevenness
of economic development as well.
13
For Punjab, see Nair (2011); for the United Provinces, see Gould (2004). The operation of caste
conflicts, including questions surrounding the political affiliations and alliances of Dalits, remains
a critical focus here, and is beginning to be the subject of important research. For Dalit politics in
relation to partition, see, for example, Bandyopadhyay (2000), Rawat (2001), and Sen (2012b). For an
overview, see also Sen (2012a).
14
For election studies, see Talbot (1980), and, for a discussion of the intersection between such local
rivalries and the rhetoric of religious nationalism, Gilmartin (1998).
15
This is a large amount of literature, but for an old but important framing in these terms, see Smith
(1981).
representation, which may explain, at least in part, the particular British openness
to partition as a solution to the conflicts unleashed by the coming of decolonization—
and point to the importance of studying partitions as a broader phenomenon.16
But a focus on elite politics—and local and regional structures—though critically
im-portant in making clear the many, varying local contexts for the politics leading
up to par-tition, has only very partially addressed the problem of explaining the role
of religion as the larger catalyst – and idiom – for the partition drama. Indeed,
historical emphases on elite agency have in some ways underwritten the ongoing –
and still widespread – polit-ical game in South Asia of apportioning “blame” for
partition among elite actors for pur-poses of competitive national self-definition,
whether the focus is Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, Patel, or, indeed, Lord Mountbatten.17
Particular elite leaders have thus been attacked for manipulating easily mobilized
religious passions, or for failing to adequately respond, but the existence of distinct
“Hindu” and “Muslim” communities is usually taken as a given. Influenced by
postcolonial scholarship, historians have been deeply sen-sitized in recent decades
to the “constructed” character of religious communities. But in much of this literature,
the underlying historical causes of a partition based specifically on religion have
nevertheless been lightly glossed, and usually assumed to relate back either to a
deep-seated civilizational division between Hinduism and Islam, or to a narrative of
religious boundaries hardened by colonial processes of boundary-making and divide-
and-rule, with little attempt to bridge the differences between these. Popular re-ligion
is often portrayed simply as a world that slipped out of control, as the violence of
late 1946 and 1947 spread.
BETWEEN CIVILIZATION AND MODERNITY
How, then, can historians develop an approach to partition that integrates causes
and results, and that historicizes the operation of religion as a key force in the coming
of par-tition, linked both to larger civilizational histories, and to the reorientations of
16
Critiques of Britain’s resort to partition are thus numerous; the latest stinging critique of Britishfailures
in precipitating India’s partition is Wolpert (2006). For a discussion of the boundary- drawing
process itself in these terms, see Chester (2009).
17
A good example is the furor over the book on Jinnah published in 2010 by the BJP leader (and former
foreign minister), Jaswant Singh, which led to his expulsion from the party, and, at least temporarily,
a ban on the book in Gujarat, due to his relatively positive portrayal of Jinnah (see Singh 2010). This
came several years after the widespread criticism of the BJP leader L. K. Advani for visiting Jinnah’s
tomb in Karachi in 2005 and praising his secularist approach. As Mridu Rai (2006) has suggested, the
controversy this engendered must be seen against the backdrop of not only the demonizing of
Jinnah in Indian school textbooks encouraged by the Hindu right, but also, and perhaps even more
importantly, his demonizing in those of “secular” Congress orientation following the old Nehruvian
line.
modernity that shaped the critical decades leading to the end of British rule? And
how can this help historians to bridge the continuing gap between elite and popular
history? In fact, a critical pointer toward such new departures was provided many
decades ago by the important reinterpretation of partition first put forward by
Ayesha Jalal in her book on Jinnah, The Sole Spokesman (1985). This was a book
very much in the mode of elite historiography. In his own discussion of partition
violence, Gyan Pandey (1994) in fact dismissed Jalal’s book as essentially a “Great
Man” history, focused overwhelmingly on the figure of Jinnah himself, a charge to
which Jalal (1996) responded by pointing out the elite bias in Pandey’s own
ap-proaches to partition’s causes. Yet it was quite true that her book – like most elite-
oriented histories – paid little attention to religion at the popular level.
Yet for all its elite focus, Jalal’s approach was critically important in pointing toward
the complexity of the Pakistan vision, a vision that fit neatly into neither a frame
defined by colonial knowledge (shaped by essentialized visions of the census-
enumerated Muslim community), nor one defined by long-term Islamic civilizational
history, as Jinnah himself sometimes framed it. Though she did not frame her own
argument with this dichotomy, her book nevertheless made clear that Jinnah’s struggle
to project an image of a unified Muslim community (of which he could claim to be
“sole spokesman”) – a struggle that prompted the Pakistan demand – was part of a
process aimed toward creating an image of united community in the face of the
considerable divisions among Muslims shaped by the innumerable cross-cutting
identities that defined Muslim life and Muslim politics within the structure of the
British Raj. Central to the dynamics of the Pakistan movement were thus the
conflicting pulls on Muslims of multiple identities, foremost among which were the
provincial and linguistic allegiances – particularly in Punjab and Bengal – that had
gained heightened meaning as the British had devolved power to the provinces after
1919. Indeed, Jalal’s key insight was that Jinnah’s image of a united Muslim
community (with himself as “sole spokesman” and “Pakistan” as a catchword),
grew out of the complex intersection of multiple, cross-cutting identities within the
imperial context. If projected as a “nation,” Pakistan was an idea profoundly shaped
by the structure of empire and the complex framings of identity within it.18
This was hardly an idea immediately followed up on by other historians. Though
Jalal’s book proved influential in shaping subsequent writing on the partition
negotiations, its influence on the broader contours of partition historiography was
somewhat limited by the book’s own framing as a study of elite negotiations, and by
the consequent tendency of some historians to take it – mistakenly – as an argument
simply about Jinnah’s negoti-ating strategy, suggesting that he used the Pakistan
concept as a “bargaining chip” rather than as a clear-cut demand for an independent
18
This reflected in some ways Jalal’s affinity with the so-called “Cambridge School” of historians,
focusing on imperial structure, with which her mentor, Anil Seal, was closely associated.
state.19 The most immediate significance of Jalal’s book was thus to launch a debate
on the relative responsibility for partition of Jinnah versus Nehru. If Jinnah could be
projected as willing to accept a vision of “Pakistan” that did not necessarily involve
complete “national” independence (as was the case, for example, in his acceptance,
at least temporarily, of the 1946 Cabinet Mission plan, which envisioned a multi-
tiered but united India), then historians could argue that it was Nehru, with his
quest for a more powerful, central, “secular” state, who was ultimately responsible
for the final “national” and bounded form of the partition settlement that ultimately
took place.20
But the longer-term significance of Jalal’s case lay precisely in its opening up for
questioning of the interconnections between civilizational ideas (rooted in the long-
term history of “empire”) and the projected “modernity” of the “nation” as a frame
for making sense of Pakistan. Emerging out of the negotiation of multiple forms of
difference and identity under the British regime, Pakistan could hardly be seen as a
product simply of national boundary-making. And indeed, the emergence of the
Pakistan idea within a complex imperial environment has pointed toward
explorations of its intellectual roots in a far longer history of civilizational tensions
between unifying ideals and the world’s myriad forms of division and interest, long
embedded within South Asian (and indeed, worldwide) imperial structures. Such
concerns have been reflected, for example, in work on Muhammad Iqbal, as the
supposed “intellectual father” of Pakistan. As Iqbal Sevea (2012) has shown in his
recent study, to see Iqbal as the father of a Pakistan nation- state, in any generally
recognizable sense, is a strange conceit, for he was hardly a cham-pion of territorial
nationalism (in spite of his early call for a separate state in northwest India). This
was so because the power of modernity for Iqbal lay less in structures of ob-jectified
knowledge and boundary-drawing, than in the rise of active individualism, a concept
that for him had deep roots also in Islam’s civilizational history. As a frame for state-
making, “religion” (and religious identity) thus had complex meanings, for state-
making mobilized “religion” both as a frame for imagining worldly identities
(through census enumeration, separate electorates, etc.), and as a frame for new
visions of moral order and progress linked far less to communal identities than to
individual aspi-ration and its expression through new imaginings of autonomy and
sovereignty. If Iqbal was thus deeply influenced by modernity (as reflected in his
strong engagement with modern European philosophy), his ideas on Pakistan were
also structured by far older civilizational obsessions with the intersection of morality
and power, that is, of “re-ligion” not simply as a marker of identity, but as a moral
19
This distortion of Jalal’s argument is evident, for example, in Devji (2013, 7). It should also be noted,
however, that Jalal’s own attempts to frame her arguments in terms of the larger development of
Muslim religious thinking in British India were much less successful than was her book on Jinnah
(see, Jalal 2000).
20
Much of the controversy has focused on Jinnah’s and Nehru’s reactions to the Cabinet Mission Plan
of 1946, and, to a lesser extent, on their responses to the United Sovereign Bengal proposal of early
1947 (see, e.g., Charkabarty 2003).
frame for ordering worldly dif-ference, and one intimately related at the same time
to forms of individual striving and attachment – ideas that survived, as Naveeda
Khan (2012) has argued, in popular concep-tions of the meaning of Pakistan after
1947. 21
Perhaps most important, however, Iqbal’s ideas, though in some ways grounded in
the last turbulent decades of the British Raj, were also a product in a broad sense of
the larger, world-wide crises of sovereignty and political order that marked the first
half of the twentieth century, when Iqbal wrote. Questions about the relationship
between conceptions of civilization and the structures of thinking marking modernity
were not in this era in any way peculiar to India, a critical backdrop for partition
histori-ography. A critical framing for this has been provided by Jane Burbank and
Frederick Cooper’s (2010) recent book on the long-term, worldwide history of empires
and their fates in modern times. Lying behind Burbank and Cooper’s book is a reaction
against the old, normalized vision of the twentieth century as the great era of
transformation from “empires to nations,” a narrative in which the history of
decolonization (with all its varying local complications, including those leading to
India’s partition) is usually em-bedded. Here the era of the two great twentieth-
century world wars is the usual turning point.22 But as Burbank and Cooper make
clear, whatever the ongoing challenges to empire rooted in nationalist ideologies,
structures of imperial rule – and empire as a frame for managing difference – can
hardly be seen as attenuated or disappearing during this time. Whatever the new
“nationalist” forms of imagining linking distinctive “peoples” to distinctive territories
during this era, structures of empire continued to be central not only to notions of
order and individual aspiration, but also to the complex or-dering of multiple, cross-
cutting forms of identities. What is critical to partition’s back-drop is that this was
not simply a matter of power politics, but also of structures of thinking – and of the
still vital meanings attached to concepts of “civilization.” “Civilizing” ideals (even
utopian ideals), defining the roles of intermediary elites in linking particular-ized
local groups to exemplary centers – long central to imperial structure (as Burbank
and Cooper show) – continued, in other words, to provide a worldwide backdrop to
the complex conflicts of the era.
From this perspective, the story of partition must be seen in relation to the larger
climate of uncertainties about new forms of community, linked both to new,
objectifying ideas about “national” communities and territories and to the older
structurings of differ-ence within imperial frameworks, that marked this era. As
Faisal Devji (2013) has noted, the period after World War I was one of widespread
21
This might also point toward the tendencies toward a utopian perfectionism in the meanings
attached to the promise of Pakistan, tendencies that have divorced Pakistan’s meanings from the
complex contextual realities of social life, and helped in some quarters to drive a sometimes violent
strand in religious sectarianism.
22
The interpretive power of this narrative was perhaps best captured in Daniel Brower’s (1999) popular
world history textbook.
intellectual ferment in thinking on these issues in India, prompted not just by
projections of the “nation” as an alternative to empire, but by the effort to reimagine
empire itself as a vehicle for new forms of com-munity and cultural difference. In
the international sphere, this was the era in which both communism and fascism
emerged as new (and in some ways reformulated “impe-rial”) frames for imagining
world order, ideologies that had important reverberations on thinking in India.23 It
was also an era in which the political and intellectual problem of the “minority” –
an issue critical to the imagining of “nations” – came to take on new meanings on a
global level, an issue crystallized as a (perhaps the) central “problem” in world
order in the peace conferences after World War I. Devji (2013) provides a foundation
for placing the Pakistan idea in this worldwide context.24
The importance of a worldwide framing for the Pakistan idea lies also at the heart of
Aamir Mufti’s (2007) important book linking the development of Muslim “minority”
pol-itics in India with the intellectual history of the Jewish “minority question” in
Europe, throwing the issue onto an even broader, long-term historical canvas. Though
Mufti does not directly explore the causes of partition, his work points clearly to the
longer-term tensions between universality and particularism that were inherent in
the concept of “mi-nority,” thus making the concept an important touchstone for
the larger problems in the reimaginings of state authority that marked this critical
era generally. To delineate “mi-norities” was to define state authority as an edifice
that stood above society’s particular-istic cultural divisions (in the manner of empires)
and yet, at the very same time, it was to buy into the enumerated and bounded
cultural divisions that defined bounded “peoples” as the inheritors of “objective”
reason and the makers of nation-states. Little wonder that the definition of
“minorities” was both a tool of reasoned state-making – and of claims to universal
authority – even as it was at the same time a wound, an impos-sible challenge to the
integrity of the people as the fount of sovereignty and the bearers of that universalism
(Mufti 2007). In his account of the “Jewish question,” Mufti thus sug-gests how the
meaning of “minority” as a larger, worldwide phenomenon provides a crit-ical clue
to the story of Pakistan and of partition, caught between the universalism of empire
and new forms of particularism critical to the idea of the “nation.”
23
The relationship of communism and fascism to the forms of thinking leading to the coming of
partition is only beginning to be explored as a topic in intellectual history (see, e.g., Daechsel 2006a,
2006b). For a recent exploration of the relationship of communist ideas to conceptions of Pakistan,
see Ali (2011). Central also here is Vali Nasr’s (1994) study of the Jamaat-i Islami and its links to
visions of the Leninist intellectual “vanguard.”
24
For all its contributions, however, Devji’s (2013) book also suggests the potential pitfalls in such an
approach. Stressing the ways that the intellectual currents leading toward Pakistan were divorced
from engagement with the realities of Indian society and politics, Devji himself adopts a style of
intellectual history that also largely ignores these connections. The result is a history that, particularly
in its comparisons with Jewish Zionism, emphasizes the idea of Pakistan as a projection onto a
“new” homeland, while largely ignoring the critical importance to the history of the Pakistan
movement of the Muslims who already lived in the areas that became Pakistan. The result, for all the
book’s strengths, is a deeply distorted vision of Pakistan’s meanings.
Perhaps the most important agendas that such worldwide perspectives have opened
are those that relate to the development of a more nuanced understanding of a
“civiliza-tional” vision of Islam in shaping the coming of Pakistan. And the key to
this lies not simply in perspectives that cast bounded “civilizational” visions as a
product of the boundary- making structure of modern forms of knowledge, but rather
in those that also analyze the reverse: the ways that “civilizational” frames of
imagining have shaped the structuring of modernity. The history of the idea of the
Khilafat in the twentieth century – and its re-lationship to the demand for Pakistan
– provides a good example. The power of the idea of the Khilafat as a civilization
center was dramatized by the history of the Khilafat move-ment in India from 1919
to 1923. Though a movement of civilizational adherence tran-scending colonial or
national boundaries, the Khilafat cause was, in concrete terms, seemingly eclipsed
by the abolition of the Khilafat in the name of the bounded “national” ideal of Ataturk
in Turkey itself (Minault 1982). But this hardly ended the widespread pull of the
idea of a civilizational center that the movement embodied – even among “nation-
alists” – and it significantly influenced many perceptions of the meaning of Pakistan.
Indeed, the importance of such civilizational ideals in shaping the meanings attached
to Pakistan has been suggested by Venkat Dhulipala’s 2014) recent book on the
Pakistan movement in the United Provinces. As many historians have argued, there
was a powerful millenarian current in popular support for Pakistan in the final
years before the British departure. But as Dhulipala argues, this should not be seen
simply as an inchoate, popular religious enthusiasm, but rather as linked to the
complex intersection of older religious ideas and the powerful vision of the modern,
territorially bounded nation state: an intersection explicated perhaps most clearly in
the ideas of the most prominent pro-Pakistan alim, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani
of Deoband. For Usmani, the cre-ation of a new nation-state in the areas defined by
census-based Muslim majorities in India would establish a new civilizational center
for modern Muslims in all of India (and, indeed, of the world), a “new Medina,” as
he put it – a beacon carrying meaning beyond the borders in which it was established.
It was, in other words, a nation-state encased structurally in a broader “civilizing”
vision. And this explained why Pakistan re-ceived such strong support among
Muslims even in areas such as the United Provinces that would not be part of it.
Usmani’s vision thus represented not the rejection of the idea of a territorial nation-
state, but a framing of its meaning in broader civilizational terms (Dhulipala 2014).25
Indeed, if such civilizational perspectives on the “nation” were powerful among
Muslims in the run-up to partition, similar perspectives also influenced many Hindu
na-tionalists as well. It is here that one can see the roots of important strands of
25
This can also be traced at other levels, for example in the “Khilafat-i Pakistan” vision popular among
some Muslim student groups in Punjab at the time of partition (see Gilmartin 1988, 208-10). Such
ideas shaped some thinking among Sufi groups as well. See, for example, Rozehnal (2007, 102-25),
who explores such visions of Pakistan in the post-partition writings of the Chishti Sabiri silsilah,
particularly in the writings of Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani.
thinking among some Hindu and Muslim writers alike stressing visions of “Hinduism”
and “Islam” as bounded, competing civilizations.26 But – and this is critical – such
ideas cannot be viewed as separate from the search in these years for larger
civilizational visions – for cosmologies of order for framing human difference that
transcended all essentialized identities, including those defined by “religion” as
particularized communi-ties. To explore this involves focusing on “civilization” not
simply as another word for “identity,” but as a framework within which large,
unifying cosmological visions served to order the worlds of mundane human
difference. Such visions influenced, for example, the seemingly secular Nehru as he
projected a moral meaning for India as a new, territorially bounded nation-state
that, at the very same time, transcended its bounded particularity, and was intimately
bound up with a simultaneously scientific and spiritual universalism linked to an
idealized vision of “humanity.”27 This indeed is what, for him, gave India’s national
independence in 1947 its worldwide significance – and it was a vision that resonated
for many with universalizing projections of Hindu and Muslim civilization as well.
Cast in such terms, we perhaps need to explore more fully what we might call larger
“cosmologies of order” (whether in the work of intellec-tuals or in popular
understandings), in order to understand the mid-twentieth-century pressures (linked
to both scientific and divine cosmologies) that produced framings of le-gitimate
sovereignty and order (simultaneously “secular” and “religious”) in the decades
leading to partition.
CONCLUSION
None of this, of course, is to pinpoint the causes of partition. Why the end of British
rule produced a massive – and wrenching – division on the basis of religion, a division
that reverberates to the present day, remains a central question to grapple with. Yet
it is clear that moving beyond explanations of partition rooted simply in images of
long-standing Hindu-Muslim cultural and civilizational difference, or in images of a
modernity that fixed borders and identities into bounded compartments, is important
– even as neither of these can be ignored. There are two ways in which the need to
ground partition in its larger contexts is critical.
First, as a spectacular moment of state-making, partition must be grounded in longer
histories of state construction, legitimacy, and sovereign authority in South Asia. It
is for this reason that paying attention to the civilizational framings of the role of
religion in par-tition is important, but this also requires being cognizant of the critical
distinction between religion as an identity, and religion as a guide to the cosmological
26
There is a large amount of literature on Hindu nationalism and the concept of Hindutva. The
distinctive roots of this as a “civilizational” concept have been explored by many; for one recent
article looking at V D. Savarkar as a revolutionary, see Chaturvedi (2013).
27
For an important explication of this, particularly in relation to the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, see the important book by Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One
World (2013).
framing of sov-ereign order. To understand how these came together in the debates
– and in the violence – of partition requires longer-term explorations of the links
between these in state-making. Future interpretations of partition inevitably will be
influenced by broader analyses of the breaks and continuities in ideas about order,
sovereignty, and the structuring of difference marking the colonial era. But as Indrani
Chatterjee (2013, 355) puts it, historians cannot be content “to see ‘locality’ and
‘nation,’ where their predecessors had seen a ‘cosmos.’” Indeed, it is already clear
that a wide range of historical work that reevaluates the transformations of early
modernity in India is reshap-ing how historians think about the longer-term
trajectories of state-making and state power in South Asia. Such work cannot help
but influence over the long term how historians think about partition as well.28
But second, and equally important, the history of partition must also be grounded in
the larger worldwide trends of the particular era in which it occurred, the decades
from 1919 to 1947. The grounding of South Asian history in larger, worldwide
narratives is, in fact, already an ongoing and important trend in South Asian history
writing, as in histor-ical writing more generally. But it is critically important that
this was not only an era of major changes in India, with the rise of Gandhi and the
nationalist movement, Jinnah, and the Muslim League, but an important era of crisis
and uncertainty in the worldwide ordering of states more broadly, and one in which
the nature of sovereignty and legiti-mate rule – and the meaning of the “nation” –
were open to major debate and contesta-tion. In a counterpoint to the longer horizons
of South Asian state-making, this was an era in which the meanings of “civilization”
and the “nation” – and the management of human difference—were open to contest
on a worldwide scale, and the importance ofthis for the framing of partition is
inescapable. In critical ways, partition was an event of worldwide significance,
precisely because it was an event both with deep historical roots and with roots in
the distinctive uncertainties of this particular era. It is little wonder that the
in-terpretation of partition continues to evoke controversy, not only among politicians
in South Asia, but among academic historians as well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Venkat Dhulipala for his helpful comments and suggestions on this
essay.
*******
28
A large number of works have explored this topic, but perhaps most importantand representative
are the works of C. A. Bayly, most notably his Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and
Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (1999). Important also is Moin (2012), and works by
Sheldon Pollock, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Indrani Chatterjee, and others, which point to the intersection
of cosmologies of sovereignty in the late precolonial period that cannot be easily contained by
visions of bounded religions.
DIMENSIONS AND DYNAMICS OF VIOLENCE DURING
PARTITION OF INDIA
Chandni Saxena
The violence during the Partition in 1947 was the final result of a long series of
unreasonable demands by the Muslim League and the concessions given by the British
and the Congress. The more the Congress became pliant, the more belligerent the
Muslim League grew. Lucknow Pact, considered to be the result of more amicable
relations between League and Congress, was actually a surrender by the latter to
Muslim communalism and separatism. Gandhi clubbed religion and politics with
the purpose of erecting a united front of the two most populous communities in
India against the colonial rule - thus clearing grounds for a secular front. The elections
of 1937 were a watershed in the politics of Muslim League. Jinnah failed to achieve
Muslim solidarity on a communal basis. The results of the elections clearly showed
the inclinations of the Indian Muslims by revealing that even the Muslim majority
provinces refused to accept Jinnah’s leadership or the communal agenda of the
League. Only 4.4 percent Muslims who went to polls voted for Muslim League. In
Bihar, the Central Provinces, the North-west Frontier Province and Orissa, the League
was mercilessly routed as not a single member of the party was elected. In Punjab,
only two members, of whom one later resigned from the Muslim League, were
returned as against eighty-four non-League Muslims. The party had some degree of
success in Bengal, Bombay, Madras and the United Provinces. But in these provinces
also, the number of non-League Muslim candidates was greatly in excess of the
League candidates. The Congress swept the polls and found itself in a position to
form ministries in eight out of eleven provinces (all except Punjab, Bengal and Sind).1
For the Muslim League, the results of the elections were a shock as it proved that a
majority of Muslim masses had rejected Jinnah, his cpmmunal leadership and his
claim of Muslim League being the sole representative of Indian Muslims. The party
was completely left out of the political game. This rout left several of its members
hugely disappointed as they expected to be a part of the provincial ministries in case
the party won. Now it was no longer possible. Still, the lure of ministership was too
big to avoid. In the United Provinces, Chaudhary Khaliquzzaman, the erstwhile
Congressman and now a newly-elected leader of the Muslim League Party in U.P.
Assembly and Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan, the president of the U.P. Muslim
League approached the Congress with the offer to form a coalition of sorts with
Muslim League in U.P. But the prospects of such a coalition could not materialize.
Nehru wrote to Rajendra Prasad on 21" July 1937 that the offer of Khaliquzzaman
“was worth having if it could be secured. This was the winding up of Muslim League
group in the U.P. and its absorption in the Congress. This would have a great effect
not only in U.P. but all over India and even outside. This would mean a free field for
our work without communal troubles. This would knock over the British Government
which relied so much on these troubles.” But Nehru was in a fix. He wrote in the
same letter, “We disliked taking in two persons... We feared reaction among the
Congressmen in general, and Congress Muslims in particular, who would have been
irritated at their being excluded in preference for those who had been fighting the
Congress. What of those who have severed their connection with the League and
joined us? What of those Muslims of ours who had stood by us during all these
years? What of the Jamiat which was supporting us and opposing the League? Were
we going to ignore those who were with us and favour our opponents who joined
us just to get the spoils of office? And then there was the risk of conflicts arising
within the ministry and the party-conflict(s) of a communal or political nature-
resulting in resignations and creation of an awkward situation.”
Congress thus, decided that before inducting the Muslim League members in U.P.
ministry, it would offer such stringent conditions to them like the Muslim League
group would be wound up, all Muslim League member would become full members
of the Congress party, all of them would abide to the discipline of Congress party, in
by- elections, no separate candidates, all support to Congress etc. But the Congress
did not ask the U.P. Leaguers to severe all their connections with the parent Muslim
League. Thus this position required dual loyalty. Congress expected that this would
not last and the U.P. Leaguers, if they accepted the conditions of the Congress,
would ultimately break away from the parent League, thereby weakening the League
on the national level. But Khaliquzzaman declined to accept the conditions of
Congress and thus the prospects of Congress and League working together for the
country fell apart. The two rivals and adversaries, who had so far stood side by side,
had by 1937 came face to face. The time for any compromise between Congress and
League had passed and the time for direct confrontation had arrived. Long before
Congress handed over its stringent conditions to Khaliquzzaman and Muhammad
Ismail Khan, Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, a Punjabi residing in Cambridge, was, in 1933,
evolving a scheme of the Partition of India and Muhammad Iqbal was, in May -June
1937, was writing to Jinnah that they should ‘ignore Muslim-minority provinces’
and instead concentrate on demanding 4 a separate federation of Muslim (majority)
provinces in the north-west and the north-east’. Jinnah, troubled by the results of
1937 elections, was evolving a much more violent and openly aggressive scheme to
win over the Muslim masses to his side. He wrote to Governor Brabourne in Bombay
in early June 1937 ‘of his plans for consolidating the Muslim League throughout
India’ and of his ‘policy .... To preach communalism morning, noon and night... and
to teach the Muslims generally “to stand on their own feet and make themselves
independent of the Hindus”.1 The lines of war had been drawn and India was in its
way to much more violent days than it had ever seen before in its long history.
Jinnah was now an angry man. In his frustration, he exhibited violence in every
decision, action and word which he took against Congress. He gave unrestrained
expression to his sentiments against Gandhi and Nehru. He urged the Indian Muslims
to organize, consolidate and become one against the Hindu front. In the Lucknow
session of All India Muslim League in October 1937, the party, changed its creed
from ‘Full Responsible Government’ to ‘Full Independence’. It is to be noted that the
session was attended by Sir Saadulla Khan, the premier of Assam, who had hitherto
refused to fall into the line with Jinnah. This indicated that some of those Muslim
who were earlier not following the communal lines, were now toeing the lines of
Muslim League. A dangerous trend indeed! An intense economic, social and
educational programme was decided to be framed to muster popular support for
the League and to woo the non-League Muslim groups like Coalition Party in Punjab
and Krishak Praja Party in Bengal. The Sikandar-Jinnah Pact was concluded. Even
Christians and scheduled castes were tried to be won over. Jinnah undertook a
countrywide tour to establish contacts with the Muslim masses. Congress was
projected to be a Hindu party and was said to be perpetrating atrocities on Muslims
where it was in power. A long list of grievances were put up against Congress.
Some of these grievances were that the song ‘Vande matram’ was sun on official
occasions. Muslim League felt that it was anti-Muslim. The use of tricolour Congress
flag, the Wardha scheme of Basic Education, the Hindi -Urdu controversy etc. were
other such issues which were aggressively used by the League to fill the Muslim
hearts with hatred. In April 1938, the League appointed a committee to look into
the atrocities committed by the Congress on the Muslims. The report of this committee,
commonly known as Pirpur Report, was submitted on 15th November 1938 and
contained nothing substantial against Congress. Meanwhile, Nehru was in
correspondence with Jinnah to evolve a formula wherein the League and Congress
could work together amicably. But Jinnah, who was developing an ever-increasing
proficiency in the art of saying ‘No’, was evasive. The more just and mellowed the
Congress became, the more violent the League turned. Eveiy single European
Governor of the provinces where the Congress ruled declared that the administration
of Congress was free from all communal biases and was completely just and impartial.
But Jinnah’s complaints were mounting- When Dr. Rajendra Prasad offered him to
have his allegations regarding the atrocities of the Congress be enquired into by the
Chief Justice of India, Jinnah declined the offer and said that the matter was now in
the hands of the Viceroy. But the League’s charges were never investigated or rebuked
by the Viceroy and the bogey of Hindu oppression was kept alive.
As the Second World War began, the British Government in India declared the
country to be also at war. This was resented by Congress as there was no consultation
with Central or Provincial Assemblies or the Congress ministries who represented
the vast majority of the people of India. As a mark of protest, the Congress ministries
in eight provinces resigned from their office leading to celebrations and jubilation in
the Muslim League camp. The party celebrated the end of Congress rule by observing
a Deliverance Day on 22nd December 1939. On that day, meetings were called by
Muslim League at various places and resolutions were passed against Congress and
its so called Hindu agenda. Full cooperation and loyalty was offered to the
Government. Congress now being out of power, the League beefed up its efforts to
grab the seats of office. If of course did not send any positive message to the country
in general and several places witnessed counter demonstrations by nationalist
Muslims. The violence of words, behaviour and deeds was slowly rising.
Till now, the League had not taken the idea of partition seriously. It was busy
partitioning the hearts. But now, partly to mobilize the mass emotions and partly to
use as a bargaining card, the Muslim League passed the famous Pakistan Resolution
at the Lahore session of the Muslim League Council on 26th March 1940. It, at the
same time, offered loyalty to the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow, who tried to make another
effort to resolve the political deadlock. Jinnah immediately put forth two demands –
first, he wanted an assurance that no constitution in the future will be framed unless
the Muslims, by which he meant the Muslim League or himself, agreed. Second, he
demanded that League’s representation in Viceroy’s Executive Council will be equal
to that of Congress. Congress rejected both the demands as it believed that Muslim
League, which was on war-path would use the power of veto to its own advantage.
Moreover, Congress- League parity in Executive Council was also not agreeable as
Congress was a nationalj party and League did not enjoy that status. The violence
of words followed and nothingj fruitful could come out.
Meanwhile, Congress had started its Quit India Movement. For months, the repression
by the Government continued. Almost all the senior leaders of the Congress and
thousands of men and women were sent to the prison or detention. The Khudai
Khidmatgars of North West Frontier Province took active part in holding
demonstrations against the Government. Jinnah exhorted the Muslims to keep away
from the movement and at the same time accused Congress of’ignoring the Muslims.’
With all the Congress leaders in jail, the field was left open for Jinnah. He did his
utmost to turn the Muslim community into a socially cohesive but violently communal
unit. “He gave them the creed of Muslim superiority implicit in the idea of Pakistan,
a code of anti-Congress and anti-Hindu behaviour, and a prevailing sentiment that
Islam stood in danger of perishing under Congress rule.”2
Jinnah mobilized every strain within the body of Muslim League and its supported
to campaign hatred and violence in favour of Pakistan. Business communities were
lured by the dreams of unhindered profits without the share of Hindu businessmen
who were richer and ore experienced than their Muslim counterparts. The political
class was lured by the promise of supreme political power concentrated in their
own hands – undivided and unrestrained. The religious class was made to dream of
a pure land of Muslims where no kajlr would exist and the middle class was convinced
that all the higher appointments and key posts will be theirs and promotions of
Muslim government servants would be more rapid. To this was added the dream of
acquiring the wealth of non-Muslims. This prospect of loot further popularised the
Muslim League. The emotional heat generated led to the utterance of such words as
spoken by Maulvi Mohammad Bahadur Khan, President of India State Muslim League
at the Muslim League Conference at Karachi in December 1943, “I solemnly pledge
and bear you (Mr Jinnah) and the audience as my witness, I bear the air, the shinning
sun, the stars and the moon and above all bear God as my witness that I will sacrifice
my life and everything at your command in the name of God. I assure you that will
never find me lag behind even at the most difficult stage of our struggle. Qaid-i-
Azam, that day will be the greatest day of my life when I shall have sacrificed the
last penny in my pocket and the last drop of my blood at the altar of God. (Voices
from the meeting: ‘We are with you’). Today, we do not want those people who
want to efflorescence into fragrant sweet flowers on the \’Tree of Millat”. We want
the people who will spill heir own blood and give their life for the life of the nation.”
Violence was spreading and was now brainwashing even those who were earlier
anti-Muslim League and voted against in 1937 elections. Jinnah fanned this violence
by refusing every effort of Congress to bridge the gap and maintaining an arrogant
and unbending attitude towards all attempts of settlement. He refused to even draft
a concrete scheme of what he demanded as that would have opened the avenues of
logical debates and deprived him of that emotional appeal which he was
endeavouring to take to new heights with every passing day. His masterly evasion,
hypocrisy and refusal to reach any formula of cooperation failed Gandhi-Jirinah
talks in 1944 and Simla Conference convened by the Viceroy Lord Wavell in 1945.
He ensured that there was no satisfactory rapprochement between the League and
Congress.
Meanwhile, the change of Government in England brought the Labour Party in
power and Clement Atlee replaced Churchill as prime-minister, thus raising the
hope of Indians. The new government decided to hold fresh elections in India for
Central and Provincial legislatures. For Muslim League, this was an opportunity to
foment the communal hatred and violence. The year 1946 can be marked as one of
hatred and bitterness. Muslim League embarked upon its strategy of continuous
and ruthless attack on everyone and everything which did not toe its ideology. It
raked up the communal frenzy to such a height that the ignorant Muslim masses
could not stop the deluge of communal passion unleashed by the League. More than
a political fight, these elections had became a prestige issue for the League as it had
to prove beyond doubt that it and not the Congress was the real voice of Indian
Muslims, that no Muslim of India backed a Hindu party (Congress) and those who
did were not the true Muslims. It was the situation of do or die for the League. As it
was clear by now that the Labour Government of England had already decided to
transfer the power to Indian hands, the situation was all the more tight for the
League. This was apparently the last and final chance for it to prove its claims.
Thus, the league left no stone unturned to win these elections. Sajjda nashins, Firs
and religious leaders were all pressed into service to propagate the creed of hatred.
It was drilled into the minds of the voters not to vote for a Nationalist Muslim as it
was a sin which could never be washed. Five times a day, after each prayer in the
mosques, the Unionist Party (ruling in Punjab) and the Nationalist Muslims who
were said to be the spies of Hindus and their party, the Indian National Congress,
were denounced as kafirs and anyone voting for them would also be a kafir and
would be excommunicated. The impact of this vicious propaganda on the illiterate
Muslim masses was horrific. Every district official, school teacher, post man or even
sub-ordinate revenue staff worked incessantly to whip up the mass hysteria among
the Muslims. Hindus became the villains against whom the ruthless gospel of hatred
and bitterness was directed.
These acts of intimidation were completely successful. The Muslim League won all
the Muslim seats in the Central Assembly and a vast majority of seats in the Provincial
Assemblies. The analysis of the voting pattern reveal that the nationalist Muslims
secured more than one fourth of the total Muslim votes cast whereas Muslim League
votes were only 17% of the total votes (all parties) cast.3 The demand for Pakistan
was therefore, supported by less than one fifth of those who went for polls. The
exultant League increased its intensity of hate-Hindu, hate-Congress campaign. A
convention of the Muslim League legislatures was held in Delhi in the beginning of
April 1946 in which unnecessary and unjustified attacks were hurled at Hindus.
The resolution passed at this convention described Hindu caste system as ‘a direct
negation of nationalism, equality, democracy and all the noble ideas that Islam stands
for’. Khan Abdul Qaiyum Khan threatened that the Muslims would take out there
swords if Pakistan was not conceded. Hindus were referred to as enemies; reason
and moderation was thrown to the winds; and abusive epithets pushed to the
superlative degree were employed.4
This barrage of violent hate campaign thus continued and all the doors of any
compromise were firmly closed. Lord Mountbatten, who replaced Lord Wavell as
the Viceroy of India came with the purpose of winding up the British power in the
country. An attempt was made to save the unity of the country by Cabinet Mission
proposals but it failed to be executed. Muslim League, which had earlier accepted it
later withdrew its support. The nation was burning with the impact of the verbal
violence unleashed by Muslim League. Riots had torn several towns and cities apart.
People were being butchered mercilessly in their homes, workplaces, on road, lanes
and by-lanes. Once the bloodshed started, the Hindus also reacted. Thousands of
Hindus were maimed and killed in Muslim majority areas and equal number of
Muslims lost their lives in Hindu majority areas. League, in its insistence on Pakistan,
could find no other way to achieve its aim but instigating mindless violence
everywhere. Congress tried and tried hard to avoid this bloodbath as well as Partition
and gave as many concessions as possible to League. But nothing short of Pakistan
was acceptable to League. It decided to join the Interim Government and Sir Sikander
Hayat Khan of Muslim League took the post of Finance Member. His policy of
opposing every move or decision of Congress led to the growing frustration in
Congress on 27lh July 1946, Jinnah gave a call to the Muslims to observe August 16,
1946 as ‘Direct Action Day\ He declared that The Muslims of India wouldn’t rest
contended with anything less than the immediate establishment of independent and
fully Sovereign state of Pakistan ... now the time has come for the Muslim Nation to
resort to Direct Action Never before in the whole life history of the Muslim
League did we do anything except by constitutional methods. Throughout the painful
negotiations the two parties (Congress and the British Government) with whom we
bargain held a pistol at us... The situation must be met. We also have a pistol’. The
Muslim League was now irrevocably on war path. Its war was declared against
Hindus and Sikhs from whom Pakistan had to be wrested. The speeches made by
Jinnah and other Muslim League leaders were violent to the extreme and such as to
give the Muslims not only broad hints, but clear instigation to attack non-Muslims
and thereby bring them to concede Pakistan. Some of the utterances of Jinnah were.
“Today we have forged a pistol and are in a position to use if, “If you seek peace, we
do not war. But if you want war, we will accept it unhesitatingly”.StiIl more
provocative speeches were delivered by other Muslim League leaders on this occasion.
Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan said, “Direct Action means resort to non- constitutional
methods, and that can take any form which may suit the conditions under which
we live. We cannot eliminate any methods. Direct action means any action against
the law.” Sardar Abdul Rab Nishtar, another League member said, “Pakistan can
only be achieved through shedding blood of ourselves, and if need be, and if
opportunity arose, by shedding blood of others.
The violence that ensured was unprecedented.
Violence Versus Unity
Congress was not willing to divide the country. It had not waged the long struggle
for freedom to see the nation divided in the end. The communal basis of the division
was all the more not acceptable as this was particularly the factor against which the
Congress stood for. Secularism, non-violence and brotherhood were the pillars on
which the body-politic of Congress stood. Partition would not only mean the
destruction of these principles but also of the unity of the country. But what was the
price the country was paying to preserve this unity? How long this unity could be
saved when it was being compromised systematically by those very leaders who
once were Nationalists and talked of India being their motherland but were now
blinded by the lure of becoming supreme overlords in a new country? The truth of
the matter was that the hearts had already been divided and any attempt to preserve
the geographical unity of the country would now be a farce. Congress had failed to
stem the surging were of Muslim communalism which, especially since 1937, had
been beating with increasing fury.
The unity of the country was threatened after the elections of 1946 in which the
Muslim League won 90 percent of the Muslim League. All effort to preserve the
unity of the country stood defeated when riots butchered people mercilessly on the
streets of Calcutta and Rawalpindi and the village lanes of Noakhali and Bihar. The
virtual collapse of the Interim Government also made the possibility of Pakistan a
reality.
Patel argued in All India Congress Committee meeting on 14lh June 1947 that the
Congress has to accept this fact that Pakistan was functioning in Punjab, Bengal
and in the Interim Government.5 Nehru was also gravely disappointed to see the
Interim Government turning into the arena of struggle. Ministers were squabbling,
met separately to reach their own decisions and Liaqat Ali Khan, a Leaguer and the
Finance Member crippled the functioning of other ministries. If Congress endeavoured
to preserve the country, who would it do the effort for? The violence within the
closed doors and outside it stalled all efforts to sustain this unity. Partition thus,
appeared to be the last safeguard to end the violence. One option which was floated
time and again by leaders like Purshottam Das Tandon(Congress leader and Speaker
of the U.P. legislative assembly), Ram Ratan Gupta (A Congressman from Kanpur),
M.R. Jayakar (the Liberal leader with Hindu Mahasabha sympathies) etc. was to
maintain the unity of the country by force. The violence of League’s communalism
should be answered with equal violence if the unity of the country could be saved.
But Gandhi and Nehru did not agree with this point of view. Such violence could
have intensified the problem. As Nehru said, ‘the use of violence at this time to
maintain Indian unity will have disastrous results. Civil war will check the progress
of India for a long time to come’.6 The option of unity by force would then mean the
answer of League hooligans with the Congress goondas and raising such bodies
which could counter Muslim National Guards – in short, the turning of Congress
into a Hindu communal organisation.
Another argument which has also been discussed is that the unity could have been
effected by the struggle against the violence. A close associate of Gandhi, S. N.
Aggarwal suggested that if by mass movements “we could compel the Britishers to
quit India, we can also tell them plainly but firmly “No, India shall not be divided’’.
And if Pakistan is forced upon us, even then the nation must resist it with all strength
at its command by starting a countrywide masss rebellion” 7 But Gandhi’s
understanding was different. He pointed out to Louis Fischer that the existing scale
of violence negated any hope or possibility of a mass movement. ‘I cannot think of u
Civil Disobedience when there is so much violence in the air.x A year later he
explained to his associate N.K. Bose that the situation was surcharged with
communalism and not at all favourable for a struggle.
In April 1947, the Congress leaders, J.B. Kriplani, C. Rajagopalachari, Rajendra
Prasad and Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel met Mountbatten and submitted their
agreement to partition the country. J.B. Kriplani said “Rather than to have a battle
we shall let them have their Pakistan”.9 By 151 May 1947, the Congress Working
Committee accepted Partition. After this, nothing much was left to be done by Nehru
or Gandhi. The country was partitioned with the hope that now when Muslim
League has got what it wished, violence would end and peace will prevail. Thus,
peace was bought at the price of unity. But sadly, the violence, instead of abating,
continued and this time, with greater ferocity. The number of victims of this violence
after Partition was greater than those before Partition. By August 1947, ‘Punjab had
become worse than all the hells we have ever heard of, commented Rajagopalachari.
The violence was far worse than what the leaders had expected. Gandhi spoke out,
4
So that what I say may reach the ears of the Muslims’: The Muslims are on the
rampage. They say that now that they have Pakistan they will make slaves of everyone
else .... If after Pakistan has come into being the conflict is further sharpened then it
will only mean that we have been made fools of’ Thus, though Congress accepted
Partition as a last measure to end the violence, this decision failed to contain it. The
irony was cruel: The Partition of India was agreed to by the Congress leaders in the
hope of averting (as Nehru himself declared in his radio talk on 3rd June) a civil war
between Hindus and Muslims, but a civil war did result, perhaps in acute form’.
Despite such monstrous violence, Gandhi still opposed Partition. He was willing to
risk anarchy but insisted on British to leave India. He believed that unity of the
country must not be compromised before the threat of violence. Once the British left,
there would be some period of chaos and lawlessness. But finally everything would
settle down. But Congress was not willing to risk this anarchy. They thought it was
better to Partition it was better to Partition the country so that both the parts could
live happily and peacefully rather than let the whole country go to pieces.’ How
wrong it finally proved to be! If they had anticipated that Partition would unleash
greater furies of violence, the leaders of the Congress would perhaps not
compromised the unity of the country.
Violence versus Non-Violence
All this violence was happening in a country which gave the world the concept of
non-violence. And the torch-bearer of this non-violence in India was of course Gandhi.
He was the living, breathing and walking symbols of non-violence. When Partition
came and the violence ensued, Gandhi was a broken man. Right before this eyes, the
pillar of non-violence which he had built brick by brick so diligently was breaking
and he could not do anything to stop this debacle. He knew no non-violent method
to stop this deluge of violence and the accompanying madness. His resistance to
Partition and his statements like ‘Let the country be divided over my dead body*
were marginalizing him in the cadres of Congress. The party was now dominated
by such leaders like Nehru, Patel, Kriplani and Rajendra Prasad, who had already
decided upon partitioning the country. On 1st June, 1947, a day before Mountbatten
formally presented his Partition plan to the Indian leaders, Gandhi’s Secretary
Pyarelal heard him murmuring to himself, “I find myself all alone. Even the Sardar
and Jawaharlal Nehru think my reading of the situation is wrong and peace is sure
to return if Partition is agreed upon... They wonder if I have not deteriorated with
age. I can see clearly that the future of independence gained at this price is going to
be dark. Everybody is today impatient for independence. Therefore, there is no
alternative.” 10
Most political analysts in the first half of 1947 preferred to believe that the root cause
of the communal cause was political and therefore its solution should also be sought
in politics. They believed that the problem had to be resolved either in Delhi or
London. But Gandhi’s approach was different. He believed in working upon the
people at grass root level and convince them that irrespective of what their leaders
said or did, they could still live together as good neighbours and forge a peaceful
living for themselves. This was the reason why when national leaders were squabbling
and wrangling in Delhi, he, with his posse of volunteers, was walking in the streets
of Noakhali and Bihar. For him, this was the only non-violent way of coming out of
the raging communal violence. But he was handicapped by the fact that no leader
was willing to follow the path he was taking. Nor did his voice now carry that
weight among the Hindu and Muslim communities, which it once did. If his efforts
of restoring peace had been seconded by Muslim leaders in Muslim majority areas
where Muslims were being murdered, the violence could have been contained to a
large extent. But everyone left him alone. Muslim League, which was at the helm of
all the violence, would have laughed away the prospect and Congress was too tired
or busy at the negotiating tables at Delhi to listen to Gandhi. The day his voice
stopped reaching these leaders, violence defeated non-violence.
Dynamics of Violence
On 27th July 1946, Jinnah gave his call to the Mu slims to observe August 16, 1946
as ‘Direct Action Day’. He famously declared, Today we have forged a pistol and
are in a position to forge it.’ Calcutta became the centre of this violence. Taking J
innah’s call, the troubles started on the morning of 16th August. Massive riots were
triggered in the city. They were instigated by Muslim League and its volunteer corps
against Hindus and Sikhs followed by the retaliatory attacks on Muslims by Congress
followers and supporters. In Calcutta, the regions most affected by the violence
were the densely populated sector of the city bounded by Park Circus and Lower
Circular road on the south, CJ.T. Road on the east, Vivekanand Road on the north
and Strand Road on the west. Official estimates put the death toll at 4,000 dead and
10,000 injured. Other sources put the death toll at 7,000 to 10,000. Skirmishes between
the communities continued for almost a week till the Muslim League government
was dismissed and Bengal was put under Viceroy’s rule. The rioting reduced by 22nd
August 1946.11
The news of the ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ soon spread like fire in the jungle and
reached East Bengal. Noakhali soon became the centre of the next rioting. These
riots, also known as ‘Noakhali genocide’ or ‘Noakhali carnage’, were a series of
massacres, rapes, abductions, forced conversion of Hindus and looting and arson of
Hindu properties, perpetrated by Muslim community in the district of Noakhali in
the Chittagong Division of Bengal in October-November 1946. It affected the areas
under the Ramganj, Begumganj, Raipur, Laxmipur, Chhagalnaiyaand Sandwip
police stations in Noakhali district and the areas under Hajiganj, Faridganj,
Chandpur, Laksham and Chauddagram police stations at Tipperah district – a total
area of more than 2000 square miles.
The massacre of the Hindu population started on 10th October and continued
unabated for about a week. It is estimated that 5,000 Hindus were killed, hundreds
of Hindu women were raped and thousands of men and women were forcibly
converted to Islam. Around, 50,000 to 70,000 survivors were sheltered in temporary
relief camps in Comilla, Chandpur, Agartala and other places. Moreover, around
50,000 Hindus that remained marooned in the affected areas where under the strict
surveillance of Muslim hooligans, where the administration had no say.12
As a reaction to the Noakhali Genocide, Bihar was rocked by violence towards the
end of 1946. Between 30,h October and 7th November, mass communal massacres in
Bihar made the Partition inevitable. Severe violence broke out in Chhapra and Saran
districts between 25,h and 28th October. Very soon, the violence spread to Patna,
Bhagalpur and Munger. Begun as a raprisal, it was very difficult for the authorities
to curb it as it was scattered over a large areas of villages. According to the subsequent
statement in the British Parliament, the death toll amounted to 5,000, the Congress
party admitted to 2,000 and Jinnah claimed about 30,000. According to some
independent sources, the death toll was around 8,000 human lives.13
Some worst riots took place at Garhmukteshwar in United Province where a massacre
occurred in November 1946 in which Hindu pilgrims, at the annual religious fair,
exterminated Muslims not only on the festival grounds but also in adjacent towns.
The death toll was estimated at between 1,000 and 2,000.14
From Garhmukteshwar, the violence spread to Punjab. It was the single province
which suffered the fate of total ethnic cleansing in the wake of bloodiest riots that
took place at the time of Partition. The process started from Rawalpindi in February-
March 1947. The large scale killing of Hindus and Sikhs continued for several days.
Hindu and Sikh women committed self-immolation or threw themselves into wells
after killing their female children as this was the only way to save their honour.
These riots were notoriously known as The Rape of Rawalpindi’.15 Justice Muhammad
Munir who represented the Muslim League on the Punjab Boundary Commission
and later served as Chief Justice had the followed to say about the riots in Rawalpindi:
“The disturbances broke out in March 1947 in the district of Rawalpindi and adjoining
areas and the Muslims were the aggressors. 1 spoke to the Quaid-i-Azam about this
telling him that it was a bad augur and he should either go himself to Pindi or send
some responsible member of the Muslim League to assure the minorities that in
Pakistan, if it ever were established, they will have equal rights.” But Jinnah neither
went to Rawalpindi nor issued any public statement condemning the atrocities. As
Ishtiaq Ahmad writes in his book The Punbjab Bloodied, Partiioned and Cleansed,
“It is to be noted that neither Jinnah nor any other leading Muslim Leaguer issued a
public statement condemning the atrocities in Rawalpindi. I have checked the main
English language newspapers The Pakistan Times and The Tribune and found no
statement by any Muslim leader on the Rawalpindi riots. In the Jinnah papers as
well there is nothing on Rawalpindi riots: nor did any Punjab-level leader of the
Muslim League issue a condemnation.”16
The Rape of Rawalpindi’ triggered a chain of destruction and suffering and the
whole of Punjab was soon engulfed in unprecedented violence. In western Punjab,
there were massive attacks against Hindus and Sikhs and their property (since many
Hindus and Sikhs were prosperous farmers or moneylenders) by Muslim crowds,
Muslim National Guards and member of Police and army. In Eastern Punjab and
adjoining Sikh princely state (particularly Patiala) the pattern of violence was marked
by the prominent role of Sikh Jathas (bands of 20 to 600 men), the police and the
army being passive. Since most Muslims in East Punjab were poor farmers, their
lives, rather than their property were the main targets. As Maulana Azad writes. “It
was learnt that in East Punjab, Hindu and Sikh mobs had attacked Mulsim villages.
They were burning houses and killing innocent men, women and children. Exactly
the same reports came from West Panjab. Muslims were indiscriminately killing
men, women and children of Hindu and Sikh communities. The whole of Punjab,
east and west, was becoming a graveyard of destruction and death”.17 There were
three main types of violence:
(1) Attacks on villages, accompanied by widespread looting and rape.
(2) Attacks on refugee trains, with explosives to derail the train, and use of
crude weapons to kill passengers.
(3) Ambushes on refugee columns moving on foot through the countryside
under military protection (the military personnels sometimes sided with the
attackers).
The death toll was in hundreds of thousands, cases cf rape and abduction of women
numbered in tens of thousands and the victims were often murdered afterwards.
The most deadly attacks were those against refugee trains. These were highly
organised affairs in which ex-military personnels, with knowledge of explosives and
sabotage techniques playing a prominent role. These trains generally carried 3000-
4000 refugees and were accompanied by small military escorts which were often
incapable of preventing considerable loss of life. Here, the death tolls sometimes
reached tow or three thousand. As Maulana Azad wrote, “One Punjab minister
after another came rushing up to Delhi. They were followed by Congress leaders
who were outside the government. All of them were horrified by the developments
taking place. They were also stunned by the magnitude of the carnage and said in
despair that perhaps nothing could stop it.”18
In September 1947, Delhi witnessed large-scale anti-Muslim violence where Muslim
refugees were concentrated – ready to leave for Pakistan. At the same time Hindu
and Sikhs arrived from Western Punjab. The trouble was bound to arise. Again
Maulana Azad writes, “There were no disturbances in Delhi in the beginning but
with the country all round aflame with such murderous upheaval, it was not possible
to deplete the small military reserve held in Delhi. We decided to send for troops
from outside but before they could arrive, trouble reached the capital. As news of
murders in Punjab was followed by trickle of refugees who were coming away from
West Punjab, violence broke out in Delhi. Murder stalked the town. Trouble was not
confined to only the refugees or even the general public. Even areas where only
Government servants lived were involved. When the reports of massacres in West
Punjab reached Delhi. Muslims in the city were attacked by the mobs of unruly
men. Sikhs took the leading part in organizing this murderous attack in Delhi.”19
Large number of Muslims were killed in Delhi and it was only Gandhiji’s personal
intervention of fasting that ended the carnage.
One of the reasons why the communal violence could not be controlled was that the
European administration was becoming lax. “Europeans in the service no long had
their heart in the work. They were now convinced that within a short time, power
would be transferred to Indians hands. As such, they were no longer interested in
their work and only marked time. They told people openly that they were no longer
responsible for the administration. This led to more unrest and uncertainty among
the people and created loss of confidence.”20
If Europeans were washing their hands off from their duty, the attitude of army had
also become critical. Before Partition, the army had been free from communal hatred.
By after 1947, the bug of communalism has bitten it too. Most of the troops in Delhi
were either Hindus or Sikhs and it soon become clear that they could not be relied
upon to restore law and order in the city. Thus, the services of the soldiers from
south were pressed into. It was they who played the most important role in bringing
the situation under control and restoring order in Delhi.
To sum up the study, India has made a long journey from those peaceful and
harmonious days of pre-British times to 1947. This journey has been made more and
more arduous by several factors. In the last and final days in and around 1947,
violence was singularly the most potent factor and that too in a country which was
the harbinger of non-violence in the world. Jinnah had won his Pakistan by playing
the game of blood. But he died a broken man. The country he wrested to rule was 4a
moth-eaten Pakistan’. The party that stood behind him was split within his lifetime.
On December 14-15, 1947, Jinnah formally announced that the Indian art part of
Muslim League would henceforth be working independently without his leadership.
One Indian member shouted, “We never thought this would be our fate; you have
divided brother and brother and left us completely in lurch.”
This after such heart-wrenching violence!
*******
The Princely States, the Muslim League, and the Partition of

India in 1947
IAN COPLAND
As THE PREMIER act of European decolonization in Asia,1 the British evacuation of

India in 1947 has deservedly attracted widespread JL scholarly interest. Inevitably,
though, attention has been focused on the dramatic and horrific circumstances
surrounding the partition, which led to the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan; in
the process, a parallel and in some respects equally momentous development has
been almost lost sight of. Prior to 1947, the subcontinent was made up of provinces
under British rule and princely states under Indian rule. Numbering in excess of
560, the latter recognized the paramountcy of the Crown, but were largely
autonomous in their internal affairs. During the 1930s, the British government tried,
and failed, to persuade the princely states to link themselves organically with the
provinces in an all-India federation. The princes preferred quasi-independence under
the Crown to taking their chances in the hurly-burly of electoral politics. Yet in 1947
almost all the states acceded to the new Dominions on terms similar to those they
had rejected in 1939.
Simply in terms of its scale and speed, the ‘integration’ of the states was a remarkable
coup. By September 1948, India alone had acquired, by this means, nearly 520,000
square miles of extra territory and eighty- nine million additional subjects. And in
nearly every case, the process was accomplished smoothly and bloodlessly. Moreover,
if Robin Moore is correct, the accession of the states also played a significant part in
The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Australian Research
Council.
The International History Review, xiii, 1, February 1991, pp. 1-220 CN ISSN 0707-
5332© The International History Review reconciling the Congress ‘high command’
to the transfer of power on what many regarded as unsatisfactory terms. Moore
argues that more than anything else the compact reached between the viceroy, Lord
Mountbatten, and the states minister in the Interim government, Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel-by which the viceroy undertook to use his consider-able influence to ensure
that most of the princes acceded to India-led the Congress to accept the more limited
form of independence repre-sented by ‘Dominion Status’. Likewise, he suggests that
the acquisition of the states helped compensate the Indian leaders for the loss of
territory to Pakistan.2
1
India was not of course the first colony to be set free; that honour belongs to the Philippines, which
was given its independence by the United States in 1946. But it was the British decision to quit the
subcontinent which sounded the death-knell for the age of European empire.
2
Robin J. Moore, ‘India in 1947: The Limits of Unity’, The States of South Asia: Problems of National
Integration, ed. A. Jeyaratnam Wilson and Dennis Dalton (London, 19812), p. 51.
On all these counts the integration of the Indian princely states warrants serious
study. Yet to date the only comprehensive work remains that by V.P. Menon who,
as reforms commissioner under Lord Wavell and Mountbatten and subsequently
first head of the states department under Patel, was involved in the events he
describes.3 What is more, such work as has been done has tended to reinforce the
impression, which Menon also fosters, that all the states joined India. H.V. Hodson,
for instance, writes that when Patel went to see Mountbatten his demand was for ‘a
basketful of accessions’, and ‘this Mountbatten was almost able to give him. Only
three apples ... were left out of the basket on August 15, 1947.’4 In fact, the Congress
had to make do with rather less, for around ten states - of which the most important
were Khairpur, Bahawalpur, Kalat, Las Bela, Swat, Dir, and Chitral- eventually
joined Pakistan. In addition, Pakistan occupies-for its status has never been
satisfactorily determined - a sizeable part of the one-time state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Although not numerous, these former states comprise almost half of the modern
Pakistan Republic.
Why did most-but not all-of the princely states accede to India? To the extent that
this question has been addressed at all, the answer given has been predictable:
namely, that the states were populated pre-dominantly by non-Muslims to whom
‘Islamic’ Pakistan was anathema. However, this thesis is, at best, ex post facto
rationalization. Although, in the end, the communal principle triumphed, a division
of the states on religious lines was not, by any means, inevitable. Other scenarios
were possible and, prior to 1947, widely canvassed. An explanation must be sought,
therefore, in the realms of policy and diplomacy, and in particular in the failure of
the All India Muslim League-in comparison with its arch-rival the Congress-to
develop a realistic strategy towards the princes and their states. Like the Congress,
the League initially treated the states with indifference; but while the former largely
aban-doned its laissez-faire posture after 1938, the latter remained astonish-ingly
complacent about the states’ future constitutional role until almost the eve of
independence, by which time it was unable to recover the lost ground.
***
At first sight, demography seems a more than sufficient reason why most states
elected to join India. As can be seen from Table 1, there were few Muslim-majority
states. Had the same rule been adopted for the ‘partition’ of princely India as was
adopted to determine the fate of the disputed provinces, Pakistan would have had a
3
V.P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (Bombay, 1961). For a more recent but
regionally limited view, see Vanaja Rangaswamy, The Story of Integration: A New Interpretation
(New Delhi, 1981). As for the inte-gration of the Pakistani states, the only study I know of which goes
into the question in any detail is the one by Wayne Wilcox, Pakistan: Consolidation of a Nation
(Berkeley, 1963); but see also William L. Richter, ‘Traditional Rulers in Post-Traditional Societies:
The Princes of India and Pakistan’, People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the
Indian Princely States, ed. R. Jeffrey (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 329-54.
4
H.V. Hodson, ‘The Role of Lord Mountbatten’, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives, 1935-
1947, ed. C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainright (London, 1970), p. 124.
watertight claim to the first five of these states and, at least, to the Kashmir section
of Jammu and Kashmir; but to nothing else. As Mountbatten declaimed in later
years, defending his decision to help Patel push the rulers into the Indian Union: ‘If
you look at a map of Pakistan, [you can see that] they had only one important state
and a few small ones ... the majority, I should say 90 or 95 per cent, were in India.’5
However, the same rule was not used. As late as 27 June 1947, the viceroy responded
to an enquiry from the raja of Bilaspur with an assurance that the decision as to
which constituent assembly the princes should enter was ‘a matter of free choice’
for them ;6 and though Mountbatten subsequently modified his position, this formula
was reproduced in the Indian Independence Act. Technically, the princes could
accede to either Dominion, or, in the last resort, to neither.
Now, as the Congress were quick to point out, this ruling had fearful implications
for the unity of Hindustan, for several of the most important princely states - including
the premier state of Hyderabad, Bhopal, Junagadh, Tonk, Palanpur, Radhanpur,
Rampur, Cambay, and Jaora7 — had Muslim rulers. Certainly, most of these states
were far removed geographically from the core of what became Pakistan, that is,
Punjab- Sind; and to Mountbatten at least this was sufficient reason for them not to
join. In July 1947, addressing the chamber of princes, he declared: ‘The States are
theoretically free to link their future with whichever Dominion they may care [to].
But when I say that they are at liberty to link up with either of the Dominions, may
I point out that there are certain geographical compulsions which cannot be evaded.
Out of some-thing like 565 States, the vast majority are irretrievably linked ... with
the Dominion of India.’8
Later, in private conversation, he put the point more bluntly: ‘I mean, the idea that
Junagadh could join with Pakistan across all the other Kathiawar states was just
stupid. The idea that Hyderabad could join ... Pakistan was equally stupid.’9 Yet the
idea of having an island of Pakis-tani territory stuck in the middle of the Deccan
was inherently no more absurd than having one stuck in East Bengal; in fact, from
one point of view, somewhat less so, as Hyderabad is a good deal closer to Karachi
than is Dakha. What is more, the concept of a separate Muslim zone in the Deccan
had long been canvassed by Islamic propagandists; and one, Chaudhury Rahmat
Ali, had even given it a name: ‘Usmanistan’, after its current ruler, the Nizam Osman
Ali. Hyderabad, he wrote in 1940, ‘is a part of our patrimony, and its de jure
sovereignty must be given international recognition’.10 Even tiny Junagadh, which,
5
Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre, Mountbatten and Independent India 16 August 1947-18 June
1948 (Delhi, 1984).
6
Quoted in Menon, Story, p. 19.
7
There were, by my calculations, 45 Muslim-ruled states having a combined area of 223,894 square
miles compared to 712,508 square miles for the states as a whole.
8
The Evolution of India, 1858 to 1947: Select Documents, ed. G.H. Philips (London, 1962), p. 438.
9
Collins and Lapierre, Mountbatten, p. 43.
10
G. Rahmat Ali, The Millat of Islam and the Menace of Indianism, quoted in R. Goupland, Indian
Politics, 1936-1942: Report on the Constitutional Problem in India: Part II (Oxford, 1943), p. 201.
unlike Hydera-bad, probably lacked the financial and economic resources to lead an
independent existence, could, with a seacoast facing the Arabian sea, conceivably
have survived as a part of Pakistan; after all, nearby Diu and Goa lasted as outposts
of a much more distant state-Portugal - until 1961.
Let us assume, however, that the geographical argument has merit, and that the
only states really eligible to join Pakistan were neighbour-ing ones. Which states fell
into this category? Again, there is no simple answer. Until, perhaps, May 1947, the
League had its sights firmly fixed on a greater Pakistan embracing all of Punjab and
Bengal. If this view had prevailed, as the resolute and ever-optimistic president of
the League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was sure it would, the new state would have
embraced all thirteen Punjab states, plus Cooch Behar in Bengal, and would have
had common borders with Kashmir and many of the states of Rajputana; in other
words, its field of propinquity would have been much enlarged. Significantly, the
then premier of Alwar, who was none other than the right-wing Hindu nationalist
N.B. Khare, believed that ‘had the whole of the Punjab gone to Pakistan, Alwar
State would have surely aligned itself with it’.11 As it was, the shrunken Pakistan
that emerged in August 1947 encompassed only two of the Punjab states- Khairpur
and Bahawalpur; but it shared borders with a number of others, including the ‘Sikh’
states of Faridkot and Kapurthala and the ‘Rajput’ States of Bikaner, Jodhpur,
Jaisalmer, and Cutch. Were some or all of these principalities potential acquisitions
for Pakistan?
Surprisingly, since none had Muslim majorities, (as Table 2 illus-trates) the answer
is yes. Many of the Rajput princes especially were deeply conservative and feared
that accession to India would mean the rapid democratization of their states and
the extinction of their powers and privileges. Sir Arthur Lothian, the British resident
in Rajputana, found during and after the Cripps negotiations [of 1942] ... that the
feeling was running high among some of the leading Rajput Princes that if the
pro-posals then made led to the establishment of an Indian Union from which Muslim
provinces like the Punjab stood out, and if the formation of a separate union by
themselves was out of the question, it would be to their interest to enter into union
with the Punjab, even although it were in effect a Muslim-controlled Pakistan, as
they completely distrusted the willingness of a Congress-controlled ... Union
[Government] to give them a fair deal.12
Likewise, the prospect of a Hindu raj held little appeal for the fiercely chauvinistic
Sikhs; and just as the Akali Dal leaders, alienated by the lack of Congress support
for their goal of an autonomous Sikh homeland, thought seriously in 1946-7 about
renouncing their past loyalties and striking a deal with the League, so the Sikh rulers,
11
N.B. Khare, My Political Memoirs or Autobiography (Nagpur, 1959), p. 298.
12
Sir A. Lothian to Sir K. Fitze, 25 Jan. 1943, in N. Mansergh (ed. in chief), Con-stitutional Relations
between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power, 1942-7 (London, 1970) [hereafter TOP], iii. 538. For
one such princely view, see nawab of Bhopal to viceroy, 14 June 1947, TOP, xi. 529.
many of them having close ties with the Akalis, also wondered if their interests
would not be better served under a Pakistani government. Certainly, observers in
the India Office thought it not ‘inconceivable that... some of those bordering on
Pakistan might prefer to throw their lot in with Pakistan rather than with a Congress-
dominated Hindustan’.13
To be sure, in the event these princes had second thoughts. But in several cases the
outcome hung in the balance right down to August 1947. In May, Bhavnagar
dissociated itself from the newly formed Kathiawar Confederation, which was
planning union with India, and said that it would ‘give consideration to the
desirability of combining with other states in the area headed by Muslim princes
and of joining a Pakistan Government’.14 In June, the ruler of the Punjab state of
Bilaspur pointedly asked the viceroy how a state or group of states might join a
Dominion government with whose territory they were not con-tiguous, adding that
‘with the exception of Patiala all the ... Punjab States were proposing to act together
in the manner that would best safeguard their future’. 15 And on the eve of
independence, the maharaja of Jodhpur-ironically ruler of the border state with the
smallest propor-tion of Muslims - came within an ace of signing with Pakistan until,
warned by his kinsman, the rajkumar of Jaisalmer, that he could face a Hindu revolt,
he lost his nerve.16 Viewed in retrospect, these flirtations with Pakistan may seem a
little capricious; yet at the time they made sense. Contrary to the impression given
by Menon, not all the inhabi-tants of the border states were fervent supporters of the
Congress. As late as July 1948, when the die had been well and truly cast, Indian
intelligence was still receiving reports from Rajasthan, and particularly from Jodhpur,
of popular demonstrations in support of Pakistan.17 Second, many of the border
states had close economic ties with Sind and West Punjab which would be severed
if they joined India. For example, the maharaja of Bikaner informed Mountbatten
that if the deliberations of the Boundary Commission put the neighbouring district
of Ferozepur, the source of much of his state’s irrigation water, into Pakistan, he
would have no choice but to follow suit.18
Nor, as one might have suspected, were the Pakistani leaders seriously disturbed
about the prospect of acquiring states with large non-Muslim majorities. After all,
their original territorial claim was for ‘the six provinces’, including the whole of the
Punjab and Bengal; which sug-gests that they were aware that the ‘Muslim homeland’
would also be home to a sizeable population of Hindus and Sikhs. Indeed, from a
13
Note by Sir W. Croft and Mr Turnbull, 25 April 1946, TOP, vii. 338.
14
John J. Macdonald, US consul-general, Bombay, to sec. of state, Washington, May 1947, United States
National Archives, State Department Deci-mal File 845.00/5-1347.
15
Mountbatten to Corfield, 30 June 1947, TOP, xi. 764.
16
Menon, Story, p. 88, and viceroy’s personal report no. 17, 16 Aug. 1947, [Broad-lands Archive]
Mountbatten Papers, file 213.
17
R. J. Moore, The Making of the New Commonwealth (Oxford, 1987), p. 35.
18
Circular letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, PM of India, to chief ministers, 1 July 1948. Nehru, Letters to
Chief Minist ers, ed. G. Parthasarathi (New Delhi, 1985), i. 142.
purely strategic vantage point, there might have been some benefit to Pakistan in
having a large minority population, as the more non-Muslim ‘hostages’ she held, the
less chance was there of the Muslims stranded in India being discriminated against
by the Congress. As it was, of course, the partition of the two disputed provinces,
following the totally unex-pected mass migration, left very few non-Muslims in West
Pakistan; yet to those that remained, Jinnah offered full rights of citizenship. As he
told the Pakistan Constituent Assembly at its inaugural session on 11 August: ‘Every
one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he
had with you in the past, no matter what his colour caste or creed, is first, second
and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations.’19 Contrary
to popular myth, Pakistan was not intended, initially at any rate, to be an Islamic
theocracy.
Thus, there is no fundamental reason why some, or all of the border states should
not have joined Pakistan. There was no legal impediment nor, at least in the minds
of decision-makers, an ideological one. And the Pakistanis were keen to have them.
On 19 June 1947, the official League newspaper, Dawn, observing that a number of
states were thinking of entering the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, editorialized
that such states could feel assured of an ‘honourable position’ in the new Dominion;20
and Jinnah, as we shall see, adopted a similar line. Why then, in the last resort, did
they all choose India?
If the above analysis is correct, the answer does not lie wholly or even primarily in
the realms of demography and geography, but rather in the chequered history of
the League’s relationship with the princes during the last three decades of the colonial
period.
***
Plagued by internal dissension, low morale, and lack of funds, the League was hard-
pressed in the 1930s just to keep afloat; fully occupied in the provinces combatting
the Congress, and trying to impose its authority on the Muslims of Punjab and Bengal,
it had no desire to add to its problems by involvement in the internal affairs of the
princely states. Nor, for that matter, did it see much need. Compared with British
India, the states were relatively free from the bane of communal vio-lence: a point
which conservatives like the British lawyer, Sir Walter Monckton, attributed to the
stabilizing influence of their rulers. ‘There is [in the states]’, waxed Monckton, ‘a
real, personal loyalty to the Ruler even if of a different faith ... This is a point of
stability which in part accounts for the fact that there has been less acute communal
division so far in India, than in British India: how little bloodshed there has been in
19
M. A. Jinnah, Speeches as Governor-General of Pakistan (Karachi, 1963), p. 8.
20
Dawn (Karachi), 19 June 1947.
the States. Contrast the Punjab, Bihar and Bengal.’21 Of course Mus-lims in the states
had grievances, and in some places, especially Jammu and Kashmir, these were
rooted in genuine, systematic discrimination.22 Overall, however, the position of
princely state Muslims was much more secure than that of their co-religionists living
in the provinces.
The League was also loath to interfere in the states for fear of provok-ing retaliatory
action by its political opponents. Until the late 1930s, the Congress, too, was keen to
leave the states alone; and while this laissez- faire stance continued, it was not in the
League’s interest to take the initiative. Moreover, the League knew that if it took up
the cause of Muslims in Kashmir, the Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj would
undoubtedly return the compliment by making trouble on behalf of their co-religionists
in Muslim-ruled states such as Junagadh and Hyderabad -and in that situation the
Muslims had far more to lose. As the political department’s Francis Wylie noted
shrewdly: ‘The Muslim League inter-fere less than they would like [to] in Kashmir
because of possible reper-cussions in Hyderabad.’ 23 Third, a strategy of non-
intervention was consistent with the League’s generally conservative and pro-
government philosophy: much as it would have liked to get rid of the Hindu raj of
Kashmir, the League had no desire to sweep away the whole monarchi-cal system.
Indeed, like the British, it saw the princes as a valuable counterweight to the socialist
tendencies of the Congress. Why go out of the way to alienate potential allies?
For a time, British plans to link the princely states with the provinces in a self-
governing all-India federation threatened to upset the logic of this policy. Under the
Government of India Act of 1935, British and Indian India were to share a federal
executive and legislature, composed, in part, of nominees of the princes. Moreover,
the electoral provisions of the act revealed that its imperial draftsmen intended the
states to hold the balance of power. With about one-third of the territory of the
sub-continent but only one-quarter of its population, the states were allocated no
less than 125 out of 375 seats in the lower house, or Federal Assembly, and 104 out
of 250 seats in the upper house, or Council of State -that is, 33 and 42 per cent
respectively. These figures showed that when, and if, the federation was set up-and
that depended, in the last resort, on the concurrence of the princes-any political
party with hopes of governing would have, of necessity, to extend its field of activity
to the states.
21
Monckton to Lord Ismay, 9 June 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file 70. Monckton* s observation was
based on his first-hand knowledge of Hyderabad, for which he acted as constitutional adviser. For a
representative princely view, see the speech given by the maharaja of Bikaner on New Year’s Day
1932, in which he asserted that ‘in the states generally, the communal question does not exist’. I[ndia]
Offfice Records,] L/PS/13/603.
22
See my article ‘Islam and Political Mobilization in Kashmir, 1931-34’, Pacific Affairs, liv (1981), 228-
59.
23
See my article, ‘Congress Paternalism: The High Command and the Struggle for Freedom in Princely
India, c. 1920-1940', South Asia, new series, viii (1985), 121-40.
The Congress and the League were as one in detesting the many reactionary features
of the Government of India Act: both deplored its reservation of powers, its veto
provisions, its undemocratic franchise. Nevertheless, opposition to the federal scheme
from the Congress was tempered by the tantalizing knowledge that the act conferred
real power on Indians: thus, while maintaining publicly that they would, under no
circumstances, ever work the federal sections of the act, the Congress high command
kept their options open by launching, in concert with the All- India States People’s
Conference (AISPC), a widespread satyagraha campaign to force the princes to
nominate popularly elected representa-tives to the federal legislature.
The League, on the other hand, saw little benefit from such a strategy. As we have
seen, Muslim-ruled states were few in number, and as Table 3 shows, commanded
between them less than 24 princely seats (out of 125) in the lower house and 18 (out
of 104) in the upper house: less than 19 per cent of the total, compared with the
Muslims’ 32 per cent share of the provincial seats.24 Even if the Muslim princes or
their nominees could be relied upon to vote as a bloc on Islamic issues, their presence
would be, on balance, a political liability.
During the 1930s, however, the princes generally adopted an eclectic approach to
religion in the interests of communal harmony. Addressing the state legislature in
September 1930, the nawab of Bhopal urged new Muslim immigrants ‘to imbibe the
spirit, which has all along kept the two communities together in Bhopal. These
Mussalmans may at times forget that as subjects of a Muslim State it is their duty, as
it should be of every Mussalman, to be extra-magnanimous, large-hearted, tolerant
and sympathetic towards those of their fellow subjects who may belong to the other
communities.’ 25 Although himself a devout Muslim, the nawab of Malerkotla
appeased the religious prejudices of his mainly Sikh subjects by affecting a turban in
the Akali style.26 And the nawab of Rampur made no secret of the fact that he
‘regarded himself as an Indian first and a Muslim second’.27 Even the nizam-in many
ways, a pillar of Islam - presided over a state in which Christmas and other non-
Muslim festivals were honoured with public holidays; where government servants
were forbidden to proselytize; and where there was a total ban on the slaughter of
cows.28 Other Muslim princes, such as the nawabs of Loharu and Pataudi, were
bitter dynastic rivals;29 while others again tended to define themselves, and structure
24
Muslims were allocated 82 out of 250 British Indian seats in the Federal Assembly and 49 out of 156
in the Council of State (31.4 and 32.8 per cent respectively). For a rather sanguine view of their
prospects under the Act, see Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the
Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985),?. 17.
25
Indian Annual Register (1930), ii. 472.
26
Richter, ‘Traditional Rulers’, p. 330.
27
US consul-general, Bombay, to sec. of state, Washington, 15 July 1947, USNA SDDF 845.00/7-1547.
28
See my article, ‘ “Communalism” in Princely India: The Case of Hyderabad, 1930-1940', Modern
Asian Studies, xxii (1988), 738-814.
29
Note by Woods-Ballard, pol. agent Punjab Hill States, encl. in resdt., Punjab States, to pol. adviser, 29
Feb. 1940, IO R/1/29/2227.
their friendships, more in regional than in religious terms. Finally, one or two of the
younger and better-educated Muslim rulers, like Bhopal and Rampur, gave every
indication of being willing to ‘break ranks’ and co-operate in all-India matters with
the ‘Hindu’ nationalists of British India.30
Up until 1938, the League could draw some consolation from the fact that the princes,
while mostly of the wrong complexion communally, were nevertheless anti-Congress.
But then came the Congress-AISPC satyagraha. While the agitation failed to topple
the princes from their thrones - thanks to the support rendered by the British - it did
weaken their authority, and in the short term added momentum to the nation-alists’
demand that the act of 1935 be amended to provide for the election of princely state
candidates; and that, of course, the League could not countenance. As the Aga
Khan remarked to the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, ‘the sugar had all come off the pill’,
for under an elective system, it was a foregone conclusion that ‘the Muslims would
not get from the States in the Central Legislature the support they required to balance
the Congress votes’.31
Fortunately, a majority of the princes also had reservations about the scheme, though
for different reasons; and the League banked on them to pull its chestnuts out of the
fire. Accordingly, the League’s leaders played on the princes’ fears of a Congress raj
while lending them their support against the steamroller tactics of the government
of India. In April 1936, the League’s twenty-fourth annual meeting at Bombay carried
a motion, proposed by Jinnah, denouncing the proposed federa-tion. Seconding the
motion, Raja Ghaznafar Ali praised the wisdom of the princes who, at a meeting in
the same city a few days earlier, had also condemned the scheme; adding that the
rulers ‘should refuse to enter the Federation until and unless there was complete
unity between the various factions in British India’.32 A similar motion was proposed
and adopted at Patna in December 1938.33 Meanwhile, Jinnah took the opportunity
to renew his contacts with the government of Hyderabad, for whom he had
performed a ‘watching brief’ at the Round Table Conference in London.34 Although,
unfortunately, little of Jinnah’s Hyderabad correspondence survives, circumstantial
evidence in the British residency records-notably at the time of his state visit in
Septem-ber 1939-suggests that his advice helped to determine the nizam’s refusal of
the government’s ‘final offer’ on federation, made to the states in the spring.35
30
On Rampur, see fn. 27, and on Bhopal see his letter to the maharaja of Rewa, 19 April 1927, Bhopal
Record Office, Chamber of Princes Archive, 11, file 46/1.
31
Quoted in Robin Moore, ‘British Policy and the Indian Problem, 1936-40’, The Partition of India, ed.
Philips and Wainright, p. 83.
32
Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1906-1947, ed. S.S. Pirzada (Karachi,
1970), ii. 261-2.
33
Ibid., pp. 307-8.
34
Sir R. Glancy, chairman, Nizam’s State Railway Board, to Sir A. Hydari, 20 Jan. 1931, Andhra Pradesh
Archives, Hyderabad, file R/1 /4J/10/180.
35
For example, resdt. to pol. adviser, 2 Oct. and 17 Nov. 1939 and 26 Aug. 1940, IO R/1/29/1860/1892/
2825. See also Bahadur Yar Jang to Jinnah, 11 May 1939> Quaid-i-Azam Papers [hereafter QIA Papers],
Quaid-i-Azam Academy, Karachi, file 319.
However, the League need not have worried. For all the safeguards and incentives
attached to it, federation remained, for most rulers, an unacceptably chancy leap in
the dark. When the scheme was suspended following the outbreak of the Second
World War, scarcely one-third of the princes had indicated a willingness to accede.
Much relieved, the League’s high command publicly congratulated the nizam and
other hesitant princes on their ‘brave stand’, which had ‘save[d] India from a grave
political crisis’.36
The spectre of federation had forced the League, for the first time in its history, to
take a public stand on a matter affecting the princely states. But this was not seen,
nor should it be construed as, a departure from the League’s traditional policy. In
contrast to the Congress-backed AISPC, the League had no wish to interpose itself
between the rulers and their subjects. Indeed, perhaps to reassure the princes of its
inten-tions, the League’s high command moved, in 1937, to close off the constitutional
loophole which, since 1919, had afforded a limited repre-sentation to state-domiciled
Muslims on the League’s general council; henceforward, only ‘resident [s] of British
India’ would be eligible for full membership.37 Three years later, with federation
conveniently put on ice for the duration of the war, the League capped this change
by shifting all responsibility for policy-making in regard to the princes on to the
shoulders of the newly formed All-India States Muslim League of Nawab Bahadur
Yar Jang.
***
It is easy to see why, in the 1930s, the Muslim League adopted a policy of laissez-
faire towards the princes; it is not so easy to explain why it maintained this stance,
virtually unchanged, down to the eve of inde-pendence in 1947. An obvious-but, as
we shall see, unsatisfactory - answer is that the League’s decision, at its annual
meeting in March 1940, to push for a Muslim homeland-which, given the
geographical distribution of Muslims, could only realistically embrace the north-
west and north-east parts of the subcontinent - rendered the final constitu-tional
shape of the proposed Indian union (and, with it, the collective destiny of the princely
states) of little further interest to the League’s political planners.
However, quite apart from the fact that the British (who had, after all, the final say)
were firmly opposed to the undoing of their imperial handiwork, the priority given
to the realization of a Muslim homeland ought, one might have supposed, to have
led the League to make a determined bid for the allegiance of at least those princely
states-such as Kalat, Bahawalpur, Faridkot, Kapurthala, Kashmir, and Tripura- which
fell within, or adjacent to, the areas claimed. Indeed, there is some evidence that this
was the League’s initial inclination. As is well known, the term ‘Pakistan’, which
36
Resolution of the AIML Council, Delhi, 27-8 Aug. 1939, AIML Papers, History of the Freedom
Movement Archive, University of Karachi, box 201.
37
‘Report of the Committee Appointed to Revise the Constitution and Rules of the All-India Muslim
League’, 15 April 1937, AIML Papers, file 3, part iv of 1919-43.
Chaudhury Rahmat Ali dreamed up in 1933 while a student at Cambridge and
which later became by default the official name for the new Muslim state, is an
acronym: and the ‘K’ stands for Kashmir. This, in itself, looked like an unambiguous
claim. What is more, the first time the homeland question was raised formally at a
League gathering-at the Sind provincial annual confer-ence in December 1938- the
demand was framed in terms which suggest that it was meant to include both
provinces and states: after criticizing, and rejecting, the scheme of federation then
current, the conference called on the government ‘to devise a scheme of Constitution
[al reform] under which Muslim majority provinces, Muslim Native States, and areas
inhabited by a majority of Muslims may attain full independence in the form of a
federation of their own, with permission to any other Muslim State beyond the frontier
to join the Federation’.38
By 1940, however, the League’s leaders were singing quite another tune. As originally
drafted, the celebrated homeland resolution moved by Fazlul Huq at Lahore spoke
of ‘provinces’, not ‘areas’39 - which suggests that it was meant to apply only to British
India; and this is how it was subsequently interpreted. In February 1941 the premier
of the Punjab, Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, who had helped to draft the Lahore resolution,
assured the League Working Committee that it was ‘not synonymous with Rahmat
Ali’s Pakistan scheme or any other schemes framed by other persons or put forward
under that name’;40 and in September 1944, in reply to Gandhi’s probing about the
implications of the resolution for Indian unity, Jinnah agreed that ‘Pakistan had lost
its original meaning’ and that its application should in the future be ‘confined to
British India’. 41 As late as 1947, the League was still talking about a Pakistan
‘comprising the six Muslim Provinces’.42
Certainly, this narrow interpretation of Pakistan did not go uncon-tested. Bashir
Ahmad, the League’s chief in Lahore, was one who took up the cudgels on behalf of
the states’ Muslims. Another was S.M. Zauqi of Ajmer: ‘You cannot ignore your
brothers in Indian States,’ he told the League’s Committee of Action in 1944. ‘Pakistan
will never be happy if so many brothers in Indian States and minority provinces are
left in the lurch.’43 And this was also the view, not surprisingly, of the Indian states’
Muslims themselves. ‘The Muslims of Kashmir’, wrote the Srinagar religious leader
Mir Waiz Yusuf Shah, ‘are part and parcel of the Great Muslim Nation of India.
They are for Pakistan and with the Quaede-Azam [sic]. They expect much help
from the Muslim League and the Mussalmans of India.’44 In March 1946, a meeting
38
Quoted in B.S. Moonje to [illegible], 10 Dec. 1938, M.S. Aney Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library, subject file 7.
39
Draft in AIML Papers, file 214, part iv of 1940.
40
Minutes of AIML working committee meeting, 22 Feb. 1941, AIML Papers, file i33, part i of 1941.
41
Jinnah to Gandhi, 17 Sept. 1944. Pakistan Resolution to Pakistan, 1940-1947: A Selection of Documents,
ed. L.A. Sherwani (Karachi, 1969), pp. 78-9.
42
Council Minutes, 27-9 July 1946, AIML Papers, file 278 of 1946.
43
Note for Council of Action, 24 Jan. 1944, AIML Papers, file 155, part i of 1944.
44
Yusuf Shah to Jinnah, 1 Nov. 1946, QIA Papers, file 979.
of ‘Muslim workers’ of Indian states at Aligarh endorsed Jinnah as ‘the sole
re-presentative of the Mussalmans living in [the] ... States’.45 And in the following
October a Kashmiri delegation formally requested the League’s Committee of Action
to change its longstanding policy:
The policy of the Muslim League with regard to Kashmir should be re-orientated.
Kashmir with its overwhelming Muslim majority and vast natural resources is
destined to play a decisive role in the establishment and consolidation of our cherished
goal of Pakistan. The policy of non-interven-tion consistently followed by the Muslim
League, whatever its justification in other cases, is inapplicable to Kashmir and should
be discarded.46
But until 1947, such appeals fell on deaf ears. While Jinnah was willing to canvass
the grievances of Kashmir Muslims privately with the viceroy- as he did in 1943 and
again in 194547 - he was not prepared to support or sanction direct action against
the Kashmiri darbar. When they sought his advice, the states’ Muslims were invariably
told to remain loyal and not to urge their rulers to democratize. ‘So far as the Muslim
League is concerned’, opined Dawn in 1946, ‘it has no wish or desire to stir up
trouble in the States or to engage in a campaign of ... vilification against the princely
order.’48 As late as July 1947, Jinnah is said to have told a delegation of Kashmiri
Muslim leaders to stop campaigning for the state’s accession to Pakistan and to
support Maharaja Hari Singh’s bid for autonomy. 49 Why, in the face of glaring
provocation and the impassioned appeals of its supporters, did the Muslim League
stay its hand?
One reason was the knowledge that the Indian states’ Muslims were heavily
outnumbered by their communal adversaries. As we have seen, Muslims in princely
India were generally the minority community; and where they were not, they were
often backward and untutored in the arts of political agitation. In Bahawalpur, for
example, the absence of any demand for representative government was ascribed to
the fact that ‘no political consciousness has yet developed among the people’.50 What
is more, the states’ Muslims were, on the whole, poorly organized. True, they now
had their own forum. However, despite its august title, the All-India States Muslim
League (AISML) remained, during the 1940s, a tiny, ineffectual body, dominated by
Hyderabadis and Kashmiris, perennially short of money, and largely dependent for
45
‘Resolution of General Meeting of Muslim Workers of Indian States Held at Aligarh, 31/3/46 under
the Chairmanship of Manzar-i-Alam’, AIML Papers, box 201.
46
‘Summary of the Situation in Kashmir Placed before the AIML Committee of Action at New Delhi on
10 October 1946', Shamsul Hasan Collection, Quaid-i- Azam Academy, Karachi, file K-54. (I am
indebted to Mr Khalid Shamsul Hasan for permission to consult and quote from his father’s papers.)
47
See AIML Papers, file 142 of 1943-7; Jinnah to Mohamad Bahadur Khan [Bahadur Yar Jang], 6 Sept.
1943, Shamsul Hasan Coll., Hyderabad, ii. 59; and Jinnah to Wavell (tel.), 22 Aug. 1945, TOP, iv. 132.
48
Dawn, 14 Oct. 1946.
49
Muhammad Yusuf Saraf, Kashmiris Fight for Freedom (Lahore, 1977), i. 712-15. The meeting took
place at Delhi on 11 July 1947.
50
Notes on Punjab States enclosed in resdt. to pol. adviser, 19 Nov. 1938, IO R/1/29/1844.
its survival on the energy of its founder-president, Nawab Bahadur Yar Jang.51 Only
in two states-Hyderabad and Kashmir-was there a significant degree of political
mobilization among Muslims-and there, too, serious problems existed.
In Hyderabad, the dominant Muslim party was the Ittihad-ul-Musli- meen. Founded
in 1928 as a social service institution, the Ittihad was transformed in the late 1930s,
under the vigorous leadership of Bahadur Yar Jang, into a full-blown political
organization dedicated to protecting the entrenched position of the Hyderabadi
Muslim elite. Thereafter, it went from strength to strength. In December 1941, the
Ittihad drew 15,000 people to its annual conference; by 1944, it had spawned 450
branches; and by the beginning of 1948 its membership stood at nearly 900,000, of
whom at least 100,000 were trained paramilitary volun-teers.52 Obviously, there
could be no doubt about the ability of the Ittihad to conduct an agitation. Nevertheless,
the League had serious reservations about its credentials. Bahadur Yar Jang was the
original ‘fanatical Muslim’.53 After his death-possibly from poison-in 1944, a friend,
Manzar-i-Alam, described him as ‘the truest and most faithful Muslim I had ever
come across’.54 Moreover, his piety was often ex-pressed in confrontation. In the
1930s, he masterminded a campaign to convert thousands of Hindu untouchables;
and at the League’s annual meeting at Karachi in December 1943, he annoyed Jinnah
and other League leaders by declaring himself in favour of a Pakistan based on ‘the
Quranic system of government’ and dedicated to ‘a resuscitation of pristine Islamic
purity and glory’ - adding that he was quite ready to ‘sacrifice my life and everything’
to achieve that goal.55 His immediate successor, Abdul Hasan Syed Ali, was more
moderate; but in December 1946 the Ittihad presidency passed to an unreconstructed
communalist, Kasim Razvi. With their minds set on a ‘big’ Pakistan composed of
Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims, and committed-privately at any rate-to the
goal of secularism, the fundamentalism of men like Bahadur Yar Jang and Kasim
Razvi was an embarrassment that the League leaders could well do without.
In Jammu and Kashmir, too, the Muslims appeared to be well or-ganized politically,
with not one but two major parties to represent their interests: the National
Conference of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, established in 1932, and the Muslim
Conference founded in 1940 by a breakaway faction led by Chaudhury Ghulam
51
‘Appeal for Funds by Md. Bahadur Khan’, 1 March 1944, AIML Papers, box 201.
52
Lucien D. Benichou, ‘From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State:
1938-1948’ (D. Phil, thesis, University of Western Australia, 1985) y PP* 140, 168.
53
Resdt. to pol. adviser, 20 July 1940, IO R/1 /2g/2173.
54
[Press statement?] by Manzar-i-Alam, AIML Papers, box 44. On the possible cause of Bahadur Yar
Jang’s death (he was only 39), see S.A. Bux to Jinnah, 11 Feb. 1946, QIA Papers, file 319.
55
Pirzada, Foundations, ii. 484-5. At one point in his speech, Bahadur Yar Jang addressed Jinnah
directly, saying: ‘Quaid-i-Azam! We have understood Pakistan in this light. If your Pakistan is not
such, we do not want it.’ It is a fair bet that this incident stayed in Jinnah’s mind.
Abbas.56 Between them, the two conferences had at least 20,000 paid-up members
and their bigger public meetings attracted crowds of at least that magnitude, with
over 100,000 people turning out to hear Jinnah speak in the Srinagar Jama Masjid in
June 1944.57 Nevertheless, these appearances deceived. On taking over as general
secretary of the Muslim Conference, the former darbari official Aga Shaukat Ali
was amazed by ‘how weak we are organizationally and financially. The party, he
informed Jinnah, had few active branches outside the metropolitan areas of Srinagar
and Jammu, and was so close to bankruptcy that it could not afford to employ ‘a
single paid worker’. 58 Nor was the National Conference much better off, as
Dwarkanath Kachru found when he toured the state on behalf of the Congress in
1941: the National Conference, he reported, ‘is not well organised. No attempt has
been made to keep a regular office, send out organisers and keep in touch with the
branch organisations wherever they are... [It] has no programme of work and no
attempt has been made to keep the organisation alive and in proper trim ...
stagna-tion, facilitated by the long winter, is fast enveloping the organisation in its
grip.’59
Moreover, while both conferences undoubtedly enjoyed a mass follow-ing, visitors
from British India were disappointed by the absence of moral fibre and the low level
of political commitment among the rank and file. In 1943, following a spate of appeals
for assistance from the Muslim Conference and the persistent Bashir Ahmad, Jinnah
sent one of his aides-most likely his private secretary, Khurshid Ahmad-to report on
the state’s potential as a field for future League activity. He discovered that
[While] the Muslim masses in Kashmir are not entirely unamenable to League
propaganda ... they are absolutely uninformed even as to the rudi-ments of the League
movement.... Besides, due allowance is to be made for certain psychological and
moral peculiarities of the Kashmiri Muslims ... Cowardice, treachery, lies, cheating
and other abominable things are now the most common features of the life of the
Muslims of that country. They lack love of Islam; they are the most greedy people
going ... It will require considerable effort, spread over a long period of time, to
reform them and convert them into true Muslims willing to suffer and sacrifice for
high, Islamic purposes.60
56
This oversimplifies what was, in fact, a tangled history. When Abdullah formed his party in 1932 he
called it-what else?-the Muslim Conference. But in 1938 he and other left-wing leaders amended the
party’s constitution to allow non-Muslims to become members. Since the old name was no longer
appropriate, the title ‘National Conference* was adopted instead. When Ghulam Abbas and others
broke away in 1939-40, they took the old name for their new party.
57
Saraf, Kashmiris, p. 625. For instance, at the Muslim Conference annual session held in Oct. 1946, ‘at
least fifty thousand Muslims were present*. Yusuf Shah to Jinnah, 1 Nov. 1946, QIA Papers, file 979.
58
Shaukat Ali to Jinnah, 19 Aug. 1946, Shamsul Hasan Coll., file K-49.
59
‘A Short Note on Kashmir’, encl. in Kachru to Nehru, 25 Dec. 1941, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 38/2311.
60
Confidential report to Jinnah, 20 Aug. 1943, IO R/1 /1 /3913.
Another League emissary, Samseenuddin Khan, was also astonished by the
backwardness of the Muslim Conference rank and file;61 while Dwarkanath Kachru
was equally scathing about the membership of the National Conference: with the
exception of Sheikh Abdullah, he told Nehru, ‘the Conference leaders ... are
theoretically very backward and most of them have not even understood the nature
of the struggle in their own State’.62
However, the most depressing aspect of the Kashmiri situation from the League’s
point of view was the fact that the Muslims were not united. While the Muslim
Conference was communalist, almost rabidly pro-Pakistan, and cultivated close ties
with the League, the National Conference was officially secularist and-as the presence
of Jawaharlal Nehru and Abdul Ghaffar Khan at the party’s 1945 annual meeting
testified - well disposed, at least at the top level, towards the Indian National Congress.
What is more, the National Conference continued, thanks to the charismatic appeal
of its legendary leader Sheikh Abdul-lah, to command by far the bigger following.
Fearful that Kashmir was in danger of becoming another North-West Frontier
Province, Jinnah tried for nearly a year to bring the two parties together. In October
1943, in company with Bahadur Yar Jang, he talked with Ghulam Abbas in Lahore.
The following March, he met Sheikh Abdullah in Delhi, and in June 1944, at
Abdullah’s request, he paid an official visit to Kashmir, where more discussions
were held. Yet at the end of his tour-the latter stages of which were marked by
violent clashes between rival bands of party supporters-he was forced to admit defeat.
Afterwards, in a press release, he laid the blame squarely at the feet of Abdullah:
‘When I, after careful consideration, suggested that the Mussalmans should or-ganize
themselves under one flag and on one platform, not only was my advice not
acceptable to Sheikh Abdullah but, as is his habit, he indulged in all sorts of language
of a most offensive and vituperative character in attacking me.’63
Recognizing that Abdullah was now a lost cause, Jinnah encouraged the Kashmiri
Muslims to throw their support behind the ‘Muslim Con-ference alone’.64 But he did
so without enthusiasm. Having seen at first hand how Kashmiri politics were played,
Jinnah began to harbour serious doubts about whether the state’s quarrelsome
inhabitants would ever make worthwhile citizens of Pakistan.
After 1942, moreover, the League’s strategy of supporting the princes’ right to run
their own affairs, free from popular or outside interference, looked poised to pay
handsome long-term dividends. When the question of the future relations between
the states and successor Indian govern-ments was first broached at the time of Sir
Stafford Cripps’s mission of 1942, it was made abundantly clear by the British
government that paramountcy would not be transferred. As Cripps told the Standing
61
M. Samseenuddin Khan to Jinnah, 28 May 1945, Shamsul Hasan Coll., file K-13.
62
A Short Note on Kashmir’, Nehru Papers, 38/2311.
63
Dawn, 25 July 1944.
64
Quoted in S. Gupta, Kashmir: A Study in Indo-Pakistan Relations (Bombay, 1966), p. 58.
Committee of the chamber of princes on 29 March: ‘The new Union will exercise no
paramountcy over the States, nor is there any question of handing over the rights of
paramountcy to [it].’65 Indeed, the Cabinet Mission of 1946 (which also included
Cripps) went further, declaring in its published memorandum on paramountcy that
once power had been devolved, ‘all the rights surrendered by the States to the
paramount power’ would return to them.66 At the same time, the imperial authori-ties
indicated that they were prepared, come what may, to honour the Crown’s existing
treaties with Indian rulers. ‘We are not going back on our treaty obligations,’ affirmed
the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery.67 ‘We cannot think’, echoed the viceroy,
Lord Linlithgow, mindful of the princes’ contribution to the war-effort and the
assistance they had given the government in suppressing the recent Congress
rebel-lion, ‘of abandoning ... the interests of those who have proved themselves our
friends and loyal supporters.’68 Taken together, these declarations amounted to an
assurance to the princely states that the British govern-ment would support their
right to resume, and maintain, an independent existence.
Independence was also, clearly, the preferred option of many of the larger states,
including Bhopal and Hyderabad. As early as 1942, Hyderabad served notice on the
government of India that she expected, on the transfer of power, to occupy a status
‘in no way inferior to the Union or Unions of India’.69 In March 1947, the dewan of
Travancore, Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyer, intimated to Mountbatten that ‘not only
Travancore, but a number of other States might apply for admission to the
Commonwealth’.70 In June, Bhopal made a similar announcement, which the nawab
defended to the viceroy by pointing out that his state ‘included 150,000 warlike
Muslims who would never agree to his joining a purely Hindu Dominion’.71 And in
July the deputy prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir told the Hindustan Times
that the mountain state was determined to become ‘the Switzerland of the East’.72
Significantly, Hyderabad let it be known that she was counting on the League to
support her bid for independence.73
65
Unofficial summary of Cripps’s meeting with the chamber of princes, 28 March 1942, TOP, i. 534.
66
Govt, of India, White Paper on the Indian States (New Delhi, 1950), p. 153.
67
Amery to Linlithgow, 10 June 1942, TOP, ii. 199.
68
Linlithgow to sec. of state, 13 Sept. 1943, TOP, iv. 244. Amery needed no con-vincing : ‘What Cripps
conceded to the provinces’, he wrote to Wavell on 18 May 1944, ‘cannot [logically] be denied to the
States’. TOP, iv. 976.
69
Moore, ‘Limits of Unity’, p. 54. This line was still being argued by Mountbatten’s maverick political
adviser, Sir Conrad Corfield, as late as June 1947. See minutes of Interim govt, meeting, 13 June, TOP,
ix. 320-7.
70
‘Aide-Memoire on the Future Constitutional Position of Hyderabad’, encl. in PM to resdt., 20 Dec.
1943, TOP, iii. 400.
71
Viceroy’s interview no. 8, 26 March 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file 191.
72
Viceroy’s interview no. 149, 17 June 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file 193.
73
Interview on 14 Oct. 1947, reported in High Commissioner, India, to Common-wealth Relations
Office London (tel.), 17 Oct. 1947, IO L/PS/13/1845B. See also Lt.-Col. W.F. Webb, resdt. Kashmir, to
C. Griffin, 14 Nov. 1946, TOP, ix. 7i.
Again, the perpetuation of the states as independent entities was, on balance,
decidedly to the Muslim League’s-and Pakistan’s-advantage. Pakistan would lose
little territory by the exclusion of the states, India a great deal. Moreover, having
large patches of autonomous-effectively foreign-territory interlaced with its own
would seriously impair the unity and economic viability of the Indian Union : as
Mountbatten later confided to the Labour secretary of state for India, Lord Listowel,
Jawaharlal Nehru’s almost apoplectic reaction to his first transfer of power plan,
when on ‘a hunch’ he gave him an advance copy to look at one evening early in
May 1947, was grounded largely in Nehru’s belief that, in extending an open
‘invitation to at least the major States to remain independent’, the plan was a recipe
for the Balkanization of the sub-continent.74 Conversely, the same arguments against
the integration of the states which had persuaded the League to oppose federation
in the 1930s still held good. Although the states were allotted relatively fewer seats
in the Constituent Assembly than they had notionally had in the Federal Legislature,
their presence still threatened to ‘swamp5 the Mus-lim bloc ‘hopelessly’.75 As well,
the voting intentions of the states re-mained something of an enigma. Apart perhaps
from the nawab of Bhopal, who, as the chancellor of the chamber of princes continued
to exhort his fellow rulers to stick together against the Congress, none of the other
important Muslim princes could be counted on to support Pakistan. Even the nizam,
whose multiple votes would be crucial, was known privately to believe that Pakistan
was ‘an impractical thing ... a shadow without substance’.76
On the information then available, the policy of laissez-faire made good sense.
However, as we now know, it was based on a serious mis-conception. Unbeknown
even to the League members of the Interim government, Whitehall had already
decided to abandon the states to their fate. As early as 1943, misgivings had been
expressed by Linlith-gow’s senior political adviser about the wisdom or practicality
of an across-the-board guarantee to all 560 states, large and small. By 1944, ‘the
realities of the position’ had also become apparent to Wavell;77 and while Amery
was uneasy about overturning past pledges, he was con-soled by departmental advice
that only about half the states’ treaties contained ‘assurances of “absolutism” and
that there is a good case for interpreting even these ... at less than face value’.78 At
war’s end, the British government was reconciled to leaving the states to ‘depend on
... their own merits’;79 and this stand was underlined early in 1947 when it was
decided that ‘neither Hyderabad nor any other Indian state should be allowed to
establish [after independence a] direct relationship with [the] ... Crown’.80
74
See Monckton to C. Brunyate, [June] 1947, quoted in Moore, ‘Limits of Unity’, pp. 63-4; and Zubaida
Yazdani and Mary Chrystal, The Seventh Nizam: The Fallen Empire (Cambridge, 1985), p. 215.
75
Sir A. Glow to Wavell, 5 Feb. 1946, quoting the Muslim League premier of Assam, TOP,vi. 881.
76
Nizam to Wavell, 9 Sept. 1946, TOP, viii. 473.
77
Wavell to Amery, 20 April 1946, TOP, iv. 901.
78
Appendix II to cabinet memo by sec. of state, 1 Feb. 1945, TOP, v. 518.
79
Cabinet memo by sec. of state, 9 Oct. 1945, TOP, vi. 328.
80
US ambassador, London, to sec. of state, Washington, 21 April 1947, reporting discussion with Sir
Paul Patrick, perm, sec., India Office, USNA SDDF 845.00/ 4-2147.
This was not a step which the British government took lightly or without regret. But
it was one which, in the circumstances, could not be avoided. At the height of the
war, the notion of an ongoing military commitment to the states seemed both proper
and practicable; by 1945, with the United Kingdom saddled with a massive global
debt, and crippled by fuel and manpower shortages, it was quite out of the ques-tion.
Britain could not even afford the six divisions which the chiefs-of- staff said would
be needed to maintain order in the provinces without ‘abandon [ing] commitments
in other areas, hitherto regarded as in-escapable.81 She simply had nothing left with
which to prop up the states. In addition, the Labour government placed a rather
higher priority than its predecessor on maintaining good relations with the Congress
in the hope of keeping India within the Commonwealth. As Listowel argued in a
note for the cabinet: ‘If we admit at this stage that we will be prepared to maintain
[a] separate relationship with States ... which do not join a Dominion, we shall be
charged with dis-integrating India and the Congress is likely to withdraw its
application for Dominion status. 82 Finally, Mountbatten seems to have been
per-suaded by the logic of the Congress argument that the independence of the
princely states would seriously undermine the viability of the new Indian Dominion,
retarding the development of the subcontinent and imperilling the security of the
Indian Ocean region. It is against this background that the deal between the viceroy
and Patel was forged.
From the commencement of the Mountbatten viceroyalty in March 1947, there was
a mounting uneasiness in the League camp about British intentions. Nevertheless,
the official line continued to be that the states would be allowed, if they wished, to
become independent. According to the government’s statement of 3 June on the
transfer of power, the policy embodied in the Cabinet Mission memorandum of
1946 remained unchanged; and this was also the burden of the viceroy’s somewhat
heated comments to reporters at the following day’s press conference: ‘Are you
suggesting, he blustered, ‘that we, in our last act, should tear up those treaties and
say we are going to compel them to join this or that... Constituent Assembly? ... I
cannot go back on a pledge based on Treaties entered into many years ago. 83
Accordingly, despite growing reservations, the League’s high command continued
in public to assert the princes’ right to choose. In April 1947, Jinnah’s deputy and
finance minister in the Interim government, Liaquat Ali Khan, told reporters that:
The states are perfectly within their rights in refusing to have anything to do
with the [Indian] Constituent Assembly as presently functioning... When the
decision regarding the future of British India has been announced, the Indian
States will be free to negotiate agreements with Pakistan or Hindustan as
81
Memo by chiefs-of-staff, 12 June 1946, TOP, viii. 869.
82
Note, 24 May 1947, TOP, x. 982.
83
Quoted in M.N. Das, Partition and Independence of India: Inside Story of the Mountbatten Days
(New Delhi, 1982), p. 233.
considerations of contiguity or their own self-interest may dictate, or they may
choose to assume complete and separate sovereign status for themselves.84
And this was still their official position in June. On the 13th, at a rowdy round table
conference of party leaders at the viceregal palace, Nehru, still reeling from the
implications of ‘Plan Balkan’, launched a blistering attack on the viceroy’s literalist
interpretation of the Cabinet Mission statement on paramountcy, which the political
adviser, Sir Conrad Corfield, in turn defended. Jinnah at once weighed in on
Corfield’s side, asserting to Nehru’s ire and the viceroy’s embarrassment that ‘every
Indian State was a sovereign State’ and that the princes were free to do as they
liked.85
Privately, though, the League was beginning to have doubts about the strategy which
it had so steadfastly pursued for so long. The policy of laissez-faire had been fashioned
at a time when the British raj was still securely in place and when the League itself
was still reconciled to the idea of a unified India. Now, the League had to make
plans for a divided subcontinent in which Congress-led India would be the dominant
power. Already, the Congress had made no secret of its determination to inherit
paramountcy. How long could the British-even assuming they wished to do so-resist
that claim? While outwardly maintaining their belief in the right of the princes to
shape their own destinies, the League leaders started, covertly, to play the Congress
at its own game.
***
The catalyst for this change of tack was the publication, on 3 June, of Mountbatten’s
revised plan for the devolution of power: a scheme which seems to have had its
genesis in Nehru’s outburst upon being shown ‘Plan Balkan’. Now, whether or not-
as is claimed by most Paki-stani writers - the new plan was drawn up specifically to
appease the Congress, it certainly represented a body-blow to the League’s ambitions,
for, while conceding the principle of partition, it ruled that the same formula should
be applied to the Punjab and Bengal, if the representa-tives of the Hindu and Sikh
communities in the provincial legislative councils so desired. At a stroke, the long-
awaited Muslim homeland had been deprived of half of its most productive
agricultural region and its largest city, the industrial metropolis of Calcutta. Shorn
of territory, population, and industry, it had been reduced to a ‘motheaten’ husk-
state which even the viceroy privately conceded could well prove too small and
weak to be viable.86 Under the circumstances, the notion of boosting Pakistan’s area
and population by incorporating some, or all, of the neighbouring princely states,
suddenly became very appealing.
Moreover, by doing nothing the League stood to lose even the small number of states
which, according to the viceroy’s principle of con-tiguity, were qualified to join
84
Press statement, 21 March 1947, AIML Papers, box 201.
85
Minutes of the viceroy’s 18th miscellaneous meeting, 13 June 1947, TOP, xi. 323.
86
Viceroy’s interview no. 46, 10 April 1947, TOP, x. 187.
Pakistan. While the League adhered to the high moral ground of non-intervention,
the Congress, in association with the AISPC, at once began actively wooing the
more pliable rulers and making life as difficult as possible for the rest-Nehru as
president of the AISPC warning that after the transfer of power on 15 August ‘non-
cooperating states’ would be ‘treated as hostile’.87 As a livid, but virtually helpless
political officer remarked to his superior in Delhi, the Congress was ‘forcing ... the
States into the Dominion of India by ... tactics which would have warmed the heart
of the late Adolf Hitler’.88 Nor did it draw the line at Muslim states. Penderel Moon,
who was serving in Bahawalpur as revenue minister, was ‘astounded’ to hear from
the prime minister, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani, that discussions had taken place
with a view to the Nawab’s acceding to India.89 Increasingly, too, the attention of
the Congress was focused on Kashmir. During July and August 1947, Gandhi and
Congress president Kripalani both travelled to Kashmir for talks with Hari Singh,
and Nehru would also have gone if Mountbatten had permitted it. Complacent as
they had been about the prospect of Kashmir remaining independent, the League’s
leaders were not prepared to see such a strategic prize go to India without a stiff
fight.
Then, on 13 August, the League suffered yet another setback when the Punjab
Boundary Commission headed by English jurist Sir Cyril Radcliffe awarded the
Muslim-majority district of Gurdaspur to India -thereby giving the latter a common
frontier with, and overland access to, Jammu and Kashmir. Had he wished, Radcliffe
could have made out a good economic case in defence of his decision; but he chose
to stay silent, leading the now paranoid League leaders to accuse him of bias and
collusion. Faced with what seemed a concerted official effort to rob them of their
rightful patrimony, they decided that the time had come to meet fire with fire.90
The League’s first recourse had been to put out discreet feelers to the border princes.
In early July, Jinnah is alleged to have written to the maharaja of Kashmir, promising
him ‘every sort of favourable treat-ment ... including the continuation of autocratic
government’, if he would join Pakistan.91 Subsequently, two Muslim Leaguers from
Punjab visited Srinagar and conveyed the same assurance to the prime minister of
Kashmir, Ramachandra Kak, who was thought to be sympathetic. Meanwhile,
contact was also made with Patiala, and, shortly afterwards, with Jodhpur and
87
Quoted in US minister, New Delhi, to sec. of state, Washington, 24 April 1947, USNA SDDF 845.00/
4-2447. For an insight into the Congress’s high-level diplo-macy, see Menon, Story, pp. 108-9.
88
Capt. A.E.G. Davy, pol. agent Bhopal, to C. Griffin, 9 Aug. 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file 144.
89
Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (Berkeley, 1962), p. 107.
90
The Gurdaspur issue is discussed in detail in Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography (London,
1959), pp. 359-61. In an interview with Collins and Lapierre a not long before his death, Mountbatten
appeared to give some credibility to these allegations when he admitted that he might have given
Radcliffe the idea that Kashmir’s accession could be affected by where he drew the borderline. He
also conceded that ‘Radcliffe let us in for an awful lot of trouble’. Collins and Lapierre, Mountbatten,
p. 43.
91
‘Record of Interview between Mountbatten and Jinnah’, 5 July 1947, TOP, xi. 936.
Jaisalmer; and again sweeping promises were ten-dered, Maharaja Hanwant Singh
of Jodhpur being given, so the story goes, a blank sheet of paper and invited by the
League president to ‘fill in all your conditions’.92 Stronger tactics, though, seem to
have been employed in the case of Rampur. Early in August, a very harassed nawab
told the viceroy that ‘Jinnah had been bringing every possible pressure to bear on
him personally to stop him acceding to the Dominion of India’, and that Liaquat
had made ‘grave threats ... as to what would happen to Rampur if he deserted
Pakistan’.93 As the date for the transfer of power - 15 August-drew near, negotiations
along these lines be-came, if the partisan V.P. Menon is to be credited, an almost
‘daily occurrence’.94
But this was only the beginning. As it became clear that all but a handful of states
were going to sign Instruments of Accession with India, the League abandoned
altogether the pretence that it had no designs on the states and attempted to swing
the issue by direct action: during July and August, League agents working
clandestinely in Alwar, Bharat- pur, and the Poonch region of Kashmir, encouraged
local Muslims to take up arms against their Hindu overlords; at the beginning of
Septem-ber, Pakistani authorities in the Punjab initiated a ‘private war’ against the
still independent Kashmir darbar by stopping supplies of fuel and other essential
commodities from crossing the border; later that month, senior League officials,
including the premier of the North-West Frontier Province, Abdul Quaiyam Khan,
assisted and possibly organized large-scale invasion of Pathan tribesmen which
came within an ace of capturing Kashmir by force; and early in 1948 (having
condemned India for its use of force in Junagadh) Pakistan used its own regular
army to coerce the khan of Kalat who had also opted to remain independent.95
Finally, the League did its best to delay what it now saw as inevitable: the absorption
of the remaining Muslim-ruled states in the Union of India. When it became apparent
that the nawab of Bhopal was not going to enter the Constituent Assembly, the
League high command encouraged him to pre-empt matters by making a unilateral
declaration of independence; and similar tactics were employed in the case of
Junagadh. On 16 July Jinnah called on the dewan, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, and told
him that he should instruct the nawab to keep out under any circumstances until 15
August. Later, after Junagadh had quixotically announced that it intended to join
92
Menon, Story, p. 88. See also viceroy’s personal report no. 17, 16 Aug. 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file
213. On Patiala, see Urmila Phadnis, Towards the Integration of the Indian States (Delhi, 1980), p. 180.
93
Viceroy’s personal report no. 16, 8 Aug. 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file 213.
94
Menon, Story, p. 109.
95
The extent of Pakistan’s complicity in the tribal invasion has been much debated and, even now,
remains an open question. Yet even the British, who were keen to play down the issue, conceded that
the tribesmen could not have ‘acted with[out] some connivance of the Pakistani authorities’. Memo
by Commonwealth Relations Office, 31 Oct. 1947, IO L/PS/13/1845B. The issues are canvassed in J.
Korbel, Danger in Kashmir (Princeton, 1954), pp. 75 ff.; Alistair Lamb, Crisis in Kashmir, 1947-1966
(London, 1966), p. 51; I. Stephens, Pakistan (London, 1963), p. 202; and Moore, New Commonwealth,
ch.2.
Pakistan, Liaquat offered the nawab seven companies of paramilitary police to help
him keep order.96 But the Muslim League’s biggest effort, naturally enough, was
reserved for Hyderabad. Here it employed a twofold strategy. First and foremost, it
strove to stiffen Hyderabadi resistance. As we have seen, the nizam had all along
planned to make his state independent; and in 1947 he re-mained intent on this
goal. However, his constitutional advisers, believing the landlocked state too
vulnerable, in the absence of British support, to stand alone, were pushing him to
negotiate a ‘standstill agreement’ with the government of India. Backed by the Ittihad-
ul-Muslimeen, Jinnah endeavoured to overturn these moderate counsels. In July he
persuaded the nizam to reject an invitation from the Indian states department to
accede on the three vital subjects of defence, foreign affairs, and com-munications
and to propose, instead, a loose treaty of mutual co-opera-tion; and in October,
when negotiations for an agreement were nearing completion, he prevailed on
Osman Ali to raise his terms, thereby wrecking what was, in retrospect, probably
the last opportunity for a political settlement.97 Second, the League tried to ward off
the Congress with a campaign of veiled threats and promises. On 12 July, after talks
with the Hyderabad delegation in New Delhi, Jinnah called on Mount-batten and
warned him that if the Congress ‘attempted to exert any pressure on Hyderabad’, a
‘hundred million Muslims ... would rise as one’ to defend her;98 and later he made
the same dire prediction in conversation with Nehru. Of course, the promised mass
support never materialized; but in 1948 when Hyderabad came under Indian
economic blockade, the Pakistani authorities did what they could to prolong her
resistance by organizing a covert airlift of arms and essential supplies.99
However, the League’s change of strategy came too late to arrest the triumphant
progress of the Indian juggernaut. By the deadline of 15 August, some 550 states, or
well over 90 per cent, had succumbed to the blandishments of Menon and Patel,
and the veiled threats of the viceroy, and entered the Indian Union.100 These included
all of the Hindu- and Sikh-majority border states which Karachi had hoped to lure
96
Menon, Story, pp. 121, i25n.
97
Yazdani and Chrystal, Seventh Nizam, p. 238, and Benichou, ‘From Autocracy to Integration’, p. 286.
98
Viceroy’s interview no. 162, 12 July 1947, Mountbatten Papers, file 194.
99
Circular letter from PM to chief ministers, 15 July 1948, Nehru, Letters, p. 155, and Moore, New
Commonwealth, pp. 84-5. Apparently, some of these flights were made by UK-registered Lancasters
owned by an Australian-born company direc-tor, F.S. Cotton.
100
The reasons why the border states chose India lie outside the scope of this paper. However, it may
be surmised that Patel’s assurances that they would have to surrender to the Indian Union only those
sovereign powers (over defence, foreign affairs, and communications) which had previously been
exercised on their behalf by the British, that their privy purses would continue to be honoured, and
that, if they co-operated, there was a possibility of governorships and cushy diplomatic jobs abroad,
all helped to swing the issue. Likewise it is probable that some princes were swayed by feelings of
loyalty to Mountbatten, whose known sympathy for the Congress position on Indian unity made his
refusal to give formal advice on the matter of accession quite redundant. Conversely, it is likely that
some states were deterred from joining Pakistan out of fear of reprisals and by the suspicion-
probably well-founded - that Pakistan would be neither able nor willing to come to their aid if
trouble ensued.
into its own sphere of influence. Only two princely states, on the other hand, had
actually signed Instruments of Accession with Pakistan-Junagadh, and its tiny
Kathiawar neighbour, Manavadar - neither of which was ad-jacent to Pakistani
territory. On Independence Day, the Dominion of Pakistan embraced the province
of Sind (but neither Khairpur nor Bahawalpur), the provinces of Baluchistan, and
the North-West Fron-tier, but none of the half dozen Baluchi and Pathan
principalities. More important still, it did not include Kashmir.
During the latter part of 1947 and the early part of 1948, the Muslim- majority states
of the Indus Valley and the North-West Frontier region were gradually incorporated
(in Kalat’s case, with considerable diffi-culty) in the new Dominion; likewise, a good
deal of the Kashmir Valley was eventually added, de facto. But the League’s dream
of a network of Muslim-ruled states dotted throughout Hindustan was quickly
shattered as, one by one, the non-acceding rulers capitulated to Indian coercion.
Bhopal was the first to break, retracting her unilateral declaration of independence
and signing with India on the eve of the transfer of power. On 22 October,
Manavadar’s bid for autonomy was uncere-moniously terminated by a detachment
of Indian reserve police; and on the 27th Junagadh surrendered after a month-long
economic blockade. Bigger and wealthier, Hyderabad survived longer; but she, too,
was eventually crushed by an armed invasion in September 1948.
Ironically, when the news of the Indian military coup against Hydera-bad came
through, in the early hours of 13 September, it found a Paki-stan government and
people still reeling from the death, only two days before, of Jinnah. In retrospect, the
conjunction of these two catastro-phes is rather fitting, for, as the nizam’s confidant
and the main architect of laissez-faire, Jinnah had done more than anyone in Pakistan
to set Hyderabad on the path to confrontation.
***
One is accustomed to read in the scholarly literature of the partition of India, of a
momentous but singular occurrence. In fact, there were two territorial settlements
associated with the transfer of power in 1947 : the partition of the provinces, or
what had been British India; and the accession, to India and Pakistan respectively,
of the erstwhile princely states. In the former settlement, Pakistan gained a great
deal, though not as much as its patrons and supporters would have liked; in the
latter division, almost all the spoils went to India. In contrast to what is com-monly
assumed, the failure of Pakistan to obtain a larger share did not stem only from the
states’ communal complexion or even from their geographical distribution, but from
the reluctance of the leaders of the Muslim League to depart from its established
policy of non-interference in the states’ internal affairs.
When this policy of laissez-faire was formulated in the 1930s, it was a sensible
response to political circumstances. So long as the ‘two Indias’ remained discrete
entities, governed on different constitutional princi-ples, the Muslim League had
nothing to gain by starting up branches in the states. Non-intervention, on the other
hand, had several things to recommend it. It cost nothing; pleased the princes, whose
support would be vital if ever the promised all-India federation came into being;
and helped to keep the League in the good books of the princes’ imperial patrons.
Finally, the laissez-faire policy served, especially after 1938, to distinguish the League
from its arch-rivals, the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, which had begun to
take a close, and from the princes’ point of view not too friendly, interest in the
states’ internal affairs. However, the maintenance of this policy down to the eve of
the transfer of power in 1947 was, as M.N. Das correctly observes, a ‘massive
blunder’.101 Why did the Muslim League not see earlier that the writing was on the
wall?
To some extent, no doubt, the League was blinded by self-interest. The prospect of a
‘Balkanized’ subcontinent was one which, for obvious reasons, the League found
appealing. Even with the ‘six provinces’, Pakistan would be overshadowed by India;
but the dominance of ‘Hindustan’ would be much reduced if her territory was
interlaced with a network of foreign principalities. Conversely, Pakistan’s hand would
be much strengthened, politically and economically, by the survival of states like
Hyderabad and Bhopal with which she had close and friendly relations. Second,
the League’s high command was to some extent caught out by the pace of events.
As late as 1945, the popular belief was that the British would remain for a substantial
period; and even in 1946 Wavell was prepared to recommend to London that in the
event of a breakdown in negotiations ‘we declare our determination to govern India
for a further period of at least 15 years’.102 Not until 20 January 1947 was a firm date
for British withdrawal announced; and even then the expectation was that the states
would have until June 1948 to make up their minds. Mountbatten’s policy of ‘scuttle’
took the League-like everyone else-by surprise. And by then the League’s leaders
had more important things to worry about - in particular, the burning issues of the
east Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province where Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s
Red Shirts were still strongly entrenched. Third, the League was handicapped by its
previous declarations of support for the rulers’ right to choose. Having repeatedly
assured the princes that it had no designs on their patrimony, it could not alter
course at the eleventh hour without appearing guilty of hypocrisy and bad faith.
In the last resort, though, the Muslim League was deceived by ap-pearances. The
Cabinet Mission’s memorandum on paramountcy made it appear that the states
were not an integral part of the constitutional framework being devised for British
India; indeed, they would become, once again, sovereign entities free to associate
with either of the two suc- sessor Dominions or to remain independent. Paramountcy
would not be transferred. And this pledge was publicly reiterated again and again,
at the highest level, by His Majesty’s Government. Even as the Attlee gov-ernment
debated how best to secure a ‘full basket’ of accessions to India, Listowel, pressed by
101
Das, Partition, p. 242.
102
Memo by the sec. of state, encl. in Pethick-Lawrence to Attlee, 21 Dec. 1946, TOP, ix. 398.
the Opposition during the debate on the India Bill in July 1947, appeared to support
their interpretation of the constitu-tional position. The states, he agreed, were ‘masters
of their own fate’, and Whitehall ‘would not use the slightest pressure to influence
their momentous and voluntary decision’.103 The appointment of Mount- batten,
too, seemed at first to indicate a solicitous posture towards the states. It is now
thought that Mountbatten was an inspired choice as viceroy because - unlike his
two predecessors - he was able to win the confidence of Nehru and Gandhi; but at
the time it was thought he was a good choice because he was a member of the royal
family, and thus bound to be persona grata with the princes. Like many others at
the time, the League’s leaders found it hard to imagine that someone of Mountbatten’s
pedigree could actually desert the Crown’s allies. Doubt-less the League should not
have been so trusting. Yet it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for their dilemma.
While they knew, as seasoned politicians, not to underestimate the importance of
realpolitik, they were perhaps entitled to think that the word of viceroys and senior
statesmen in Whitehall counted for something-particularly when it was confirmed
by Act of Parliament. Lastly, the main reservoir of support for the princes was located
in the Conservative Party, then out of office, and it seems that the League was given
a distorted picture of British opinion by its most influential British adviser, Sir Walter
Monckton.104
However, even after the League’s leaders grasped what was afoot, and started to
put pressure on the princes, they failed to make the most of their opportunities: in
part because their bid came too late, several of the key northern princes having
already entered the Indian Con-stituent Assembly; in part because their diplomacy
was not as astute or as co-ordinated as that of Patel and Menon, who had the
advantage of being able to call on the resources of a large states department;105 and
in part because they continued to divide their efforts between the border states and
Hyderabad. In retrospect, it is clear that the League should have cut its losses and
come to an arrangement with the Congress (which the viceroy, for one, would have
supported) for plebiscites in the dis-puted states.106 Had it done so, Pakistan would
have ‘lost’ Junagadh and Manavadar and most probably Hyderabad, too;107 but she
would almost certainly have gained Jammu and Kashmir. As it was, the Pakistanis
ended up with the worst of both worlds, losing not only the first three, which, being
Muslim minority states, were perhaps expendable, but also the greater part of
103
Speech of 16 July 1947, quoted in Moore, ‘Limits of Unity’, p. 66.
104
See Monckton to Lord Templewood, 15 Jan. 1947, ibid., p. 62.
105
A Pakistan states department was set up at the same time as the Indian one pre-sided over by Patel;
but it was much smaller and lacked high-calibre staff.
106
Mountbatten in fact proposed this formula to Jinnah in Lahore at the beginning of Nov. 1947 as a
way of solving the Kashmir crisis. It is a pity for all concerned that he did not float the idea sooner.
Note by Mountbatten, 1 Nov. 1947, IO L/PS/13/1845B.
107
India did hold a plebiscite in Junagadh, with the predictable result. But no refer-endum was ever
held, despite promises to this effect, in Hyderabad, which suggests that the Indian authorities may
have been worried about losing. On this possi-bility, see Benichou, ‘From Autocracy to Integration’,
ch. viii.
Kashmir, which, as the premier of the North-West Frontier Province, Abdul Quayam
Khan, protested in October 1947, was ‘a Moslem majority state and belongs to
Pakistan as a matter of right’.108
Backing Hyderabad’s quixotic bid for independence did bring some short-term
benefits: principally, the offer of a 20-crore loan at a time when Pakistan was
desperately short of funds as a result of the govern-ment of India’s decision to
withhold the cash balances due under the partition settlement.109 Conversely, the
nizam’s fall in September 1948 dealt the nascent Dominion a severe psychological
blow and led to much heart-burning and recrimination. As an anguished Chaudhury
Khaliquzzaman wrote to Liaquat on 13 September: ‘In my last inter-view with you
I had ... suggested that if [the] Pakistan Government is not in a position to help
Hyderabad, it should be clearly and unuqui- vocally [sic] urged upon the ... State to
accede to India ... This was not only not done but Hyderabad was egged on to resist
the Indian demand. Now, when the thing has reached a climax, some of your Cabinet
Ministers want to sit back and allow the Hyderabad Muslims to be butchered.’110
However, the cost to Pakistan of the ‘tragedy’ of Asafjahi Hyderabad was small
compared with the consequences that flowed from the loss of the greater part of
Jammu and Kashmir. Khaliquzzaman’s dire predictions notwithstanding, there was
no indiscriminate butchery of Hyderabadis. But there was of Kashmiris. In the last
half of 1947, perhaps 50,000 Kashmiri Muslims died in Poonch and Jammu at the
hands of Dogra troops of the darbar and of the Hindu paramilitary forces of the
Rashtriya Swayamseevak Sangh; and as many again may have perished in the
protracted civil war that began with the tribal invasion in October. As well, the
festering Kashmir problem has been a continuing source of tension between India
and Pakistan and one of the main reasons why Pakistan continues to spend heavily
on armaments that she can ill afford, thereby seriously retarding the economic
develop-ment of the country. Of all the errors of judgement made by the League’s
leaders on the pathway to Pakistan, none can have left such a doleful legacy.
Monash University
Table 1: Muslim-Majority States, 1941
State Population Muslims (%)
Kharan 33,832 99.7
Las Bela 67,310 97.5
Kalat 235,305 96.8
Khairpur 305,787 82.9
Bahawalpur 1,341,209 81.9
108
Press statement, 29 Oct. 1947, quoted in High Commissioner Pakistan to CRO London, (tel.), 30 Oct.
1947, IO L/PS/13/1845B.
109
In the event the money never reached Pakistan. The loan was always dependent on the Reserve
Bank of India being prepared to honour it; in the circumstances it refused to do so.
110
C. Khaliquzzaman to Liaquat Ali Khan, 13 Sept. 1948, AIML Papers, box 141.
Jammu and Kashmir 5,439,130 79.8
(Jammu) 1,572,887 61.0
Table 2: Religious Distribution in States Bordering Pakistan, 1941
State Religion of Ruler Muslims (%)
Kalsia Hindu 39.5
Malerkotla Muslim 38.5
Kapurthala Sikh 31.2
Faridkot Sikh 30.8
Cutch Hindu 30.0
Jaisalmer Hindu 29.4
Tippera Hindu 24.0
Dujana Hindu 22.6
Bikaner Hindu 14.3
Jodhpur Hindu 03.3
Table 3: Seats Allocated to Muslim-Ruled States in the Proposed Federal
Legislature, 1935
State Seats in L.H. Seats in U.H.
Hyderabad 14 5
Kalat 1 2
Bhopal 1 2
Bahawalpur 1 2
Rampur 1 1
Tonk 1 1
Khairpur 1 1
Junagadh 1 1
Palanpur* ½ ½
Radhanpur* 1
/3 1
/3
Cambay* 1
/3 1
/3
Janjira* 1
/3 1
/3
Malerkoda* 1
/3 1
/3
Loharu* 1
/3 1
/3
Banganapelle* 1
/3 1
/3
Balasinor* 1
/9 ¼
Sachin* 1
/9 ¼
Total 23 2/ 3 18
* Indicates states required to share a seat with one or more others on a rotation basis.
INTEGRATION OF PRINCELY STATES AND THE REORGANIZATION OF
STATES IN INDIA
PHOOL KUMAR SHARMA, M.A.
Lecturer in Political Science, Shivaji College, New Delhi
An important event that occurred in the post-independence era must be mentioned

as it helped in the consolidation of the country. The many princely states lost their
identity after merger with the Indian Union. The memorandum in regard to States
Treaties and Paramountcy issued on 12th May, 1946 stated, “...His Majesty’s
Government will cease to exercise the powers of paramountcy. This means that the
rights of the States which flow from their relationship to the Crown will no longer
exist and that all the rights surrendered by the States to the paramount power will
return to the States. Political arrangements between the States on the one side and
the British Crown and British India on the other will thus be brought to an end.”1
The void was to be filled by the States entering into a federal relationship with the
successor Government and the gradual introduction of a democratic political system.
It may be recalled that as early as 1938 at its Haripura Session the National Congress
made it its objective to integrate the States in Indian Union and to achieve political
homogeneity throughout the country:
The Congress stands for the same political, social and economic freedom in the
States as in the rest of India and considers the States as integral parts of India
which cannot be separated. The Purna Swaraj or complete independence, which
is the objective of the Congress, is for the whole of India, inclusive of the States,
for the integrity and unity of India must be maintained in freedom as it has been
maintained in subjection.2
The simultaneous maintenance of two different political systems in the States and
Provinces was not justified by any difference in the culture of the people. The
difference was an artificial one. Essentially all people had intimately related common
problems to face. The close relationship between the States and the Provinces and
their common destiny was also expressed in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of
1918 in the following observations:
India is in fact, as well as by legal definition, one geographical whole. The integral
connexion of the States with the British Empire not only consists in their relations
to the British Crown, but also in their growing interest in many matters common
to the land to which they and the British provinces alike belong.3
1
White Paper on Indian States issued by the Government of India in July 1948, Appendix III, p. 45.
2
Indian National Congress February 1938 to January 1939 (Allahabad, Pub -lished by General Secretary,
All India Congress Committee) p. 10.
3
Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms 1918 (Calcutta, Government of India Central Publication
Branch, Reprinted 1928) para 296.
Similarly, the Indian Statutory Commission characterised the differ-ence between
the provinces and princely States as purely arbitrary. To quote a few words from the
Report:
Whatever may be the differences of climate and physical feature, and whatever
may be the diversities of race and religion in India, it is not these differences that
are reflected in the purely arbi-trary division between British and State territory.4
The integration of princely States with the Indian Union was also necessary to achieve
harmonious administration. The existence of a number of small States created a
multiplicity of governing agencies. Each State differed in its administrative rules
from the neighbouring States. The difference in rules necessarily created barriers
between one unit and another. In such a state of affairs it was not possible to launch
any large economic planning. The country, for its economic development, needed a
broad- based economic policy. Exploitation of the natural resources and co-ope-ration
in production of new materials required a competent administration. Convenience
in administration is a very important condition for implement-ing economic
planning. The White Paper on Indian States deprecated the multiplicity of governing
agencies in following words:
Existence of a large number of small units led to unnecessary multiplication of
governing agencies which necessitated the mainte-nance of numerous ornamental
and dignified institutions. These States could never provide efficient service or
maintain anything like modern standards of administration, continuance of
separate govern-mental institutions in such States led only to the dissipation of
national wealth.5
It was evident that in the existing set-up it was not possible to make any uniform
progress and to inter-relate the development made in various regions of India. As
the White Paper pointed out, “In such a set-up any kind of co-ordinated development,
opening up to economic potentialities or any form of real progress was hardly
possible.”6
Apart from the need for good administration, the multiplicity of princely States
could prove dangerous to the political unity and security of the country. The existence
of two political systems created a wide disparity between the states and neighbouring
provinces. This fact could create misunderstanding at any time among the people
residing in various parts of the country. The Provinces were ahead in the development
of democratic institutions whereas the States were still continuing with autocracy.
There-fore, the integration of States was essential to achieve political uniformity in
the country. This alone could answer the demand of time. The political disparity in
4
The Report of the Indian Statutory Commission 1930 (Calcutta, Government of India, Central
Publication Branch, 1930 Vol. 2, para 15.
5
White Paper on Indian States, n. 1, para 100.
6
Ibid., para 101.
the country could encourage disruptionist forces.7 In his valu-able study V. P. Menon
pointed out the danger of this glaring disparity. According to him “Normal
development of political progress had been arrested in most of the States.”8
The existing circumstances end the need of the time eased the task of integrating the
States for Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel—the then Deputy Prime Minister of India. Almost
all the States were integrated by signing the Instrument of Accession, leaving aside
only the States of Junagadh, and Hyderabad. Later on these two States were also
integrated in the Union of India.9 After the integration, the internal arrangement in
the States and their relationship with the centre were cast into a new mould so as to
fit into the new constitution of 1950, which provided three categories of Slates.10
The territorial integration of princely States took three forms— (a) merger with the
adjacent provinces; (b) grouping of certain States into separate units; (c)
transformation of certain States into centrally adminis-tered areas.11 The process
through which the states were adjusted into the new constitutional structure was
two-fold. It involved, in the first place, the accession of the Indian States to the
Dominion of India. Secondly, it involved the changes whereby the consolidation of
small States into viable administrative units had taken place. With it also was set
into operation the development of democratic institutions and responsible
governments in the States.12
The policy of integration served a great purpose. It united the whole country in one
political framework, and removed many administrative draw-backs and financial
disparities. Thus was created an atmosphere favourable to large scale economic
planning. The financial integration of States helped to implement a co-ordinated
economic policy. It was a great change for India, which affected its political, economic
and social life. In the words of Sardar Patel:
The great ideal of geographical, political and economic unification of India, an
ideal which for centuries remained a distant dream and which appeared as
remote and as difficult of attainment as ever even after the advent of Indian
independence” was consummated by the policy of integration.13 The efforts of
Indian leaders opened new vistas for the country. Equally praiseworthy was the
patriotic spirit of the princes, who demonstrated that they could intelligently
appreciate the spirit of the times.14
7
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s speech, The Constituent-Assembly Debates, Vol. 10, 1959, p. 167.
8
V. P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (Bombay, Orient Longmans Ltd., 1956)
p. 486.
9
For further study see Ibid., pp. 144-45 and 376-77.
10
Constitution of India : As modified upto 1st September, 1951, Delhi, Govt, of India Press, 1951, First
Schedule, pp. 205-207.
11
V. P. Menon, n. 8, pp. 435 and 470.
12
13
Constituent Assembly Debates 1949, Vol. 10, pp. 166-67.
14
Governor-General Lord Mountbatten’s speech in New Delhi on the tve of independence. Constituent
Assembly Debates, 1947, Vol. 5, pp. 16-17.
The changing circumstances also strengthened the forces striving for the
democratization of the States. After independence the people became more and
more conscious of their political rights. Like their brethren in the Provinces they
claimed the right of self-government in the States. It might be called an hour of
independence for all people, and one that exercised a tremendous influence on the
unification of the States. Under the impact of new forces developed on the occasion
of the independence of the country the people of the princely States demanded the
establishment of government based on popular sovereignty.15
The introduction of popular elements into administration was mainly responsible
for ending the autocracy in States.16 By the completion of this process the difference,
that helped maintain two political systems, ended. Now under the common political
heritage every part of India was to endeavour to develop India into a progressive
welfare State. Though a uniform standard in all matters of administration was not
achieved by this time, it prepared the ground for further administrative and political
reforms. This had further facilitated the changes in the political map of Ihe country
on the basis of some rational principles. As the SRC report commented in 1955:
“One of the main impediments in the way of reorganisation was that a certain
measure of territorial inviolability was enjoyed by the former Indian States, ‘both
under the British rule and during the period immediately following the transfer
of power. The integra-tion of these States has, however, removed this impediment
atfd has paved the way for a rational approach to the problem.17
The preoccupation with the problems arising immediately after the partition would
hardly permit the Indian leaders to ponder over the reorga-nization of States at that
critical juncture. The newly prepared constitu-tion which recognized three categories
of States and a separate identity for the centrally administered units,18 was only a
temporary framework designed to meet the exigencies of administration, and unity
of the nation. N. V. Gadgil, member of Parliament, pointed out in the then House of
the People on the 7th of July, 1952 that, “In 1947-48 we had to consolidate the
power, we had to bring about a sense of unity in the country, and therefore, the
great Sardar Patel started the unification by three stages: First, accession of the States,
then merger, then democratisation.”19 The inte-gration of States and constitution-
making have been a simultaneous process in India. The constitution left scope for
future changes in State boun-daries.20 For the first time after the formation of the
constitution, the change in the boundary of a State was made in 1953. It resulted in
15
The Hindu (Madras), 15 December 1946, p. 6.
16
17
Report of the States Reorganisation Commission 1955 (New Delhi, Govt, of India, 1955 ) para 86.
18
The Constitution of India : As modified upto 1st September 1951. Delhi, Manager, Government of
India Press, 1951, Article 1.
19
Parliamentary Debates, 1952, Part II, vol. 3, col. 3340.
20
See The Constitution of India, n. 18, Articles 3-4.
the formation of a new State of Andhra Pradesh from territory which had previously
formed part of the Madras State.
The Home Minister, Dr. K. N. Katju and other members of Parlia-ment wished the
new State speed in progress. Speaking at Kurnool to the people of Andhra the Prime
Minister asked them not to think in terms of separateness from the rest of India, but
only as part of the Union and work for its progress. “If India progresses, Andhra too
progresses, and the progress of Andhra consists in the progress of the country for
which you should all strive,” he said.21 In the meantime, the Home Minister, Dr.
Katju indicated in his reply to the House of People on the 27th of August, 1953 that
an All-India Boundaries Commission would be appointed before the end of the year.
He promised to solve the problem as a whole, “we want to have done with this
problem in one compact whole, not in com-partments.”22 The members of Parliament
expressed their hope that the creation of the new State of Andhra would provide a
good example for any future State to come.23 After the recognition of the linguistic
factor in the formation of Andhra, the need for change in State boundaries Lwas felt
more acutely in the rest of the country.
The Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution in New Delhi on the 20th of
September 1953, in which it expressed its readiness to reorganize the States and it
appealed for a calm atmosphere:
In view of the decision of the Government of India to appoint a Commission at
an early date to consider the problem of the reorganization of States, the Working
Committee are of the opinion that in order to ensure a calm atmosphere for the
full consideration of this vital problem, public agitation for the formation of new
States or any changes in the boundaries of States is undesirable and uncalled
for. 24
In a speech delivered at Madras on the 2nd of October 1953, the Prime Minister
characterized the reorganization of States as a part of the general development of
the country and said, “That process has begun and let us do it well and thoroughly.”
He further added, “Let us not be afraid of it or be sorry about it. It is a historic
development which is taking place or is going to take place all over India in various
shapes or forms.”25 The Government had taken up the problem as a necessary part
of the general progress of the country, and therefore, there could be no hitch in
going ahead with the new plan.
While speaking in Parliament on the 22nd of December 1953, the Prime Minister
announced the appointment of a Commission to examine the whole question of the
reorganization of States. On behalf of the Government of India, he stated that the
21
The Hindu (Madras), 2 October 1953, p. 6.
22
Ibid., dated 28 August 1953, p. 5.
23
Discussion on Andhra State Bill, Parliamentary Debates 1953, Part II, vol. 7, cols. 1721-32.
24
The Hindu (Madras), 21 September 1953, p. 1.
25
Ibid., dated 3 October 1953, p. 7.
whole question of reorganization was one that had to be examined carefully,
objectively and dispassionately, so that the welfare of the people of each constituent
unit could be promoted. The Prime Minister laid great emphasis on the need to bear
in mind the preservation and strengthening of the unity and security of India, and
as well as the “financial, economic and administrative considerations” while
attempting the reorganization.26 The Commission was asked to submit its report
before the 30th of June 1955.
The Government decision to appoint a Commission on State boun-daries was
welcomed by various group leaders in Parliament, although there was difference of
opinion on the time given to the Commission to submit its report. Mr. Hiren Mukerjee,
Deputy Leader of the Communist Parliamentary Party, expressed satisfaction on
the appointment of the Commission. At the same time he was of the view that the
Commission could have been asked to report much earlier than the 30th June, 1955.27
The protagonists of linguistic States like Mr. S. Nijalingappa, President of the Karnatak
Pradesh Congress Committee, expected good result from the appointment of the
Commission.28 Leaders in Maharashtra also wel-comed the appointment of the
Commission. Mr. Y. B. Chavan, Minister for Civil Supplies, said that it was a step
further in the direction of forming linguistic States.29 The Bombay Congress leader
Mr. S. K. Patil said in Bombay that the Government of India deserved congratulations
for appoin-ting a Commission to examine the reorganization problem.30 Thus the
leaction of various leaders to the appointment of the Commission was quite
favourable, and the attitude of the Government was also encouraging. The country
had the advantage of having a stable government at the Centre. Moreover, the
Congress Party which provided a common political platform was a great uniting
force in the difficult situation.
*******
26
Parliamentary Debates 1953, Part II, vol. 10, cols. 2842-43.
27
The Times of India (Bombay), 23 December 1953.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid., p. 1, col. 1.
30
Ibid.
Gender and Early Textual Traditions
Kumkum Roy
It is indeed an honour to be a part of the centenary celebrations of the Government

Sanskrit College, Tripunithura and to be called on to deliver the Parikshith Memorial
lecture. The late maharaja was renowned for his knowledge and understanding of
Sanskrit, and for his commitment to traditions of learning amongst other things.
While I do not have pretensions to being a Sanskritist, I have a keen interest in
textual traditions and their significance, and in issues of gender. And, given my
preoccupation with ancient Indian history, I would like to use this opportunity to
focus on representations of gender within early textual traditions. In a sense, this
may seem somewhat remote from the speed at which we seem to be hurtling towards
the future in the 21st century. However, as a glance at virtually any daily newspaper
would indicate, we continue to invoke the past in a variety of ways in a frantic
search for precedents, role models, or even to distance ourselves from the past and
argue that we are better off. In other words, the past very often provides a resource
for the present.
Before turning to the past, it may be useful to focus on the concept of gender. Gender,
like caste and class, is a relational term. At one level, the implications of this may
seem fairly obvious. For instance, in order to understand what it means to be a dalit
or a brahmin, we have to have an awareness of the entire hierarchy of caste
relationships. Likewise, in order to understand what it means to be below the poverty
line, we need to be aware of the lives of both those who are located below this much-
contested marker as such as well as those who are not. So also, in order to understand
what it means to be a woman, or a person with a transgender identity, we need to
be aware of what it means to be a man in the same situation.
This relationship, where each term derives its meaning from other terms in the same
category, is sometimes obscured when we focus only on women. I have often
wondered why, while we have had dozens of seminars, workshops and lectures on
women in early
India, we have not had any on men in early India. This is obviously because it is
assumed that men are the ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ subject of history, and most other
disciplines, and are by default the taken for granted focus of study.
There is, however, another perspective that we need to take into consideration. Some
scholars, including feminists, have argued, and often justifiably, that we need to
concentrate on women as a distinct category, in order to render our lives visible, and
to draw attention to the specific experiences of women. We will draw on both these
perspectives in the present discussion.
We also need to note that feminist (and other) scholars have been grappling with
the concept of intersectionality. Briefly, this draws attention to both the distinctions
as well as the connections amongst our multiple and shifting identities. One, again
fairly obvious understanding is that while women share certain forms of oppression,
especially gender violence, in common, there are also major differences amongst
women in terms of caste, class, region, community, age, sexual orientation, and
disability. At the same time, none of these identities is watertight: each intersects
with the other. Also, gender (as indeed each of these other identities) both shapes
these identities and is in turn shaped by them. To give an example, the experiences
of gender violence that a poor, low caste disabled woman has may be very different
from those of an upper class/ caste woman with the same disability. In other words,
gender relations need to be located in a web of structures if we are to understand
them meaningfully and intervene effectively to transform them.
Intersectionality then challenges us to think in more complex ways. It also cautions
us against quick and easy generalizations about the status of women either in the
past or in the present. It alerts us to the diversity amongst women. In this context,
what we need to be particularly wary about are stereotypes about the nature of
women. We may share several things in common, but we are also different from one
another; instances when our interests conflict may be far more common than those
when our struggles coincide. At the same time, acknowledging both similarities and
differences allows for a more effective intervention in the world around us.
If gender relations acquire meaning only in specific contexts, so does the term Indian’.
I use it as a conventional term, acknowledging that many of the texts that we draw
on to reconstruct the past did not have a subcontinental perspective. To cite just one
instance, the geography of the Rgveda, the earliest known text in Sanskrit, revolves
around the Saptasindhu, the Indus and its tributaries, with only one mention of the
Ganga and Yamuna. It is clearly located in the northwest of the subcontinent, even
though knowledge of the Vedas subsequently spread, as part of brahmanical culture,
to the south and east, but did not penetrate in the North East beyond Assam.
Before moving on to specific early Indian texts, it may be useful to chart out, briefly,
the ways in which these can be classified. One is on the basis of language—at present,
texts are available in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, and Tamil. By the end of the first
millennium CE we begin to find traces of other regional languages as well, many of
which flourished in the second millennium.
Another possible mode of classification is in terms of genre— for instance, religious
literature, pertaining to Brahmanical Hinduism, the tantric traditions, Buddhism,
and Jainism. Within each of these we have an enormous range—from mantras, to
narratives, to prescriptive texts. There are also texts such as the epics in both Sanskrit
and Tamil that point to the blurring of the secular/ sacred divide that we often take
for granted. Besides, there are more obviously literary works, including the Sangam
poetry in Tamil, the Gathasattasai in Prakrit, and the vast kavya tradition in Sanskrit,
as well as the caritas and avadanas. Besides, there are complex treatises on a wide
range of subjects, including grammar, medicine, other sciences, the performative
tradition, architecture and the visual arts, to name a few.
We can press distinctions amongst these texts further in terms of prose compositions
and poetic works. At the same time, we must remember that there are considerable
variations amongst these categories. For instance, the sometimes deceptively simple
Sanskrit slokas of the epic and Puranic traditions seem far more accessible than the
ornate prose of Banabhatta, the author of one of the most famous caritas or
biographies in Sanskrit, the Harsacarita, or the terse prose of sutras and sastras such
as the Kamasutra and the Arthasastra.
At another level, there are other issues that we might wish to consider. Who were
the authors of the texts that we explore? This question can be answered in terms of
some of the categories of social identity that we use today, which may or may not
overlap with those of the authors themselves. So we can work with a focus on the
caste, class, gender, and region as well as the contexts within which these
compositions were located. At the same time, we must recognize that early texts are
often extremely difficult to date with reasonable precision. Besides, some of the most
significant works tend to be anonymous, and even those that are assigned to single,
named authors, often seem to be compiled from diverse traditions.
Related to the issue of authorship, we can raise the question of audience. For whom
was a specific text intended? Are there possibilities that it may have spread beyond
the intended audience? What would the implications of this have been?
Even as I raise these questions, I do not necessarily propose to answer them. They
are useful, nonetheless, in providing the context within which I will explore two
rather different texts—the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, (henceforth BAU), and the
Therigatha (henceforth TG). The first text is in Sanskrit, while the second is in Pali.
The texts are less easy to classify in terms of genre—while most of the BAU is in
prose, it contains several verses as well. While the TG is in verse, the gathas, these
are embedded in a prose commentary, the Paramatthadipani, composed in
Kanchipuram in the 6th century CE and attributed to a monk named Dhammpala.
After discussing, and wherever possible comparing these two texts, I will conclude
by touching briefly on a small section of the Mahabharata that has been analyzed
insightfully by Arindam Chakravarti.1 At one level, this is a tribute to the tradition
from which maharaja Parikshith’s name is derived. But, and more in tune with the
present enterprise, it analyzes the implications of a dialogue between Brahmanical
and Buddhist traditions, which are intertwined with gendered meanings as the
protagonists happen to be a man, Janaka, and a woman, Sulabha.
Returning to the BAU and the TG, each of these texts has certain unique features.
The BAU, recognized as one of the earliest Upanisads, contains dialogues, explanatory
passages, often esoteric, and genealogies. The TG, as it now exists, has a certain
formal structure—the compositions are arranged in terms of the number of verses
1
Arindam Chakrabarti, Just Words, An Ethics of Conversation in the Mahabharata, in Arindam
Chakrabarti and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (eds.), Mahabharata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics, New
Delhi, Routledge, 2014, pp. 244-283.
they contain, beginning with those consisting of a single verse, and going up to
those containing dozens of verses. The compositions ostensibly celebrate the
attainment of liberation or nibbana, and the text is distinctive in being attributed to
women composers.
In terms of authorship, the BAU is anonymous, even as it contains names of several
men (and three women) who are recognized as participants in the process of acquiring,
transmitting, and receiving and validating what was regarded as mystic knowledge.
More generally, the formal transmission of the text was the preserve of the brahmanas.
The TG on the other hand, as mentioned above, is recognized as a compilation of
compositions attributed to several named women. At the same time, the text itself
was preserved and transmitted by men, the bhikkhus, especially after the decline of
the order of the bhikkhunis. I have discussed the complexities of these processes
elsewhere.2 Here I would simply like to highlight the fact that the texts we are
considering had very different histories of composition and preservation.
While all the texts have been available in print and in translation since the 19th
century, and are now accessible online, their circulation in earlier periods would
have been distinctive. The Upanisads have been viewed as containing mystic insights,
and would probably have been accessible to a rather restricted audience. Originating
and developed within a different tradition, the TG was possibly circulated widely,
as it was meant to encourage all those who were engaged in the quest for attaining
nibbana.
What may make a comparison of these texts fruitful is that they represent, in very
different ways, attempts to create, conserve and disseminate knowledge. In exploring
how these were gendered, we may arrive at an understanding of their significance.
At the same time, we need to remember that the richness of these texts cannot be
simply reduced to illustrate gender relations—their scope transcends our present-
day social concerns in a variety of ways. Also, neither of the texts claimed to be
totalizing enterprises—in other words, the formulations of gender relations implicit
and explicit in these texts do not exhaust all the possibilities that may have existed in
the past.
I
Gendered Cosmogonies, Dialogues, Genealogies and the Everyday
The BAU consists of six adhyayas or chapters, grouped into three sections, the
madhukanda, the Yajnavalkyakanda and the khilakanda. I draw on Patrick Olivelle’s
edition and translation of the text, which follows the Kanva recension.3 In opening
2
Kumkum Roy, The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power: Explorations in Early Indian History,
New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 17-37.
3
Patrick Olivelle (ed. and tr.), The Early Upanisads: Annotated Text and Translation, New Delhi,
Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998. All references to the text are from this edition.
up the text for discussion, we will focus on four themes— some examples of the
extent to which cosmogonic and mystic speculation draws on gendered imagery,
the roles envisaged for women and men in the dialogues that form a significant part
of the text, records of the transmitters of the knowledge embodied in the text, which
I refer to as genealogies, that are inserted and preserved within the Upanisad, and
the way in which the text visualizes gender relations in the context of the everyday.
Given the rich complexity of the text, the discussion will be illustrative rather than
comprehensive and detailed.
Flowing from the preceding discussion in the later Vedic classic, the Satapatha
Brahmana, with which the BAU is closely connected, the latter text begins somewhat
dramatically by equating the anatomical parts of the sacrificial horse of the
asvamedha with parts of the universe. The horse is clearly an embodiment of
masculinity, and, as we will see, masculine imagery is an integral and basic element
in the repertoire of the authors of the text. The very first passage4 is remarkable for
its graphic details. We learn that the head of the horse is the dawn (Usas), its eye the
sun (Surya), its breath prana) the wind, its mouth fire (Agni Vaisvanara), its atman
is the year (samvatsara), Dyaus or the sky is its back, its belly is the antariksa or
intermediate space, and Prthivi or the earth is constituted by its sides. Its ribs are the
intermediate spaces, its limbs are the seasons, its joints are the months and fortnights,
its feet pratistha) are the day and night, its bones are the naksatras or asterisms, its
flesh constitutes the clouds, the contents of its stomach are the sands, its intestines
are the streams, its liver and lungs are the mountains, its hairs are the plants and
trees. When it yawns, there is lightning, when it shudders there is thunder, and
when it urinates, it rains. Its sound is speech.
And yet, this cosmic horse is circumscribed in the imagery by the yoni or the wombs—
symbolized by the sacrificial cups placed in front and at the back, which represent
the eastern and the western seas. There is a blurring of the grammatical and the
semantic registers, a strategy common in this genre, when the text declares— samudra
eva asya bandhuh samudro yoni. The seas are at once linked to the horse and are its
womb. The juxtaposition of masculine and feminine imagery, even as the latter is
not elaborated, occurs at a significant juncture—in locating the cosmic horse within
the ritual world within which it acquires its symbolic meaning.
Elsewhere in the text5 atisrsti, translated by Olivelle as supercreation6 is envisaged as
stemming from purusa or the primeval man. Initially, being alone, he found no
pleasure; he therefore proceeded to create a second, leading to the emergence of the
husband and wife, pati and patni. The primeval man united with the woman, and
from this union were produced manusya, human beings. She, however, was troubled
that he who had produced her had also had intercourse with her, and decided to
4
BAU 1.1. 2.
5
BAU 1.4. 1-6
6
Olivelle, op.cit, p.47.
escape into other animal forms, ranging from the cow to all known creatures down
to ants. But, no matter whatever form she adopted, the primeval man pursued her,
and, taking on an ‘appropriate’ masculine form, united with her to create new species.
The imagery in this myth is at once anthropocentric and hierarchized—creation is
envisaged as proceeding from the primeval man, and it is he who dominates and
drives the process, pursuing his reluctant partner as she tries to escape. In other
words, asymmetrical gender relations are inherent in this myth.
Gendered imagery permeates less dramatic descriptions as well. In one instance7 the
primeval self (atman) desires a wife, offspring and wealth jaya,, praja and vitta
respectively), in order to engage in karma or action. What is interesting is the way in
which these are incorporated within the self—the wife is equated with speech, the
offspring with breath and worldly wealth with sight. Divine wealth is associated
with hearing, and the self with action. In other words, a certain notion of domesticity
becomes a resource for generating and thinking through a range of spiritual
equations. In the process, this representation of domesticity is both valorized and
naturalized.
There is yet another, more abbreviated cosmogony that occurs in the khilakhanda,
Here, creation is visualized as commencing from the primeval waters, Apah,
semantically and grammatically multiple and feminine. They created (asrjanta) truth
(satya), from which emerged Brahman, followed by Prajapati, who then created the
gods (devas).8
We can see then that a varied repertoire of gendered imagery runs through the
cosmogonic speculation that is an intrinsic part of the BAU. While some of the
dominant imagery is obviously hierarchical and representative of asymmetrical
relations of power, other imagery is more complex, and less easily reducible to a
single pattern. What is significant is that both the dominant imagery and the less
common variants draw on gendered categories in different ways.
Turning from the cosmogonies to the dialogues that are interspersed through the
BAU, we may note that these provide interesting insights on social relations, both
gendered and otherwise. While the contents of the dialogues are fascinating, and
we will occasionally be touching on these, our focus will be on the participants, and
their social locations. While these locations are gendered, there are also discussions
amongst brahmanas, often fraught with tensions about relative rank and/ or
wisdom, and amongst brahmanas and ksatriyas.
One of these depicts a conversation between a Gargya, named Drpta Balaki, identified
as a brahmana, and Ajatasatru, a ksatriya,9 in which the latter interrogated the
former. Gargya’s ignorance of the ultimate reality was established in the course of
7
BAU 1.4.17.
8
BAU 5.5.1.
9
BAU 2.1.
the discussion. He then decided to approach Ajatasatru as a pupil. Ajatasatru
recognized this relationship as pratiloma, (against the grain, or the established order),
but nonetheless proceeded to impart the secret knowledge that he possessed.10 A
similar reversal of roles occurs when Gautama, a brahmana, approached Jaivali, a
ksatriya, in order to learn from him.11 In this case, the knowledge imparted was
explicitly recognized as non-brahmanical.
In another series of dialogues, triggered off by king Janaka’s offer to gift a thousand
cows to the most learned brahmana, the sage Yajnavalkya claimed the cows, and
was then drawn into debates with those who challenged him.12 The dialogue was
initiated by the hotr priest Asvala, and, in the first round, Yajnavalkya demonstrated
his ability to unpack ritual symbolism and forge equations between the ritual and
the cosmic worlds. The second set of questions was posed by Jaratkarava Artabhaga,
and pertained to the nature of the body and the soul. It ended in the two participants
moving out of the public space for a private conversation, which, the text reveals,
was about the nature of karman. A third participant, Bhujyu Lahyayani, posed a
question about the destiny of the Pariksitas, evidently related to brahmanical or
ksatriya legends. Once again, Yajnavalkya resolved this satisfactorily. The fourth
interrogator, Usasta Cakrayana, raised questions about the nature of the self, and
fell silent on hearing Yajnavalkya’s response. Some of these concerns were reiterated
by the next interrogator, Kahola Kausitakeya, and were resolved somewhat
differently.
Gargi’s famous dialogue with Yajnavalkya was part of this series. Her questions,
however, seem to have been of a different order. She was interested in knowing the
basis on which the hierarchy of worlds or realms imagined within the brahmanical
tradition rested—and pushed her quest from one level to another, till Yajnavalkya,
after reaching the level of brahmaloka, warned her not to ask any more. She was
guilty of asking too many questions, atiprichhasi, he stated, and if she persisted, her
head was liable to shatter. At this point, Gargi desisted.
The discussion did not, however, end with this dramatic moment, but continued.
This time, the interlocutor was Uddalaka Aruni. The discussion reverted back to the
nature of the self, and Yajnavalkya provided an elaborate, almost poetic analogy,
connecting the cosmic with the corporal, and touching on the mysteries of the self.
At this point, Gargi re-entered the discussion, posing two questions about the nature
of time and space, adding that if Yajnavalkya was able to address these, the other
brahmanas ought to consider him invincible. Once again, Yajnavalkya proved to be
eloquent and erudite, and Gargi acknowledged that no one would be able to defeat
him in debate (brahmodyd). However, instead of ending with this resolution, the
10
Incidentally, the name of Gargya figures in one of the lists of teachers preserved in the text, mentioned
later.
11
BAU 6.2. 4.ff.
12
BAU 3.1. ff.
discussion took a rather grim turn. The debate continued, through a long and
somewhat tortuous course, with Yajnavalkya and Vidagdha Sakalya as the two
protagonists—and ended with the latter overstepping his limits. His head, we learn
shattered, and his skeleton was dismembered.
The figure of Gargi has acquired a certain centrality in urban, literate middle class
perceptions. She figures in school textbooks as exemplifying a golden age when
women had access to the highest realms of learning. At the same time, it has been
pointed out by feminist scholars that she was threatened into silence, and was, in
any case, exceptional.
It may be useful to step back from these polarized positions for a while. It is true that
Gargi was the sole vocal woman in an assembly dominated by men. What is, however,
interesting is that while the dialogue was sharp, there was no condemnation of her
as a woman. What is also noteworthy is that she assumed the role of judge, and
correctly evaluated Yajnavalkya’s learning. Her assessment was not immediately
accepted, but was evidently justified. What is likely is that Gargi was exceptional
rather than typical—women, even of brahmana families, do not seem to have had
automatic or routine access to learning. At the same time, her status, once achieved,
seems to have been implicitly acknowledged.
The BAU contains other, more intimate dialogues between Janaka and Yajnavlakya
as well.13 While the details need not detain us, there seems to be an element of friendly
rivalry between the brahmana and the ksatriya. The former was knowledgeable but
in need of material resources—the latter, by no means ignorant, and endowed with
an ability to assess true learning, had the additional asset of wealth, allowing him to
be a generous patron. Both the roles of teachers and patrons, so crucial to the
transmission of learning, were implicitly if not explicitly restricted to men.
One of the best-known, and perhaps most cited dialogue in recent times is that
between Yajnavalkya and his wife, Maitreyi.14 Like Gargi, the latter was viewed as
exemplifying the existence of learned women in antiquity, and became a figure who
found space in formal histories throughout the 20th century. The practice of invoking
her is likely to survive in the present century as well.
In this context, the process through which Maitreyi acquired learning may be of
interest: she had no automatic access to it. It was when Yajnavalkya proposed to
renounce the world that he decided to make a settlement between his two wives,
Maitreyi and Katyayani. Maitreyi asked whether wealth would make her immortal.
When she learnt that it would not, she demanded that Yajnavalkya impart his
knowledge instead. Yajnavalkya, we learn, was pleased with her response and agreed
to teach her, provided she concentrated.
13
BAU 4.1-4
14
BAU 2.4. See also BAU 4.5.
Yajnavalkya’s teachings worked through a series of examples, beginning with how
the husband (pati) should not be held dear on account of himself, but on account of
the atman. This is then reiterated, replacing the husband with the wife, jaya), son
(putra), wealth (vitta), the priestly category (brahman), ruling power (ksatra), the
worlds (loka), the gods (deva), and all beings (bhuta), culminating in all (sarva).
What is interesting about this listing is its non-linearity in terms of conventional
categories—if we are looking for a sequence from the immediate to higher and wider
realms, it is evident that the obviously higher does not coincide with the wider—
devas precede bhutas, and brahmanas precede ksatriyas, subverting any neat
hierarchy in what seems to be an ascending sequence of equations.
A complex sequencing is also evident in ways in which sensory perceptions and
actions are woven into the discussion. Just as all waters merge into the ocean, so also
the skin absorbs touch, the nose smells, the tongue tastes, the eyes sights, the ears
sounds, the mind thoughts, the heart, the vidyas (sciences), the hands action, the
sexual organs (upastha) bliss (ananda), the anus excretion, the feet travels, and speech
the Vedas. In each instance these perceptions and actions are described as ekayana.
Other chains or lists in the same context seem to be in a more obvious descending
order. These include those of forms of knowledge, which are regarded as breaths of
the supreme being.
Here the enumeration starts with the Rgveda, and goes on to include the Yajurveda,
Samaveda, the Atharva-Angirasa, itihasa, purana, vidya, upanisads, slokas, sutras,
anuvyakhyas and vyakhyas.15
There are other analogies as well—of the impossibility of ‘catching’ the sound of the
drum (dundubhi), conch (sankha and lute (vina), without catching the player and
the instrument. Also deployed is the analogy of salt dissolving in water—once the
all-pervasive nature of the atman is perceived, it can no longer be disaggregated. In
this context, death is viewed as the ending of duality, and merging with the ultimate.
Strategies for teaching Maitreyi thus include using quotidian imagery as well as
listing traditions of knowledge.
If the participants in the dialogues are recognized as engaged in defining and
acquiring ‘true’ knowledge, there are other indications, in lists and genealogies, of
those who were regarded as knowledgeable within the tradition. In one instance,16
the traditional list of seven seers, the saptarsi, is inscribed onto the human (unmarked
male) head. The two ears are Gotama and Bharadvaja, the eyes Visvamitra and
Jamadagni, the nostrils Vasistha and Kasyapa, and speech Atri.
There are other, more formal genealogies as well. One instance17 lists as many as
sixty-five teachers. There are repetitions in the names, and treating the list as a literally
15
This list is repeated at BAU 4.1. 2.
16
BAU 2.2.4.
17
BAU 2.6.
verifiable historical account may be problematic. At the same time, what is
noteworthy is the absence of figures like Ajatasatru, Janaka, Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi
from this list. This is also true of a second genealogy inserted in the text,18 which
consists of 62 names. There are, expectedly, certain names in common between these
lists, both of which terminate, in ascending order, with Brahman. What is worth
noting about the second list is the presence of a figure called Gargya. Could this be a
descendant of the legendary woman seer, who is herself missing from the list?
The BAU ends19 with a rather intriguing set of genealogies. This runs through the
names of thirtyeight men who are identified in terms of their mothers (e.g.
Kausikiputra, Vaiyaghrapadiputra etc.), without their proper names being
mentioned. This is followed by another set of sixteen names, including Yajnavalkya
and Uddalaka, where there is no allusion to matrilineal affiliations. This list ascends
up to Aditya or the sun through Vac Ambhini (deified speech). There is also an
alternative, final genealogy, which culminates in Brahman, and contains thirteen
names, all of men, and once again without any matrilineal links.
There is yet another, less structured genealogy inserted in the khilakanda of the
text.20 This seems to be connected with a fertility ritual, to ensure that a withered
stump would sprout new branches and leaves. This knowledge was transmitted by
Uddalaka Aruni to Vajasaneya Yajnavalkya, who in turn passed it on to Madhuka
Paingya, from whom it was transmitted to Cula Bhagavitti, who communicated it
to Janaki Ayasthuna, who in turn passed it on to Satyakama Jabala. This list, much
shorter than the other genealogies, alludes to figures regarded as protagonists of the
Upanisadic dialogues. The section ends by stating that this knowledge should not be
communicated to one who was not a putra or an antevasin. This suggests that the
legitimate, institutionalized transmission of knowledge was restricted to sons and
pupils.
It may be impossible for us to untangle these lists and arrive at the underlying logic.
However, they do suggest that sacred knowledge was transmitted through a variety
of means, and that not all who were considered knowledgeable shared the same
modes of social identification. In other words, they alert us to the diversity and the
complexity of the worlds within which these textual traditions and forms of
knowledge circulated.
Moving into the realm of the everyday, the BAU envisages the scenario of a dying
man.21 He is advised to summon his son, and pass on the sacred knowledge to the
latter; the knowledge that he is brahman, yajna and loka (the self, sacrifice and
world respectively). Thus, the patrilineage is intertwined with knowledge of the
ultimate reality, and other kinsmen and women are implicitly excluded from this
18
BAU 4.6.
19
BAU 6.5.
20
BAU 6.3.7-12.
21
BAU 1.5.17.
rite of passage. Typically, also, for the man who has realized the ultimate reality,
everything else appears irrelevant. What is interesting is the set of terms used to
define “everything”. These include the putra, vitta and loka (the son, wealth and
the world respectively).22
And yet, there are indications that other lineages/ social networks, were also significant
and taken for granted. One instance is provided by the dialogue between Yajnavalkya
and Janaka, where Yajnavalkya points out descriptions of Brahman provided by
other, apparently learned men, are as obvious and banal as describing a man as
matrman, pitrman, and acaryaman (having a mother, father and teacher
respectively).23 These distinctions are visualized as losing their relevance when one
attains knowledge of the ultimate reality. Then, the father is no longer the father,
the mother is no longer the mother, and the worlds, gods, and even the Vedas lose
their relevance.24
At another level, heterosexual intercourse, visualized from the perspective of the
male protagonist, runs as an undercurrent through parts of the text, apart from
being graphically prescribed and described in a section conventionally recognized
as an appendix. An indication of the former appears in the course of the dialogue
between Yajnavalkya and Janaka mentioned above. Here, the former declares the
mind to be the source of bliss or ananda, as it is through the mind that a woman is
grasped, leading to the birth of a son.25
More fundamentally, it is the male body that is assumed as the unmarked, natural
site for speculation about the significance of the senses, or the primacy of prana or
breath.26 In this instance, the person survives without powers of speech, sight, hearing,
thought and the procreative powers associated with semen (retas), but is on the
verge of collapse when breath threatens to abandon him.
The difference between the way in which men and women are conceptualized is
most sharply apparent in analogies that Jaivali, the ksatriya, shares with Gautama,
the brahmana. In this context, fire is deployed as a metaphor for the ultimate reality,
and equated with the sun, the rain cloud, the earth, a man and a woman.27
While all the analogies are vivid, we will focus on the last two. For the man, his
mouth is equated with firewood (samit), his breath (prana) with smoke (dhuma),
his speech (vac) with the flame (arcis), his sight (caksus) with the embers (angara),
22
BAU 4.4.22.
23
E.g. BAU 4.1.2.
24
BAU 4.3.22.
25
BAU 4.1.6. Yajnavalkya declares: manasa vai samrat striyam abhiharyate, tasyam pratirupah putrah
jayate, sah ananda. Elsewhere, in the course of one of the longest dialogues with king Janaka,
Yajnavalkya draws on the analogy of being lost in the embrace of a beloved woman, where both the
external and the internal lose their significance, as exemplifying the state of knowledge of the ultimate
reality—tat-yatha priyaya striya samparivatka na bahya kimcana veda na-antaram (BAU 4.3.21).
26
BAU 6.1. 7 ff.
27
BAU 6.2. 9-14.
his hearing [srotra) with the sparks (visphulinga). The devas offer food into that fire,
which generates semen or retas. In other words, the man is defined in terms of a
range of sensory experiences.
This presents a sharp contrast with the way in which the woman is conceptualized.
For the woman (yosa), her vulva (upastha) is the firewood, pubic hairs are equated
with the smoke, her flame is the vagina (yoni), the embers are produced by the act of
penetration, while the sparks are generated from the climactic experience of
intercourse. The devas offer retas into this fire, which yields the purusa (man).28
At one level, it may appear that both men and women are part of this
conceptualization of the ultimate reality. And yet, while this is true, we can see that
women are reified into their sexual and procreative anatomy. Men, on the other
hand, are visualized as more complete sensory beings, even as they are sexualized.
The text, however, does not remain in the rarefied realms of metaphors and analogies,
but moves into the mundane, laying down strategies for intercourse with a woman
after her menstrual period (which was thought to be polluting) was over.29 She was
ideally to be persuaded; however, if persuasion failed, she could be purchased, or
beaten with the palm or a stick.
Also interesting are the attempts to acquire offspring imbued with distinctive
characteristics. Not surprisingly, the person whose choice is considered significant
or relevant is the man. He is given five possibilities.30 One of these is of acquiring a
fair complexioned son, possessed of knowledge of a single Veda. The second is of a
son with a reddish complexion possessed of knowledge of two Vedas. The third is a
dark complexioned son with knowledge of three Vedas. The fourth is a daughter
who will be a pandita. The fifth is of a son who would not only be a pandita but
would be able to speak well in the samiti or the assembly and would possess
knowledge of all the Vedas (sarvan vedan). Depending on his preference, the man
was instructed to get his wife to prepare a sacrificial offering, after which they were
expected to partake of the remains and then engage in sexual intercourse.
As in the case of the mention of Gargi and Maitreyi, the mention of the pandita
daughter as a possibility has often excited present-day scholars. While this is certainly
a remarkable provision, we also need to contextualize it—this hypothetical daughter
is only one possibility amongst five. Besides, while she is potentially learned, she is
not expected to master Vedic learning. There is, perhaps in this, an implicit
acknowledgement of other forms of learning, which remain, unfortunately,
tantalizingly vague. And finally, it is evident that the initiative and the choice remain
vested in the male partner in this procreative relationship.
Almost inevitably, the text proceeds to lay down rituals associated with the birth of
the boy child. Once again, expectedly, the chief protagonist is the father, who kindles
28
For another analogy between the woman’s genitalia and the sacrifice see BAU 6.4.3.
29
BAU 6.4.6-8.
30
BAU 6.4.14-18.
the sacrificial fire, makes offerings, places the child within the ideal cosmic and
social realms, is the first to speak to him, feed and name him, and then hands him
over to the mother.31
The BAU then, provides access to gendered cosmogonies, traditions of dialogue and
debate, genealogies of learning and the ways in which concerns of gender were
ideally embedded in the everyday— in relations of reproduction. We may speculate
on whether these concerns were shared across castes, or were restricted to brahmanas
and ksatriyas, who appear as the major protagonists in the tradition. Also, given
that the text was meant for a rather exclusive audience, there is the possibility that
the ideas we have traced may have had a relatively restricted circulation. And we
must remember that spatially, the text is focused on what would have been parts of
present-day Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. That beliefs and practices about gender
relations may have been different in other parts of the subcontinent is only to be
expected.
II
Contemplation, Creativity and Communication
In turning to the Therigatha, we enter a rather different social and intellectual milieu.
There is little by way of cosmological speculation, which is not surprising, given the
early Buddhist Theravada aversion to such concerns. And, as we will see, while
there are dialogues, these are generally not framed in the competitive mode that we
have noticed in the BAU. Finally, while there are representations of the everyday,
these spring from a rather different perspective. While the text is extremely rich, I
will, for the moment, focus on three themes—the representation of contemplation
leading to the attainment of enlightenment, creativity in modes of expression, and
strategies of communication. At the same time, and somewhat obviously, it is
necessary to remember that these three strands of contemplation, composition and
communication are almost inextricably intertwined—and the text that survives for
our scrutiny combines all three in complex ways. In fact, the very survival of the
tradition probably rests on this effective combination, that often resists unraveling.
As many of us are aware, the Therigatha is a unique text in world history, one of the
few early texts attributed to women authors.32 These women, as tradition tells us,
were those designated as theris, revered, wise and elderly. Further, they were women
who had attained the highest goal within Buddhism, viz., nibbana or enlightenment,
or mutti, liberation. And, what is more, their achievements were recorded in the
gathas, literally songs or poetic compositions, attributed to them.
31
BAU 6.4.24-28.
32
Kathryn Blackstone, for instance, observes: “The Therigatha is an exciting and provocative text. As
far as I know it is the only canonical text in the world’s religions that is attributed to female authorship
and that focuses exclusively on women’s religious experiences.” In Women in the Footsteps of the
Buddha: The Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha, Surrey, Curzon, 1998, p.1.
Elsewhere33 I have attempted to analyze the text from the perspective of a historian.
I will not repeat those arguments here, even as I may occasionally touch on them.
My attempt will be to focus on the rich diversities that are embedded in the text
supplemented by its accompanying commentary, the Paramatthadipani, composed
by Dhammapala in the 6th century CE, evidently on the basis of earlier commentarial
traditions.
In her introduction to the one of the earliest English translations of the text, C.A.F.
Rhys Davids wrote:
No one, not even, I imagine, a pious Buddhist, believes that these verses contain
the ipsissima verba of those members of the Order to whom they are ascribed, or
that these notable adherents conversed in Pali slokas. We shall never get at the
quantum of historic fact that there may be in the tradition, nor even know how
many of the Elders here named ever really existed. Nor does it very much matter.
The historical fact that we here have and hold is the record, that just the
sentiments and the aspirations, which are expressed in this work, have been for
so many centuries, and by a very considerable communion of followers, attributed
to saintly men and women co-operating in the building up of certain ideals; and
also that the logia should, as such, have been incorporated in a literature so long
preserved, cherished, and revered as ‘holy writ.’ The registration of such views;
the reverence accorded to such views; these are for the history of human ideas
the really precious truths, however legendary or lost the genuine sources may
have become.34
Rhys Davids35 also collates the various circumstances under which women were
drawn towards the renunciatory tradition, as recorded in the verses and the
commentary. One of these was hearing the Buddha or one of his disciples, either a
man, or a woman, preach. The impact of this was often dramatic—women (as well
as men) recognized the impermanence of worldly existence and strove to attain
enlightenment, freeing themselves from what were perceived as the bonds of mundane
concerns.
Some women were driven to seek refuge following bereavement, especially the loss
of children. Several evidently realized the futility of worldly riches, others sought an
escape from poverty and drudgery, a few from the pressures of sex work. And in
other instances, women were apparently motivated by a quest for knowledge. In at
least some cases, relations amongst kinsfolk were redefined in the course of the quest:
three sisters of one of the Buddha’s dearest disciples, Sariputta, evidently followed
33
Kumkum Roy, Of Theras and Theris: Visions of Liberation in the Early Buddhist tradition, in Roy,
The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power: Explorations in Early Indian History, New Delhi,
Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.17-37.
34
C.A. F Rhys Davids, (tr.), Psalms of the Early Buddhists, London, Pali Text Society (first edition, 1909,
1913), accessed online on 31st May 2013, pp 9-10. All references to the TG are from this version of the
text.
35
Op. cit. p. 17.
him in renunciation, and attained the highest goal,36 while in yet another instance, a
mother, who had joined the sangha, instructed her son.37 These provide, in a sense,
a counterpoint to the genealogies of teachers and taught embedded in the BAU,
suggesting alternative, less formal, and more flexible contexts of receiving and
transmitting knowledge.
What is inspiring and thought provoking is the diversity of these ‘biographies’. As
noted earlier, it is not a question of whether these accounts are literally true: what is
significant is that the quest, which was at once intellectual and more, was not
considered the exclusive preserve of any one category of women, but was viewed as
being accessible, at least potentially, to all—rich and poor, widows, mothers, wives,
single women, sex workers. An intellectual tradition that was ideally inclusive, in
spite of all its practical limitations, was conducive to creating space for these women.
Also noteworthy are the diverse locations of the bhikkhuni sanghas. According to
the commentator Dhammapala,38 these were to be found in villages and towns, in
the countryside as well as in royal palaces. In other words, sites of intellectual activity
were visualized as dispersed rather than centralized, which probably accounts for
the rich variety of self-expression that we find within the text. Once again, there are
both parallels and differences with the BAU. While many sections of the BAU do
not specify spatial contexts, most of the dialogues occur either in the setting of royal
courts, or within the domestic space.
What is also worth noting is that the spaces traversed by the bhikkhunis were
conceptualized as intersecting and overlapping rather than unique or isolated. This
is evident, for instance, in the narrative woven around Dhammadinna, who
renounced the world when her husband decided to do so. Subsequently, she retreated
to the solitude of a village to meditate. Once she had attained insight, she decided to
return to Rajagaha, literally the king’s abode, and a royal capital, located in present-
day Bihar, where she “answered every question as one might cut a lotus-stalk with
a knife” and established her preeminence as a teacher.39 Once more, there are both
similarities and differences if we compare this narrative with those in the BAU.
While Gargi was evidently recognized as a learned woman, neither she, nor Maitreyi
were acknowledged as teachers. The formal space of participating in the transmission
of learning does not seem to have been open to such women in spite of their
acknowledged accomplishments.
The quest of the bhikkhunis was at once collective and solitary. The sangha, with its
discipline, provided a contrast to the world of domesticity. The bhikkhuni would
wear distinctive austere attire, and follow the regime of the begging round as she
was bound by the rules that held the sangha together. Also, as has been often noted,
36
Op. cit, pp.101-106.
37
Op. cit, pp.106-108.
38
Op. cit. p. 36.
39
Rhys Davids, op.cit, pp. 43-44.
the institutional inferiority of the bhikkhuni sangha to that of the bhikkhus was well
established and unchallenged. Yet, it is within this circumscribed domain that the
bhikkhunis created and found the space to reflect, and meditate, and attain the
ultimate goal.
Dhammapala, the commentator on the Therigatha, records an abbreviated version
of the origin of the bhikkhuni sangha:
Now Great PajapatT had once already asked the Master for admission to his Order,
and had not won his consent; wherefore she now bade her hairdresser cut off her
hair, and donning the yellow robes, she took all those Sakiya ladies with her to
VesalT, and there entreating Him of the Tenfold Power through Elder Ananda,
she gained his permission to leave the world and enter the Order by accepting the
Eight Rules. And the others, also, were all ordained at the same time.40
What is significant about this narrative is that Mahapajapati Gotami, the foster mother
of the Buddha, is represented as taking the initiative in acquiring the externals—the
shorn hair and the robes. It is then that she turns to Ananda, the favourite disciple
of the Buddha, and gains permission to enter the order. Thus, the bhikkhuni sangha
was recognized as being shaped by the aspirations of women, as well as by the rules
and regulations laid down by men, an interesting instance of the tension and dynamics
that often accompany what are viewed, conventionally, as illegitimate intrusions by
women into the hallowed and exclusive spaces of male contemplation. What is
noteworthy is the institutionalized space that was carved out by and for these women
who chose the path of contemplation, presenting a marked contrast with the scenario
represented in the BAU, where women who participated in debates or acquired
learning appear as exceptional rather than the norm.
The recognition that the Buddhist sangha evolved through a complicated mediation
resonates through other narratives as well. According to Dhammapala’s
commentary41 the ‘author’ of the very first gatha was a woman who wished to join
the sangha, but was denied permission by her husband. Ultimately, when she
succeeded in convincing him, he took her to Visakha, the archetypal lay woman
devotee, who in turn introduced her to Dhammadinna, who took her to
Mahapajapati Gotami, through whom she reached the Buddha.
Yet, leaving the world was not, in itself, enough. One woman, Mittakali, recognized,
in the verses attributed to her, that she was obsessed with success even after
renunciation:
Leaving my home through call of faith, I sought
The homeless life, and dwelt with eye intent
On offerings from the faithful and the praise
Of this one and the gratitude of that.42
40
Rhys Davids, op.cit, pp.35-36.
41
Rhys Davids, pp. 36-37.
42
TG 5.53
It was only when she was able to abandon these desires that she attained the final
goal. What is interesting is the element of introspection that leads her beyond the
immediate. While reflection and introspection are implicit in many of the situations
described in the BAU, the candid and vivid accounts in such verses in the TG are
somewhat unique.
At least some women evidently explored a variety of traditions before being convinced
about the path they chose. One, Bhadda Kundalakesa, records:
Lo! fifty years have I a pilgrim been,
In Anga, Magadha and in Vajj,
In Kasi and the land of Kosala,
Nought owing, living on the people’s alms.
And great the merit by that layman gained,
Sagacious man, who gave Bhadda a robe-
Bhadda who now (captive once more to gear)
Is wholly free from bondage of the mind.43
These women had to contend with implicit and explicit misogyny within the sangha
as well as in the world outside. The strategies of dealing with this were varied, and
included, in one spectacular instance, a simple rejection of the relevance of categories
of gender in the final quest. This is evident in a verse attributed to a bhikkhuni
named Soma:
How should the woman’s nature hinder us?
Whose hearts are firmly set, who ever move
With growing knowledge onward in the Path?
What can that signify to one in whom
Insight doth truly comprehend the Norm? 44
Others, such as Bhadda Kapilani, claimed to be equal to male bhikkhus such as the
renowned Kassapa. In a verse attributed to her she declared:
We both have seen, both he and I, the woe And pity of the world, and have gone
forth. We both are Arahants with selves well tamed. Cool are we both, ours is Nibbana
now. 45
While many narratives celebrate the intervention of the Buddha as marking the
transformatory moment, others dwell on the links amongst the bhikkhunis. Perhaps
one of the most moving narratives of the journey to the sangha, and the support
offered by women to one another is provided in the gathas attributed to Canda:
43
TG 5.66. All the states and cities mentioned were in north India. According to the biographical details
in the commentary, she had adopted Jainism, with its emphasis on abandoning clothes.
44
TG 3.66.
45
TG 4.37.
Fallen on evil days was I of yore.
No husband had I, nor no child, no friends
Or kin-whence could I food or raiment find?
As beggars go, I took my bowl and staff,
And sought me alms, begging from house to house,
Sunburnt, frost-bitten, seven weary years.
Then came I where a woman Mendicant
Shared with me food, and drink, and welcomed me,
And said: ‘Come forth into our homeless life!’
In gracious pity did she let me come-
Patacara-and heard me take the vows.
And thenceforth words of wisdom and of power
She spake, and set before my face
The way of going to the Crown of Life.46
Another illustrative account is that of Uttama, whose gathas mention an unnamed
bhikkhuni, identified in the commentary as Patacara, as leading her to the ultimate
goal:
Four times, nay, five, I sallied from my cell,
And roamed afield to find the peace of mind
Long vainly sought, and governance of thoughts
I could not bring into captivity.
To me she came, that noble Bhikkhuni,
Who was my foster-mother in the faith-
She taught to me the Norm, wherein I learnt
The nature of this transitory self.
And well I minded all, e’en as she taught.
For seven days I sat in Jhana-joy
And ease, cross-legged; on the eighth day at last
I stretched my limbs, and went my way serene,
For I had burst asunder the surrounding gloom.47
We may pause to contrast these moving, humane narratives of compassion and
support with the genealogies of teacher and taught that are part of the BAU. The
latter were designed to preserve dozens of names as markers of identity and status—
lost in these lengthy lists are the vibrant processes of interaction which would have
characterized the transmission of wisdom, learning and insight.
Some narratives in the TG point to awe-inspiring determination in the face of a
long-drawn quest. This is evident in the story of Sama, who strove for 25 years
before attaining her goal:
46
TG 5.69.
47
TG 3.30.
Full five-and-twenty years since I came forth!
But in my troubled heart in no way yet
Could I discern the calm of victory.
The peace of mind, the governance of thoughts
Long sought, I found not; and with anguish thrilled
I dwelt in memory on the Conqueror’s word.
To free my path from all that breedeth Ill
I strove with passionate ardour, and I won!
Craving is dead, and the Lord’s will is done.
To-day is now the seventh day since first
Was withered up within that ancient Thirst.48
In yet another instance, a bhikkhuni named Siha recalls how she was virtually driven
to suicide. It was only when she was about to end her life that realization dawned
on her:
I, wretched, found no ease by day or night,
So took a rope and plunged into the wood:
‘Better for me a friendly gallows-tree!
I’ll live again the low life of the world.’
Strong was the noose I made; and on a bough
I bound the rope and flung it round my neck,
When see! . . . my heart was set at liberty!49
What is also remarkable is the lack of regimentation within the sangha. Different
paths to nibbana were acknowledged and recorded without being prioritized or
valorized. Consider, for instance, the composition attributed to Dantika:
Coming from noonday-rest on Vulture’s Peak,
I saw an elephant, his bathe performed,
Forth from the river issue. And a man,
Taking his goad, bade the great creature stretch
His foot: ‘Give me thy foot!’ The elephant
Obeyed, and to his neck the driver sprang.
I saw the untamed tamed, I saw him bent
To master’s will; and marking inwardly, I passed into the forest depths and there I’
faith I trained and ordered all my heart.50
In this instance, a unique sight inspires Dantika to meditate and realize her goal in
solitude. Varied paths, charted out by individuals, sometimes through mutual support,
48
TG 3.29.
49
TG 5.40.
50
TG 3.32.
and occasionally through intensely personal efforts, were recognized as equally
capable of leading to the final goal.
What is remarkable about the compositions attributed to the theris is their diversity.
Rhys Davids51 noted, with almost poetic precision: “(the) glory of saintship was for
them ...no white light, but prismatic through the circumstances and temperament
of each.”
We catch a glimpse of this in the very first composition in the present anthology, a
short verse, attributed to an unnamed theri, who attained enlightenment on seeing
how the food that she was cooking was reduced to ashes. This, for her, was a sign of
impermanence, according to the commentator. The imagery is simple and vivid:
Stilled are the passions that would rage within,
Withered as potherbs in the oven dried.52
There is also a vivid evocation of the quotidian. In a much-cited verse attributed to a
theri named Mutta, whose very name carries connotations of freedom or liberation,
she celebrates her freedom from three crooked things—the mortar and pestle that
are signs of domestic drudgery, and her hunch-backed husband.53
In yet another instance, in a gatha attributed to a bhikkhuni named Sakula, the
rupture from worldly existence is represented with vivid brevity:
Thereat I left my daughter, left my son,
I left my treasures and my stores of grain;
I called for robes and razors, cut my hair,
And gat me forth into the homeless life.54
The attainment of nibbana is also described with deceptive simplicity. In a verse
attributed to a bhikkhuni named Uttara she declares:
Well have I disciplined myself in act,
In speech and eke in thought, rapt and intent.
Craving with root of craving is o’ercome;
Cool am I now; I know Nibbana’s peace.55
In other instances, a contrast is built between tangible, yet barren rituals and the
intangible attainment of enlightenment. This finds expression in the composition
attributed to Mitta:
On full-moon day and on the fifteenth day,
And eke the eighth of either half the month,
I kept the feast; I kept the precepts eight,
51
Op.cit. p.16.
52
TG 1.1.
53
TG 1.11.
54
TG 5.44.
55
TG 1. 15.
The extra fasts, enamoured of the gods,
And fain to dwell in homes celestial.
To-day one meal, head shaved, a yellow robe-
Enough for me. I want no heaven of gods.
Heart’s pain, heart’s pining, have I trained away.56
Many of the compositions convey personal experiences with a vivid intensity. The
following verse, attributed to a bhikkhuni named Dhamma, exemplifies some of
these qualities. She was born in a wealthy family and renounced the world after
meeting her social obligations. The very act of wandering in search of alms would
have been in stark contrast to her earlier existence. She breaks down under the
physical strain, and yet, this collapse becomes a positive transformative experience,
providing her insights into the transience of worldly life, and allowing her to move
beyond the limits of her body.
Far had I wandered for my daily food;
Weary with shaking limbs I reached my rest,
Leaning upon my staff, when even there
I fell to earth.-Lo! all the misery
Besetting this poor mortal frame lay bare
To inward vision. Prone the body lay;
The heart of me rose up in liberty.57
In some instances, even the symbols of renunciation, the robe and the alms bowl, are
considered redundant. This is evident in the composition attributed to Citta, a woman
from a relatively affluent family, who adopted the hardships of the ascetic life:
Though I be suffering and weak, and all
My youthful spring be gone, yet have I climbed,
Leaning upon my staff, the mountain crest.
Thrown from my shoulder hangs my cloak, o’erturned
My little bowl. So ‘gainst the rock I lean
And prop this self of me, and break away
The wildering gloom that long had closed me in.58
In other instances, the compositions resonate with unmistakable pride, evident for
example, in one of the verses attributed to Uttama:
Buddha’s daughter I,
Born of his mouth, his blessed word, I stand,
Transported with Nibbana’s bliss alway.59
56
TG 2.25.
57
TG 1.17.
58
TG 2.23.
59
TG 3.31.
And yet others attempt to capture the incomparable experience of nibbana. One of
these is from a composition attributed to Sona, a woman who renounced the world
after bearing ten children:
Mine is the ecstasy of freedom won
As Path merges in Fruit, and Fruit in Path.
Holding to nought, I in Nibbana live.60
Also consider the declaration attributed to Vijaya:
While passed the last watch of the night, I burst
And rent aside the gloom of ignorance.
Then, letting joy and blissful ease of mind
Suffuse my body, seven days I sat,
Ere stretching out cramped limbs I rose again.
Was it not rent indeed, that muffling mist?61
What is interesting is that the body is both acknowledged and transcended in this
gatha: the blissful ease of mind takes over, but the cramped limbs are also a part of
the experience.
The poem attributed to Patacara, one of the most famous theris, who found refuge
in the sangha after losing her sons, husband, parents, and brother, is characterized
by a stark, austere beauty and simple imagery:
One day, bathing my feet, I sit and watch
The water as it trickles down the slope.
Thereby I set my heart in steadfastness,
As one doth train a horse of noble breed.
Then going to my cell, I take my lamp,
And seated on my couch I watch the flame.
Grasping the pin, I pull the wick right down Into the oil. . . .
Lo! The Nibbana of the little lamp!
Emancipation dawns! My heart is free!62
Other compositions celebrate the attainments of women teachers. The following
verses, in praise of Sukka, compare her words to the rain that brings relief, as opposed
to inebriating wine:
What would ye men of Rajagaha have?
What have ye done? that mute and idle here
Ye lie about, as if bemused with wine,
Nor wait upon Sukka, while she reveals
60
TG 5.45.
61
TG 6.58.
62
TG 5.47.
63
TG 3.34.
The precious gospel by the Buddha taught.
The wise in heart, methinks, were fain to quaff
That life’s elixir, once won never lost,
That welleth ever up in her sweet words,
E’en as the wayfarer welcomes the rain.63
Most of the gathas ascribed to the theris are brief compositions. Yet, there are some
that are more elaborate. One of these is the poem (No. 66) authored by Ambapali,
an ex-courtesan who joined the sangha. This is a long, lyrical composition, lamenting
the transience of physical beauty, and contemplating, in a somber mood, the ageing
feminine body. This is how she describes her sagging breasts:
Full and lovely in contour rose of yore the small breasts of me. They with the
waste of the years droop shrunken as skins without water.64
As is evident, the imagery that is used in these compositions is at once rich and
diverse.
Apart from the imagery, the very form of the text is also significant. Rhys Davids,65
amongst others, drew attention to the fact that the gathas were, by definition,
composed in verse. The use of the metrical composition as a mode of communication
permitted easy memorization and dissemination in a situation where written modes
of communication were not easily accessible. If anything, it draws attention, implicitly
if not explicitly, to the reliance on oral modes, modes that would have bridged the
divides between the bhikkhu or the bhikkhuni striving for enlightenment in situations
of seclusion and those engaged in more mundane pursuits. It points, I may add, to a
concern and a commitment to communication, a reminder that intellectual pursuits
or spiritual quests were meant to be shared and transmitted rather than preserved
as an exclusive, inaccessible set of lofty or esoteric activities, removed from the scrutiny
of the less privileged.
Several of the compositions are marked by a vivid, personal immediacy. This is
exemplified by the following verses from one of the longer compositions, attributed
to Isidasi:66
My salutation morn and eve I brought
To both the parents of my husband, low
Bowing my head and kneeling at their feet,
According to the training given me.
My husband’s sisters and his brothers too,
And all his kin, scarce were they entered when
I rose in timid zeal and gave them place.
That which was to be stored I set aside,
64
TG 13.66.
65
Op. cit,, p. 14.
66
TG 15.72.And as to food, or boiled or dried, and drink,
And served it out and gave to whom ’twas due.
Rising betimes, I went about the house,
Then with my hands and feet well cleansed I went
To bring respectful greeting to my lord,
And taking comb and mirror, unguents, soap,
I dressed and groomed him as a handmaid might.
I boiled the rice, I washed the pots and pans;
And as a mother on her only child,
So did I minister to my good man.
One of the strategies of communication deployed was the use of simple, vivid, and
consequently effective puns. Consider this example, where there is a play on the
name of the bhikkhuni, Punna, which could mean both pure, and full, and the full
moon which was also regarded as the punna candaIn this verse, the bhikkhuni is
compared to the full moon, whose light is equated with her knowledge, and considered
capable of dispelling ignorance.
Fill up, Punna, the orb of holy life,
E’en as on fifteenth day the full-orb’d moon.
Fill full the perfect knowledge of the Path,
And scatter all the gloom of ignorance.67
Another strategy, often deployed in the longer compositions, was to structure these
as dialogues. In some instances, these are dialogues between the tempter Mara and
the bhikkhuni striving for and achieving enlightenment, the conversation concluding
in the triumph of the latter.68 In another instance, there is a dialogue between husband
and wife.69 There are other dialogues between parents and daughter,70 as also between
a theri and a man who was attracted to her.71 There are also conversations amongst
the theris, as they share experiences, as in the case of Bodhi and Isidasi.72 As is
evident, these dialogues are markedly different from those of the BAU—inevitably,
the women succeed in winning over those with whom they engage in conversation.
Also, the element of competition or rivalry is virtually absent. The outcome of these
dialogues may seem less profound, more intimate, compassionate and personal, and
often embody the idea of liberation in simple, effective imagery.
The use of the dialogue as a mode of communication in this anthology was obviously
significant. It could allow for dramatization in the course of oral narration. At another
level, it provided the audience with space to identify with the characters who
67
TG 1. 3.
68
E.g., TG 3. 35.
69
TG 13.68.
70
TG 13.69.
71
TG 14.71.
72
TG 15.72.
participated in the dialogue, to enter into their shifting stances, and perhaps to be
convinced by the position of the one who ultimately triumphed.
One of the most effective examples of such strategies of communications comes from
the composition attributed to Punna, a slave woman, describing her encounter with
a brahmana, some excerpts from which are as follows:73
Drawer of water, I down to the stream,
Even in winter, went in fear of blows,
Harassed by fear of blame from mistresses.
‘What, brahmin, fearest thou that ever thus
Thou goest down into the river? Why
With shiv’ring limbs dost suffer bitter cold?’...
‘Nay now, who, ignorant to the ignorant,
Hath told thee this: that water-baptism
From evil karma can avail to free?
Why then the fishes and the tortoises,
The frogs, the watersnakes, the crocodiles
And all that haunt the water straight to heaven ...
Of evil thou hast wrought, they’d bear away
Thy merit too, leaving thee stripped and bare.
That, dreading which, thou, brahmin, comest e’er
To bathe and shiver here, that, even that
Leave thou undone, and save thy skin from frost.’
What is evident from this composition is the attempt to reach out to a wide audience
in terms of everyday experiences—those of the slave woman, whose chores included
fetching water even when it was bitterly cold, and that of the brahmana priest who
felt obliged to take a dip in those very same waters in order to fulfill his ritual needs.
What is more, the apparently lowly slave woman demolishes the pretensions of the
learned priest with arguments that are drawn from commonsense: do all the creatures
of the water go to heaven? If water can wash away sin, does it wash away
accumulated merit as well? The imagery is vivid, the argument telling in its simplicity.
Punna goes on to refuse the gift of a robe made by the grateful brahmana, suggesting
that he would benefit by accepting the dhamma instead.
What inspired some, if not all the efforts that went into the composition, compilation
and transmission of the tradition was the sentiment of kalyanamittata, benevolent
friendship, as Rhys Davids points out. 74 Even the somewhat contemptuous
representation of brahmanical beliefs and practices is accompanied by a suggestion
that there is a way out. These dialogues, then, have a different texture from those in
the BAU. What is also interesting is the space and voice claimed for the woman
73
TG 12.65.
74
Op.cit. p. 14.
domestic slave, at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. This again, contrasts with
the situations represented in the BAU, where most men and women who participate
in conversations belong to the first two varnas.
While I have analyzed the social origins and prehistories of the bhikkhunis before
they entered the sangha elsewhere,75 it is evident that the gathas themselves can be
visualized as gendered texts. The imagery is often drawn from women’s lived
experiences—of cooking, caring, bereavement, especially the loss of children. Besides,
there is a recognition of the not so complimentary ways in which women’s bodies
were perceived, with some theris attempting to deny their physical attributes in
their quest for liberation. The image of the everyday that emerges from these
descriptions both resonates with that of the BAU and diverges from it, containing a
wealth of graphic detail. What is perhaps more significant is that the purported
women authors of the TG both acknowledge and attempt to transcend gender
differences. It is here that they differ from the authors of the BAU, who attempted to
inscribe gender hierarchies into practices of sexual intercourse and procreation, and
used gendered imagery in their speculation about the cosmos.
III
Beyond Emulation and Adulation
I will conclude by turning briefly to Arindam Chakravarti’s76 lucid analysis of a
conversation embedded in the Mahabharata, between Janaka, who may or may not
be the king of Upanisadic fame, and an otherwise unknown woman named Sulabha.
Sulabha, Chakravarti suggests, may represent a woman renunciant within the
Buddhist tradition. She approaches Janaka in order to test his knowledge of the
ultimate reality and demonstrates, gently but firmly, that he is still trapped in dualities
and binaries, even as he claims to have transcended these.
Janaka charges Sulabha with four offences, all related to the questions of
intersectionality with which we began—she (he assumes) is a brahmana woman
who is engaging with him, a ksatriya, and thus violating the orders of varna and
gender. Second, she is violating the order of asramas, or stages of life, by reverting
from renunciation to uniting with him, a householder. Third, she may be violating
norms of gotra. And fourth, in case she has a husband, she is guilty of adultery.77
Sulabha’s response is measured, and on a different plane. She refuses to engage
with these mundane classifications. Hers is a plea for a triangular balance—amongst
the speaker, the listener, and what is said—
vakta srota ca vakyam ca yadatva vikalam nrpa
samam eti vivksayam tada-so ‘rthah prakasita
75
Roy, op.cit.
76
Op. cit.
77
Ibid., p. 258.
When the speaker, the listener, and the sentence take equal shares, without losing
any part, into what is intended to be said, only then, O King, does such meaning
come to light.78
She also suggests that the search for an essential, ultimate human reality is flawed in
a world marked by flux:
The constituent elements of the body, which serve diverse functions in the general
economy, undergo change every moment in every creature. Those changes, however,
are so minute that they cannot be noticed. The birth of the minute cells, and their
death, in each successive condition, cannot be marked, O king, even as one cannot
mark the changes in the flame of a burning lamp.79
This is one luminous instance of the richness of the textual traditions that await us,
when we explore these, beyond looking for simple, immediate answers in terms of
whether women had a high or a low status. Also noteworthy is that while this
dialogue is embedded in a Sanskrit text, it resonates with ideas that were part of the
Buddhist Pali canonical tradition. In other words, it is a reminder that dialogues
were possible and indeed occurred at a variety of levels, across traditions and
languages. And, gender relations were conceptualized, shaped and challenged, if
not transformed through such dialogues.
We have also seen that the exploration of the BAU and the TG suggests that there
were different ways of conceptualizing the ultimate reality, and of communicating
and sharing knowledge about it. Gendered metaphors as well as everyday gender
relations were some of the resources used in this process. In this context, the BAU
may seem to be more exclusive, hierarchical and structured in terms of gender. The
TG, by contrast, even as it was preserved within a gendered and even misogynistic
order of bhikkhus, suggests a more flexible textual tradition.
Clearly, in the 21st century, there is no question of our returning to the cloistered,
secluded space of the bhikkhuni sangha, tempting as it may appear in an increasingly
conflict-ridden world. It is also useful to resist converting the bhikkhunis into token
figures who can be idolized, idealized, and then, like most ideals and idols, forgotten.
The fates of Gargi and Maitreyi remind us of the limitations of these strategies.
Can we engage with these traditions in more constructive and creative ways? Is it
possible to remind ourselves of the diversity amongst the theris, even while recognizing
that many of them were recruited from the higher strata of society? Can we commit
ourselves to making opportunities for intellectual exploration, speculation and
expression being more inclusive and more accessible as a right to women (and men)
who are often denied access to the basic necessities of life?
We have also noted that the worlds of the bhikkhunis, even as they ostensibly
renounced the attractions of mundane existence, straddled diverse spaces, and some
78
Ibid. p. 265.
79
Ibid. p. 267.
such as Dhammadinna, recognized as a renowned teacher within the tradition,
traversed these spaces with ease. Once again this ability and urge to build bridges
rather than barriers has the potential of rendering the intellectual enterprise truly
worthwhile.
What is also worth recalling is that the bhikkhuni sangha was not visualized as a
pristine, exclusive, secluded space. It was far more complex, a space created through
negotiation, occasionally contentious, between men and women, both within the
world of renouncers and outside. The testimony of the Therigatha testifies to these
complexities, and, if we wish to learn lessons, probably suggests that we need to
engage with these rather than escape from them.
We may also wish to consider the non-dogmatic resolutions that the Therigatha
suggests. There is no single, formulaic path to attain the final goal—each woman
goes through her individual quest, even as she is supported by and in turn supports
others. Some may declare gender differences irrelevant; others may claim that they
are equal to men. In other words, there is scope for flexibility and fluidity. The absence
of any attempt to cling rigidly to positions creates constructive space, something we
may wish to reflect on and aspire towards.
What is also distinctive about the theris and those who preserved their memories
was the urge to communicate—using language and idioms that had a wide appeal,
even as they dealt with some of the most complex and inexpressible human
experiences. There is, perhaps, a lesson for us in that process, a reminder that
intellectual achievements, problems, ideas need to be shared, and shared in ways
that are accessible rather than abstruse.
None of these was easy: that they were nonetheless thought of as possibilities is in
itself inspiring, and is something that we may wish to revisit, and reconsider, even
as we work out our own paths towards our aspirations today.
Kumkum Roy
Fellow,
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
kumkumr@yahoo. com
23rd February 2015
*******

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PREFACE

Introduction: An introduction is tracing out the theoretical and/or theoretical

II. Decided cases and material

III. Practice exercise/Model questions

Dr. Rashmi Salpekar

UNIT I- EARLY DEVELOPMENTS (1600-1836)

1. The English East India Company: Provisions of Administration of

2. Organisational set-up of the English Company’s Factories

3. Administration of Justice and the Development of Court and

4. The Regulating Act of 1773 & The Act of Settlement , 1781

6. Beginning of Adalat System in Bengal

7. Development of Personal Laws of Hindus and Mohammedans

8. Development of Criminal Law

9. Development of Civil Law: Mofussil

10. Codification of Laws: 1833-1882

11. The Indian Council Act, 1861

12. Establishment of High Court

UNIT III- THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENTS AND

14. The Indian Council Act, 1909

15. The Government of India Act, 1919

16. The Government of India Act, 1935

17. Colonialism and Imperialism: Stages

18. Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements

India before the arrival of British

Background of the Establishment of British Power in Bengal:

THE WORKING OF THE INDIAN FEDERAL COURT

Sir Maurice Gwyer’s appointment as Chief Justice of India was announced in

The Return of the Colonial in Indian Economic History: The

Gandhi’s Swaraj by RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

The Historiography of India’s Partition: Between

The Princely States, the Muslim League, and the Partition of

As THE PREMIER act of European decolonization in Asia,1 the British evacuation of

An important event that occurred in the post-independence era must be mentioned

It is indeed an honour to be a part of the centenary celebrations of the Government

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