Colonial India

“Every single empire in its official

discourse has said that it is not like all
the others, that its circumstances are
special, that it has a mission to enlighten,
civilize, bring order and democracy, and
India till 1857 that it uses force only as a last resort.
And, sadder still, there always is a chorus
of willing intellectuals to say calming
Legislating the Indians words about benign or altruistic empires,
as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of
Read one's eyes watching the destruction and
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20836977?seq=14 the misery and death brought by the
latest mission civilisatrice.”
-Edward W. Said
The Permanent Settlement of Bengal 1793
The Permanent Settlement of Bengal was brought into effect by the East India Company
headed by the Governor-General Lord Cornwallis in 1793. This was basically an agreement
between the company and the Zamindars to fix the land revenue. First enacted in Bengal,
Bihar and Odisha, this was later followed in northern Madras Presidency and the district of
Varanasi. Cornwallis thought of this system inspired by the prevailing system of land revenue
in England where the landlords were the permanent masters of their holdings and they
collected revenue from the peasants and looked after their interests. He envisaged the creation
of a hereditary class of landlords in India. This system was also called the Zamindari System.

Many waqf properties were confiscated in Bengal in favor of the Calcutta Madrassah (used as
for pro-British ideological teachings)
The Charter Act of 1813
● This Act asserted the Crown’s sovereignty over British possessions in India.
● The company’s rule was extended to another 20 years. Their trade monopoly was
ended except for the trade in tea, opium, and with China.
● It empowered the local governments to tax people subject to the jurisdiction of
the Supreme Court.
● The company’s dividend was fixed at 10.5%.
● The Act gave more powers for the courts in India over European British subjects.
Cont’d
● Another important feature of this act was to grant permission to the missionaries to
come to India and engage in religious proselytization. The missionaries were
successful in getting the appointment of a Bishop for British India with his
headquarters at Calcutta in the provisions of the Act.
● The act provided for a financial grant towards the revival of Indian literature and the
promotion of science.
● The company was also to take up a greater role in the education of the Indians under
them. It was to set aside Rs.1 Lakh for this purpose.
Christian Mission Activity and the Civilizing Mission

1. A project of imperial social formation

begins
2. Who gets to educate the Indian? “Is it surprising that prisons resemble
3. A battle for spiritual hegemony factories, schools, barracks, hospitals,
4. Upward social mobility became possible for which all resemble prisons?”
the depressed classes
5. It was a good look to advocate ‘education’
- Michael Foucault, Discipline and
and multiple missionary schools were set up Punish (1977)
6. Corporeal empires and corporeal
punishment
Timeline of Events from 1813-1833
● 31st December, 1818: The Third Anglo-Maratha War ends with the defeat of
Bajirao II and the end of the Maratha Empire, leaving the East India Company
with control of almost the whole of India.
● 1819: Sikh Empire defeats the Durrani Empire in the Battle of Shopian and
captures Srinagar and Kashmir. Islamic rule ends in Jammu and Kashmir.
● 1823-1826: The Anglo Burmese War. It ended with the British establishing
their empire in Burma (till 1947)
● 1829: Abolition of Sati By Sir William Bentick
● 1831: Sikh Empire defeats the Mujahideen forces of Syed Ahmad Barelvi in
the Battle of Balakot
The Charter Act of 1833
● The company’s commercial activities were closed down. It was made into an
administrative body for British Indian possessions.
● The company’s trade links with China were also closed down.
● This act permitted the English to settle freely in India.
● This act legalised the British colonisation of the country.
○ The Governor-General of Bengal was re-designated as the Governor-General of India. This made Lord
William Bentinck the first Governor-General of India.
○ The Governor-General had legislative powers over entire British India.
○ For the first time, the Governor-General’s government was called Government of India and the council
was called India Council.
● The company still possessed the Indian territories but it was held ‘in trust for his
majesty’.
Macaulay’s Minute on Education
Macaulay who was the first Chairman of the Indian Law Commission (set up after the
Charter Act of 1833):

“To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to
have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of
citizens would indeed be a title to glory all our own.[5] The sceptre may pass away from
us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may
be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverses.
There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific
triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and
our morals, our literature and our laws.”
“I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in
the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the
Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
[7] [...] And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the
Arabic and Sanskrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But
when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and
general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely
immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information
which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less
valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory
schools in England.”
Timeline of Events from 1833-1857:
● 1839: The First Anglo-Afghan War
● 1845-1849: Series of Wars between British and the Sikh Empire
● 1848-1856: The Doctrine of Lapse + The Doctrine of Paramountcy (under
Lord Dalhousie)
○ Satara (1848), Jaitpur and Sambalpur (1849), Baghat (1850), Chota
Udaipur (1852), Jhansi (1853), and Nagpur (1854).
● 1855- The Santhal Rebellion in West Bengal against the EIC and zamindars.
● 25 July, 1856: The Hindu Widows Remarriage Act
The Indian Rebellion of 1857
The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the company's
army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 mi (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted
into other mutinies and civilian rebellions chiefly in the upper Gangetic plain and central
India, though incidents of revolt also occurred farther north and east.

After the outbreak of the mutiny in Meerut, the rebels quickly reached Delhi, whose 81-
year-old Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was declared the Emperor of Hindustan.
Soon, the rebels had captured large tracts of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh
(Oudh). The large princely states, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and Kashmir, as well
as the smaller ones of Rajputana, did not join the rebellion, serving the British, in the
Governor-General Lord Canning's words, as "breakwaters in a storm".
1857-1905
Results of the Mutiny
1. Reorganizing the Army: The Indian army was completely reorganised: units
composed of the Muslims and Brahmins of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh,
who had formed the core of the rebellion, were disbanded. New regiments, like the
Sikhs and Baluchis, composed of Indians who, in British estimation, had
demonstrated steadfastness, were formed.
2. Rewarding the zamindars and British loyalists and establishing a new elite
3. The Indian Penal Code (extensive) came into action in 1860
4. Punishments: In Oudh alone, some estimates put the toll at 150,000 Indians killed
during the war, with 100,000 of them being civilians. The capture of Delhi, Allahabad,
Kanpur and Lucknow by British forces were followed by general massacres.
Punishments
The rebels' murder of British women, children and wounded soldiers (including sepoys
who sided with the British) at Cawnpore, and the subsequent printing of the events in the
British papers, left many British soldiers outraged and seeking revenge. Aside from
hanging mutineers, the British had some "blown from cannon", (an old Mughal
punishment adopted many years before in India), in which sentenced rebels were tied over
the mouths of cannons and blown to pieces when the cannons were fired. A particular act
of cruelty on behalf of the British troops at Cawnpore included forcing many Muslim or
Hindu rebels to eat pork or beef, as well as licking buildings freshly stained with blood of
the dead before subsequent public hangings
In terms of sheer numbers, the casualties were much higher on the Indian side. A letter
published after the fall of Delhi in the Bombay Telegraph and reproduced in the British
press testified to the scale of the Indian casualties:

.... All the city's people found within the walls of the city of Delhi when our troops entered
were bayoneted on the spot, and the number was considerable, as you may suppose, when
I tell you that in some houses forty and fifty people were hiding. These were not mutineers
but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to
say they were disappointed
The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871
● The Thuggee Act of 1836 set the legal precedent for the Criminal Tribes Act 1871. Colonial
records characterises thuggees with five qualities--strangulation, secrecy, organisation,
antiquity, and religiosity. These distinguished them from other categories of criminality and
provided the basis of the 1836 act.
● Under these acts, ethnic or social communities in India were defined as "addicted to the
systematic commission of non-bailable offences" such as thefts, and were registered by the
government. Adult males of the groups were forced to report weekly to local police, and had
restrictions on their movement imposed.
● The colonial government prepared a list of "criminal castes", and all members registered in
these castes by caste-census were restricted in terms of regions they could visit, move about
in or people they could socialise with. In certain regions, entire caste groups were presumed
guilty by birth, arrested, children separated from their parents, and held in penal colonies or
quarantined without conviction or due process.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and the Hindu-Muslim Division

1. Muslim leadership was subdued after 1857, and Muslims were forbidden from
entering Delhi. Mirza Ghalib bemoaned “while the birds and animals can come to
Delhi Muslims can’t.
2. Chaudhry Muhammad Ali on the Muslims after 1857:

“Too proud to cooperate wit the victor, too sullen to adjust themselves to the new
circumstances, too embittered to think objectively too involved emotionally with the
past to plan for the future. Muslim society in the decades following the events of
1857 presented a picture of desolation and decay.”
● Out of 240 Indians admitted to the Calcutta Bar between 1852-68 only 1 had been
Muslim.
● In 1878, there were 3155 Hindus with graduate/postgraduate degrees compared to 57
Muslims.
● Sir Syed Ahmed Khan arose as a champion of the Muslim community from this
quagmire by advocating for Muslims to be educated/work with the system.
● 1875- The Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College was set up (which made Arabic and
religious instruction mandatory).
● He was a member of the Governorn General’s Legislative Council and campaigned
successfully for separate nomination in local self-government institutions for
Muslims.
● He also contested the National Congress’s desire to enlarge indian representation in
the government through competitive examination.
The Partition of Bengal, 1905
1. Bengal (with the inclusion of Bihar and Orissa) was becoming difficult to administer
as 1 province.
2. Bengal’s economy was dominated by the industrialist of Calcutta (depressing local
initiatives to progress).
3. The agitation from Hindus over the partition created fears in the Muslim community
that they too needed stronger political leaders.
4. 1906- The All India Muslim League was formed in Dhaka.
5. 1906- a delegation led by the Aga Khan requested that muslims be given separate
electorates at the provincial level since in the United Provinces they had not secured
a single seat in the government (despite being 14%)
Reflection Question
How did the Rebellion of 1857 represent the tensions of empire which were brewing
between different communities (British, Hindu, Muslim, landed elites, depressed classes
etc.) in 1800s India?