Exploring Society I · Chapter 4 — The Colonial Era in India

In 1778 a painter in London finished a picture over three metres long for the East India Company's headquarters. It shows 'the East' kneeling to offer pearls, jewels and cotton to a seated figure of Britannia. The title says the East is offering its riches. As you read this chapter, ask yourself: was it offered, or taken?

What is colonialism? Colonialism is the practice of one country taking control of another region, settling there and imposing its own political, economic and cultural systems. It is very old: great empires of the 1st millennium BCE did it, and in the 1st millennium CE the spread of some religions also involved taking over lands. But the Age of Colonialism usually means Europe's expansion from the 15th century onward, when Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and the Netherlands built colonies across Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia and the Pacific, often through massacre or enslavement of native peoples.

Why did they do it?

• Rivalry: European powers raced each other for land and influence.
• Economic gain: new resources, new markets, new trade routes and, often, plunder.
• Religion: converting local people to Christianity.
• Science: a lesser motive, the wish to map and study unknown lands.

The 'civilising mission'. Colonisers often claimed they were bringing progress to 'savage' or 'primitive' peoples. In reality the colonised lost their independence, their resources were exploited, their ways of life were broken and foreign values were imposed. The colonial age did connect the world and speed up technology, but the benefits went mostly to the colonisers. Colonialism declined in the mid-20th century, especially after World War II, when most colonies became independent.

Why India? India had traded with the Greeks and Romans more than two thousand years ago, selling spices, cotton, ivory, gems, sandalwood, teak and wootz steel. Estimates by the economist Angus Maddison suggest that, until European ships arrived in the 16th century, India produced at least one-fourth of the world's GDP (the total value of goods and services produced in a year), making it one of the two largest economies with China. European travellers described a flourishing land of skilled manufacture, varied farming and wide trade. That wealth is exactly what made India a target.

Big questions. What drew the Europeans? How did a trading company come to rule? And what did colonial rule do to India's people and economy?

In May 1498 a small Portuguese fleet anchored at Kappad, near Kozhikode (Calicut) in Kerala. Their captain, Vasco da Gama, had found a sea route from Europe round Africa to India. A plaque at Kozhikode still marks the spot. His arrival opened the door to European colonisation of India.

From guest to aggressor. Vasco da Gama was received well, but his aggressive behaviour spoiled relations with local rulers. On his second voyage, four years later, he seized, tortured and killed Indian merchants and bombarded Calicut from the sea. The Portuguese captured key ports, above all Goa (1510), which became the capital of their Indian colony, and set up trading posts along the Malabar and Coromandel coasts.

The cartaz system. The Portuguese demanded that every ship in the Arabian Sea buy a Portuguese pass, the cartaz. Ships without one were seized. Control of the sea let them dominate the spice trade between India and Europe for nearly a century.

Religious persecution. The Portuguese in western India also persecuted people for their faith. In 1560 they set up the Inquisition in Goa, a church court for judging so-called heretics. It harshly persecuted Hindus, Muslims, Jews and converted Christians suspected of still following their old faith. There were forced conversions and many Hindu temples were destroyed. The Goa Inquisition was abolished only in 1812, more than 250 years later.

Resistance: the Abbakka queens. The port of Ullal, in present-day southern Karnataka, was ruled by Rani Abbakka I. In the late 16th century the Portuguese tried again and again to seize it, but she built alliances with neighbouring kingdoms and drove them back. She was finally captured and died fighting in prison. Her successor, Rani Abbakka II, is said to have set Portuguese ships on fire with burning coconut-shell fireballs. Their stories are still performed in Yakṣhagāna, a traditional dance-drama of coastal Karnataka.

Pattern to notice. The Portuguese used three tools that later powers also used: naval power, control of trade routes through passes, and pressure on local religion and culture. Indian rulers resisted, sometimes successfully, but the sea gave Europeans a big advantage.

Quick timeline. 1498 arrival; 1510 Goa captured; 1560 Inquisition set up; 1812 Inquisition abolished.

In a painting at Padmanabhapuram Palace in Kerala, European officers kneel in surrender before an Indian king. It records a rare moment in history: an Asian kingdom defeating a European colonial force on land and at sea.

The Dutch: business first. The Dutch arrived in the early 17th century and, unlike the Portuguese, cared mainly about trade, especially spices. Their Dutch East India Company had posts at Surat, Bharuch and Cochin (Kochi) on the west coast and Nagapattinam and Masulipatnam (Machilipatnam) on the east coast. Their strongest presence was in Malabar, where they pushed the Portuguese out of several trading centres.

Colachel, 1741. The Dutch were decisively beaten at the Battle of Colachel by the forces of King Marthanda Varma of Travancore (in southern Kerala), on land and at sea. After this their presence in India declined sharply.

The French: big ambitions. The French set up their first trading post at Surat in 1668 and then at Pondicherry (Puducherry) in 1674, where their East India Company planned a French empire in India. Dupleix, Governor-General of French India from 1742 to 1754, developed two methods the British later copied:

• He trained Indian soldiers in European drill and tactics, creating disciplined infantry called sepoys.
• He used indirect rule: interfering in quarrels over who should inherit a throne and installing friendly 'puppet' rulers.

The Carnatic Wars (1746 to 1763). Britain and France fought a series of wars in south India. Dupleix captured Madras (Chennai) in 1746, but in the end the French lost, and their territory shrank to Pondicherry and a few small enclaves.

Religion and society. Like the Dutch, and unlike the Portuguese, the French mostly did not interfere in Indians' religious and social life. A rare exception was 1748, when Dupleix ordered the destruction of Pondicherry's large Vedapurishwaran temple at the urging of Jesuit priests and his own wife.

Comparing the powers.

How does a company that came to buy cloth and pepper end up ruling a subcontinent? The British story in India is one of history's clearest examples of a trading company turning into an empire, gradually and often disguised as business.

A company with special powers. The English East India Company received a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I, which allowed it, among other things, to raise its own army. Its agents at first acted as simple traders. Between 1612 and 1690 they set up posts at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Indian rulers, long used to foreign trade, did not object.

Divide and rule. Company agents offered military help to some rulers against their rivals and took sides in quarrels over succession. In this way they became power brokers rather than open invaders. They also identified and often encouraged tensions within Indian society, for example between religious communities.

Plassey, 1757. When the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, clashed with Company officials led by Robert Clive, Clive plotted with the Nawab's commander Mir Jafar, promising to make him Nawab. At Palashi (Plassey), about 150 km north of today's Kolkata, Mir Jafar's troops, most of the Nawab's army, stood aside, and the smaller British force won. 'Mir Jafar' still means 'traitor' in India. A few years later the Company won the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.

Doctrine of Lapse. In the 19th century the Company declared that a princely state would be annexed if its ruler died without a natural male heir, ignoring the accepted Indian custom of adoption. Many states were taken this way, causing deep resentment that fed into 1857.

Subsidiary alliance. A British 'Resident' was placed at an Indian ruler's court. The ruler had to keep British troops at his own cost and deal with other states only through the British. He kept his throne but lost real power, and paid for it too. Hyderabad joined in 1798, and others followed. It gave Britain control 'on the cheap', and leaving was almost impossible.

Princely states. These were regions ruled by Indian princes under British protection. At Independence there were over 500, covering about 40% of the subcontinent.

Key dates. 1757 Plassey; 1798 Hyderabad's subsidiary alliance; 1818 Maratha power ends; 1848-49 Punjab annexed after the fall of the Sikh Empire; 1858 the British Crown takes over from the Company.

Robert Clive called Bengal 'the paradise of the earth'. Within a few years of the Company taking over its revenue, Bengal suffered one of the worst famines in history.

Bengal, 1770 to 1772. After two years of poor harvests, the Company's harsh revenue targets made farmers pay high cash taxes on their land whatever the harvest. The famine killed nearly one-third of Bengal's population, an estimated 10 million people, yet the Company kept its tax targets and even raised the land tax. A century later, the British official W.W. Hunter described how farmers sold their cattle, their tools and even their children, and ate leaves and grass, while the government kept demanding more tax.

Not a one-time event. Famines kept returning under British rule. In the Great Famine of 1876 to 1878, up to 8 million people died, mostly on the Deccan plateau. Counts of severe famines during British rule range from about a dozen to more than 20, and estimates of total deaths range from 50 to 100 million, close to the death toll of World War II.

What made them so deadly?

• High cash taxes collected even in bad years.
• Grain exports continued: about one million tonnes of rice a year were shipped out during the three years of the 1876-78 famine.
• Hoarding by some traders hoping for higher prices.
• 'Free market' policy: Viceroy Lord Lytton ordered that the government must not interfere to lower food prices. In 1876, at the height of the famine, he held a lavish durbar in Delhi with a week-long feast for 68,000 guests.
• Too little relief: a few relief camps in cities, poorly supplied; a Famine Commission even argued that relief should be kept low, so the poor would not expect help at other times.

Famines before and during colonial rule. Droughts, floods and wars caused famines throughout India's history, but never on such a scale. Rural India sank into deep poverty and did not recover during colonial rule.

Thinking about causes. A drought is a natural event; a famine is when people cannot get food. Policy decides whether a drought becomes a famine: whether taxes are reduced, grain stops being exported and relief reaches people in time.

Imagine a family whose earnings are sent away every month to someone else, while it is charged for the roads and wires laid to carry the money out. Historians call what happened to India in the colonial period 'the drain of wealth'.

Plassey and the Industrial Revolution. In 1895 the American historian Brooks Adams argued that soon after Plassey the plunder of Bengal began to reach London, and that Britain's Industrial Revolution, which needed huge investment, took off around 1760. In his view few investments in history had earned such profit. The historian Will Durant later spoke of 'stolen wealth from India'.

Indian voices. Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons (in 1892), collected figures from British reports in his book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). He argued that Britain's rule in India broke Britain's own ideals of fair government. The historian Romesh Chunder Dutt did similar work in his Economic History of India. Both showed that many billions of pounds had been taken out of India.

A modern estimate. The economist Utsa Patnaik estimates the drain from 1765 to 1938 at about 45 trillion US dollars in today's value, roughly 13 times Britain's GDP in 2023. Like all such estimates it depends on assumptions, but every study points the same way: a very large transfer of wealth out of India.

How was wealth drained?

• Taxes collected in India were spent on British interests.
• Indians were charged for British spending on railways, the telegraph and even wars.
• Salaries and pensions of British officials were sent home.
• Profits of British firms and the trade in raw materials and finished goods favoured Britain.

Reading the painting again. In 'The East offering its riches to Britannia', Britannia sits high, with a lion for power, while India kneels below offering pearls and jewels, and dark-skinned figures carry bales of cotton. China offers a precious jar; Mercury, god of commerce, and Father Thames, for London, look on. The picture claims the colonies gave willingly and that white Britain stood above darker 'natives'. The evidence of the drain suggests the wealth was taken by force or trickery.

Why it matters. Had this wealth stayed and been invested in India, the country would have been very different at Independence.

Before the 18th century, Indian muslin was among the finest cloth in the world, so light and thin that buyers from many lands prized it. Indian cotton, silk and wool cloth, in bright colours and rich designs, was in demand across the world. Within a century the weavers who made it were starving.

How the textile industry was ruined. Britain placed heavy duties on Indian textiles entering Britain, while forcing India to accept British factory-made goods with very low duties. Britain also controlled most sea trade and exchange rates, so Indian traders found it hard to export. In the 19th century India's textile exports fell sharply and British imports into India rose even more sharply. Skilled artisan families were pushed back into farming on overtaxed land. In 1834 Governor-General William Bentinck admitted that the bones of cotton weavers were 'bleaching the plains of India'.

Other industries. Iron, steel, paper and other crafts declined the same way. This is called deindustrialisation, the shrinking of a country's industry. India's share of world GDP kept falling, to hardly 5% at Independence. In less than two centuries one of the world's richest lands became one of its poorest.

Village self-government. Before colonial rule, village councils managed local affairs, settled disputes and organised works such as irrigation and roads, and regional kingdoms had detailed administrations suited to local needs. Charles Metcalfe, an acting Governor-General in the 1830s, described Indian villages as 'little republics' that survived while dynasties rose and fell, and said they had done more than anything else to preserve India's people.

What replaced it. The British dismantled these systems and set up a centralised bureaucracy whose chief aims were collecting taxes and keeping order, not public welfare. Centuries-old ways of community decision-making were lost.

New laws and courts. British codes of law pushed aside customary laws that had guided communities for generations. Presented as modernisation, the new courts were expensive, slow and run in a foreign language, so ordinary Indians felt shut out of justice.

In the early 1800s British officers counted something that surprised them: in Bengal and Bihar alone there were between 1 and 1.5 lakh village schools teaching reading, writing and arithmetic simply and cheaply. Within decades most of them had vanished.

India's education traditions. India had many kinds of learning: pāṭhaśhālās, madrasās, Buddhist vihāras and apprenticeships in crafts. They passed on practical skills along with cultural values.

Macaulay's Minute, 1835. The British historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, who admitted he knew no Sanskrit or Arabic, declared European knowledge vastly superior and claimed that one shelf of a good European library was worth all the literature of India and Arabia. He wanted to create a class of Indians 'Indian in blood and colour' but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect. Some British scholars of Indian languages argued for teaching in Indian languages, but Macaulay's view won.

Effects.

• Traditional schools slowly disappeared.
• English became a language of prestige, dividing an English-educated elite from the masses, a divide that lasted.
• The system produced clerks and junior officials to staff the administration at a fraction of the cost of British staff.
• Generations grew up disconnected from their own heritage.

An economy for the empire. The British turned India from a largely self-sufficient economy of farming and crafts into a supplier of raw materials for British factories and a market for British goods.

The railways: a closer look. Railways are often called a colonial blessing, and they did bring people closer and link markets. But they were designed mainly to carry raw materials from the interior to ports and to spread British goods inland, and to move troops quickly to put down rebellions. Routes often ignored older trade patterns. Most of the cost was paid from Indian taxes, and the same was true of the telegraph.

Indians paid for their own rule. The administration, the army, military bases and the lavish lives of British officials were all funded by Indian taxpayers. The chapter sums it up: Indians funded their own subjugation.

Jewel in the crown. Because India supplied so much wealth and manpower, the British called it 'the jewel in the crown' of an empire 'on which the sun never sets', since it had colonies around the globe.

India's national song, Vande Mātaram, first appeared in a novel about a rebellion of wandering monks against the East India Company. Resistance to colonial rule began almost as soon as that rule did.

The Sannyasi-Fakir Rebellion. After the 1770 Bengal famine, groups of Hindu sannyasis and Muslim fakirs, who traditionally travelled freely for pilgrimage and charity, found their movement blocked by new Company land and tax policies. For about three decades they attacked British treasuries and tax collectors. The British called them bandits and finally crushed them. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel Anandamath (1882), inspired by this rebellion, contained the song Vande Mātaram.

Tribal uprisings. As the British moved into forests and hills they called tribal people 'primitive', restricted their use of forests, turned tribal land into private property, imposed cash taxes, trapped people in debt, replaced tribal councils with British law and backed missionaries. A colonial law even labelled hundreds of communities as 'criminal tribes', exposing them to harassment for decades.

• Khasi Uprising (1829-1833) in present-day Meghalaya.
• Kol Uprising (1831-1832) in Chota Nagpur (Jharkhand), by Mundas, Oraons and others, against land policies favouring outsiders; they held large areas for a time.
• Santhal Rebellion (1855-1856) across parts of Jharkhand, Bihar and Bengal, led by brothers Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu against moneylenders and landlords who took Santhal land with British support. The Santhals declared their own government. The British burned villages and killed thousands, including the leaders, but the rebellion inspired others.

The Indigo Revolt (1859-1862). European planters forced peasants in Bengal to grow indigo, a blue dye in demand in Europe, instead of food crops. Paid very little, peasants fell into debt slavery; those who refused faced prison, torture and destruction of property. They rose against the planters, supported by educated Bengalis and the press, and the government was forced to curb some of the worst abuses.

Vellore, 1806. New uniform rules banned Hindu and Muslim sepoys from wearing religious marks and required them to shave their beards. Sepoys seized Vellore fort in present-day Tamil Nadu and killed many British officers before the revolt was crushed and hundreds executed.

A pattern. Each group rose against a specific injustice: blocked movement, lost land, forced crops or insult to faith. None alone could defeat the British, but together they built up anger that exploded in 1857.

The British called it the 'Sepoy Mutiny'. After Independence, historians rejected that name because the rising spread far beyond soldiers. Following many scholars, we call it the Great Rebellion of 1857.

Background. Sepoys were Indian soldiers in the Company's army, whose officers were almost all British. Most came from farming families hurt by land-revenue policies. In 1857 rumours spread that new rifle cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat, offending both Hindu and Muslim sepoys.

How it spread. At Barrackpore, sepoy Mangal Pandey attacked British officers and was executed. At Meerut, sepoys killed their officers and marched to Delhi, where they declared the elderly Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar their leader, though military decisions stayed with commanders. The revolt spread across north and central India: Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi. At Kanpur, rebels under Nana Saheb promised British civilians safe passage but then killed over 200 men, women and children, for reasons still debated.

Leaders. Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi fought to save her kingdom from annexation, escaped the siege of Jhansi and, with Tatia Tope, captured Gwalior fort; she was killed in battle on 18 June 1858. Even the British officer who attacked Jhansi called her the bravest of the rebels. Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh led the defence of Lucknow, refused offers of safe passage and took refuge in Nepal. Tatia Tope fought on until 1859, when he was betrayed and hanged.

Repression and result. The British retook Delhi in September 1857 with house-to-house killings, carried out mass executions and burned villages and crops, causing far more deaths than the rebels had. The rebellion failed, partly for lack of a united command and plan. But it planted the idea that foreign rule was unacceptable. In 1858 the British Crown took over from the Company, starting the British Raj, and the army was reorganised to prevent unity in future. Hazrat Mahal warned Indians not to trust Queen Victoria's promises.

The legacy. Colonial rule was not a civilising mission; India's civilisation was far older than Europe's. It brought exploitation and violence for most Indians. Some results were unintended: India was reconnected with the world; the British surveyed the land, documented monuments and began archaeology, though their 'race' lists were unscientific. Colonial powers also carried off thousands of statues, paintings, jewels and manuscripts to Europe, and debates about returning them continue.

Culture flowing back. Charles Wilkins published the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gītā in 1785. Indian texts deeply influenced European and American thinkers; the German philosopher Hegel compared the discovery to finding a new continent. Political control flowed one way, but culture also flowed the other.