Historical India
History
India is home of one of the world's greatest civilizations - its social structure as it exists today can be traced back thousands of years and empires of great size and complexity existed here far earlier than anything comparable in Europe. Yet India as an entity is a comparatively recent invention put together by the British. India's role as the birthplace of two of the world's great religions is enough to ensure its historical importance.
Indus Valley Civilization
India's first major civilization flourished for a thousand years from around 2500 BC along the Indus River Valley. Its great cities were Mohenjodaro and Harappa, where a civilization of great complexity developed. The Indus Valley cities were ruled by a religious group rather than by kings but the most interesting thing about them is the highly developed engineering. Four thousand years ago they already had a sophisticated drainage system and even organized garbage collection! Despite the extensive excavations conducted at the sites, relatively little is known about the development and eventual demise of this civilization. Their script has still not been deciphered, not is it known why such an advanced civilization collapsed so quickly with the invasions of the Aryans.
Early invasions
The Aryans came from the north from around 1500 BC and gradually spread across India from the Punjab and down the Ganges towards Bengal. Under Darius (521-486 BC) the Punjab and Sind became part of the Persian Empire but this was till peripheral to India itself.
Alexander The Great reached India's borders in 326 BC but his troops refused to march further than the Beas river and he turned back without extending his power to India itself.
The rise of religions
The Hindu religion is one of the oldest in the world. The great Hindu books are all thought to refer to actual historical events. The Vedas written around 1500 to 1200 BC tell of the victory of Brahma over Indira, the God of thunder and battle. This probably refers to the revival of brahminism following the Aryan invasions.
Buddhism: first formulated around 500 BC, Buddhism enjoyed spectacular growth after Emperor Ashoka embraced it but lost its touch with the general population and faded as Hinduism was revived between 200 and 800 AD.
The Mauryas and Ashoka
Two centuries before Alexander made his long march east, an Indian kingdom had started to develop in Northern India. Chandragupta Maurya's empire came to power in 321 BC. From its capital at the site of the present day city of Patna, the Mauryan Empire gradually spread all over northern India. Under Emperor Ashoka it reached its peak. Under Ashoka, the Mauryan empire controlled more of India than probably any subsequent ruler prior to the British. Following his death in 232 BC the empire rapidly disintegrated and finally collapsed in 184 BC.
The Gupta Empire
In 319 AD Chandragupta II founded the Gupta empire and the Gupta period extended till 606 AD. The arts flourished during this period with some of the finest work being some at Ajanta, Ellora, Sanchi and Sarnath.
The First Muslim Invasions
Muslim power first made itself strongly felt in India with the raids of Mohammed Of Ghazni. Today Ghazni is just a small grubby town between Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, but from 1001 AD Mohammed conducted raids from Ghazni on a virtually annual basis. His army would descend upon India destroying infidel temples and carrying away everything of value that could be moved. In 1033, after his death, one of his successors actually took Varanasi. After the Seljuk Turks took Ghazni, the raids on India ceased.
In 1192 Muslim power arrived on a permanent basis. Mohammed Of Ghori took Ajmer. In the following year his general Qutb-Ud-Din took Varanasi and Delhi. Within 20 years the whole of the Ganges basin was under Muslim control.
In 1297 Alauddin Khilji pushed into Gujarat and in 1388, Mohammed Tughlak decided to shift his capital city south to Daulatabad (near Aurangabad in Maharashtra state). His empire was weakened when Timur made a devastating attack from Samarkand in 1398. From then on the power of this Muslim kingdom steadily contracted , until it was supplanted by another Muslim kingdom, the Mighty Moghuls.
The Moghuls
These larger-than-life individuals ushered in another golden age and spread their control over India to an extent rivaled only by Ashoka and the British. Their rise to power was rapid but their decline was equally quick - there were only six great moghuls: Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb.
Akbar was probably the greatest of the moghuls for not only had he a great military ability but was also a man of culture and wisdom with a sense of fairness. He came to the throne aged only 14 but was able to claim complete and effective control of the empire. Akbar had a deep interest in religion and spent hours in discussion with religious experts of all persuasions including Christians. He eventually formulated a religion which combined the best points of all those he had studied.
Jehangir followed Akbar but devoted most of his time expressing his love for Kashmir. He died while en-route there.
Shah Jehan built some of the most vivid monuments during his reign. Best known is the Taj Mahal. However, some say this led to his downfall. His son Aurangzeb deposed his father to put a halt to these architectural extravagances.
Aurangzeb was the last of the great moghuls. His belief in Islam was deep and austere with the result that he soon lost the trust of his subjects and had to cope with revolts on all sides. In many parts of India stand mosques built on the foundations of temples that were destroyed due to his fanatical beliefs. With his death in 1707 the moghul empire disintegrated.
The smaller states which followed on from the moghul empire continued on for some time. In the south, the viceroyalty in Hyderabad became one of the British-tolerated princely states and survived right through till the independence of India. The Nawabs Of Oudh in north India ruled eccentrically till 1854 when the British `retired' the last Nawab. In Bengal the moghuls unwisely clashed with the British and their rule was terminated in the Battle Of Plassey in 1757.
The Rajputs and the Marathas
Throughout the Muslim period in North India there were still strong Hindu powers , most notably the Rajputs. The Rajputs were a warrior caste , a race of chivalrous princes and they opposed every foreign foot that tried to walk in India. During the moghul era, some of the best military men in the emperor's army were Rajputs.
The Marathas first rose to prominence with Shivaji who took over his father's kingdom and between 1646 and 1680 performed feats of arms and heroism all over central India. As a lower caste shudra he showed that great leaders do not have to be brahmins and demonstrated great abilities in confronting the moghuls. At one time he was even captured by the moghuls but managed to escape.
Shivaji's son was captured, blinded and executed by Aurangzeb. Shivaji's grandson was not made of the same sturdy stuff so the maratha empire continued under the Peshwas, ministers of Shivaji who then became the real rulers.
Maratha power came to an abrupt halt in 1761 when Ahmed Shah Durani from Afghanistan defeated them in battle.
The Portuguese
The British were not the first Europeans to enter India nor the last to leave. Both these honors go to the Portuguese. In 1498, Vasco da Gama arrived on the coast of modern day Kerala. They had pioneered sailing the route around the Cape of Good Hope and they held a century of uninterrupted monopoly over Indian trade with Europe because of this factor. In 1510 they captured Goa which they controlled till 1961, 14 years after the British had left India.
The French
In 1672 the French established themselves at Pondicherry, an enclave they would hold even after the British had left India.
The British
In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I had granted a charter to a London trading company giving them a monopoly on British trade with India. In 1612 the British established a trading post at Surat. For 250 years, British power was exercised in India not by the Government but by the East India Company. British trading posts were established in Madras in 1640, at Bombay in 1668, in Calcutta in 1690.
In 1746, the French took Madras from the British only to hand it back in 1749. Anglo-French enmity continued and Tipu Sultan sided the French. French influence in the region declined only after the 4th Mysore War in 1788-89 when Tipu Sultan was killed.
The long-running British struggle with the Marathas was concluded in 1803, which left only the Punjab outside British rule. That too came under control of the British in 1849 after the two Sikh wars. Britain also took on the Nepalese, whom they defeated but did not annexe, and the Burmese whom they did.
Rise and fall of British India
By the early 19th century, India was effectively under British rule. India remained a patchwork of states, many of them nominally independent but actually under strong British influences.
In 1857, less than a half century after Britain had taken firm control of India, they had their first serious setback. To this day, the causes of the `Indian Mutiny' are hard to unravel. The dismissal of local rulers, inefficient and unpopular as they might have been, proved to be a flashpoint in certain areas, but the main single cause, believe it or not, was bullets. A rumor, quite possibly true, leaked out that a new type of bullet issued to the troops, many of whom were Muslim, was greased in pig fat. A similar rumor was developed that the bullets were actually greased with cow fat. Pigs are unclean to the Muslims and cows holy to the Hindus. The British were slow to deny these rumors and even slower to prove that they were either incorrect or that changes had been made. The result was a loosely coordinated mutiny of the Indian battalions of the Bengal Army. Of the 74 battalions, seven remained loyal, twenty were disarmed and the other forty-seven mutinied. The mutiny first broke out at Meerut (near Delhi) and soon spread across North India. There were massacres and acts of senseless cruelty on both sides but in the end the mutiny died out.
By the end of the century opposition to British rule began to take on a new light. The `Congress' which had been established to give India a degree of self-rule now began to push for the real thing. Eventually, the British mapped out a path towards independence similar to that pursued in Canada and Australia. However, World War I shelved these plans.
Mahatma Gandhi
In 1915, Mohandas Gandhi returned from South Africa. After the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, when a British army contingent opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protestors, Gandhi became involved in the quest for independence. He adopted a policy of passive resistance (or satyagraha) to British rule. His central achievement was to change the level of independence struggle from the middle class to the village. He led movements against the iniquitous salt tax and boycotts of British textiles and was jailed several times.
Independence
With the close of World War II, it was clear that the European colonial era was over. Elections within India revealed the obvious - the country was split on purely religious grounds with the Muslim League, led by Muhammed Ali Jinnah, speaking for the Muslims and the Congress party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, commanding the Hindu population. Gandhi remained the father figure for the Congress but without an official role.
`I will have India divided or India destroyed' were Jinnah's words.
In early 1946, a British mission failed to bring the two sides together and the country slid increasingly towards civil war. A `Direct Action' day, called by the Muslim League in August 1947, led to a slaughter of Hindus in Calcutta. This was followed by reprisals against the Muslims.
The Punjab region of Northern India was in a state of chaos and the Bengal region close to it. The new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, made a last-ditch attempt to convince the rival factions that a united India was a more sensible proposition but they - Jinnah in particular- remained intransigent and the reluctant decision was made to divide the country. Only Gandhi stood firm against the division, preferring the possibility of a civil war to the chaos he so rightly expected.
A neat slicing of the country in two proved to be an impossible task. Although some areas were clearly Hindu and some clearly Muslim others had evenly mixed populations and some others remained isolated `islands' of Muslims surrounded by Hindu regions. The complete impossibility of dividing all the Muslims from all the Hindus was illustrated by the fact that after partition India was still the third largest Muslim country in the world - only Indonesia and Pakistan had greater population of Muslims.
Worse, the two overwhelmingly Muslim regions were on the exact opposite sides of the country. Pakistan would inevitably have an eastern and western half divided by a hostile India. The instability of this arrangement was self evident, but it took 25 years before the predestined split came and East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
Mountbatten decided to follow a break neck pace towards independence and announced that it would come on 14th August 1947.
At midnight, of 14th August 1947, India gained independence.
For months the greatest exodus in human history took place east and west across the Punjab. Trainloads of Muslims fleeing west would be held up and slaughtered by Hindu and Sikh mobs and Sikhs fleeing to the east would suffer the same fate. By the time the Punjab chaos had run its course, over 10 million people had changed sides and around a quarter of a million people had lost their lives.
The Kashmir problem
Kashmir, with a predominantly Muslim population had a Hindu Maharaja. In October, the Maharaja had still not opted for India or Pakistan and a ragtag Pathan army crossed the border from Pakistan, intent on annexing Srinagar and annexing Kashmir without really provoking an India-Pakistan war. Unfortunately, the Pathans had been inspired to this invasion with the promise of plunder and they did so much plundering on the way that India had the time to rush troops to Srinagar and prevent the invasion. The indecisive Maharaja finally opted for India, a brief India-Pakistan war broke out, the U.N. finally stepped in and Kashmir has remained a central cause of disagreement between the two countries ever since.
The final stage of independence had one last tragedy to be played out.
On 30th January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.
Copyright © 2003. ISA, UNB.