1858–1868: Rebellion aftermath, critiques, and responses File:Rani of jhansi.jpg|
Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, one of the principal leaders of the
Great Uprising of 1857, who had lost her kingdom by the
Doctrine of lapse File:Image victoria proclamation1858c.JPG|The proclamation to the "Princes, Chiefs, and People of India", issued by
Queen Victoria on 1 November 1858 File:SAKhan.jpg|
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan founder of the
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, wrote one of the early critiques,
The Causes of the Indian Mutiny. File:Victoria empress india1.jpg|An 1887 souvenir portrait of Queen Victoria as
Empress of India, 30 years after the Great Uprising Although the
Indian Rebellion of 1857 had shaken the British enterprise in India, it had not derailed it. Until 1857, the British, especially under
Lord Dalhousie, had been hurriedly building an India which they envisaged to be on par with Britain itself in the quality and strength of its economic and social institutions. After the rebellion, they became more circumspect. Much thought was devoted to the causes of the rebellion, and three main lessons were drawn. First, at a practical level, it was felt that there needed to be more communication and camaraderie between the British and Indians—not just between British army officers and their Indian staff but in civilian life as well. 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. From then on, the Indian army was to remain unchanged in its organisation until 1947. The 1861 Census had revealed that the English population in India was 125,945. Of these, only about 41,862 were civilians as compared with about 84,083 European officers and men of the Army. In 1880, the standing Indian Army consisted of 66,000 British soldiers, 130,000 Natives, and 350,000 soldiers in the princely armies. Second, it was also felt that both the princes and the large land-holders, by not joining the rebellion, had proved to be, in Lord Canning's words, "breakwaters in a storm". At the same time, it was felt that the peasants, for whose benefit the large land reforms of the United Provinces had been undertaken, had shown disloyalty by, in many cases, fighting for their former landlords against the British. Consequently, no more land reforms were implemented for the next 90 years: Bengal and Bihar were to remain the realms of large land holdings (unlike the Punjab and
Uttar Pradesh). Third, the British felt disenchanted with Indian reaction to social change. Until the rebellion, they had enthusiastically pushed through social reform, like the ban on
sati by
Lord William Bentinck. It was now felt that traditions and customs in India were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily; consequently, no more British social interventions were made, especially in matters dealing with religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows). This sentiment was exemplified further in Queen Victoria's Proclamation released immediately after the rebellion. The proclamation stated that "We disclaim alike our Right and Desire to impose Our Convictions on any of Our Subjects", demonstrating official British commitment to abstaining from social intervention in India.
1858–1880: Railways, canals, Famine Code File:India railways1909a.jpg|The 1909 map of
Indian Railways, the fourth largest in the world. Railway construction began in 1853. File:Victoriaterminus1903.JPG|Stereographic image of
Victoria Terminus,
Bombay, completed in 1888 File:Agra canal headworks1871a.jpg|The
Agra canal (), a year from completion, was closed to navigation in 1904 to increase irrigation during a famine. File:George Robinson 1st Marquess of Ripon.jpg|
Lord Ripon, the Liberal Viceroy of India, who instituted the Famine Code. 1880. In the second half of the 19th century, both the direct administration of
India by the
British crown and the technological change ushered in by the industrial revolution had the effect of closely intertwining the economies of India and Great Britain. In fact, many of the major changes in transport and communications (that are typically associated with Crown Rule of India) had already begun before the Mutiny. Since Dalhousie had embraced the technological change then rampant in Great Britain, India too saw the rapid development of all those technologies. Railways, roads, canals, and bridges were rapidly built in India, and telegraph links were equally rapidly established so that raw materials, such as cotton, from India's hinterland, could be transported more efficiently to ports, such as
Bombay, for subsequent export to England. Likewise, finished goods from England were transported back for sale in the burgeoning Indian markets. Unlike Britain, where the market risks for the
infrastructure development were borne by private investors, in India, it was the taxpayers—primarily farmers and farm-labourers—who endured the risks, which, in the end, amounted to £50 million. Despite these costs, very little skilled employment was created for Indians. By 1920, with the fourth largest railway network in the world and a history of 60 years of its construction, only ten per cent of the "superior posts" in the Indian Railways were held by Indians. The rush of technology was also changing the agricultural economy in India: by the last decade of the 19th century, a large fraction of some raw materials—not only cotton but also some food-grains—were being exported to faraway markets. Many small farmers, dependent on the whims of those markets, lost land, animals, and equipment to money-lenders. In one form or other, they would be implemented worldwide by the United Nations and the Food and Agricultural Organisation well into the 1970s.
1880s–1890s: middle class, Indian National Congress File:A O Hume.jpg|
Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912), who proposed the idea of the
Indian National Congress in a letter to graduates of
Calcutta University File:1st INC1885.jpg|Congress,
Bombay, 28 December 1885. Third row (middle) (l. to r.)
Dadabhai Naoroji, Hume,
W. C. Bonerjee, and
Pherozeshah Mehta. File:Poverty and Un British Rule in India1.jpg|
Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India, 1901, by Naoroji, Member, British Parliament (1892–1895), and Congress president (1886, 1893, 1906) File:Pherozeshah mehta.jpg|
Mehta, lawyer, businessman, and president of the sixth session of the
Indian National Congress in 1890 By 1880, a new middle class had arisen in India and spread thinly across the country. Moreover, there was a growing solidarity among its members, created by the "joint stimuli of encouragement and irritation". The encouragement felt by this class came from its success in education and its ability to avail itself of the benefits of that education such as employment in the
Indian Civil Service. It came too from Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 in which she had declared, "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." Indians were especially encouraged when Canada was granted
dominion status in 1867 and established an autonomous democratic constitution. It was, however, Viceroy
Lord Ripon's partial reversal of the
Ilbert Bill (1883), a legislative measure that had proposed putting Indian judges in the
Bengal Presidency on equal footing with British ones, that transformed the discontent into political action. On 28 December 1885, professionals and intellectuals from this middle-class—many educated at the new British-founded universities in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, and familiar with the ideas of British political philosophers, especially the
utilitarians assembled in Bombay—founded the
Indian National Congress. The 70 men elected
Womesh Chunder Bonerjee as the first president. The membership consisted of a westernised elite, and no effort was made at this time to broaden the base. During its first 20 years, the Congress primarily debated British policy toward India. Its debates created a new Indian outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, by the restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and by the use of Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India.
Thomas Baring served as Viceroy of India 1872–1876. Baring's major accomplishments came as an energetic reformer who was dedicated to upgrading the quality of government in the British Raj. He began large scale famine relief, reduced taxes, and overcame bureaucratic obstacles in an effort to reduce both starvation and widespread social unrest. Although appointed by a Liberal government, his policies were much the same as viceroys appointed by Conservative governments. Social reform was in the air by the 1880s. For example,
Pandita Ramabai, poet, Sanskrit scholar, and a champion of the emancipation of Indian women, took up the cause of widow remarriage, especially of Brahmin widows, later converted to Christianity. By 1900, reform movements had taken root within the Indian National Congress. Congress member
Gopal Krishna Gokhale founded the
Servants of India Society, which lobbied for legislative reform (e.g., for a law to permit the remarriage of Hindu child widows) and whose members took vows of poverty, and worked among the
untouchable community. By 1905, a deep gulf opened between the moderates, led by Gokhale, who downplayed public agitation, and the new "extremists" who not only advocated agitation but also regarded the pursuit of social reform as a distraction from nationalism. Prominent among the extremists was
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who attempted to mobilise Indians by appealing to an explicitly Hindu political identity, displayed, for example, in the annual public
Ganapati festivals that he inaugurated in western India.
1870s–1906: Muslim social movements, Muslim League File:LordMelgund1885.jpg|
Lord Minto, the viceroy who replaced Curzon in 1906. The
Minto-Morley Reforms of 1909 allowed separate Muslim electorates. Brit IndianEmpireReligions3.jpg|
1909 Prevailing Religions, map of the British Indian Empire, 1909, showing the majority religions based on the Census of 1901 File:1921ajmalkhan.jpg|
Hakim Ajmal Khan, a founder of the Muslim League, was to also become the president of the
Indian National Congress in 1921. The overwhelming, but predominantly Hindu, protest against the partition of Bengal and the fear in its wake of reforms favouring the Hindu majority, led the Muslim elite in India to meet with the new viceroy,
Lord Minto in 1906 and to ask for separate electorates for Muslims. (for his part, Curzon's desire to court the Muslims of East Bengal had arisen from British anxieties ever since the 1871 census—and in light of the history of Muslims fighting them in the
1857 Mutiny and the
Second Anglo-Afghan War—about Indian Muslims rebelling against the Crown). In the three decades since, Muslim leaders across northern India had intermittently experienced public animosity from some of the new Hindu political and social groups. but also—distraught at the 1871 Census's Muslim numbers—organized "reconversion" events for the purpose of welcoming Muslims back to the Hindu fold. Lastly, the Muslim elite, and among it
Dacca Nawab,
Khwaja Salimullah, who hosted the League's first meeting in his mansion in
Shahbag, was aware that a new province with a Muslim majority would directly benefit Muslims aspiring to political power.
1905–1911: Partition of Bengal, Swadeshi, violence File:George Curzon2.jpg|
Lord Curzon,
Viceroy of India, 1899–1905, who partitioned the
Bengal Presidency in 1905 Surendranath Banerjee.jpg|Congress moderate Sir Surendranath Banerjee led the opposition with the
Swadeshi movement. File:1909magazine vijaya.jpg|Tamil magazine,
Vijaya, 1909, showing "Mother India" with her progeny and the slogan "Vande Mataram" The viceroy,
Lord Curzon (1899–1905), was unusually energetic in pursuit of efficiency and reform. His agenda included the creation of the
North-West Frontier Province; small changes in the civil services; speeding up the operations of the secretariat; setting up a gold standard to ensure a stable currency; creation of a Railway Board; irrigation reform; reduction of peasant debts; lowering the cost of telegrams; archaeological research and the preservation of antiquities; improvements in the universities; police reforms; upgrading the roles of the Native States; a new Commerce and Industry Department; promotion of industry; revised land revenue policies; lowering taxes; setting up agricultural banks; creating an Agricultural Department; sponsoring agricultural research; establishing an Imperial Library; creating an Imperial Cadet Corps; new famine codes; and, indeed, reducing the smoke nuisance in Calcutta. Trouble emerged for Curzon when he divided the largest administrative subdivision in British India, the
Bengal Province, into the Muslim-majority province of
Eastern Bengal and Assam and the Hindu-majority province of West Bengal (present-day Indian states of
West Bengal,
Bihar, and
Odisha). Curzon's act, the
Partition of Bengal, had been contemplated by various colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck but was never acted upon. Though some considered it administratively felicitous, it was communally charged. It sowed the seeds of division among Indians in Bengal, transforming nationalist politics as nothing else before it. The Hindu elite of Bengal, among them many who owned land in East Bengal that was leased out to Muslim peasants, protested fervidly. Following the
Partition of Bengal, which was a strategy set out by Lord Curzon to weaken the nationalist movement, Tilak encouraged the
Swadeshi movement and the Boycott movement. The movement consisted of the boycott of foreign goods and also the social boycott of any Indian who used foreign goods. The Swadeshi movement consisted of the usage of natively produced goods. Once foreign goods were boycotted, there was a gap which had to be filled by the production of those goods in India itself. Bal Gangadhar Tilak said that the Swadeshi and Boycott movements are two sides of the same coin. The large Bengali Hindu middle-class (the
Bhadralok), upset at the prospect of Bengalis being outnumbered in the new Bengal province by Biharis and Oriyas, felt that Curzon's act was punishment for their political assertiveness. The pervasive protests against Curzon's decision took the form predominantly of the
Swadeshi ("buy Indian") campaign led by two-time Congress president,
Surendranath Banerjee, and involved boycott of British goods. The rallying cry for both types of protest was the slogan
Bande Mataram ("Hail to the Mother"), which invoked a mother goddess, who stood variously for Bengal, India, and the Hindu goddess
Kali.
Sri Aurobindo never went beyond the law when he edited the
Bande Mataram magazine; it preached independence but within the bounds of peace as far as possible. Its goal was Passive Resistance. The unrest spread from Calcutta to the surrounding regions of Bengal when students returned home to their villages and towns. Some joined
local political youth clubs emerging in Bengal at the time, some engaged in robberies to fund arms, and even attempted to take the lives of Raj officials. However, the conspiracies generally failed in the face of intense police work. The
Swadeshi boycott movement cut imports of British textiles by 25%. The
swadeshi cloth, although more expensive and somewhat less comfortable than its Lancashire competitor, was worn as a mark of national pride by people all over India.
1914–1918: First World War, Lucknow Pact, Home Rule leagues Khudadad khan vc1915.jpg|
Khudadad Khan, the first Indian to be awarded the
Victoria Cross, hailed from
Chakwal District, Punjab (present-day Pakistan). Indiantroops medical ww1.jpg|Indian medical orderlies with the
Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in
Mesopotamia during
World War I Annie a Taormina.jpg|alt=Annie Besant shown with the Theosophists in Adyar, Madras in 1912 four years before she founded an Indian Home Rule League.|
Annie Besant shown with the
Theosophists in Adyar, Madras in 1912 four years before she founded an Indian Home Rule League Jinnah lucknow pact1916.jpg|
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, seated, third from the left, supported the Lucknow Pact in 1916, ending the Muslim League-Congress rift. The
First World War would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. Shortly before the outbreak of war, the Government of India had indicated that they could furnish two divisions plus a cavalry brigade, with a further division in case of emergency. Some 1.4million Indian and British soldiers of the
British Indian Army took part in the war, primarily in Iraq and the
Middle East. Their participation had a wider cultural fallout as news spread of how bravely soldiers fought and died alongside British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia. India's international profile rose during the 1920s, as it became a
founding member of the
League of Nations in 1920 and participated, under the name "Les Indes Anglaises" (British India), in the
1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. Back in India, especially among the leaders of the
Indian National Congress, the war led to calls for greater self-government for Indians. It was under the Defence of India act that the Ali brothers were imprisoned in 1916, and
Annie Besant, a European woman, and ordinarily more problematic to imprison, was arrested in 1917. In the
Lucknow Pact, the League joined the Congress in the proposal for greater self-government that was campaigned for by Tilak and his supporters; in return, the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in the provincial legislatures as well as the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1916, the Muslim League had anywhere between 500 and 800members and did not yet have the wider following among Indian Muslims that it enjoyed in later years; in the League itself, the pact did not have unanimous backing, having largely been negotiated by a group of "Young Party" Muslims from the
United Provinces (UP), most prominently, two brothers
Mohammad and
Shaukat Ali, who had embraced the Pan-Islamic cause; Besant, for her part, was also keen to demonstrate the superiority of this new form of organised agitation, which had achieved some success in the
Irish home rule movement, over the political violence that had intermittently plagued the subcontinent during the years 1907–1914. Earlier, during his South Africa sojourn, Gandhi, a lawyer by profession, had represented an Indian community, which, although small, was sufficiently diverse to be a microcosm of India itself. In tackling the challenge of holding this community together and simultaneously confronting the colonial authority, he had created a technique of non-violent resistance, which he labelled
Satyagraha (or Striving for Truth). For Gandhi,
Satyagraha was different from "
passive resistance", by then a familiar technique of social protest, which he regarded as a practical strategy adopted by the weak in the face of superior force;
Satyagraha, on the other hand, was for him the "last resort of those strong enough in their commitment to truth to undergo suffering in its cause". Upon his arrival in the district, Gandhi was joined by other agitators, including a young Congress leader,
Rajendra Prasad, from Bihar, who would become a loyal supporter of Gandhi and go on to play a prominent role in the Indian independence movement. When Gandhi was ordered to leave by the local British authorities, he refused on moral grounds, setting up his refusal as a form of individual
Satyagraha. Soon, under pressure from the Viceroy in Delhi who was anxious to maintain domestic peace during wartime, the provincial government rescinded Gandhi's expulsion order, and later agreed to an official enquiry into the case. Although the British planters eventually gave in, they were not won over to the farmers' cause, and thereby did not produce the optimal outcome of a Satyagraha that Gandhi had hoped for; similarly, the farmers themselves, although pleased at the resolution, responded less than enthusiastically to the concurrent projects of rural empowerment and education that Gandhi had inaugurated in keeping with his ideal of
swaraj. The following year Gandhi launched two more Satyagrahas—both in his native
Gujarat—one in the rural
Kaira district where land-owning farmers were protesting increased land-revenue and the other in the city of
Ahmedabad, where workers in an Indian-owned textile mill were distressed about their low wages. The satyagraha in Ahmedabad took the form of Gandhi fasting and supporting the workers in a strike, which eventually led to a settlement. In Kaira, in contrast, although the farmers' cause received publicity from Gandhi's presence, the satyagraha itself, which consisted of the farmers' collective decision to withhold payment, was not immediately successful, as the British authorities refused to back down. The agitation in Kaira gained for Gandhi another lifelong lieutenant in
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organised the farmers, and who too would go on to play a leadership role in the Indian independence movement.
1916–1919: Montagu–Chelmsford reforms In 1916, in the face of new strength demonstrated by the nationalists with the signing of the
Lucknow Pact and the founding of the
Home Rule leagues, and the realisation, after the disaster in the
Mesopotamian campaign, that the war would likely last longer, the new viceroy,
Lord Chelmsford, cautioned that the Government of India needed to be more responsive to Indian opinion. After more discussion by the government and parliament in Britain, and another tour by the Franchise and Functions Committee for the purpose of identifying who among the Indian population could vote in future elections, the
Government of India Act 1919 (also known as the
Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms) was passed in December 1919.
1917–1919: Rowlatt Act , the British judge under whose chairmanship the
Rowlatt Committee recommended
stricter anti-sedition laws In 1917, as Montagu and Chelmsford were compiling their report, a committee chaired by a British judge,
Sidney Rowlatt, and was tasked with investigating "revolutionary conspiracies", with the unstated goal of extending the government's wartime powers. The
Rowlatt Committee comprised four British and two Indian members, including
Sir Basil Scott and
Diwan Bahadur Sir C. V. Kumaraswami Sastri, the present and future Chief Justices of the
High Court of Bombay and the
High Court of Madras. It presented its report in July 1918 and identified three regions of conspiratorial insurgency:
Bengal, the
Bombay presidency, and the
Punjab. The increased taxes coupled with disruptions in both domestic and international trade had the effect of approximately doubling the index of overall prices in India between 1914 and 1920. and post-war inflation led to food riots in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal provinces, To combat what it saw as a coming crisis, the government now drafted the Rowlatt committee's recommendations into two
Rowlatt Bills. Although the bills were authorised for legislative consideration by Edwin Montagu, they were done so unwillingly, with the accompanying declaration, "I loathe the suggestion at first sight of preserving the Defence of India Act in peacetime to such an extent as Rowlatt and his friends think necessary." The
Indian National Congress estimated three times the number of dead. Dyer was removed from duty but he became a celebrated hero in Britain among people with connections to the Raj. Historians consider the episode was a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India. In 1920, after the British government refused to back down, Gandhi began his campaign of
non-cooperation, prompting many Indians to return British awards and honours, to resign from the civil services, and to again boycott British goods. In addition, Gandhi reorganised the Congress, transforming it into a mass movement and opening its membership to even the poorest Indians. Although Gandhi halted the non-cooperation movement in 1922 after the violent
incident at Chauri Chaura, the movement revived again, in the mid-1920s. The visit, in 1928, of the British
Simon Commission, charged with instituting constitutional reform in India, resulted in widespread protests throughout the country. Earlier, in 1925, non-violent protests of the Congress had resumed too, this time in Gujarat, and led by Patel, who organised farmers to refuse payment of increased land taxes; the success of this protest, the
Bardoli Satyagraha, brought Gandhi back into the fold of active politics. The finances of the Raj depended on land taxes, and these became problematic in the 1930s. Epstein argues that after 1919 it became harder and harder to collect the land revenue. The Raj's suppression of civil disobedience after 1934 temporarily increased the power of the revenue agents but after 1937 they were forced by the new Congress-controlled provincial governments to hand back confiscated land. Again the outbreak of war strengthened them, in the face of the
Quit India movement the revenue collectors had to rely on military force and by 1946–47 direct British control was rapidly disappearing in much of the countryside. In 1935, after the Round Table Conferences, Parliament passed the
Government of India Act 1935, which authorised the establishment of independent legislative assemblies in all provinces of British India, the creation of a central government incorporating both the British provinces and the princely states, and the protection of Muslim minorities. The future
Constitution of independent India was based on this act. However, it divided the electorate into 19 religious and social categories, e.g., Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Depressed Classes, Landholders, Commerce and Industry, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, etc., each of which was given separate representation in the Provincial Legislative Assemblies. A voter could cast a vote only for candidates in his own category. The 1935 Act provided for more autonomy for Indian provinces, with the goal of cooling off nationalist sentiment. The act provided for a national parliament and an executive branch under the purview of the British government, but the rulers of the princely states managed to block its implementation. These states remained under the full control of their hereditary rulers, with no popular government. To prepare for elections Congress built up its grass roots membership from 473,000 in 1935 to 4.5million in 1939. In the
1937 elections Congress won victories in seven of the eleven provinces of British India. Congress governments, with wide powers, were formed in these provinces. The widespread voter support for the Indian National Congress surprised Raj officials, who previously had seen the Congress as a small elitist body. The British separated Burma Province from British India in 1937 and granted the colony a new constitution calling for a fully elected assembly, with many powers given to the Burmese, but this proved to be a divisive issue as a ploy to exclude Burmese from any further Indian reforms. Second round tableconf.gif| The Second Round Table Conference showing Gandhi and British prime minister,
Ramsay MacDonald,
Samuel Hoare and
B. R. Ambedkar. NewDelhiInaugurationSecondDayCancellation27Feb1931.jpg|A second-day cancellation of the series "Inauguration of New Delhi", 27 February 1931, commemorating the new city designed by Sir
Edwin Lutyens and Sir
Herbert Baker Separation of Burma from British India 1937.jpg|A first-day cover issued on 1 April 1937 commemorating the separation of Burma from the British Indian Empire
1939–1945: World War II With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the viceroy,
Lord Linlithgow, declared war on India's behalf without consulting Indian leaders, leading the Congress provincial ministries to resign in protest. The Muslim League, in contrast, supported Britain in the war effort and maintained its control of the government in three major provinces, Bengal, Sind and the Punjab. Jinnah repeatedly warned that Muslims would be unfairly treated in an independent India dominated by the Congress. On 24 March 1940 in Lahore, the League passed the "
Lahore Resolution", demanding that, "the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign." Although there were other important national Muslim politicians such as Congress leader
Ab'ul Kalam Azad, and influential regional Muslim politicians such as
A. K. Fazlul Huq of the leftist
Krishak Praja Party in Bengal,
Fazl-i-Hussain of the landlord-dominated
Punjab Unionist Party, and
Abd al-Ghaffar Khan of the pro-Congress
Khudai Khidmatgar (popularly, "red shirts") in the
North West Frontier Province, the British, over the next six years, were to increasingly see the League as the main representative of Muslim India. The Congress was secular and strongly opposed to having any religious state. It insisted there was a natural unity to India, and repeatedly blamed the British for "divide and rule" tactics based on prompting Muslims to think of themselves as alien from Hindus. Jinnah rejected the notion of a united India, and emphasised that religious communities were more basic than an artificial nationalism. He proclaimed the
Two-Nation Theory, stating at Lahore on 23 March 1940: While the regular Indian army in 1939 included about 220,000native troops, it expanded tenfold during the war, and small naval and air force units were created. Over twomillion Indians volunteered for military service in the British Army. They played a major role in numerous campaigns, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Casualties were moderate (in terms of the world war), with 24,000killed; 64,000 wounded; 12,000missing (probably dead), and 60,000captured at Singapore in 1942. London paid most of the cost of the Indian Army, which had the effect of erasing India's national debt; it ended the war with a surplus of £1,300million. In addition, heavy British spending on munitions produced in India (such as uniforms, rifles, machine-guns, field artillery, and ammunition) led to a rapid expansion of industrial output, such as textiles (up 16%), steel (up 18%), and chemicals (up 30%). Small warships were built, and an aircraft factory opened in
Bangalore. The railway system, with 700,000 employees, was taxed to the limit as demand for transportation soared. The British government sent the
Cripps mission in 1942 to secure Indian nationalists' co-operation in the war effort in exchange for a promise of independence as soon as the war ended. Top officials in Britain, most notably Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, did not support the Cripps Mission and negotiations with the Congress soon broke down. Congress launched the
Quit India Movement in July 1942 demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British from India or face nationwide civil disobedience. On 8 August the Raj arrested all national, provincial and local Congress leaders, holding tens of thousands of them until 1945. The country erupted in violent demonstrations led by students and later by peasant political groups, especially in Eastern
United Provinces, Bihar, and western Bengal. The large wartime British Army presence crushed the movement in a little more than six weeks; nonetheless, a portion of the movement formed for a time an underground provisional government on the border with Nepal. Earlier,
Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been a leader of the younger, radical, wing of the
Indian National Congress in the late 1920s and 1930s, had risen to become Congress President from 1938 to 1939. However, he was ousted from the Congress in 1939 following differences with the high command, and subsequently placed under house arrest by the British before escaping from India in early 1941. He turned to
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for help in gaining India's independence by force. With Japanese support, he organised the
Indian National Army, composed largely of Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army who had been captured by the Japanese in the
Battle of Singapore. As the war turned against them, the Japanese came to support a number of
puppet and provisional governments in the captured regions, including those in Burma, the Philippines and Vietnam, and in addition, the Provisional Government of
Azad Hind, presided by Bose. Bose's effort, however, was short-lived. In mid-1944 the British Army first halted and then reversed the Japanese
U-Go offensive, beginning the successful part of the
Burma Campaign. Bose's Indian National Army largely disintegrated during the subsequent fighting in Burma, with its remaining elements surrendering with the recapture of Singapore in September 1945. Bose died in August from third degree burns received after attempting to escape in an overloaded Japanese plane which crashed in Taiwan, which many Indians believe did not happen. Although Bose was unsuccessful, he roused patriotic feelings in India. Ncert gandhi tomeet linlithgow1939.jpg|
Mahatma Gandhi (centre-right) and
Rajendra Prasad (centre-left) on their way to meet the viceroy,
Lord Linlithgow, on 13 October 1939, after the outbreak of
World War II Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman.jpg|
Chaudhari Khaliquzzaman (left) seconding the 1940 Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League with
Jinnah (right) presiding, and
Liaquat Ali Khan (centre) Newly-arrived Indian troops.jpg|Newly arrived Indian troops on the quayside in Singapore, November 1941 Operation Crusader.jpg|Indian Army troops in action during
Operation Crusader in the
Western Desert Campaign in North Africa in November/December 1941
1946–1947: Independence, partition In January 1946, a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain. The mutinies came to a head with
mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, followed by others in
Calcutta,
Madras, and
Karachi. Although the mutinies were rapidly suppressed, they had the effect of spurring the new Labour government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the secretary of state for India,
Lord Pethick Lawrence, and including
Sir Stafford Cripps, who had visited four years before. The subsequent convictions of the officers, the public outcry against the convictions, and the eventual remission of the sentences, created positive propaganda for the Congress, which only helped in the party's subsequent electoral victories in eight of the eleven provinces. The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of the partition. Jinnah proclaimed 16 August 1946,
Direct Action Day, with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a Muslim homeland in
British India. The following day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and quickly spread throughout British India. Although the Government of India and the Congress were both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India's prime minister. Later that year, the
British Exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, and the
Labour government conscious that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support, nor the reliability of
native forces for continuing to control an increasingly restless British India, decided to end British rule of India, and in early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948. As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated. With the British army unprepared for the potential for increased violence, the new viceroy,
Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power, allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan for independence. On 15 August 1947, the new
Dominion of Pakistan (later
Islamic Republic of Pakistan), with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the governor-general; and the
Dominion of India, (later
Republic of India) with
Jawaharlal Nehru as the
prime minister, and the viceroy,
Louis Mountbatten, staying on as its first governor-general came into being; with official ceremonies taking place in
Karachi on 14 August and
New Delhi on 15 August. This was done so that Mountbatten could attend both ceremonies. The great majority of Indians remained in place with independence, but in border areas millions of people (Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu) relocated across the
newly drawn borders. In Punjab, where the new border lines divided the Sikh regions in half, there was much bloodshed; in Bengal and Bihar, where Gandhi's presence assuaged communal tempers, the violence was more limited. In all, somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people on both sides of the new borders, among both the refugee and resident populations of the three faiths, died in the violence. Muslim percent 1909.jpg|Percentage of
Muslims by district, in 1901 Hindu percent 1909.jpg|Percentage of
Hindus by district, 1901 Sikhs buddhists jains percent1909.jpg|District-wide percentages of
Buddhists,
Sikhs, and Jains in 1901 Cabinet mission to india1946.jpg|Members of the
1946 Cabinet Mission to India meeting
Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Far left is
Lord Pethick Lawrence; far right is
Sir Stafford Cripps.
Timeline of major events, legislation, and public works File:VictoriaQueen1862Empress1886.jpg| Two silver one rupee coins used in India during the British Raj, showing Victoria, Queen, 1862 (left) and Victoria, Empress, 1886 (right) File:EdwardVIIKingEmperorIndia1903and1908.jpg| Silver one rupee coins showing
Edward VII, King-Emperor, 1903 (left) and 1908 (right) File:GeorgeVKingEmperor1913and1919.jpg| Silver one rupee coins used in India during the British Raj, showing
George V, King-Emperor, 1913 (left) and 1919 (right) File:GeorgeVIKingEmperorIndia1940and1947.jpg| One rupee coins showing
George VI, King-Emperor, 1940 (left) and just before India's independence in 1947 (right) == British India and the princely states ==