Indian independence · CHAPTER 2 ·
British Raj and the early Congress
Chapter 2 of Indian Independence & Partition, 1857–1964: “Congress and the Raj”
After 1858 the Raj governed India through a Viceroy, about a thousand Indian Civil Service officers and allied princes, and by 1900 railways built with Indian taxes ran to about 25,000 miles. Famines struck in 1876–78 and 1896–1900, and the Indian National Congress was founded at Bombay in December 1885.
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The map above is the world of India, December 1885 — Congress meets; Burma falls.
Part of IB History: Indian Independence and Partition →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The way the British ran India after 1858, as a vast estate managed for the Crown, explains both how long the Raj lasted and why its own subjects learned to oppose it. The Raj, as British Crown rule was called from the Hindi word for rule, placed power in a Viceroy, the monarch’s representative in Calcutta, and in the Indian Civil Service (ICS). This was a corps of about a thousand British officials, chosen by examination in London, who governed districts the size of small countries, much as a head office runs distant branches through a few senior managers. The princes, hereditary rulers of more than five hundred states who ran their own affairs under British supervision much like vassal kings, were kept as allies; their lands are the tan patchwork on the map. Railways built with Indian taxes bound the subcontinent together and carried its grain and cotton to the ports. When the monsoon, the summer rains on which most harvests depended, failed in 1876–78 and again in 1896–1900, famines killed many millions under policies that are still argued over.
The same system produced its critics. Indians educated in the new universities found the higher posts closed to them in practice, and in 1883 a campaign by British residents against a bill letting Indian judges try Europeans showed how thin the promise of equality was. In December 1885, 72 lawyers, journalists and teachers met in Bombay and founded the Indian National Congress, a forum that asked the government to share power, much like a modern lobby petitioning a legislature. Its economists, led by Dadabhai Naoroji, argued that British rule drained India’s wealth, because salaries, pensions and interest paid in Britain sent a tribute out of the country every year, much as rent paid to a distant landlord keeps a household from saving. By the 1890s younger men such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak wanted agitation in the streets as well as petitions. On the map Upper Burma turns charcoal, the colour of direct British rule, in 1885, so the empire reached its widest extent in the same weeks that its subjects first organised against it.
The full story
The Raj, as Crown rule over India was called, governed cheaply by relying on three pillars, and each of them shaped the map. The first was the Indian Civil Service, about a thousand British officers who ran every district, collected the land tax and sat as judges, much as a small corps of senior managers might run a vast company’s branches. Victoria had promised that her subjects would be admitted to office impartially, yet the examination was held only in London and its age limit was cut to nineteen in 1876, so only a handful of Indians entered. The second pillar was the princes, rulers of the semi-independent princely states, who were guaranteed their thrones and their right to adopt heirs; Mysore, run by British commissioners since 1831, was even returned to its dynasty in 1881. The third was an army rebuilt with more British troops and recruited in the Punjab and Nepal. Each pillar kept power in reliable hands, and each showed educated Indians where equality stopped.
Railways and famine show the Raj’s economic policy helping and harming in the same decades. The through line from Bombay to Calcutta opened in 1870, and by 1900 India had about 25,000 miles of track, built largely by British companies whose five per cent profit was guaranteed from Indian taxes. The trunk lines on the map created a national market for grain, so that when the monsoon failed in 1876, grain moved to buyers who could pay, and wheat was still exported while between about 5.6 and 9.6 million people died, most of them in the south and west. Lord Lytton’s government paid famine workers the “Temple wage” of one pound of grain and one anna, a small coin, a day, less than its own doctors advised. A Famine Code followed in 1883, a rulebook telling officials when to declare famine and how to run relief, much like a modern disaster plan. It saved many lives, yet the famines of 1896–97 and 1899–1900 still killed millions more, because prices and land tax still decided who could afford to eat.
A new politics grew out of these grievances, led by the class the Raj itself had educated. In 1883 British residents of Calcutta forced the government to weaken the Ilbert Bill, which would have let Indian judges try Europeans in country courts, and educated Indians saw that organised pressure worked. On 28 December 1885, 72 delegates met in Bombay to found the Indian National Congress, which held an annual convention, much like a national lobby, and petitioned for elected Indians on the advisory councils of the Viceroy, the Crown’s representative. Its moderates, such as Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, argued that India’s wealth was being drained to Britain. In 1890 the physician Kadambini Ganguly became the first woman to address it. Tilak, in Poona, used festivals and newspapers to reach a wider public, while Sayyid Ahmad Khan at Aligarh urged Muslims to stay out of a body he expected Hindus to dominate. By 1905 the Raj looked more secure than ever, although every argument that would undo it had already been made.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Drought, markets and the famine policy debate
Historians agree that drought began the late-Victorian famines and disagree about how far policy turned drought into mass death. The monsoon failures of 1876–77 and 1896–97 were linked to strong El Niño years, the same swings of climate that brought famine to China, Brazil and Africa. Mike Davis, in Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), argued that British policy, with its faith in free markets, its heavy land revenue and its grudging relief, made the famines far deadlier than nature alone, and he put India’s dead across the period at 12 to 29 million. Demographic reconstructions give lower totals, which are still enormous: about 8.2 million for 1876–78 (Arup Maharatna), and for 1896–1902 between 6.1 million (the Cambridge Economic History of India) and 8.4 million (Maharatna and Seavoy). Economic historians including Tirthankar Roy stress weak harvests, poor transport and the limits of relief in any poor agrarian state. David Hall-Matthews has shown how officials in western India believed that generous relief would make peasants dependent, and so rationed it through hard labour. The case for the policy view is strongest on the government’s own choices: exports continued, relief rations were cut below what its medical officers advised, and remissions of land revenue were partial. The famines killed most where the state chose to economise.
Railways for whom?
Nationalist critics argued that the railways were built for Britain, and the evidence shows that they served British interests and Indian consumers at the same time. The guarantee system meant that Indian taxpayers made good any shortfall in the companies’ five per cent return, and routes and freight rates were set to move raw cotton and grain to Bombay, Calcutta and Karachi and to carry Lancashire cloth inland, which hastened the ruin of India’s handloom weavers. Yet the economist Dave Donaldson, working from district records in “Railroads of the Raj” (2018), found that the railways sharply cut the cost of trade and raised real incomes in the districts they reached. Robin Burgess and Donaldson also showed that once a district was connected, a failed monsoon raised its death rate far less than before, because grain could now be brought in. The two findings together explain the paradox of 1876–78. In that famine the new lines carried grain to wherever buyers could pay, often away from the starving, while by the early twentieth century, with relief codes in force, the same lines carried food into famine districts. Who a railway serves depends on who controls the market it creates and the state that runs it.
Who founded Congress, and why?
The founding of Congress has its own historiographical argument, and it turns on the role of Allan Octavian Hume, the retired British civil servant who organised the first session. In 1913 Hume’s biographer, William Wedderburn, claimed that Hume had seen secret reports of rural discontent and created Congress as a safety valve, a harmless outlet that would prevent another 1857, with the approval of the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin. Later nationalist historians found this demeaning, and Bipan Chandra turned it around: if Hume was a safety valve for the Raj, the Indian founders used him as a lightning conductor, a respectable British sponsor who shielded their new organisation from official hostility. Research by S. R. Mehrotra and Briton Martin showed that political associations in Calcutta, Bombay, Poona and Madras had been building towards an all-India body for a decade, and the Cambridge historian Anil Seal read early Congress as a network of educated elites competing for patronage. The documents support a joint origin. Hume supplied the timing and the contacts, while the delegates, the agenda and the ambition were Indian, which is why the organisation outgrew its sponsor so quickly.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The Crown’s promise and its limits. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 promised that Indians would be “freely and impartially admitted” to office, and educated Indians took the promise literally, while the Raj did not. The ICS examination was held only in London, and in 1876 the Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, cut its upper age limit to nineteen (from the examination of 1878), which made it nearly impossible for Indian graduates to compete, so only a handful entered the service before the end of the century. A generation of lawyers and teachers learned that the Raj’s liberal language and its practice were different things, and they organised to close the gap.
The Ilbert Bill and the lesson of agitation. The Ilbert Bill taught educated Indians how organised pressure worked, because they watched British residents use it against them. In 1883 the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, backed a bill drafted by his law member, Courtenay Ilbert, to let senior Indian magistrates try Europeans in rural courts. British planters, merchants and officials in Calcutta answered with an openly racial campaign, and in 1884 the government retreated to a compromise that let a European accused demand a jury at least half European. Indians drew two conclusions: that the Raj would bend to organised pressure, and that they had no comparable organisation of their own. Two years later they built one of their own, the Indian National Congress.
Railways, print and English made an all-India public. The Raj unified India physically and intellectually in ways it did not intend. Railways let delegates from Madras, Lahore and Calcutta meet in a single city; the telegraph and cheap newspapers carried debates across provinces; and English, the language of the universities founded at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857, gave Bengalis, Marathas and Tamils a shared political language. Congress met in a different city each December, which only the railway made possible. The infrastructure of empire supplied nationalism with its delegates, its readers and its vocabulary.
Famine and the economic case against the Raj. The famines gave nationalist economists their strongest evidence. Dadabhai Naoroji, whose estimates of income per head from the 1870s were collected in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), argued that a “drain” of tribute to Britain, through pensions, army costs and interest, kept India poor and therefore defenceless against drought. Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Economic History of India (1902–04) blamed heavy land revenue for the famines directly. The argument mattered because it turned British rule from a question of dignity into a question of livelihood, which any peasant could understand.
THE TURNING POINT
Bombay, 28 December 1885. The first session of Congress is the hinge of this chapter because it turned scattered local associations into a body that claimed to speak for India as a whole. Its 72 delegates came from every province, met under an Indian president, W. C. Bonnerjee, and passed resolutions addressed to the government of India and to Parliament. Its demands were modest: more elected Indians on the legislative councils, ICS examinations held in India as well as London, and lower military spending. What changed was the frame, because from 1885 the Raj faced a standing national opposition that met every year, and every later movement in this atlas, from Swadeshi to Quit India, worked through it or against it.
What it changed
Moderates and extremists. Within twenty years Congress divided over method. Moderates such as Gokhale believed that reasoned petitions to British liberals would win reform step by step. Tilak, sentenced to eighteen months for sedition in 1897 over articles in his newspaper Kesari, which had also attacked the plague searches in Poona, argued that only pressure would move the Raj, and he used the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals to carry nationalism into the street. The split became open at Surat in 1907, two chapters on, and its question, whether petition or pressure moved the Raj, ran through every later phase of the movement.
Muslim politics takes its own road. Sayyid Ahmad Khan believed that Muslims, about a fifth of the population and behind Hindus in English education, would be outvoted under any elected system, and in 1887–88 he urged them to keep out of Congress. His college at Aligarh trained the generation that founded the All-India Muslim League in 1906. The argument over whether India’s Muslims were a minority to be protected or a nation in their own right began here, half a century before anyone spoke of Pakistan.
Curzon inherits a confident empire. Lord Curzon inherited an empire that looked unshakeable, and he governed as if it were. When he became Viceroy in 1899 the Raj had absorbed Upper Burma, survived two great famines and kept Congress to annual petitions. He read that record as proof of permanence, staging the Delhi durbar, an imperial pageant, in 1903 and partitioning Bengal in 1905 with little regard for Indian opinion. That confidence is the starting point of the next chapter and its overreach the subject of the one after, because a ruler sure of permanence stops asking what his subjects will accept.
The drain becomes a nationalist creed. The economic critique built by Naoroji and Dutt gave Congress a programme that outlived its petitions. Swadeshi, the campaign begun in 1905 to buy goods made in India and boycott British ones, was the drain theory turned into action, and Gandhi later drew on the same arguments when he made homespun cloth the symbol of independence. The famines of 1876–1900 were the evidence the critique pointed to, which is why Indian economic nationalism began as a theory of hunger.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did British policy cause the famines of 1876–78 and 1896–1900, or only fail to prevent them?
Drought caused the harvest failures and policy decided how many people died, so the strongest answer separates the trigger from the toll. The trigger was climatic, since the El Niño droughts of 1876–77 and 1896–97 were among the worst of the century across the tropics. The toll, however, depended on human choices. The government let grain be exported and moved by private traders to the highest bidder, set relief rations below what its own medical officers advised, and demanded hard labour before giving food, in the belief that generous relief would create dependency. Death rates were far lower where relief came early, and the Famine Codes after 1883 did save lives. Davis’s estimate of 12 to 29 million dead and Maharatna’s lower reconstructions differ on scale, yet both describe a catastrophe of many millions. A fair judgement is that drought was the trigger and British policy made the famine deadlier than it needed to be, because it put the market and the budget first. Amartya Sen later showed that people starve when they lose the means to buy food, even where food exists, and these famines are early evidence for his point.
An interesting fact
The first Congress was meant to meet in Poona, whose Sarvajanik Sabha was to host it, but an outbreak of cholera there forced a last-minute move to Bombay, where the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College lent its hall. Its leading economist later carried the argument into Parliament itself. In 1892 Dadabhai Naoroji won the London seat of Finsbury Central for the Liberals by just five votes, and he used his three years in the House of Commons to press the drain argument on the government that ruled India, a colonial subject lobbying the empire from inside its own legislature.
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