IB History: Indian Independence and Partition — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The Rebellion and the Crown

Dalhousie’s annexations and the Doctrine of Lapse. Dalhousie’s annexations gave every Indian ruler a reason to fear the Company. Between 1848 and 1856 he added more territory to British India than any governor before him, by conquest in the Punjab (1849) and Lower Burma (1852) and by the Doctrine of Lapse, under which a dependent state passed to the Company if its ruler died without a natural son. Satara, Jhansi and Nagpur fell this way, and their adopted heirs were refused. Several who lost a throne or a pension to the Company, from the Rani of Jhansi to Nana Sahib, went on to lead the rising, so the annexations supplied the rebellion’s leaders as well as its grievances.

Awadh: an annexation that reached the barracks. The annexation of Awadh turned a princes’ grievance into a soldiers’ grievance, because so many of the Bengal Army’s sepoys came from the province. It was annexed in February 1856 on the grounds of misgovernment, and its king, Wajid Ali Shah, was sent into exile in Calcutta. The summary revenue settlement that followed stripped the talukdars, Awadh’s great landholders, of thousands of villages. Soldiers, landholders and peasants there therefore shared a grievance, and that shared grievance is why the rebellion in Awadh became a popular war.

An army that no longer trusted its masters. The Company’s Bengal Army was held together by pay, status and respect for caste, and in the 1850s each of those bonds weakened. Allowances for service in newly annexed provinces were cut, and the General Service Enlistment Act of July 1856 required new recruits to serve overseas, which many high-caste Hindus believed would break caste. Missionary preaching and reforms such as the law of 1856 allowing Hindu widows to remarry fed a fear that the Company meant to convert India by force. The sepoys’ loyalty, already strained, became conditional on how the next order was read.

The cartridge: a rumour as trigger. A rumour became the trigger because it confirmed what sepoys already feared about the Company. The Enfield rifle issued in 1857 used paper cartridges that had to be bitten open, and word spread from Dum Dum and Barrackpore that their grease contained cow and pig fat, polluting to Hindus and Muslims alike. The army ordered the cartridges issued ungreased and changed the drill, yet it could not stop the story. At Barrackpore on 29 March Mangal Pandey attacked his officers, and at Meerut on 9 May, 85 troopers who had refused the cartridges were shackled on parade; the next evening their comrades rose, which shows how fast a rumour could turn private fears into a common act.

Chapter 2: Congress and the Raj

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.

Chapter 3: The Raj at High Noon

Conquest completed, confidence at its peak. By 1905 the conquest phase was a half-century past — the Mutiny of 1857 crushed, the Crown ruling directly since 1858, the frontier fixed against Russia in the Great Game. Curzon could tell himself the Raj was “the miracle of the world” because no serious challenge had yet been mounted. The confidence mattered: it made the government careless of Indian opinion at the exact moment Indian opinion was organizing.

The quilt, not the monolith. Britain deliberately preserved the princely states after 1857 — loyal buffers, cheap to run, a firewall of tradition against nationalism. The result was the patchwork this map paints in tan: two-fifths of the land and a quarter of the people outside British India proper, with no elections, no Congress branches, and rulers whose treaties ran to the Crown personally. In 1947 that legal firewall would become the era’s last crisis: 565 separate sovereignties to be gathered in ten weeks.

An educated class with nowhere to rise. The universities Britain founded in 1857 produced graduates faster than the Raj would employ them: by 1905 the ICS remained almost entirely white at the top, and the “statutory Indian” faced examinations held only in London. Congress was born of this blocked elite — English-speaking lawyers and editors who took the Raj’s own liberal rhetoric seriously and asked for its application. Refusing that modest ask radicalized a generation.

Land revenue and the drain. The Raj paid for itself from the Indian land tax and paid Britain a “Home Charge” besides — pensions, army costs, guaranteed railway dividends flowing to London. Nationalist economists (Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule, 1901) named this the Drain, and tied it to the famines of the 1890s that had killed millions. The economic critique preceded the political one, and outlasted it.

A democracy that held. India’s democracy proved durable in exactly the years when it was most fragile. The second and third general elections were held on time in 1957 and 1962, and after Nehru’s death power passed peacefully to Lal Bahadur Shastri. In 1957 Kerala elected a Communist government, one of the first anywhere to take office through a free election, and the centre accepted it until it dismissed that government in 1959, an early warning of the power the constitution gave Delhi. Across the decolonising world many new states moved toward one-party or military rule, so India’s survival as a democracy became its most cited achievement.

The unfinished revolution of caste and gender. The constitution abolished untouchability, and the Hindu Code laws of 1955–56 gave Hindu women rights to divorce and to inherit, yet law ran well ahead of society. Ambedkar resigned from Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 when the Hindu Code Bill stalled, and in October 1956 he left Hinduism altogether, converting to Buddhism at Nagpur with several hundred thousand followers. His warning, that political democracy would not survive without social democracy beneath it, remained the republic’s sharpest criticism of itself.

A planned economy and its limits. The Five-Year Plans built an industrial base faster than they fed the country. They raised steel mills, dams and research institutes, and industry grew quickly from a low base, yet national income grew only about 3.5 to 4 per cent a year and farming lagged behind. By the early 1960s India depended on American wheat shipped under PL-480, a United States law that sold surplus grain to poorer countries, and the droughts of 1965–66 would make food the next government’s emergency. The planners had laid the foundations of an industrial state while the villages, where most Indians lived, changed far more slowly.

Borders still in dispute. The republic settled its internal map and left its frontiers in dispute. The war of 1962 left China holding Aksai Chin, about 38,000 square kilometres claimed by India, and the boundary has never been agreed. Kashmir remained divided along the ceasefire line of 1949, and little more than a year after Nehru’s death India and Pakistan went to war again. The map Nehru left in 1964 had a settled interior and contested edges, the reverse of the map of 1857, whose edges were secure and whose interior was in revolt.