- Government and society
- Cultural life
- India from the Paleolithic Period to the decline of the Indus civilization
- The development of Indian civilization from c. 1500 bce to c. 1200 ce
- The early Muslim period
- The Mughal Empire, 1526–1761
- Regional states, c. 1700–1850
- India and European expansion, c. 1500–1858
- British imperial power, 1858–1947
- The Republic of India
- Pre-Mughal Indian dynasties
- Prime ministers of India
British India’s conquest of Burma (Myanmar) was completed during this period. The Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852) had left the kingdom of Ava (Upper Burma) independent of British India, and under the rule of King Mindon (1853–78), who built his capital at Mandalay, steamers bringing British residents and private traders up the Irrawaddy River from Rangoon (Yangon) were welcomed. Mindon, noted for convening the Fifth Buddhist Council at Mandalay in 1871 (the first such council in some 1,900 years), was succeeded by a younger son, Thibaw, who in February 1879 celebrated his ascendancy to the throne by having 80 siblings massacred. Thibaw refused to renew his father’s treaty agreements with Britain, turning instead to seek commercial relations with the French, who were then advancing toward his kingdom from their base in Southeast Asia. Thibaw sent envoys to Paris, and in January 1885 the French signed a treaty of trade with the kingdom of Ava and dispatched a French consul to Mandalay. This envoy hoped to establish a French bank in Upper Burma to finance the construction of a railway and the general commercial development of the kingdom, but his plans were thwarted. The viceroy, Lord Dufferin (governed 1884–88)—impatient with Thibaw for delaying a treaty agreement with British India, goaded to action by British traders in Rangoon, and provoked by fears of French intervention in Britain’s “sphere”—sent an expedition of some 10,000 troops up the Irrawaddy in November 1885. The Third Anglo-Burmese War ended in less than a month with the loss of hardly 20 lives, and on Jan. 1, 1886, Upper Burma, a kingdom of greater area than Britain and with a population of some 4,000,000, was annexed by proclamation to British India.
Indian nationalism and the British response, 1885–1920
Origins of the nationalist movement
The Indian National Congress held its first meeting in December 1885 in Bombay city while British Indian troops were still fighting in Upper Burma. Thus, just as the British Indian empire approached its outermost limits of expansion, the institutional seed of the largest of its national successors was sown. Provincial roots of Indian nationalism, however, may be traced to the beginning of the era of crown rule in Bombay, Bengal, and Madras. Nationalism emerged in 19th-century British India both in emulation of and as a reaction against the consolidation of British rule and the spread of Western civilization. There were, moreover, two turbulent national mainstreams flowing beneath the deceptively placid official surface of British administration: the larger, headed by the Indian National Congress, which led eventually to the birth of India, and the smaller Muslim one, which acquired its organizational skeleton with the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 and led to the creation of Pakistan.
Many English-educated young Indians of the post-mutiny period emulated their British mentors by seeking employment in the ICS, the legal services, journalism, and education. The universities of Bombay, Bengal, and Madras had been founded in 1857 as the capstone of the East India Company’s modest policy of selectively fostering the introduction of English education in India. At the beginning of crown rule, the first graduates of these universities, reared on the works and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Macaulay, sought positions that would help them improve themselves and society at the same time. They were convinced that, with the education they had received and the proper apprenticeship of hard work, they would eventually inherit the machinery of British Indian government. Few Indians, however, were admitted to the ICS; and, among the first handful who were, one of the brightest, Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1925), was dismissed dishonourably at the earliest pretext and turned from loyal participation within the government to active nationalist agitation against it. Banerjea became a Calcutta college teacher and then editor of The Bengalee and founder of the Indian Association in Calcutta. In 1883 he convened the first Indian National Conference in Bengal, anticipating by two years the birth of the Congress on the opposite side of India. After the first partition of Bengal in 1905, Banerjea attained nationwide fame as a leader of the swadeshi (“of our own country”) movement, promoting Indian-made goods, and the movement to boycott British manufactured goods.
During the 1870s young leaders in Bombay also established a number of provincial political associations, such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (Poona Public Society), founded by Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), who had graduated at the top of the University of Bombay’s first bachelor of arts class in 1862. Ranade found employment in the educational department in Bombay, taught at Elphinstone College, edited the Indu Prakash, helped start the Hindu reformist Prarthana Samaj (Prayer Society) in Bombay, wrote historical and other essays, and became a barrister, eventually being appointed to the bench of Bombay’s high court. Ranade was one of the early leaders of India’s emulative school of nationalism, as was his brilliant disciple Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), later revered by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) as a political guru (preceptor). Gokhale, an editor and social reformer, taught at Fergusson College in Poona (Pune) and in 1905 was elected president of the Congress. Moderation and reform were the keynotes of Gokhale’s life, and by his use of reasoned argument, patient labour, and unflagging faith in the ultimate equity of British liberalism, he was able to achieve much for India.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), Gokhale’s colleague at Fergusson College, was the leader of Indian nationalism’s revolutionary reaction against British rule. Tilak was Poona’s most popular Marathi journalist, whose vernacular newspaper, Kesari (“Lion”), became the leading literary thorn in the side of the British. The Lokamanya (“Revered by the People”), as Tilak came to be called after he was jailed for seditious writings in 1897, looked to orthodox Hinduism and Maratha history as his twin sources of nationalist inspiration. Tilak called upon his compatriots to take keener interest and pride in the religious, cultural, martial, and political glories of pre-British Hindu India; in Poona, former capital of the Maratha Hindu glory, he helped found and publicize the popular Ganesha (Ganapati) and Shivaji festivals in the 1890s. Tilak had no faith in British justice, and his life was devoted primarily to agitation aimed at ousting the British from India by any means and restoring swaraj (“self-rule” or independence) to India’s people. While Tilak brought many non-English-educated Hindus into the nationalist movement, the orthodox Hindu character of his revolutionary revival (which mellowed considerably in the latter part of his political career) alienated many within India’s Muslim minority and exacerbated communal tensions and conflict.
The viceroyalties of Lytton and Lord Ripon (governed 1880–84) prepared the soil of British India for nationalism, the former by internal measures of repression and the futility of an external policy of aggression, the latter indirectly as a result of the European community’s rejection of his liberal humanitarian legislation. One of the key men who helped arrange the first meeting of the Congress was a retired British official, Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912), Ripon’s radical confidant. After retiring from the ICS in 1882, Hume, a mystic reformer and ornithologist, lived in Simla, where he studied birds and theosophy. Hume had joined the Theosophical Society in 1881, as had many young Indians, who found in theosophy a movement most flattering to Indian civilization.
Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), the Russian-born cofounder of the Theosophical Society, went to India in 1879 to sit at the feet of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), whose “back to the Vedas” reformist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj, was founded in Bombay in 1875. Dayananda called on Hindus to reject the “corrupting” excrescences of their faith, including idolatry, the caste system, and infant marriage, and to return to the original purity of Vedic life and thought. The Swami insisted that post-Vedic changes in Hindu society had led only to weakness and disunity, which had destroyed India’s capacity to resist foreign invasion and subjugation. His reformist society was to take root most firmly in the Punjab at the start of the 20th century, and it became that province’s leading nationalist organization. Blavatsky soon left Dayananda and established her own “Samaj,” whose Indian headquarters were outside Madras city, at Adyar. Annie Besant (1847–1933), the Theosophical Society’s most famous leader, succeeded Blavatsky and became the first and only British woman to serve as president of the Indian National Congress (1917).
1Includes 12 members appointed by the president.
2Includes 2 Anglo-Indians appointed by the president.
3The first symbol for the rupee was officially approved in July 2010, and coins and banknotes with the new symbol began being issued in late 2011.
|Official name||Bharat (Hindi); Republic of India (English)|
|Form of government||multiparty federal republic with two legislative houses (Council of States ; House of the People )|
|Head of state||President: Pranab Mukherjee|
|Head of government||Prime Minister: Narendra Modi|
|Official languages||Hindi; English|
|Monetary unit||Indian rupee ₹3|
|Population||(2014 est.) 1,278,689,000|
|Total area (sq mi)||1,222,550|
|Total area (sq km)||3,166,391|
|Urban-rural population||Urban: (2012) 30.2%|
Rural: (2012) 69.8%
|Life expectancy at birth||Male: (2011) 63.9 years|
Female: (2011) 67.1 years
|Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate||Male: (2007) 76.9%|
Female: (2007) 54.5%
|GNI per capita (U.S.$)||(2013) 1,570|