Title: The Colonial Subjugation of India
Author: Amar Farooqui
Publisher: Aleph, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9789391047344
Pages: 298
When the Union Jack was lowered for the last time on Aug 15, 1947 in Delhi, it was marking the end of an eventful double century in which the yoke of colonialism was firmly affixed on India and a great plunder – the likes of which the world had not seen yet – had taken place. Since modern India still maintains many of the institutions introduced by the British, there is a distinct perception among anglophile Indians that the Empire was benign towards India. This is far from the truth. A careful analysis would show that the part of British legacy which independent India chose to sustain was only those related to political and administrative functions for running a large country. Otherwise, India did not change its cultural attributes like literature, fine arts, dance forms or visual arts. It did not change its religion or language. On the political front, India did not have a viable alternative as when the British came, she was reeling under eight centuries of Islamic invasions and forced occupation which unsettled the political stability of the country. It was the political-administrative system of the sultans which was found wanting to manage a modern state and as a consequence, was dismantled by the British – or at least a large part of it. What is to be stressed here is that the British Empire was anything but benign. This book tells the story of the establishment of a colonial empire that subjugated the native people by wars, conquests, unequal treaties and plain intimidation. The scope of the book starts with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498 and ends with Indian independence in 1947, but the main focus of the narrative is from the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919. Amar Farooqui was a professor of history at the University of Delhi and was a fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
After introducing the pre-British colonial incursions on India, Farooqui also discusses the modalities of movement of trading commodities to various destinations through the sea routes. It seems that the East did not buy anything from Europe, but instead exported spices, textiles, silk and porcelain to it. This forced the West to spend silver and gold coins to purchase the merchandise. Naturally, this unequal balance of payments caused a huge drain of bullion on their economies. Consequently, they entered into intra-Asian trade also. They bought textiles from India, sold it in the emporiums of Southeast Asia and China and bought spices and silk for taking it to Europe. Trading with many partners brought in many uncertainties which they answered with invasion and piracy. It is a tempting conjecture that if there was balance in trade between the East and the West, probably the impetus to establish colonies and control the markets would have been weak or non-existent. More research is needed on this line of thought. The author however does not mention this and goes on to examine the spread of British power for a century starting from 1730. The Mughal power had faded by then and it is clearly seen that the British wrestled the bulk of northern India from the Marathas.
The book includes a good coverage of the Revolt of 1857 which marked a turning point in the colonial administration. Expelling the English East India Company from the rule of India, Queen Victoria took over the country as a subject part of her empire. The revolt was bitterly fought but there is a perception that the Punjab and southern provinces did not participate in it. Farooqui claims that contrary to colonial historiography, sepoys in Punjab also mutinied. Dispelling the notion of the ‘loyal Sikh’, he cites examples of leaders belonging to that community getting executed for rioting. Sporadic incidents of violence in the Madras army are also listed. Over a thousand sepoys were court-martialed. What is noteworthy is that the flame kindled at Meerut in 1857 elicited a response thousands of miles away in the south of the country when communication facilities were poor. But substantial sections of princely rulers, feudal elites and landed aristocracy sided with the British along with commercial classes that had benefitted from colonial rule. Contrary to popular perception that there was no military intervention or annexation over native states after 1857, Farooqui points out that such cases did occur, though rarely. The armed intervention in Manipur and cession of Berar from Hyderabad are two such examples.
A very good initiative shown by the author is to describe the constitutional, administrative and military developments taking place in the colonial state. A string of constitutional reforms and military restructuring took place after the revolt of 1857. The Bengal army was practically disbanded and the concept of martial races was introduced. The Sikhs, Pathans, Dogras, Rajputs and Gorkhas were the martial races. The irony that all these martial races were defeated on the battlefield by the supposedly non-martial Bengal army, mainly constituted by sepoys from present-day Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Bihar went unnoticed. Military recruitment became concentrated in Punjab. Bombay and Madras armies, which had sizeable lower caste soldiers, were also scaled down. This move coincided with the advent of ideas of racial superiority and eugenics in Europe.
The local population in India was subjected to 200 years of British rule which followed another 800 years of Islamic occupation of the subcontinent. However, the author uses selective emphasis of events to glorify the reign of Mughals and other Muslim dynasties in India as the last bastion of India’s fight against colonialism. This is not true. Qualitatively, the fight between the British and the Mughals was no different from the Indian point of view than that between the British and the French in India for retaining their own colonies. In this vein, the author almost sheds tears on Siraj ud-Daula’s defeat at Plassey and accuses it on the nexus between the East India Company, rebel nobles and Hindu businessmen of Murshidabad, Siraj’s capital city. Similarly, Tipu Sultan of Mysore is elevated to the status of a saint. This bloodthirsty tyrant who massacred and forcibly converted his opponents to his religion is portrayed to have possessed a great vision on international polity and to have modernized the Mysore state. Tipu’s overtures to the Ottomans and France for an alliance against the British was nothing more than a coming together of colonial forces against another colonial power. Tipu was as much a pawn of French colonialism as his successor Wodeyar was of the British. Farooqui laments at the plunder of Seringapatam in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in which Tipu fell in battle. The pillage is artfully described to cause outrage in the minds of readers. However, this was nothing compared to the plunder of Delhi made by Nadir Shah Afzar half a century earlier. That pillage was perhaps the greatest of its kind which emptied the Mughal treasury and was one of the reasons for the collapse of the Mughals. The author is silent on this episode. This book also employs a sanitized reference to Mughal sultans in the eighteenth century to project them as respectable sovereigns. Muhammad Shah is depicted as solemn, without disclosing his disparaging sobriquet of ‘Rangeela’ that reveals the delinquency of the man.
Farooqui tries to pass on a clever argument regarding the accession of Kashmir to the Hindu Dogra dynasty as a ‘devious’ one. It is not clear what he intends to achieve by flagging an event which was quite normal in history as an act amounting to injustice. The First Punjab War between the British and post-Ranjit Singh Sikh kingdom ended with the Treaty of Lahore (1846). The British were to be indemnified with 1.5 crore rupees for the expenses of the war. The Lahore durbar was not in a position to pay such a huge sum. The author claims that a ‘devious’ stipulation was made in the treaty for ceding all hill countries between Beas and Indus including Kashmir and Hazara. Thus these territories came under British possession. What is devious in this transaction? Several examples of ceding provinces against arrears in tribute could be pointed out. The real target of Farooqui lies elsewhere. If Kashmir had stayed with Punjab or kept intact by the British, it would have automatically gone over to Pakistan as a Muslim-majority province. But it was not to be. The British themselves were in urgent need of money. They entered into a separate treaty with Gulab Singh, the leader of the Dogras, by which Kashmir was given to him in return for rupees 75 lakhs. Farooqui again accuses the article in the treaty which recognized Gulab Singh as the sovereign of Kashmir as ‘devious’. This also was fairly common in history. Gulab Singh was rewarded for the services rendered by him for ‘restoring the relations of amity between Lahore and British governments’ (p.123). One of the successors of Gulab Singh then chose in 1947 to accede to India and Kashmir became an integral part of India. By alleging these articles and actions as ‘devious’, Farooqui is, knowingly or unknowingly, buttressing the Pakistani claim on Kashmir.
The book includes a short history of the development of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and the efforts to appoint Indians to this elite cadre. At first, the exams were conducted only in England which severely curtailed the chances of Indian aspirants. In 1892, the House of Commons passed a resolution in support of simultaneous exams for the ICS in India too. This took thirty years to implement as the colonial officialdom was strongly opposed to it. Besides, sections of Indian society also opposed this on the grounds that candidates from Bengal, especially those belonging to upper castes, would be the major beneficiaries of the simultaneous exams. The British exploited and deepened every fault line in Indian society to divide the people. They then played upon the fears of one section, projecting themselves as guardians of these interests.
Another aspect of the narrative is that the author tries to wear his leftist credentials on the sleeve. There are several references to Marx’s writings which are either irrelevant or at most marginally related to the topic under discussion. The higher echelons of Indian academia are still colonized by the Leftists who openly flaunt their political orientation by such tricks. It is obvious to a student of history that the 1919 Mont-Ford reforms was a logical corollary to the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms. But Farooqui claims that the latter package was prompted by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He arduously finds a left connection for the 1935 reforms as well. The brotherhood of the leftists extends across national borders and even chronological separation. He claims that Stafford Cripps was the only British politician who was sincere and sympathetic to India. And what was the reason for this sympathy? He belonged to the left-wing of the Labour party! The Quit India movement of 1942 was the final popular uprising against the British. After the War, the destiny of India was decided across the negotiating tables of Delhi and Shimla. But the author credits the subversive movements of Tebhaga in Bengal, Telangana and Punnapra-Vayalar in Travancore as popular movements for independence that forced the British hand. This is also in line with the policy of Indian communists. Their significance to Indian freedom is so vanishingly negligible that even this author also contents with just one sentence about these movements which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of volunteers.
The first part of the book resembles a high school history text book and deals with the political history of the subcontinent. It shows how the stage was being set by interconnected events that eventually led to the colonial takeover of a vast country by a foreign commercial trading house. This part is rather drab as the author uses his sources uncritically and nothing new is seen. But the latter half examining the nature and development of the imperial state after the 1857 revolt is noteworthy and neatly written in which various aspects such as constitutional reforms and indigenization of bureaucracy are discussed. Farooqui makes a short survey of the books and other writings about the Revolt of 1857 including both colonial and Indian accounts of the upheaval. He acknowledges Savarkar’s contribution to this literature and remarks that it provided a fresh interpretation of the uprising but warns that he presented no new evidence and had wanted only to put forward a political manifesto to the nation.
The book is recommended.
Rating: 2 Star
Publisher: Aleph, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9789391047344
Pages: 298
When the Union Jack was lowered for the last time on Aug 15, 1947 in Delhi, it was marking the end of an eventful double century in which the yoke of colonialism was firmly affixed on India and a great plunder – the likes of which the world had not seen yet – had taken place. Since modern India still maintains many of the institutions introduced by the British, there is a distinct perception among anglophile Indians that the Empire was benign towards India. This is far from the truth. A careful analysis would show that the part of British legacy which independent India chose to sustain was only those related to political and administrative functions for running a large country. Otherwise, India did not change its cultural attributes like literature, fine arts, dance forms or visual arts. It did not change its religion or language. On the political front, India did not have a viable alternative as when the British came, she was reeling under eight centuries of Islamic invasions and forced occupation which unsettled the political stability of the country. It was the political-administrative system of the sultans which was found wanting to manage a modern state and as a consequence, was dismantled by the British – or at least a large part of it. What is to be stressed here is that the British Empire was anything but benign. This book tells the story of the establishment of a colonial empire that subjugated the native people by wars, conquests, unequal treaties and plain intimidation. The scope of the book starts with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498 and ends with Indian independence in 1947, but the main focus of the narrative is from the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919. Amar Farooqui was a professor of history at the University of Delhi and was a fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
After introducing the pre-British colonial incursions on India, Farooqui also discusses the modalities of movement of trading commodities to various destinations through the sea routes. It seems that the East did not buy anything from Europe, but instead exported spices, textiles, silk and porcelain to it. This forced the West to spend silver and gold coins to purchase the merchandise. Naturally, this unequal balance of payments caused a huge drain of bullion on their economies. Consequently, they entered into intra-Asian trade also. They bought textiles from India, sold it in the emporiums of Southeast Asia and China and bought spices and silk for taking it to Europe. Trading with many partners brought in many uncertainties which they answered with invasion and piracy. It is a tempting conjecture that if there was balance in trade between the East and the West, probably the impetus to establish colonies and control the markets would have been weak or non-existent. More research is needed on this line of thought. The author however does not mention this and goes on to examine the spread of British power for a century starting from 1730. The Mughal power had faded by then and it is clearly seen that the British wrestled the bulk of northern India from the Marathas.
The book includes a good coverage of the Revolt of 1857 which marked a turning point in the colonial administration. Expelling the English East India Company from the rule of India, Queen Victoria took over the country as a subject part of her empire. The revolt was bitterly fought but there is a perception that the Punjab and southern provinces did not participate in it. Farooqui claims that contrary to colonial historiography, sepoys in Punjab also mutinied. Dispelling the notion of the ‘loyal Sikh’, he cites examples of leaders belonging to that community getting executed for rioting. Sporadic incidents of violence in the Madras army are also listed. Over a thousand sepoys were court-martialed. What is noteworthy is that the flame kindled at Meerut in 1857 elicited a response thousands of miles away in the south of the country when communication facilities were poor. But substantial sections of princely rulers, feudal elites and landed aristocracy sided with the British along with commercial classes that had benefitted from colonial rule. Contrary to popular perception that there was no military intervention or annexation over native states after 1857, Farooqui points out that such cases did occur, though rarely. The armed intervention in Manipur and cession of Berar from Hyderabad are two such examples.
A very good initiative shown by the author is to describe the constitutional, administrative and military developments taking place in the colonial state. A string of constitutional reforms and military restructuring took place after the revolt of 1857. The Bengal army was practically disbanded and the concept of martial races was introduced. The Sikhs, Pathans, Dogras, Rajputs and Gorkhas were the martial races. The irony that all these martial races were defeated on the battlefield by the supposedly non-martial Bengal army, mainly constituted by sepoys from present-day Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Bihar went unnoticed. Military recruitment became concentrated in Punjab. Bombay and Madras armies, which had sizeable lower caste soldiers, were also scaled down. This move coincided with the advent of ideas of racial superiority and eugenics in Europe.
The local population in India was subjected to 200 years of British rule which followed another 800 years of Islamic occupation of the subcontinent. However, the author uses selective emphasis of events to glorify the reign of Mughals and other Muslim dynasties in India as the last bastion of India’s fight against colonialism. This is not true. Qualitatively, the fight between the British and the Mughals was no different from the Indian point of view than that between the British and the French in India for retaining their own colonies. In this vein, the author almost sheds tears on Siraj ud-Daula’s defeat at Plassey and accuses it on the nexus between the East India Company, rebel nobles and Hindu businessmen of Murshidabad, Siraj’s capital city. Similarly, Tipu Sultan of Mysore is elevated to the status of a saint. This bloodthirsty tyrant who massacred and forcibly converted his opponents to his religion is portrayed to have possessed a great vision on international polity and to have modernized the Mysore state. Tipu’s overtures to the Ottomans and France for an alliance against the British was nothing more than a coming together of colonial forces against another colonial power. Tipu was as much a pawn of French colonialism as his successor Wodeyar was of the British. Farooqui laments at the plunder of Seringapatam in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in which Tipu fell in battle. The pillage is artfully described to cause outrage in the minds of readers. However, this was nothing compared to the plunder of Delhi made by Nadir Shah Afzar half a century earlier. That pillage was perhaps the greatest of its kind which emptied the Mughal treasury and was one of the reasons for the collapse of the Mughals. The author is silent on this episode. This book also employs a sanitized reference to Mughal sultans in the eighteenth century to project them as respectable sovereigns. Muhammad Shah is depicted as solemn, without disclosing his disparaging sobriquet of ‘Rangeela’ that reveals the delinquency of the man.
Farooqui tries to pass on a clever argument regarding the accession of Kashmir to the Hindu Dogra dynasty as a ‘devious’ one. It is not clear what he intends to achieve by flagging an event which was quite normal in history as an act amounting to injustice. The First Punjab War between the British and post-Ranjit Singh Sikh kingdom ended with the Treaty of Lahore (1846). The British were to be indemnified with 1.5 crore rupees for the expenses of the war. The Lahore durbar was not in a position to pay such a huge sum. The author claims that a ‘devious’ stipulation was made in the treaty for ceding all hill countries between Beas and Indus including Kashmir and Hazara. Thus these territories came under British possession. What is devious in this transaction? Several examples of ceding provinces against arrears in tribute could be pointed out. The real target of Farooqui lies elsewhere. If Kashmir had stayed with Punjab or kept intact by the British, it would have automatically gone over to Pakistan as a Muslim-majority province. But it was not to be. The British themselves were in urgent need of money. They entered into a separate treaty with Gulab Singh, the leader of the Dogras, by which Kashmir was given to him in return for rupees 75 lakhs. Farooqui again accuses the article in the treaty which recognized Gulab Singh as the sovereign of Kashmir as ‘devious’. This also was fairly common in history. Gulab Singh was rewarded for the services rendered by him for ‘restoring the relations of amity between Lahore and British governments’ (p.123). One of the successors of Gulab Singh then chose in 1947 to accede to India and Kashmir became an integral part of India. By alleging these articles and actions as ‘devious’, Farooqui is, knowingly or unknowingly, buttressing the Pakistani claim on Kashmir.
The book includes a short history of the development of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and the efforts to appoint Indians to this elite cadre. At first, the exams were conducted only in England which severely curtailed the chances of Indian aspirants. In 1892, the House of Commons passed a resolution in support of simultaneous exams for the ICS in India too. This took thirty years to implement as the colonial officialdom was strongly opposed to it. Besides, sections of Indian society also opposed this on the grounds that candidates from Bengal, especially those belonging to upper castes, would be the major beneficiaries of the simultaneous exams. The British exploited and deepened every fault line in Indian society to divide the people. They then played upon the fears of one section, projecting themselves as guardians of these interests.
Another aspect of the narrative is that the author tries to wear his leftist credentials on the sleeve. There are several references to Marx’s writings which are either irrelevant or at most marginally related to the topic under discussion. The higher echelons of Indian academia are still colonized by the Leftists who openly flaunt their political orientation by such tricks. It is obvious to a student of history that the 1919 Mont-Ford reforms was a logical corollary to the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms. But Farooqui claims that the latter package was prompted by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He arduously finds a left connection for the 1935 reforms as well. The brotherhood of the leftists extends across national borders and even chronological separation. He claims that Stafford Cripps was the only British politician who was sincere and sympathetic to India. And what was the reason for this sympathy? He belonged to the left-wing of the Labour party! The Quit India movement of 1942 was the final popular uprising against the British. After the War, the destiny of India was decided across the negotiating tables of Delhi and Shimla. But the author credits the subversive movements of Tebhaga in Bengal, Telangana and Punnapra-Vayalar in Travancore as popular movements for independence that forced the British hand. This is also in line with the policy of Indian communists. Their significance to Indian freedom is so vanishingly negligible that even this author also contents with just one sentence about these movements which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of volunteers.
The first part of the book resembles a high school history text book and deals with the political history of the subcontinent. It shows how the stage was being set by interconnected events that eventually led to the colonial takeover of a vast country by a foreign commercial trading house. This part is rather drab as the author uses his sources uncritically and nothing new is seen. But the latter half examining the nature and development of the imperial state after the 1857 revolt is noteworthy and neatly written in which various aspects such as constitutional reforms and indigenization of bureaucracy are discussed. Farooqui makes a short survey of the books and other writings about the Revolt of 1857 including both colonial and Indian accounts of the upheaval. He acknowledges Savarkar’s contribution to this literature and remarks that it provided a fresh interpretation of the uprising but warns that he presented no new evidence and had wanted only to put forward a political manifesto to the nation.
The book is recommended.
Rating: 2 Star
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