Useful Notes / India

7 Following

Traditional Indian history argues that the ancient world of India was shaped by the Aryan invasions, a range of tribes coming from the land that became Iran (calling themselves arya which means "Noble"). Aryans brought with them aspects of what is later called the Indo-European Civilization which is borne out in the Indo-European languages of Ancient India (Sanskrit but also Pali, Kharosthi and others) and the Indo-European Mythology (which explains the similarity between Hindu Mythology and Classical Mythology and Norse Mythology among others, their progenitors migrated west where the Aryans migrated east). They often faced and interacted with the Dravidian peoples, who are considered more authentically indigenous. The Dravidian peoples of course were also migrants, having originally migrated from Africa after the dawn of homo sapiens and went east. The "Aryan Migration" theory has faced pushback and criticism over the years with many arguing that it framed the North-South divide in later parts of Indian history and projects it backwards. Genetic testing has revealed that India is full of migration and that genetically speaking there's not much different from North Indians and South Indians. At different points of time, people in various regions migrated to one place or another and then planted roots there. This helps explain why even though India has often been politically divided across time, it often had a recognized cultural unity that transcended regional/linguistic/religious divides (and in far more rare cases, caste divides). This is similar to Ancient Greece which was often fractious and prone to infighting but nonetheless recognized themselves as the People of Hellas even if Sparta and Athens were at each other's throats.

The land of the Indian subcontinent is one of the great ancient civilizations in the archaeological record. There are also cave paintings dating back to 10,000 BCE in Bhimbetka. The ruins of the Harappa Civilization, unearthed in 1924, was dated to 3300 to 1300 BCE, contemporaneous to Sumer (who traded with the region and called it Meluhha) and Ancient Egypt. Articles from India, like carnelian, have been found in the tombs of the Pharoahs and the ruins of Mesopotamia hinting at a great deal of lively trade in ancient times. The Harappan civilization's ruins reveal features such as a public bath, indoor plumbing, and features for public life of a kind rarely seen in other civilizations of a comparative time frame. The civilization left behind very little writing much of which is considered indecipherable, similar to the Etruscan precursors of Ancient Rome. At some point the Harappan civilization collapsed and disappeared in the sands. Subsequently, Ancient India underwent a secoond urbanization which led to forests being burned for the sake of gathering wood and building settlements, much of which brought them in conflict with the peoples who lived in the forests, whose descendants later came to be called Adivasis and officially recognized as Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis are recognized as truly indigenous and aboriginal groups who even into the 21st Century come into conflict with the modern unified state). This led to several kingdoms competing for power, called Mahajanapadas, of which the biggest was Magadha, located around the Eastern plain of the Ganga River. The greatest of the Mahajanapadas was the Nanda Kingdom, they were contemporaries of religious thinkers like Vardhaman Mahavira (the founder of Jainism) and Gautama Buddha (the founder of Buddhism).

While international trade existed even in the ancient period, and Indian traders are recorded to have visited Athens in the time of the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great's campaign was the major event that connected India to the wider world to its North and its West. Alexander reached India's Northern frontiers (much of it in Pakistan, though also in parts of Punjab that fall in modern India's borders) but was unable to go further because of a mutiny of his soldiers who were tired of campaigning, and also by advisors from his enemies-turned-vassals, like Porus, who expressed to him that India was far vaster than he had conceived). While Alexander had conquered the biggest landest empire that anyone in Greece had ever known, expanding from Macedon to The Achaemenid Empire to "Bactria" (modern day Afghanistan), Peninsular India would be a domain nearly equal to the size of the territory he conquered. Alexander turned away from India, but he left behind successors like the general Selecus Nikator who inherited his Persian domains and several others who settled and intermarried locally (parts of Punjab have traces of Ancient Greek ancestry). Many local Indian soldiers and other mercenaries were incorporated in Alexander's army and some of them are believed to have become part of the retinue of an ambitious local ruler called Chandragupta Maurya.

Chandragupta is considered the earliest recorded Samrat (Emperor) in Indian history. Arguably, the political concept of India, i.e. a single state under the authority of an unified government began in the 300s BCE, when most of the subcontinent came under the Maurya Empire. Very little information exists about Chandragupta. Contemporary records are found in Greek sources (where he is called Sandrokyptos, or Sandrocottus) and they record Chandragupta as the Emperor of a vast domain, with his capital Pataliputra (modern day Patna, the capital of the State of Bihar), considered to be larger than Ancient Athens and Rome, and with a far greater population. Later Buddhist texts feature and record a figure called Chanakya, a Brahmin who served as mentor and guide to Chandragupta, and who is later conflated with Kautilya, the author of the "Arthashastra" a book of political theory often compared to The Prince.^note  In this recounting, the Mauryan Empire united many fragments of the subcontinent, as a defense against the Greek/Macedonian. Chanakya, the purported architect of Chandragupta's rise to power, supposedly viewed the Greek conquest as an attack on Indus culture, leading him to be credited later on as one of the greatest war strategists of all time. Later historians have questioned this conflation with many disputing Chanakya and Kautilya being the same person and most agreeing that the Arthashastra was written down centuries after the fact, likely by multiple authors but perhaps based on oral records that originate much earlier. Contemporary historians see Chandragupta as an ambitious martial ruler, likely from a lower-caste warrior clan. A figure who saw Alexander's conquest as a model to similarly build an empire in India. Chandragupta centralized his state and won victories against the Seleucids which was then cemented by a treaty that traded war elephants to Seleucus in exchange for a marriage pact between Chandragupta and the general's relative (which means that Chandragupta's descendants, Bindusara and Ashoka were part Macedonian/Greek). The Mauryans traded with the Seleucids and other Macedonian statelets (referred to in Indian sources as Yavanas, derived from the Ionian sea). A key facet is the development of Buddhist and Jain sculpture which was inspired by Greek artisans. The recovery of Mauryan era artifacts likewise shows inscriptions in Pali (the ancient Indian script) alongside Greek, suggesting a level of diplomatic contact and exchange between the Mauryans and the Hellenistic Kingdoms.

The Mauryan Empire reached the height of its territorial extent, military power, and cultural achievement under Chandragupta's grandson, Ashoka who assumed the title of Priyadarshi and Chakravartin (Universal Ruler). Modern Indians have referred to him as Ashoka the Great, which as with Alfred the Great is not contemporaneous but a latter-day tradition. Ashoka ruled for 37 years and presided over the greatest expansion of Indian territory by a single ruler in all of recorded Indian history. While later Indian dynasties matched the size of his territory, none expanded as far in a single reign, capturing territory similar in scale to Alexander. His kingdom stretched from parts of Modern Day Afghanistan to Modern Day Bhutan, and included everything from the North of the Indus River to an area just above the Southern tips, going as far as modern day Andhra Pradesh. His regime is immortalized by a series of rock edits and pillars that are found in the farthest stretches of the Subcontinent, hinting a wide domain and united polity. The rock edits were written in Greek, Aramaic, Kharosthi and Pali, the presence of Greek helped it to be decoded by James Prinsep centuries later, in a manner analogous to Champollion's deciphering of the hieroglyphics with the Rosetta Stone.

The rock edits and later Buddhist accounts presents Ashoka is a tragic warrior king who committed bloodshed in his rise to power but felt immense guilt and regret upon victory, especially over a terrible victory at Kalinga where Ashoka's own edicts record the deaths of over 100,000 in battle. His edicts are unique in world history for its confessional nature, for its open acknowledgement and admission of war crimes and an insistence on an ethical committment to repair his karma by becoming a Buddhist and spreading dharma across the land. In Ashoka's time, there was a proto-Hinduism called Brahmanism that revolved on the veneration of the Vedas (the oldest being the Rig Veda, the most ancient text in the Indian subcontinent) and this faced rivalry with new religious traditions such as Jainisms and Buddhism among others. Ashoka is considered the single most important figure in Buddhism, after the Buddha himself, for insisting on missionary activity to spread Buddhism not only across India but also across Asia. He oversaw the Third Buddhist Council, and sent his own son Mahinda to the land that became Sri Lanka, and likewise became a model for a just king in Buddhist tradition. Ashoka also oversaw more lasting contributions in the form of the usual good-monarch business (lawgiving, fair dispensation of justice, efficient administration, etc.). He built many stupas (i.e Buddhist temples) across India, one of them in the city of Sanchi became legendary for its Ashoka Pillar containing a lion capital featuring four lions arranged in a square symmetrical pattern standing above a pedestal with a wheel with many spokes. The Republic of India put the wheel on its flag and used the Lion Capital as the Seal of India, ensuring continuity with the ancient world over two millennia.

The Mauryan Empire barely lasted for a few decades after Ashoka's death before collapsing in time to the Shunga dynasty, which in turn warred with and fought against other new states in the North and Middle of India. Every now and then, a new empire would rise and run most of the subcontinent for a few generations, but nobody really cared other than the nobles doing the ruling and fighting, as these political distinctions did comparatively little to affect the economic activity on the ground, which is good because during the classical to medieval period, India was considered the wealthiest economy in the world.

In the North of India, the Gupta Kingdom established political control but did not expand as far South as Ashoka did. In the South of India, new states like the Pallavas and the Cholas came to power and rather uniquely building a maritime power that stretched from the South of India across the Bay of Bengal, reaching as far as Indonesia and Cambodia. This was also a period where Brahmanism revived and Buddhism declined in India. You also had the development of new strains of Hinduism, which while dating earlier in oral records, first find their archaeological record in this period. It was in this period that the great Hindu epics of The Mahabharata and The Ramayana are first traced in records, with multiple written versions and commentary first showing up in written records in Sanskrit and other languages.

Despite internal fractures, India in this period experienced an early peak in its position in global trade. Indian goods and products such as black pepper (known as black gold) were in high demand in The Roman Empire, and Indian merchants traveled across the Arabian Sea to Roman Egypt where its products were then sold for high profits. Indian trade was so highly valued that the Emperor Augustus agreed to a personal sit-down with traders who came to discuss terms with him in the island of Samos in 20/19 BCE. Pliny the Elder complained about Rome having a trade deficit with India, which he regarded as a drain through which the world's gold was sucked dry. In the East, Indian influence led to forms of Buddhism spreading to the land known as Indo-China, influencing Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the spread of the Hindu epics across the world. Indian architectural style also spread across the world, evident in achievements such as the Ellora Rock Temples, the Udyagiri Temples, the Elephanta Temples, and the much earlier Ajanta Cave Complex dating back to the 4th Century BCE. This inspired developments across East Asia such as the Prambanan Temple complex in Java and of course the largest religious structure known to man, and the biggest Hindu temple anywhere in the world, Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

The most consequential Indian export to the world was in the realm of mathematics. The mathematicians of Alexandria had invented calculus and logic, as well as the Pythagorean Theorem, which many Indian astronomers and astrologers (they overlapped in the Medieval and Early Modern periods of India) had devised independently (as did Sumer and Egypt). The Indian mathematician Aryabhatta was the first to argue that a blank space which was skipped over in Western mathematics ought to be seen as a number unto itself. He called the number 'shunya' (translated into Arabic as zephyr, which later became the source for both cipher and zero in English). Brahmagupta meanwhile expanded this to include a new notational system noting that with 9 symbols and zero, one can create any number in any notational combination. This later became the source for the modern numeral system.

Around the 700s-1000s CE, India experienced a wave of migrations from across the Arabian Sea, while also in turn travelling and settling further East. Most of them settled in the Southern India, the stretch of mountains consisting of the Deccan Plateau (or Western Ghats as it's called in India). Zoroastrians fleeing the decline of the Sassanian Empires came and settled in India, forming the nucleus of what later became known as the "Parsee" community. Jewish migrations also occurred in this era, many of them settling in what later became the state of Kerala. Christian communities also settled in the South, forming a unique group known as "Santhome" Christians (based on the legend that Thomas the Apostle travelled to India and spread the gospel down South). Muslim traders and merchants first arrived in the South and slowly and surely built communities on the coast and proceeded inland, becoming in the course of time, the second largest religious group in the Subcontinent, and forming a unique Indo-Muslim culture that is otherwise quite distinct from Arabic Islam, having many syncretized elements and features reflecting assimilation within India.

India was the center of the spice trade and was linked to the Silk Route, and in the opinion of historian William Dalrymple arguably formed its own "Golden Road" forming a parallel node of its own for global trade. Traders from across the world came to India, including the Arab scholars Al-Beruni (who brought Indian mathematics to the Middle East and helped spread it westwards until it reached the Italian Fibonacci who made the system European). The decline in strength of kingdoms in the North along with the great wealth of India made it vulnerable to raids from Arab warriors, who captured Sind in 711-712 CE.

In the centuries that followed there would be more raids from Iranian dynasties such as Mahmoud of Ghazni and Mahmoud of Ghori. Over time, they built alliances with Hindu kings in the North and soon cast coins with dual Iranian-Sanskrit inscriptions and in the course of time Farsi would become a lingua franca and a vernacular language across the North of India, and would eventually blend in with local indigenous languages forming a dialect known as Hindavi which later became "Hindustani", and then later in the 20th century the dual languages of Urdu and Hindi. A small area of land on the Yamuna River slowly became an important settlement, and in the course of time, the city of Delhi, which for the next 1000 years frequently became the capital of many kingdoms, states, and finally Independent India. Alauddin Khilji established his supremacy over the North of India, and most crucially via his general Malik Khafur (a former slave turned elite soldier who converted from Hinduism to Islam, and also became the "court favorite" of Alauddin Khilji), expanded the Delhi Sultanate to the South, bringing large parts of South India under Northern supremacy, wrecking the local kingdoms and states in the region.

Some of the notable figures of the Delhi Sultanate were Iltutmish and Qutub-uddin Aibak, both were former slaves who became elite soldiers and eventually ruled as Sultans, with Aibak overseeing the construction of the Qutb Minar, one of the first masterpieces of Indo-Islamic Architecture. Razia Sultana, daughter of Iltutmish became the only female Sultan of India who ruled on her own. There was also Muhammad-bin Tughluq who ruled over more of India than anyone since Ashoka but was notorious for his violence and eccentricities, a Caligula type who sought to move the capital from Delhi to a place called Daulatabad (later known as Aurangabad in Maharashtra) but the resulting exodus proved costly and mishandled leading to much death along the way. It was during the reign of Tughluq that the famous Ibn Batuta visited India as part of his legendary series of travels.

The Mongol Horde sought to invade and raid India but they were beaten back by Alauddin Khalji and his successors. The Mongols’ rampage and destruction of the Khwarezmid Empire sent many Iranian refugees arriving to Delhi and settling in the city, including the poet Amir Khusro who became one of the first major poets to write in the Hindavi language. Eventually of course Timur the Lame succeeded where his precursors had failed and he launched a devastating raid of Delhi that reduced the city to its shell, and eventually sparked an exodus that led many in Delhi to flee elsewhere to other neighboring Northern and Eastern Kingdoms.

The period of Northern destabilization led to a period of Deccan resurgence (the Anglo-Indian word "Deccan" comes from the Sanskrit word "Dakshina" which means South).

After Malik Khafur conquered the South, he established Sultanates in the region which eventually coalesced into the Bahmani Kingdom that later fractured again into the Ahmadnagar Sultanate (having parts of Madhya Pradesh, most of Maharashtra, parts of Gujarat), the Bijapur Sultanate, the Golconda Sultanate, and the Bidar and Berar sultanates. Golconda was world renowned even in the middle ages for being the only source in the world for diamonds. India held monopoly on the diamond trade until the discovery of diamonds in Brazil in the 1700s and the crown jewels of virtually every European royal family was adorned with diamonds from the mines of India, chiefly Kollur in Golconda. This is true of the two most famous diamonds in the world, the Hope Diamond and the Koh-I-Noor. Further South, there was the Vijayanagara Empire. The Vijayanagara Empire was ruled by Hindu rulers, who nonetheless called themselves sultans, wore Persianate clothing and engaged in mixed religious marriages with their Muslim neighbors of the Bahmani Kingdom. They presided over a Renaissance in the South, leading to a creative period in literature, poetry, and the arts. As well as the developments of substantial settlements and cities that wowed travellers from around the world.

The Early Modern Period saw the beginning of many European excursions and visits to India. Marco Polo visited the Vijayanagara Empire in the reign of King Devaraya II and marveled about the wealth in the South, writing down memoirs that cast a spell in the minds of European travelers about the wealth of India, and ways by which they might get access to it. The Portuguese were the first to discover sea routes to India with Vasco de Gama arriving to Calicut in 1498. The Portuguese trading companies would be followed in time by Dutch, French and English. The Portuguese by means of guns, ships and bribery, established settlements in India, the biggest and longest lasting being Goa which in the course of time became the most heavily Christian part of India, and the headquarters of the Catholic Mission in Asia. The body and relics of Jesuit priest St. Francis Xavier would be buried and displayed in the Basilica de Bom Jesus. Another settlement that fell into the territory of the Portuguese was a set of islands in the Konkan Coast, featuring communities and settlements that had existed for centuries. The Portuguese saw its natural harbour which they called “Bom Baim” (Good Bay) and identified its potential, but upon the marriage of the Portuguese princess Catharine de Braganza to King Charles II, it was ceded to the British crown as a dowry. It became known by the English as Bombay (Mumbai) and would evolve over time to becoming the economic and cultural capital of India, and one of the world’s great cities. It was through the Portuguese that New World crops arrived in India: tomatoes, cashews, bell peppers, potatoes, chilies etc. which in the course of time transformed and reshaped Indian farming and Indian cuisine. The Portuguese however also introduced the Inquisition to Goa, and were quite oppressive to the local Muslim communities, inducing forceful conversions of Brahmin groups, as well as Portuguese Jews who fled Europe to the colonies for refuge. The Portuguese also established trade with other Indian kingdoms, especially the South, and made a fortune in selling European weapons, such as cannons and arquebuses to the Deccani Sultanates as well as the Vijayanagara Empire, much as they did in funding the Sengoku Jidai in Japan. The introduction of European weapons and firepower made conflicts in the South deadlier than before, and rulers more ambitious and it led to a period of internecine warfare that saw the destruction and collapse of the Vijayanagar Empire, leading the South to be entirely ruled by the Deccani Sultans in a relatively stable equilibrium until the arrival of the legendary Mughal Empire in the North.

The founder of the Mughal Empire was Zahir-uddin Muhammad "Babur" (which meant Tiger, setting a precedent for later Mughal Emperors to have regnal names distinct from their birth name, similar to the Catholic Pope). He claimed descent from Timur and through him Genghis Khan, and Mughal was the local word for "Mongol" though the Mughals were quite distinct and separate from the Mongols culturally and socially, much in the way that England isn't really the same as Anglo-Saxon Angleland. He was a petty ruler in Uzbekistan until defeat in battle forced him into the life of a mercenary warlord across Central Asia and Afghanistan until the instability of the Delhi Sultanate under the Lodi dynasty led aristocrats to make overtures to Babur to settle into the power vacuum and provide stable rule. Babur built an army that was strong in cavalry but especially innovative for featuring gunners who learned techniques from the Ottoman Empire. By means of military victory and also by forming alliances, Babur triumphed over the Rajputs of North India (upper-caste kshatriya kings who were prone to in-fighting and disunity, with several favoring alliances with the Central Asian arriviste than their neighboring kingdom) and established an Empire that over the course of the next 400 years would heavily reshape and alter the Subcontinent and the wider world, and whose impact would reverberate into the 21st Century.

Babur oversaw construction and literary activities (most notably the Baburnama, one of the earliest examples of autobiography anywhere in the world, and certainly one of the first of its kind in the Non-Western World). A major monument constructed by him was the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Gujarat. This monument would be destroyed in 1992 by a mob of Hindu fundamentalists under the belief that A] The Original Monument was the birthplace of Rama, B] It was an edifice specifically demolished by Babur. There is no evidence whatsoever for this claim. Most tellingly, Babur’s own enemies among Hindu kshatriyas never once recorded any act of destruction that it would have served them best to promote and rally against. In pre-modern India, temples or temple complex were source of commercial trade and community, and was sponsored by kings and rulers, and in the course of wars temples would be destroyed and raided by Hindu kings as well as Muslim rulers. The Hindu Chola Kings raided and looted and destroyed local temples of rival Hindu leaders, and the Vijayanagara rulers even destroyed mosques of the Deccani Sultans during their military campaigns against them. Muslim raiders before Babur such as the Mahmoud of Ghazni had destroyed the Temple of Somnath as did other raiders but they also allied with Hindu rulers after conquests and requested little conversion in the aftermath. Likewise both Hindu and Muslim rulers attacked and raided Buddhist sites. In addition, there are archaeological records of Hindu temples built on Buddhist sites and even then it seems that religious centers were chosen for reasons of topography and geography rather than any kind of aniconic act of violence against a rival faith, with the academic consensus suggesting that it was common for religious sites to fall into disuse and be left abandoned owing to regional migration patterns, famine and drought. These abandoned ruins would then be repurposed and rebuilt and reused. As such it’s common for temple architecture or in some cases mosque architecture to be repurposed into alternating religious buildings, and the same site of ruined temples to be used for later temples.

The Mughals in fact would in time prove unique for their syncretism with Indian traditions especially under its most famous and admired ruler, Jalal-uddin Muhammad “Akbar” (1542-1605). His regnal name literally means “The Great”, an allusion to his idol Alexander the Great. Much like Alexander, Akbar was a boy king and a military prodigy and Young Conqueror. His father Humayun, had been deposed by the Afghan warlord Sher Shah Suri. Suri proved to be a capable ruler in his own right in his brief reign which involved constructing the Grand Trunk Road and issuing the currency of the Rupee, innovations kept and maintained by Humayun after he reclaimed the throne after Suri’s early death and the power vacuum among his successors. Akbar succeeded to his father’s throne at the age of 13 and fought wars to reclaim the former domains and then expand it even further. Akbar would then rule for 49 years and preside over a Golden Age. Akbar famously abolished the tax for non-Muslims and promoted Hindus into high positions in the government and started a much admired policy of religious co-existence that would later be cited by nationalists as an inspiration for a plural society that formed part of secular Indian nationalism.

This era of the Mughals brought about an architectural and cultural Renaissance comparable to Florence under the Medici, or France under Louis XIV. From this period dates monuments such as Humayun's Tomb, Fatehpur Sikhri, Buland Darwaza and under Akbar's grandson, Shahjahan, the Old Delhi quarter and of course the Taj Mahal, India's most iconic monument. The Mughals also promoted infrastructure, relative order and generated trade. They sponsored a school of painting that combined styles from across India, many syncretized it into a series of miniatures that are considered triumphant works in art history. The chefs at the Mughal courts created cuisine that in the course of time would powerfully shape North Indian cuisine, the kind most familiar and known across the world. New World Crops like tomatoes, potatoes , beans, peppers among others were cultivated and incorporated to help create the unique Mughlai Cuisine. After the fall of the Mughal empire and their vassals, many of these chefs would form the ancestors to Indian restaurants and Indian street food. The economy of the Mughal Empire is estimated to have been the biggest in the world in the 1500s-1700s and the word “mogul” would enter the language as a synonym for tycoon, businessman, billionaire and so on.

In the course of their expansion, the Mughals faced rebellions especially in the Deccan region whose mountainous terrain proved unsuitable for the large pitched battles their tactics were built around. They had problems expanding East, into Assam though they did establish control over Bengal, which eventually became its richest and most fertile province near its end. Rebellions also sprang against their hegemony and within Punjab, regional rebellion also led to the rise of Sikhism (along with Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, the major religion of the Indian subcontinent) whose Gurus often battled against the Mughal armies. Of course, the Mughals had a tendency to be their own worst enemies what with the Decadent Court and their fratricidal policy of succession. Much like the Ottomans, princes competed against each other for the right of succession and brothers would often kill their siblings and imprison their fathers when they became old. Jahangir, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb came to power in this manner, and while the first two are still respected, Aurangzeb became in the words of Dalrymple, “the most controversial figure in a Indian history”, since he partly turned against his ancestors policy of religious pluralism (his brother Dara Shikoh, who he killed, translated the Gita into Persian for instance).

Aurangzeb paradoxically had more Hindus in his administration than any previous Mughal ruler, in part because he ruled over more Indians than earlier Indian rulers. By the end of his reign, Aurangzeb “Alamgir” (his regnal title, it meant “world-seizer” or “world conqueror”) brought the Mughals to the peak of their military power and territorial expansion. At the same time, Aurangzeb ordered high profile destruction of temples in Varanasi owing to the association of its priests with his enemies. These temple destructions would be exaggerated in latter day Indian textbooks and later political propaganda as being in the range of hundreds or even thousands. The actual documented number was 12. Moreover, Aurangzeb gave permission to build temples in other parts of India and offered protection and patronage, for which he’s inscribed in many of these structures. Nonetheless, Aurangzeb built his reign on military conquest rather than soft power and unlike his precursors rarely sponsored the grand monuments that employed local craftsmen which burnished their memory and their legacy.

His conquests made him many enemies and kept him away from the capital for the majority of his reign, living in many mobile tent camps where he conducted court policy. He ended the policy of ‘jharokha’ by which Mughal Emperors from before would appear in a window before crowds of people on a fixed day, allowing many to see their faces. This meant that for many of his subjects, loyal or otherwise, the Emperor was elusive and aloof which left a vacuum for his enemies to define his narrative. Aurangzeb also ordered the execution of rebels, irrespective of their creed, including fellow Muslims, such as his destruction of the Deccani Sultanates after submitting it to siege. More notoriously, he ordered the execution of the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur. Sikhism was an emerging religious tradition that developed in the Punjab during the Early Modern Era, and while a minority would prove to be culturally influential and Aurangzeb essentially marked himself down as a Satanic figure in their histories. Shivaji’s son Sambhaji had opposed the Mughals but also allied with them. After his father’s death, he led a major raid in Surat that led to his capture and brutal execution on the Emperor’s orders. This cemented the Emperor as a figure of hate for the politically dominant Maratha community in later centuries. The fact that the Emperor adopted Sambhaji’s son, who remained Hindus in captivity, without any conversion, is conveniently left out as is the fact that Sambhaji’s execution was greeted with praise and cheer from Surat’s merchant communities of Hindus and Jains, who were the victims of his raids. Aurangzeb also established Mughal supremacy over European powers. He nearly shut down the East India Company after the pirate Henry Avery raided the Ganj-I-Sawaj, a Mughal trading vessel rich in jewels that was sailing to Mecca. His own sister and several Mughal princesses were on board when it was raided by Avery’s crew and many of them were raped and murdered with the ships being lost forever. Understandably and justifiably furious, Aurangzeb imprisoned the East India Company officers and demanded and received restitution for his loss of property while the Company launched a global manhunt that partially recovered some of the loot, captured some of the crew but notably evaded Henry.

No Indian ruler afterwards would ever have such power over Europe, and specifically England, ever again.

Aurangzeb campaigned into his old age. undefeated in his lifetime. His death however marked the beginning of the end of the Mughal Empire which under his weak successors became in the 1700s a Vestigial Empire and by the time of its final end in 1857, a Land of One City.

Aurangzeb’s campaign in the Deccan sparked the rise of the Maratha Empire aka the Maratha Confederacy. Tracing its lineage from a group of Shudra castes who had risen to prominence in the Deccani Sultanate (who being Muslims were less rigid on the caste boundaries albeit only to an extent). Its founder Shivaji Bhonsle became a young warlord who united many others to sponsor raids against local rulers and magnates before challenging the advance of Aurangzeb himself. Shivaji was a charismatic leader who similar to Akbar, who he admired (he would chastise Aurangzeb for betraying his ancestor’s legacy) sought to build a pluralistic army of Hindus and Muslims. Shivaji fought a guerrilla campaign against the Mughals (inspired by Malik Ambar, a general in the Ahmadnagar sultanate who had Ethiopian slave origins) where he avoided giving battle and instead built forts and hilltop outposts through which he could retreat and wage asymmetrical warfare. Shivaji had successes but also some defeats but he consolidated a foundation for the Marathas to eventually become the greatest subcontinental power of the 1700s before the rise of the East India Company.

At the same time, owing to his Shudra lineage, Shivaji sought legitimacy so as to make himself a peer rival of both the Mughals and the Rajput clans who allied with the Mughals against the upstart lower caste Maratha warrior. To this end, he arranged a coronation by Brahmins from Varanasi, taking on the title of Chhatrapathi and being anointed specifically as a Kshatriya and upper caste Hindu ruler. His coronation was conducted in Sanskrit, and in later years would be seen as a moment of Hindu revivalism. After his early death (of illness, not in battle), his small kingdom fell into a Succession Crisis before consolidating under the Peshwas. The Peshwa was a title that roughly meant Prime Minister and was a position that Shivaji had appointed in his court. It later became hereditary and the Peshwas became a title controlled by Chitpavin Brahmin upper castes who established a highly unequal society. At the same time, the Peshwas expanded and took over former Mughal domains in campaigns that were famously brutal. The Bargi raids in Bengal over 10 years were especially notorious. At the same time, much like the Mughals, the Marathas established a multi religious attitude to government and even kept Mughal laws and codes on the books. Maratha power ended after it faced a major defeat at the hands of Ahmad Shah Abdali an Afghan warlord who raided India and defeated the Maratha army at Panipat.

The Mughals had steadily declined in the North at Maratha gain. Most humiliatingly of all, they would be sacked by the Persian conqueror Nader Shah who came to Delhi and left with the Peacock Throne and the Koh-I-Noor diamond ^note which would later be recovered by the Sikh Empire before coming into possession of the English, whose Crown Jewels outfit it to this day. This incident confirmed a reality that had already come to pass. Power passed from the Delhi court to local governors (called Nawabs, later Nabob in Anglo-Indian). In theory, these nawabs were supposed to collect taxes and send it to the imperial treasury, and allow the Emperor to conduct foreign policy. In practice, they stopped doing so, many of them ended up forming armies and conducting independent policy by themselves. This often took the form of many of them allying with the European companies who had settled in India, giving them company land and rights in exchange for weapons and military advisers. The same companies who also allied with and sold weapons to newly emergent and independent state powers such as resurgent Rajputs and Maratha clans. The two major European companies in India was the French and the English.

The East India Company was originally chartered by Elizabeth I. It made small impressions with Jahangir in 1619, who saw them at the time as a fairly minor set of diplomats seeking permission for trading rights. The French had made similar overtures in turn. The wars in Europe of the 1600s and the 1700s resulted in proxy theaters in India, where French and English states would fight each others. The English in time saw the weakness of the Mughal Empire as an opportunity to gain rights to develop an army, much of which was recruited from local Indian soldiers, mercenaries and soldiers of fortune who would then be trained in European battle tactics. At the outset, there was little sense in the East India Company that they would conquer India. Many of the Early Company factors/agents merely sought favorable trade and many of them often showed an appreciation for local culture, even taking to converting to local religions and dressing in Indian fashion. The first figure to change this was Robert Clive, who saw the weakness of India as a chance to make a fortune. He led a campaign to conquer Bengal, the richest part of India, and the center of the textile trade. He allied with the Jagat Seth, the banking merchants in the court of Siraj ud-Daulah, and his treacherous advisor Mir Jafar (whose name has the same status as Benedict Arnold in India and Pakistan) and eventually defeated his forces in the Battle of Palashi (Plassey) in 1757. This allowed the East India Company the right to the entire province of Bengal, the right to establish an army and control over a settlement that became the major city of Calcutta (Kolkatta).

The French for their part allied and supported states in Mysore, and helped train and arm the Rajputs and some Maratha clans, who saw the fall of Bengal as a major wake up call, since it made the English East India Company the most influential force in the Subcontinent. The most fierce of the opponents to the English is Tipu Sultan, who ruled the rich kingdom of Mysore and who came closer than any other Indian ruler in driving the English to the sea. Serving with the army of his father Hyder Ali, Tipu defeated the English at the Battle of Pollilur which left the way to Calcutta open. The Mysore army refused to give chase, allowing the English to beat a retreat. Tipu built an enterprising kingdom, innovated in rocket technology, introduced sericulture into his kingdom, that led to the start of the silk center in South India. At the same time his belligerence meant that he often attacked potential allies as well as his enemies. Rather than seek support from the vestigial Mughal emperor, Tipu entertained notions of capturing Delhi for himself. He would at times attack the Marathas and then seek alliances with them later. While Tipu was personally philanthropic to Hindu and Christian subjects in his realm, he would be brutal to his enemies’ subjects, be they Hindus, Christians, or Muslims and upon victory in battle was known for extracting conversions from those who were defeated. The English eventually isolated Tipu diplomatically and defeated him in battle, where Tipu went down swinging, sword in hand, at the Siege of Srirangapatnam, which was subject to a brutal sack by the English.

The only major holdout left was the Marathas who were defeated in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Governor General Richard Wellesley and his younger brother, The Duke of Wellington led the British forces against the Marathas, which at that time was larger and better armed. The Battle of Assaye would be described by the Duke as the most fierce battle of his career, a victory he ranked higher than his defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The East India Company felt satisfied that they had established supremacy over most of India. The exception was the Sikh Empire which ruled over the modern state of Punjab (including East Punjab that falls in India and West Punjab that falls in Pakistan, but also Kashmir). Ruled by Raja Ranjitsinhji, they established a regime that negotiated favorable terms with the English, and boasted stable and popular rule. As such, the English did not conquer Punjab until the 1840s.

The East India Company was a mercenary joint-stock corporation that conducted policy separately from the English Parliament, with local company factors given freedom of action owing to distance from London. At the outset, their justification of conquest was self interest, greed, monopoly, accumulation of trade and influence, which they never made bones about in private correspondence. European colonialism differed from simple conquest of the kind Indians were familiar with, and which they tolerated and accepted to a degree; which also explains why they tolerated and welcomed the Company originally. Earlier conquerors arrived in India, established Kingdoms, became Indian, and defended Indians from crime, provided some form of relief, defense from other kingdoms and generally avoided disrupting the usual patterns of trade and local economies. The East India Company however remained English and drained wealth from India and transported it back to England. The economy of India was now reorganized so as to serve the bottom line and not the well being of Indians or the well-being of the local Kingdom’s stability and order to be precise (Indian rulers were rarely philanthropic but they did believe they had a duty to provide order and safety if only to stimulate an economy to serve their armies). Thie company’s policies affected the kind of crops that could be grown, the kind of trade being done, and likewise disrupted preexisting systems. A famine that broke out in Bengal in 1770 came as a result of Company policies, which never showed inclination or interest in public welfare and neglected institutions geared to it. This was the first of many famines in a India that came as a result of the British presence in India.

The British government expressed some misgivings about the Company being in India. Robert Clive who was initially hailed as a hero came to be seen as “Lord Vulture” as news came out about the deprivation of Bengal, while Warren Hastings the Governor-General of India at the time of the Famine was subject to a high profile trial in Parliament, grilled by Edmund Burke (ironically a future apostle for conservatism) for his conduct. At the same time, the money spinning from India was too much to pass, and the British saw Waterloo as a chance to establish a Pax Britannica with India as the Jewel in the Crown of The British Empire. This was also the age of The Enlightenment which saw the spreading of ideas associated with liberalism in economy and politics, but in practice meant liberalism for Europeans at the expense of Non-Europeans. This mix of jingoism, triumph, and European white supremacy added a note of self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, and self-delusion. The British decided that they would remain an Empire, keep the money and the exploitation of the people. But they would now profess it to conducted for altruistic reasons like spreading civilization, and shepherding backward nations into the light of progress rather than the more straightforwardly honest reasons for looting professed by earlier adventurers. “Loot” incidentally is another word imported from Indian languages to English, and among the very first.

Under British Colonial Rule, first under the East India Company and then directly under the Crown, two hundred and fifty years of capital-F-Foreign rule began. Initially, the East India Company was allowed to govern more or less by itself, which resulted in such lovely policies such as abusive tax-collecting (with collectors often torturing people to pay up like a proto-mafia Loan Shark), aggressive missionary activity, destruction of rural infrastructure, imperialism and annexation violating treaties that the Company formerly agreed to. The East India Company also farmed opium in India with which it tried to open up China's market. Company rule initially sought control over India for trade monopoly but eventually saw India as a captive market for cheaply made English goods. English textiles, developed by the mills of the Industrial Revolution would produce goods in bulk that were then sold in India to consumers in greater and cheaper numbers, pricing out Indian handicraft textile industries. This eventually sent many people out of work, deprived of loss of status, herded to poorer livelihoods.

Disruptive as the Company was, there were nonetheless many numbers of Indians who benefitted from British rule, enough that the Company largely depended on local allies and proxy armies to run the subcontinent with only a small number of Englishmen, less than 100,000 at any point of time in India. The English directly ruled the Calcutta Presidency, the Bombay Presidency and the Madras Presidency in the North/West/South. These presidencies were like Italian City States which controlled territory greater than its nominal cities. Later there was the Delhi Presidency in the North. The rest of India were governed by Princely States, local rulers who were loyal to the English and who subordinated its military and foreign policy to the Company. The majority of the public in India could harbor the illusion that India was still run as it was before the English. Most never saw an Englishman in person. The Company and the Raj controlled land grants to ensure that there was never large scale immigration and settlement in India, unlike North America and Australia. They set up a system of subordinates, namely local landlords, called zamindars, to ensure order and a level of buffer by which scapegoats could be made and presented between them and the people.

At the same time, the majority of the wealth used for the running of India came from money taxed from Indians by the English, for services by Indians rendered to the English. To use a 21st century idiom, the English built walls and made the Indians pay for it. Or trains. The Indian Railway System would in later years be the major propaganda achievement of British rule in India. An impressive engineering feat to be sure, this system was created for military purposes of movements of troops and goods and was paid by massive tax hikes on the Indian population. Populations grew and many company settlements like Bombay and Calcutta (the capital of the Raj for most of its history until shifting back to Delhi in the 20th century) emerged as bustling cities where Indians started engaging in modern businesses such as shipbuilding, merchant navy, print journalism, and factory work. Many Indians started to immigrate and travel across the world in this period, with Raja Ram Mohan Roy being the first major intellectual who saw in the European Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, not a vision of European supremacy but ideas by which India could adopt and learn and modernize itself (The Revolution and its ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ would prove influential to India and the Indian flag would follow the tricoleur format or triranga in Hindi). Other Indians traveled and settled in London around the dockyards and establish the first Indian Restaurants there, helping to build the long lasting immigrant community that persists into the 21st century.

Socially, the English made fitful moves to reform Indian laws and customs. This had the benefit of philanthropy and self righteousness since any new victory helped to reinforce the idea of the British rule being ultimately for the Indian good. Sati, the custom of widows joining the cremation pyre of their husbands became a particular fixation. The custom was never completely widespread across India, even if it nonetheless did happen across regions and caste and class divides. Earlier Indian rulers such as Akbar had tried to reform or moderate it (Akbar would insist that he would allow it only if he gave permission, which he never did) as did Bhakti reformers in the medieval era but the English would claim to be the first to have done so. And even then would only irregularly enforce it. The East India Company eagerly participated in the Indian Ocean slave trade for most of its history and even after the British Parliament ended the slave trade in 1807, they continued trading human beings inside India until 1834, when the Royal Navy had to force the company to follow the law. The caste system was another thing they tried to reform but never eroded or annihilated even when lower caste activists such as Mahatma Jyotirao Phule exhorted them to do so. And the solution they pursued, missionary activity with the explicit aim of spreading Christianity by focusing on lower caste or untouchable converts put a target on the back of Christians and lower caste Indians, who were now seen by upper caste Indians as fifth columnists who would one day rise up and stab them in the back with a British made bayonet, a typical example of divide and conquer. The newly converted Christians were hardly helped or treated fairly either, subject to racism from whites and gaining little material benefit aside from the comfort of the word of Jesus, which many nonetheless accepted and held onto, even centuries later in the teeth of Hindu and Muslim revanchism. Christian communities existed across India, and originally arrived peacefully via trade independently of European colonialism and while it heightened due to the arrival of the English, French and Portuguese, is not directly conditioned or premised on it.

In military terms, the English rarely expanded the domain of the Raj beyond their domains in the 18th century. The major expansion was the Conquest of the Sikh Empire, already an ally. The British intervened in a Succession Crisis after the death of Ranjitsinhji and brought the state under its control and in the process seized the Koh-I-Noor diamond which they then elevated into a symbol of English conquest. Another expansion was the Kingdom of Myanmar which later became British Burma. The greatest failure of course was the First Anglo-Afghanistan War which became the only territory of the subcontinent to defeat the British in battle and forced them to retreat, and helped build its modern reputation as the “Graveyard of Empires” (The Mughals for their part conquered and established control over Afghanistan for centuries, so this might perhaps be, to use another 21st century idiom, a skill issue). Later English excursions would prove more successful but even then they maintained nominal independence for the Afghans and never incorporated them directly into the empire. The First Anglo-Afghan War had an expedition that featured an army of local sipahis (Persian/Hindavi for “soldier” more specifically “private” or “GI”). This was anglicized as Sepoy. A decade later, many of the units that were veterans of that conflict would participate in the 1857 Uprising.

1857 was the largest colonial resistance against any European imperial power in the 19th Century. It’s also an event that is as consequential in historiography as it is in history. The English call it a mutiny, which it was in the technical sense, since it was largely a case of soldiers trained in English tactics, using English weapons, veterans of wars where they killed and conquered on English orders, and were paid out of the crown’s pocket, turning against their former commanding officers often quite brutally. Indians however call it the “The First War of Independence” or more neutrally and simply as “The Uprising” rejecting the idea that the sepoys ever owed loyalty to their colonial overlord to start with. The neutral words of Rebellion and Uprising would be adopted by post colonial historians even among the British academic community. The notion of it being a nationalist movement is subject to skepticism even among Indian historians owing to the fact that few of the mutineers wrote down sources, most of them being executed and the ones who survived disappearing from records and living lives of anonymity. Most of the records come from social histories written by Delhi, Lucknow, Meerut residents in local languages (noble or merchant) during the mutiny or by the British from their barely coherent reports of white supremacist rage and grievance (copious uses of the n-word to refer to Indians abound in these 19th century archives). The general picture is that the mutiny was partly driven by officer corps of sepoys, Hindus and Muslims both, who abhorred the missionary activities of the British, and also the conversion of lower caste communities to Christianity on the premise of equality and even superiority over them (Christian converts were victims of lynchings and pogroms by mutineers during the uprising). Others suggest disillusionment and guilt over the British presence in India, driven by PTSD over the defeat and retreat from Afghanistan, nearly 15 years before. The proximate cause, according to British reports, is the issue of cartridges for rifles that were to be coated with either beef or pork, offensive to dietary practices of both Hindus and Muslims. However, the budding of nationalist feelings cannot be altogether ignored or dismissed altogether. Many of the mutineers would not quite have had the refinement of Raja Ram Mohan Roy to put it into words, nor read his works of course, but it’s not impossible for them to have pent-up feelings for years stewing in resentment boiling over at the right time. Either way, the full extent of their grievances will remain a Riddle for the Ages.

What isn’t up for dispute is the fact that upon rising in Meerut and spreading to Lucknow and Delhi, the Mutineers made clear that they wished to revive the Mughal Empire, accepting only the line of Babur and Akbar as capable of providing legitimacy for their actions, and rallying to the Mughal Legacy as a signal to unite Hindus and Muslims against the English. They took over Delhi and acclaimed the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their leader. Delhi was a mere city state at this point, without a standing army of its own and the Emperor was a poet and literary connoisseur rather than any warrior and he was never comfortable with the fact that he Got Volunteered by an army. Nonetheless, his sons, the young Princes saw that this was indeed a chance to liberate India from the English and bring back the Glory Days, taking military command while their father remained a figurehead. Other local Indian rulers, and princely states also supported the mutineers, these figures among others, included Nana Sahib, Tatya Tope, and the legendary Rani of Jhansi, a warrior queen who fought and died in battle. The noble princes joined the mutiny because of their objection to the “Doctrine of Lapse” a clause by which the English would claim Princely States by disinheriting its heirs on arbitrary grounds, insisting that the inheritance lapsed because there was no heir, even if there was clearly one or many. The annexation of the princely state of Awadh in 1856, year before the mutiny proved to be one of the flashpoints.

The mutiny overwhelmed the company armies stationed in India, and would likely have succeeded had there been unity and coordination among the different groups of Sepoys. And if there had been common policy for peace and negotiation with the English, similar to the American Revolution. However, the English print media became radicalized and insisted that the Parliament send reinforcements to India. Reports of massacres at Kanpur (Cawnpore in British sources) where hundreds of British women and children were murdered and thrown into wells proved especially scandalous. Said massacre occurred during a siege when Nana Sahib was discussing hostage exchanges with the English and overtures were refused owing to the British believing their position was favorable. However, reports of British massacres against Indian villages reached Nana Sahib’s ear and he ordered the hostages to be murdered en masse. In the final analysis, while there were war crimes conducted by the Mutineers, the total numbers of the dead inflicted by the English were far greater with many villages burned in full, and the cities of Delhi and Lucknow subject to brutal sieges and sackings after their fall. The British held the Mughal Emperor guilty for the mutiny and even the massacre of Cawnpore (which happened far away from him and outside his knowledge and command). He was deposed and exiled to Rangoon (modern day Yangon) while the princes were brutally executed (shot in guts to make their death agony prolonged and painful) and then displayed and buried at Delhi’s Khooni Darwaza (Bloody Gate).

A brutal round of executions, lynchings, and reprisals followed the mutiny, whose memories continue to color negative perception of the English in India. The English made POWs lick the blood of the walls at the wells in Cawnpore as an act of torture and similar incidents followed. Another brutal execution method was the British strapping sepoys to the mouth of canons and then igniting a blast through their chest, a method of execution known as “blown by gun” which was used by local Indian rulers but not for a century at that point and was brought back by the English specifically as a means of torture and desecration of their bodies. White mutineers like the ones who had revolted on the Bounty, were never subject to a similar level of cruelty but British dehumanization of India had a made it open season for war crimes that would have been seen as such had it been done by Europeans against Europeans, even in the 19th Century. Paradoxically, the Mutiny can be said to have achieved success. The British Parliament and Queen Victoria believed that missionary activity had heightened and inflamed passion as well as the profit driven policies of the Company. As such the East India Company was privatized, and removed from India though of course all shareholders were compensated by the English in the same way they compensated English slaveholders upon abolition of slavery. Not one British war criminal was ever held to account with the likes of liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill insisting they were beyond reproach. The British Parliament established the British Raj and recognized India as a domain of the Empire with Queen Victoria as Empress of India. Victoria issued a proclamation guaranteeing respect and recognition for the religious diversity of all her subjects, putting an end to any direct future social reform policies in India, much of which was halfhearted and hypocritical anyway.

It was the last major military revolt against the English. And the last time Indian rulers commanded soldiers in battle and died sword in hand. More poignantly, the 1857 Uprising was a high point of Hindu-Muslim unity in the pre-colonial subcontinent. The two largest religious traditions in India found common cause, and fought and bled together in battle with the English, albeit colored of course by their mutual communal dislike for Christian converts. The communal feeling in time would turn against each other, helped along by the British who identified the Mughal Empire and its legacy for comity between both groups as a threat. After the mutiny, the British limited the influence of Muslim communities in favor of Hindus. The dissolution of the Mughals and the court culture they had promoted drove many away from Delhi to more isolated corners. And in time Hindu-Muslim communal violence, while no means unheard of in precolonial India, heightened and spread across different parts of India, continuing even after Independence.

After 1857, and the aftermath of violence and bloodlust, the British decided to try social engineering rather than social reform. With India now being an official colony directly ruled by England, the state’s official purpose was no longer that of a profit making venture. Unofficially, the British Raj’s government was similar in size and shape to the East India Company and was still exploitative. The main innovations were the Indian Civil Service, which was originally staffed by the English, which took upon tasks relating to public works and engineering to maintain public order, not bound entirely or solely by the profit motive as the East India Company was and whose work was at times for the benefit of the Indian people. Thomas Macaulay, who had helped the Company direct educational policy in their territory had recommended the instruction of English as a language of instruction in secondary schools and this task was spread with gusto by the British after 1857 under the idea that Indians exposed to the English language and English life would identify and respect them, and even think like the British do about themselves, ie they are semi-barbaric imbeciles who are too dumb to see the British as the best thing that happened to them. Industrialization and urbanization had slowly seen the emergence of an English-speaking middle class intelligentsia in Calcutta (a class known as Bhadralok) and this persisted in Bombay and Madras. And the English believed they could be natural allies, more loyal to them, than aristocrats pining for the days they commanded an army. In actual fact it would be this middle class that would bring about the end of British colonialism in India.

Britain created a modern system in India, with railways, telegraph and court systems - but the entire infrastructure was specifically designed to exploit the resources of the country, with only a minimal regard as to the consequences for the Indian people, although it was also careful to avoid unnecessarily antagonising the people. Right up until independence, there was minimal interest with zero support from the crown, in fixing social problems such as casteism, illiteracy, gender and income inequality, etc that civilizations were attempting to overcome around the world; any progress made on those fronts was either made in spite of the government or because something the government found expedient happened to lead to progress tangentially. Indeed, the British often encouraged these inequalities by establishing ethnic identities by special categories and quotas, which further spread religious divides. The Indian rupee would be pegged to the silver standard rather than gold as with the English Pound. This devalued the currency and hampered the rupee for decades. This is known as "The Drain" in Indian history, when India's wealth and resources were harnessed—recklessly—by the British for their own ends. Britain then proceeded to popularize this image of the 'Poor India' around the world, emphasizing that such a country of "savages" was unfit to rule itself. The British rule was also marked by periodic famines in India, which came about because of the laissez faire attitude to liberal capitalism. As Franklin D. Roosevelt^note Who despite his friendship with Churchill was a critic of British Imperialism and repeatedly stated that America would push for decolonization after the war, noted, "Every year the Indian people have one thing to look forward to, like death and taxes. Sure as shooting, they have a famine. The season of the famine, they call it."

Britain could hardly claim to be a democracy even in its native land in the 19th century. Property qualifications were still demanded for voting, and women were denied the vote and universal male suffrage only arrived in the UK after World War 1, and true universal suffrage for men and women only a few years later. Even so India under the British was more or less a totalitarian state. A population several times the size of the United Kingdom had no say in the running of their land, their own economic policies, social policies, and foreign policy. Political parties and assembly were encouraged by the English however. One of the parties being the Indian National Congress which in the course of time would become one of the major political parties in India and govern for a great part of its early post-independent history. At the outset, Congress was 19th century liberal in outlook, seeking to slowly reform India to autonomy and home rule. Factions within the party dreamed of true independence ruling India the same way they had seen the English rule themselves in the UK. They opposed radical action. However others saw the need for direct opposition and rejection of British rule, Bal Ganghadar Tilak being chief among them. Tilak was a Chitpavin Brahmin. He often expressed his support of Indian self-rule in upper caste terms but at the same time, he radically supported all kinds of actions against the English, and was imprisoned on charges of sedition after he criticized the British government for its handling of plague in 1897, and then for his refusal to condemn assassinations of British officials by local agitators. These actions established that British support for Indian political parties had certain limits, and they established the British as hypocrites especially among the wealthy middle class English speaking Indian intelligentsia of this period. Many had gone to England, studied there and had participated in and observed British reform movements and read about agitations in Ireland and other anti-colonial movements. It quickly dawned on them that the British might preach civilization to “the savages” but there was no amount of improvement and education that would ever prove “savages” as “civilized”, so long as the British could keep Moving the Goalposts.

All it would take is for the right kind of political leader to brave those limits and push the contradictions and hypocrisy in British ideology to its logical extent.

India's independence struggle caught global attention after World War I. Several Indian freedom fighters had supported calls for Indian soldiers to enlist in the hopes for Dominion Status and autonomy. Despite the great numbers of Indian soldiers who died for the Crown, the British didn't uphold their side of the bargain. Then after the war, the events of the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre happened, where British General Dyer ordered a contingent to fire on protesters in a crowded area. The resulting violence, brutal crackdown, martial law in Amritsar and grotesque acts of torture earned condemnation across India and the world (even by arch-imperialist Winston Churchill in Parliament). Around this time, a lawyer returning from South Africa, named Mahatma Gandhi (though still called Mohandas Karamchand at the time) was making his voice heard in India. To protest this massacre, he called for the Non-Cooperation Movement, a large scale boycott of Indian goods that electrified public opinion and earned Gandhi worldwide attention. Later events such as the Civil Disobedience movement and the iconic Salt March, and several other agitations exposed the absurdity and arbitrary nature of English rule behind the propaganda of the Empire.

Before Gandhi, the notion of Indian Independence had largely been an elite concern. Most of the population of India, rural and poor, and only slowly connecting to modernization through the emergence of train travel, had little sense that India was exploited by a foreign power, specifically a European power. Most had never seen an Englishman, and the colonial bureaucracy was often staffed by Indians engaged in the British system for professional and careerist ends. The spread of print media and new technology such as radio and newsreels however, helped spread the idea of larger economic and international forces at work. Despite his traditional dress of a man in a dhoti and a walking stick, Gandhi was well aware of the power of new media to spread a movement, and he designed his protests to help raise awareness and education about the nature of Indian rule under the thumb of the British Raj. Gandhi helped make the cause of independence a mass movement and build the cause of Indian nationalism.

Despite his immense importance however, Britain's withdrawal from India was not solely, or mainly, a result of Gandhi's protests. The Independence movement had many factions and groups, not all of whom agreed partly or wholly, or even at all, with Gandhi. There were radical socialist groups such as Chandrashekar Azad and Bhagat Singh who believed in radical action, assassination, and terrorism to achieve their ends. There were communist groups across India, and there was the mercurial figure of Subhash Chandra Bose who professed socialism and courted an alliance with Stalin but was rebuffed (the USSR were neutral at the time, to both Nazi Germany and the Allies, and Stalin wanting to keep his options open did not want to foment rebellion against the British Empire when he might need help from them, later down the line). Bose then turned to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan instead. Bose wasn’t personally a fascist, his Indian National Army had no caste or religious barriers, with soldiers from all walks having common messes, and likewise the first female pilots in the Indian military. The Indian Armed Forces after independence would take inspiration from his outfit. He saw his alliance with Imperial Japan as an Enemy Mine against the English which in a colonial context made him fall into a gray area for many Indians, who were not as quick to mark him as a fascist traitor as the British undoubtedly did. Militarily unsuccessful as it was, the INA came to be seen as a symbol of resistance during a landmark trial and Bose who died in a plane crash was rather quickly elevated into a national icon, having escaped the potentially embarrassing repercussions of his decisions. The fact that many members of the INA did in fact participate in war crimes alongside Imperial Japan is rarely given acknowledgment in India. Nor the fact that during the war, Imperial Japan actually conducted bombing raids in Bengal and Assam and had explicitly aimed to conquer India.

World War II transformed India. Several Indians served in the allied armies, seeing action in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many activists joined the army hoping that fighting fascism abroad would lead to the end of imperialism at home. This includes figures like Noor Inayat Khan who became a British spy and ended up captured, tortured and executed at the Dachau concentration camp. Indians numbered heavily in the British Expeditionary Forces at Dunkirk. World War II severely drained the British economy and was one of the major cracks in English resolve to hold on to its colonies. During the war, Gandhi announced the Quit India movement and this led to protests and anti-British riots beginning to break out around the country. Many felt that it was hypocritical for the British Empire to paint the Nazis as tyrants and imperialists for taking over other White European nations while excluding what they had done from the conversation, seemingly treating the sovereignty of the non-white nations as of lesser consideration. During World War II, British requisitioning of grain in Bengal for the war effort triggered the Bengal Famine of 1943, which resulted in the deaths of 2.1 million people, a famine comparable to the Holodomor in the USSR. Whether the famine was deliberately caused by Churchill, or occurred by means of indifference and contempt, (his statements like “Indians are 'breeding like rabbits” and that “Indians are a beastly people with a beastly religion certainly didn’t help matters.) or because of the conditions of a war superimposed on top of centuries of British laissez-faire contempt for public works in all its colonies, remains a topic of contention. The Fall of Singapore was a major defeat of the Royal Navy and confirmed, even to Churchill, that the only way the English could maintain colonial holdings in India, was with support from USA. FDR however was unsympathetic, coming to believe that a post-war world order could not contain the old form of 19th century imperialism (one of the many inspirations and justifications for Nazi Germany, and Prussia before them, was the British Empire and its conquest of India, believing that they deserved to carve a similar empire) favoring instead peace and free trade (shaped of course by the US dollar). FDR also contended with the USSR who were defiantly taking the cause of anti imperialism and he wanted to shore up America’s poor record on that front.

The war made the UK more democratic and the more democratic England became at home, the less invested they were in keeping imperialism alive. And as such in 1945, the Labour Government of Clement Attlee won its first parliamentary majority, on the promise of the NHS and a claim to grant independence to its colonies in South Asia, for which there was great support and international pressure from USA and USSR. However, it was by no means inevitable or automatic that the British would have left India without substantial local opposition. The British stayed in Kenya into the 1950s, and violently contended against its rebellion, and likewise in Malaysia and later sponsored a coup against the democratically elected Mussadeq in Iran when he nationalized oil. Other European nations such as France violently defended colonial possessions in Algeria and Vietnam, as did the Dutch in Indonesia. The US government at that time had turned militantly anticommunist and that meant in practice that they often defended and supported preexisting imperialist interests. India’s independence was largely achieved through the agency of its own people, its own leaders, and the generations from before who put their lives on the line in the fight against European white supremacy and exploitation.

Even then, the independence attained in 1947 was as much triumph as it was tragedy.

The policies of The Raj, alongside internal party disputes within the Congress, led to a polarization between the two parties of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. The leader of the Muslim League, and founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was originally a member of the Congress party. He had once voiced support for Hindu-Muslim unity, and was a committed nationalist. Yet, factional disputes within the Congress, perceived closeness to Hindu religious leaders and fears of a Hindu nationalism rather than a secular one, made him sympathetic to the two-nation theory, a demand for a separate nation for India's sizable Muslim minority carved out of provinces in the Raj that had sizable Muslim majorities and Hindu-Sikh minorities.

Despite the purpose of Pakistan as a nation for the Muslim minority, a vast number of Muslims did not wish to live in a separate Muslim nation and identified with Indian nationalism. Indeed, in the 21st Century, India ranks among the top three Muslim populations in the world, with 172 million residing in India and calling it home (greater than the total populations of Russia and Japan). It's only in proportion to the 900+ million Hindu population that Muslims constitute a "minority" in India. The British eventually introduced reforms by which some form of regional autonomy and elected representation was allowed. In 1938, the Muslim League got 4.4 % of the vote, with the majority of Muslims across India (even in the areas of Modern Pakistan) voting for the Congress, leading Nehru to boast that he represented more Muslims than Jinnah did (in retrospect a case of Tempting Fate). However, the Congress' support of the Quit India movement in 1942, while bowing to the demands of the populace, proved to be a tactical political failure. This event got the party leaders imprisoned for two years while leaving the floor entirely to Jinnah's Muslim League who stepped into the vaccum and offered critical support to the Churchill government, in exchange for recognition as the party that represented the interests of the subcontinent's Muslim population. In 1945, the leaders of Congress were released and fresh elections were called for, and this time Jinnah and the Muslim League won a resounding majority across the Muslim majority regions and raised their vote share to 75%, seemingly claiming a mandate for their demands of a separate nation, that merited validation from the English. This 1945 election was the largest of its kind at the time in colonial India, but owing to its newness, it only managed to get registered voters that accounted for 10% of the population of undivided British Raj (which numbered 390 million). The British however interpreted this as a mandate for a separate Muslim state.

That's the important thing to emphasize about the Partition of India. At no point can it be said that the majority of people, neither in independent India nor in independent Pakistan, ever truly voted for partition, and definitely not for the Partition that it got.

The leadership of both the Congress and the League remained elite rich professionals who spoke English in meetings and discussions, fairly detached from the mass of public opinion and barely aware of how calls for two nations and partitions would sound to the people on the ground. Jinnah for his part seemed to give feelers and indications that the partition was merely an extreme demand and that there might be concessions he'd agree to, but the Congress party, embittered by imprisonment, felt angry and resentful at the prospect of treating the Muslim League as a party of equals, after seemingly consigning them to be a joke in 1938. They saw their recent electoral gain as evidence of opportunism, and even collaboration, and not a true shift in public mood. This was not an atmosphere for cooler heads to prevail. Jinnah's vision for Pakistan and India, expressed at various times in the past and even in his speech on Pakistan's Independence Day (August 14, one day before India's) was of two nations that would rest side-by-side with separate electorates, and governments, but would have open borders for trade. He expected Hindu and Sikh minorities to remain in Pakistan and Muslim minorities to remain in India without any calls for expulsion. He often said that he saw 'India' as a subcontinent containing two nations of Hindustan and Pakistan. He defined 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' as ethnic categories, noting that simply having one set of last names in Sanskrit/Persian marked you out with seperate diets, separate social circles, separate community halls, and this existed outside of one's personal religious convictions ^note  Jinnah by a variety of sources is considered to have been a non-observant Shia Muslim. He never professed to be an atheist but theology was a matter that he rarely ventured into and was a highly Westernized aesthete who enjoyed the high life. This clashed with Gandhi and Nehru who were committed to, respectively, a syncretic and secular vision of India, and they refused to back down.

The Labour government, who came to power in 1945, promised independence, and the goal was a "dignified exit". Louis Mountbatten, part of Britian's Royal Family, and who was reeling from the disaster of the Dieppe Raid was appointed to be the last Governor-General of the Raj. Mountbatten arrived to find that the Raj's government was barely holding on, with daily strikes across India in 1945. Many, even among independence leaders, personally estimated that a transfer of power could occur in 1948, some suggesting the 1950s, but Mountbatten pushed it months earlier. The deal he agreed to was the division of India and Pakistan by which Hindu majority states and Muslim majority states, directly under British control, would fall to the two new nations. Princely states in the domain and vicinity of both India and Pakistan had the option to accede to either country as per the desires of the Princes. The bigger issue is that the boundaries dividing India and Pakistan, was tasked to be drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a Briitsh civil servant who had never been to India. He conducted no new land surveys, and he relied on outdated maps, with little to none on the ground research to see the terrain and the people who lived there. While the Muslim League campaigned on an independent Pakistan in 1945, and got the votes for it, the nature of that claim was left vague during the campaign. The high-minded idea, that the partition was merely geographic with open borders, by which people of both states could cross if they wished with nobody inside either state being forced out politically, never exactly filtered down into a fancy slogan or neatly encapsulated message. There was never a true referendum with clear votes on a variety of options, as to what kind of partition would ensue, and which states could join which nation. It was entirely done in back room deals, and smoke filled rooms, horse trading between political elites, who simply expected that the masses of peoples whose futures they were shaping would sit back and take what they decided, with the same bonhomie and 'smiles for the camera' with which they ended meetings.

Radcliffe revealed the line dividing India and Pakistan on August 17, 1947. The leaders of both new states had declared independence without knowing in full detail what they had agreed to and both sides were appalled at the settlement. But that is nothing compared to the total shock with which the people on the ground received it with. It caused panic across the states of Punjab, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Kashmir, and Bengal. Villages, small towns and cities which had hoped to fall in India and/or Pakistan in fact fell the other way. Lahore was a city with a mixed population and historically a center of Sikh culture and the capital of the Sikh Empire, Karachi had a population that was almost 50% Hindu. The Partition was a true partition in that regions that had historically been considered parts of a single culture were permanently severed in connection demographically and culturally, rather than gain independence. Both India, Pakistan and much later Bangladesh lost parts of their society and culture and decades later would be filled with a historical and socio-cultural empty space where the rest of their land across the border used to fill. Many noted that cities like Lahore and Karachi were closer in feeling to Amritsar and Delhi than both cities were to the rest of India. The Grand Trunk Road which unified the two regions into one whole was literally partitioned with border tolls and crossing.

The lack of infrastructure meant that public order had collapsed and local powers such as landlords, “businessmen” (an euphemism for crime lord in 1940s Hindu-Urdu slang) and other vigilante mobs and farmers felt that they had to take up arms to defend family and property. And you know, potentially take other people’s property if they get the chance. Old scores and grudges could also be settled in the wake of chaos, preexisting family feuds, caste hatred, or religious grudges. On account of the 19th century eugenics inspired policies of the English, sections of India were divided into “martial races” which meant places like Punjab were heavily favored for recruitment and promotion of local soldiers into the British army. Many of these soldiers (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs) fought for the English in World War II. They saw action in Europe and in Asia. A lot of them, demobbed on allied victory, likely coping with PTSD and so on, were recruited to become muscle for partition gangsters on both sides of the border. The moving up the date meant that the infrastructure to arrange and police the population exchange had to be erected in haste, and in some cases, not at all. As such people were forced to suddenly leave what they considered their homes, with their belongings and asked to move to an area which they were told was now their country when, in most cases, their true homeland was the world they left behind, whose new residents were the strangers coming their way to take it. This led to the violence of the Partition, the largest and bloodiest communal violence in South Asia, where more than 1 million people were killed as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims clashed in Bengal, Punjab and the Sindh, in addition to leaving millions more displaced. The level of violence was often shocking and personal. Families on both sides of the border record stories of people who had been guests at weddings weeks before, leading mobs to murder them and run off with women and children. The violence often extended beyond simple religious feeling, since even secular and non observant Hindus and Muslims felt animus and resentment that someone with a Sanskrit or Persian last name was part of their social circle, accusing each other of treachery. Even in places further removed from partition, mixed communities started forcing out groups and families for more ethnically homogenous enclaves under the belief that Hindu and/or Muslim neighbors could become fifth-columnists at the first window of opportunity.

This was the largest population exchange and greatest human migration in history, and the greatest collective act of mob violence in recorded history. It has often been compared to The Holocaust which was revealed to the world two years before. Indians and Pakistanis often use the term “genocide” to describe the event, and both nations argue that the other is responsible for the violence, leading to little consensus in publicly recognizing this incident. To say that the parties (India, British, Pakistan) were unprepared and incompetent in handling the crisis is an Understatement. The trauma of these events had a psychological impact on India and Pakistan, and the memories of these events, the loss of land, lives and dignity, and the overall responsibility is an issue of great contention. In plain fact, most of the perpetrators of the violence of the partition were never brought to justice either side of the border, and lands taken by force were never given acknowledgments or reparations. Oral histories and records on both sides, in joint projects by Indian and Pakistani academics are trying to rectify it however. In the immediate aftermath, both India and Pakistan took to helping refugees, many of whom had lived in temporary camps and shelters, even in large monuments like Delhi’s Humayun’s Tomb. Both sides felt it convenient to play down the trauma of partition, partly to not dial away the legitimate triumph of post-colonial independence and positive national fervor, as well as the fact that both nations genuinely had equally pressing concerns at hand.

The former British Raj which governed the whole subcontinent was divided into what is now modern India, Pakistan, and much later Bangladesh. On Partition, Pakistan became a non-contiguous land that included West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Eventually, with Indian military support, East Pakistan, carved out of the Bengal province, became Bangladesh and gained its own independence from Pakistan after a rather bloody civil war. Other important issues included Portuguese occupied Goa (which was later conquered and integrated into India—not that most Goans had any problem with it) ^note This led to a rather amusing incident in which the Portugese attempted to invoke the Anglo-Portugese Treaty of 1373 to defend Goa against India; the British basically told them, "You're a puny bunch of quasi-fascist colonialists, India is a powerful and reasonably-friendly and democratic member of The Commonwealth, so...how about no?". Other former Raj domains included Bhutan (which remains independent), and Sikkim (which was an Indian protectorate from independence to 1975, at which point it was admitted as a state).

A much-overlooked fact is that because of the structure of the British Raj, India had to fight for considerable swaths of territory. The country at the time was divided into a whopping five hundred plus now-independent Princely States (which Britain had governed and taxed indirectly through traditional Indian monarchs) and, deciding not to expend the vast resources that would be necessary to make a smooth transition, Britain took an attitude of "you guys sort it out among yourselves" and withdrew without establishing the new government. The Herculean task of gargantuan task of uniting the 560+ princely states fell to Home Minister Vallabhai Patel, his Constitutional Advisor V.P. Menon, and the Britain-appointed Viceroy Louis Mountbatten. While the parts of the subcontinent under direct British rule immediately became part of the Union of India (as it was called before it became a republic in 1950), the Princely States themselves had the option of joining India, Pakistan, or remaining independent. Majority-Muslim states on the border with Pakistan tended to join Pakistan without controversy, while most others chose to join India. However, several princely states refused to follow the obvious patterns, the most notable of which are Kashmir, Junagadh, and Hyderabad, all instances where the ruling elite was a different religion from the majority of the population in the state. Kashmir, where the ruler was Hindu and the people Muslim, is quite possibly one of the biggest political cans of worms in the world today, besides the Arab–Israeli Conflict, Korea, Afghanistan, and The Troubles. The other two major instances involved a Muslim ruler over a majority-Hindu state: Junagadh's Muslim prince decided to join Pakistan despite not bordering it at all, leading India to essentially lay siege to the territory, and eventually the prince bailed out to Pakistan. Hyderabad's Muslim ruler, the Nizam, decided he didn't much care to be part of either India or Pakistan. The princely state of Hyderabad was extremely wealthy and the Nizam was one of the world’s richest men, and he saw independence as a chance to rewind the past to precolonial statelets. He built a force, called the Razakars, who violently defended the state. In response, India launched a military operation, with Hyderabad becoming forcefully integrated, although the actions of the Indian army were quite violent and would cast bitter memories for years to come.

On August 15, 1947, India became an independent nation, which despite its partitions, constituted the 7th largest nation in the world. The next few years was a period of consolidation, when the Constitution was debated and discussed and it was finally ratified four years later, January 26, 1950, which is celebrated in India as Republic Day.

The constitution of India, was written by Dr. Ambedkar, the great Dalit scholar who was considered the greatest legal mind of his generation. He was an equal opportunity critic of different political groups and blocs, and especially critical of Gandhi. Strangely this might be the reason why one of Gandhi’s final actions before his assassination, was recommending to the future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that Ambedkar be the one to author India’s constitution. Someone who was on the fringes of all existing power blocs alone had the neutral disposition to craft a truly equitable settlement. In later years, Ambedkar would see his work writing the constitution as “hack work” but neutral observers nonetheless consider it a great achievement by any measure. It is the world’s longest written constitution at 145,000 words with 395 articles in 22 parts and 8 schedules. It defined India as a sovereign, secular republic. It recognized regional autonomy with federal (called central in India) government at the center directing affairs. It broke down caste barriers, and recognized universal suffrage for men and women. India can claim to have given the vote to women far before Switzerland and with a longer democratic history than Spain, Portugal, and modern Greece, in the comparative timeframe.

Ambedkar’s dismissal of his own work in writing the Constitution is partly because of his own bitterness in his difficulties seeking political office in the years after independence. He was far more a pamphleteer and critic in the vein of Thomas Paine (one of his greatest inspirations) than a politician. It also stemmed from his belief and observation that the Indian Independence Movement was not a true revolution. The movement had indeed spread national consciousness across class, regional, linguistic, and religious lines, among men and women, but it failed to do anything to advance “the annihilation of caste” (the title of a monograph that Ambedkar had written). The Indian Independence Movement for the most part was backed by business magnates like Birla, Bajaj, Tata, Godrej, Wadia who had all thrived in the British Raj, albeit several of them did commit and support the Independence movement out of genuine patriotism and a pragmatic belief that they’d make more money outside the Raj and its glass ceilings, than within it. It’s leadership was upper caste Hindu as was its business and social intelligentsia and the end of British rule meant that they could attain generational wealth and social capital denied to many newly enfranchised lower caste and Dalit Indians. One of the earliest attempts at redressing this was a caste census which was conducted but had its findings suppressed and periodic attempts at generating a caste census has become a third rail in Indian politics.

The partition of India left a large sizable minority of Muslims within India, several of whom spread out geographically across the Subcontinent, many of them regionally integrated. A Marathi speaking Muslim or a Tamil speaking Muslim had little to identify with Muslim majority Pakistan located far away from them (the distance between Lahore or Peshawar and South India is analogous to asking people from Poland to migrate to Iceland, by land, rail, and ship as plane travel wasn’t widely a thing in India at this time) in an Urdu language most of them didn’t speak or comprehend. For many of them, their home was in India and so they remained Indian. However, the loss of Pakistan left Muslim communities vulnerable. A full half of their demography had shrunk and the political class of Pakistan was largely the wealthy elite, the well educated, and ironically enough, secularized less observant communities. Without them, their avenues for political representation and enfranchisement had been reduced, and over time, Indian Muslims with storied exceptions in the entertainment and business industries, became poorer, less educated and more discriminated against over time, and more heavily criminalized for offenses than other groups. They had to rely on parties like the Congress which was a big tent group that had factions that leant to Hindu majoritarianism (largely around Sardar Vallabhai Patel) and those led by Nehru, a professed atheist who nonetheless wore traditional khaki clothing and dutifully accepted rituals and other functions happening around him.

The Congress for their part had to stave away groups like the RSS, a militant faction led by Madhav Gowalkar and intellectually supported by V. D. Savarkar who called for a Hindu supremacist nation run by upper caste Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and sections of Shudras who could be co-opted. The ideology took a major setback when an assassin radicalized by Savarkar murdered Gandhi in 1948. He was planning to visit Pakistan on a diplomatic visit and personally meet refugees of partition violence. Godse, his killer, blamed Gandhi for the partition (a man who had opposed it, and whose visit to Calcutta helped calm mob violence in the city). The event if anything solidified the secular consensus for India, which lasted for decades into the 90s. Savarkar died in disgrace and embarrassment. While legally found non liable for the killing, he was judged for moral responsibility. The RSS would be banned though that would be lifted later and their path to power into Indian politics was by no means permanently closed.

On its left, the Communist Party of India organized itself as a bloc that never could take power outright at the center but would be a force in regional politics in Bengal and Kerala, and would likewise develop an intelligentsia and cultural output to counter that of the Congress. The mainstream of the Party in India never radicalized the way they did in other parts of Asia, fully agreeing to engage in electoral politics. For the most part they aligned with the Congress under Nehru, mildly critical of their alliance with paternalistic businessmen who supported heavy government investment and regulation, noting that said regulations would neither go far enough nor for that matter generate wealth to justify more public works. However, the mainstream of the Party while subject to the surveillance and disapproval common to the democratic nations during the Cold War never entirely opposed Nehru from the left. Real radical actions were done by people on the fringes, several of whom took up the cause of the tribal groups in Naxalbari. Taking inspiration from Mao, the Naxalites became a radical militant faction who opposed the forest clearances and displacement of Adivasis from tribal land for the sake of mining interests. They would argue that the Indian Independence Movement replaced colonialism by Europeans with a Europeanized bourgeoisie that exploited and colonized its own people for the sake of international capitalism. Many noted that the adivasis were comparatively left alone by the Raj. Leftist groups also conducted violent action especially in Kolkatta, the city that is furthest left in India.

Regional politics over time became a bigger hotbed. The Indian States were divided on linguistic lines rather than mixed regions with multiple dialects. This meant that communities became more endogamous and linguistically isolated. In the South, local political parties sabre rattling on language and shared culture would ensure that its own parties rather than national big tent parties would rule. The height of the regional backlash is the rise of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, home of Bombay the economic hub of India. Led by a former cartoonist named Bal Thackeray, the Sena claimed ideological descent and continuity with Shivaji and the Maratha Empire (its name means Shiva’s Army or Shiva’s Squad). From the 1980s to the 1990s, they took over the city’s municipal corporation and the city’s trade unions, operating a political machine that argued for a majoritarian Hindu nationalism and the supremacy of the Marathi language. Their biggest triumph was renaming the city of Bombay to Mumbai, on the historically contested claim that the city was originally called Mumbai after a local goddess Mumba Devi. This was done unilaterally on seizing the state congress without putting it up for popular referendum. They rose to national notoriety for their involvement in communal riots of the 1990s. But in later decades they would at times moderate and become a more conventional centrist Conservative Party. Politics in India became more about client patronage links, doing favors, or being connected than about any true ideology.

At the center, the Indian state navigated many crises, some of its own making. Military defeats in China wounded Nehru personally and politically. He had sought rapprochement and alliance with China on a common internationalist socialist vision. The Chinese however had unresolved border issues and used force to play their hand, resulting in a military setback in 1962. The Sino-Indian Conflict also saw one of the first state-directed attempts at persecuting minorities, namely interning Indian citizens of Chinese descent, who were migrated to camps in a policy based directly on the US Japanese-American internment program. This remains a buried secret in India's public discourse even if the records of the event are all in public and recorded in articles and books dedicated to the topic. Nehru died in office shortly after, out of illness and stress. Economically he had created a mixed public-private policy that heavily regulated businesses and provided social programs for the poor. The actual assessment of this record is highly partisan and prone to extreme claims on both the left and the right. Nehru’s greatest legacy was simply consolidating and building the institutions and organs of Indian parliamentary democracy, in which his success is remarkable when measured against contemporaries in Pakistan, Indonesia, Africa, and South America. Paradoxically, his daughter nearly undid it. Indira Gandhi became the party leader after Lal Bahadur Shastri. She ruled as the third Prime Minister and continued her father’s socialist program, going further in some respects. At the same time, she proved far more shrewd in international politics, outfoxing Nixon and Kissinger during her intervention into the Bangladeshi War of Independence in 1971 against their ally in Pakistan. The presence of a US vessel in the Bay of Bengal led her to invest in nuclear weapons, building of the work in civilian atomic research conducted in her father’s term. She oversaw the building and detonation of a nuclear weapon in Pokhran, Rajasthan in 1974, code named “Smiling Buddha” (a more inappropriate name for a nuke has rarely been recorded elsewhere). This made India an entrant into the Nuclear Club. It also led to the start of Pakistan’s nuclear program which in time would make the Indo-Pak conflict one of the potential hot zones for nuclear Armageddon, arguably more so than the US-USSR.

Indira Gandhi provoked India’s greatest constitutional crisis when she invoked a State of Emergency in 1975-1977. There was a state of political dissatisfaction and unrest over her government, and her personally authoritarian manner. There were already widespread protests and general government disorder. Nine of it however on any scale to justify the Emergency Authority under which elections were suspended and political opponents were imprisoned. Mostly on her right. She suspended the emergency after 21 months and called for fresh elections which led to the Congress Party being defeated electorally for the first time, losing to the Janata Party, a coalition of anti-authoritarian left with communal right wing parties, including the RSS. The later more right wing Bharatiya Janata Party claims descent and continuity from this. The Emergency was in part driven by ideological fixations close to Indira’s circle, chiefly her eldest son Sanjay Gandhi who fell under the sway of radical family planning ideas promoted by quack statisticians in the West. He launched a campaign of forced vasectomies and sterilizations on segments of Delhi’s population. These were the major crimes committed at the time, which otherwise evaded the mass executions common in other repressive moments of authoritarianism. The Emergency polarized Indian society, and while the Congress party returned to power electorally, it had ceded much of its moral authority. Indira Gandhi herself would be assassinated in her time in office after her actions in Punjab against the Sikh Separatist movement calling for an independent Khalistan. The assassination would be followed by a wave of Anti-Sikh pogroms in the capital of Delhi, that unleashed the spectre of communal violence within independent India. Her son Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister after her and he likewise intervened in the Tamil separatist conflict in Sri Lanka which eventually led to his own assassination by suicide bombing years later.

Culturally and socially, independent India found moments of success in sports, with its cricket team that became World Cup Champions in 1983 as well as similar achievements in chess, mathematics, and science. The culture of Bollywood films in the classical era helped build a secular culture that mixed influences from different communities and is credited by many for keeping Urdu alive as a language in India, rather than entirely subsumed with the more Sanskritized Hindi dialect of post-independence India. Regionally there was a great creative explosion in culture in many languages. Films by Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak became world renowned and writers like R. K. Narayan won international fame for his “Malgudi” novels. Indian origin writers in the diaspora such as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie also attained fame and controversy and Indian fashion, textiles, and art exercised influence across the world. Indian Cuisine especially became treasured around the world. The Delhi restaurant Moti Mahal created by exiles from partition developed the globally renowned Butter Chicken, which became voted, fittingly enough, as the most favored and preferred dish of post-imperial UK.

For its first 25 years, independent India could claim to be a reformist liberal success story that established rule of law, but gradually political violence organized by “goondas” (crooks who arm themselves with knives, swords, sticks and bludgeons, rarely guns owing to gun control laws) made a resurgence. At significant moments, political parties across the spectrum, sent gangs to raise hell and rouse tensions for political gain. By the time of the Republic of India’s 50th Year Anniversary in 1997, the mood was a lot less triumphant. India’s mixed economy period ended ignominiously when the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to mark ‘the end of history’. India became a free market liberalized economy in the 1990s during the P. V. Narasimha Rao administration, from the same Congress Party as Nehru moreover. To achieve this, India had to take a loan from the IMF in a moment of considerable embarrassment. Paradoxically, India also lurched into the past. In 1992, a group of RSS activists destroyed the Babri Masjid arguing, on pseudo-historical grounds, that it was the site of the birthplace of Lord Rama, the mythological king from the Ramayana. The failure to prevent this desecration of a protected historical monument and bring perpetrators to account it also radicalized sections of India’s Muslim community. In Bombay, bomb blasts in theaters and other public spaces, planted by gangsters Dawood Ibrahim and Abu Salem sparked the rise of terrorism in India, with many bombings and attacks in the 90s. These bombings led to communal riots organized by Hindu right wing parties that further spiraled into chaos. While equilibrium had returned, things were never the same again.

American capital, TV, movies, and consumerist goods and values entered India to general cheer. India developed a middle class that became affluent and soon lived lives in India more or less identical to Europeans or Americans in the first world, with new upmarket malls and restaurants and more exclusive private schools and ritzy enclaves which could be somewhat secluded from the slums around the city. Market Liberalization heightened income inequality in India. Affluent houses existed alongside flophouses, many of them featuring servants who lived in tiny pantry like spaces but traveled hours to work in a loft several times the size of their homes. The myth of India since the 90s was the emergence of entrepreneurial classes, and rags to riches success stories, of which there only a few. Most of the wealth was concentrated in the very top percentages. Given the exponential rise in India’s population, a small percentage of Indian wealthy groups would still add up to a large number by global standards. Furthermore, most of the wealth and nouveau riche come from pre established caste groups and elite families. The political class became largely dynastic and many claimed access to privileged admissions in elite schools. Corruption has always been a problem, with India, much like many societies with client patronage networks, but it heightened in the 90s and 2000s where virtually every year there was some scam or scandal in the financial world, in entertainment, in sports, or in politics.

Socially, the increasing use of violence by political parties started to constrain freedom of speech and expression. India is the only major democratic nation to have an official national censorship organization which greatly limits the kind of movies, and documentaries that can be seen in mass media and limits the kind of adversarial positions that artists and academics otherwise take in other democratic nations. There are of course exceptions but most of the media and artistic class are considered conformist by most outside observers regardless of who is the ruling party. Political demonstrations against movies with any kind of taboo content, such as movies that cast a critical eye on religion, or approach women’s sexuality, or academic books that present a critical or skeptical eye towards historical figures are likely to provoke squads of goondas to beat up theater owners, news organizations, and even archives containing actual historical records. The Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray in 1960 made a film that angered religious conservatives with ‘Devi’ but the Nehru administration supported him in a way that later liberal and even leftist organizations rarely do so. Women in India are still tied to family and clans, and are constantly under threat of sexual assault and while the presence of women in the workforce is rising as are women living independently, the glass ceiling is diamond hard for them in a milieu that is traditionally patriarchal. In India, abortion laws face a unique problem different from other parts of the world. Most Indian families favor their first born child to be male or otherwise desire a male child. As such sonographies identifying the gender of a child has led to forced abortions by the husband or their in laws over the mother’s objections. The Indian government has banned ultrasound sonographies from revealing the gender of a child before birth as a result.

Despite this, Indian society has made progress socially and economically. A large number of people have been lifted from absolute poverty, even in the most skeptical assessments. While social liberalization has slowly occurred in India, such as the increasing acceptance of gay rights and even trans rights, both of which have been legalized by the Supreme Court. Many Indians, even from Dalit castes have found pathways to higher education, if not within India, then through immigration abroad. There have been large protest movements led by university students, and farmers, against controversial legislations, with the 2019 protests against a citizenship bill being in terms of size, the largest since independence and a farmer’s protest a few years later boasting similar large numbers.

Against this, there is the rise in organized troll groups who use modern social media apps such as WhatsApp and others to spread pseudo history and drive up vigilante violence. There is constant ethnic tension and flare ups across India. The Naxalite insurrection remains a bleeding ulcer for more than fifty years at this point, and the Kashmir issue while seemingly dormant for the 2000s has flared up again in the late 2010s and 2025, igniting further fears of nuclear war. Meanwhile the wealthy Indians - Ambani, Adani, Mittal - get richer still, and more opulent, spending north of a billion dollars on a wedding in a nation with high rates of infant mortality. Much like other parts of the world in the late 2010s and 2020s, India faces challenges of rising oligarchy, democratic backsliding, rise in online disinformation, and populist posturing.

Narendra Modi became the defining political figure of early 21st Century India. As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi’s tenure witnessed an attack on Hindu pilgrims on a train in Godhra, Gujarat. Before an official investigation could be concluded, a communal riot broke out across Gujarat leading the the deaths and displacements of more than a thousand people, largely Muslims who were forced out of their homes and killed en masse. Internally displaced Muslims were forced into poverty and terror. The failure of the administration to prosecute him, built up his aura. Modi built important ties to the business community as well as affluent donors from the global Indian diaspora. Elected as PM in 2015 with a large electoral mandate (in actual fact the party, under Modi has never reached even 40% of the popular vote in a national election, benefitting greatly from opposition divides and FPTP), Modi showed an appetite for radical action such as Demonetization, by which the higher denominations bank notes had to be exchanged in a small deadline, without any approval from Parliament. The impact of demonetization largely fell on those who worked in a cash economy, largely low and poor income households and wiped out savings overnight. However, divided opposition and a shrewd media image has kept Modi from facing real electoral repercussions or internal party challenges. The Covid pandemic was initially responded with alacrity by the Modi ministry largely since the lockdowns disrupted the protests against the citizenship bill. But after locking down early he ended social distancing far earlier than others leading to a spike in deaths in the second and third waves, leading to mass panics and shortages of oxygen cylinders as well as smog cover caused by excessive cremation of dead.

Time will tell, if the Modi state faces a setback and reversal much like the Nehru and Indira ministries did in their time or if a new kind of politics takes root sometime later in the century.

In the 21st Century, India became one of the world’s largest economies and identified as an emerging great power. It has challenges from within and without and much like other nations, coping with the threat of climate change and extreme weather events.