Walsh J.E. A Brief History of India

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

162

access to ICS (civil service) examinations, broader (middle-class) Indian

participation in the government’s Legislative Councils, the excessive

expenses of the Afghan wars, and government inaction during famines.

Pune

One of the earliest and most successful of the regional associations

was Pune’s Sarvajanik Sabha. Founded in 1870 out of several smaller

groups, Pune’s political association regularly organized public meet-

ings, debates, protests, and petitions on the issues of the day. It pro-

vided an early and regional context for the political development of

three of India’s most famous nationalist leaders.

The three men were Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), a

leader of the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay, Gopal Krishna Gokhale

(1866–1915), and Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920). All came

from Maharashtra, from the elite Chitpavan Brahman community, and

all three were English educated: Ranade and Gokhale at Elphinstone

College in Bombay and Tilak ﬁ rst at Pune’s local Deccan College and

then later at Elphinstone. Ranade, the eldest of the three, was a lawyer

and judge, college teacher, historian, and above all else, social reformer.

He founded in 1887 the National Indian Social Conference. Gokhale,

Ranade’s disciple, was a founding member of Pune’s Fergusson College,

where he taught for 20 years. He was committed to secular social

reform, founding the Servants of India Society in 1905, an organization

of full-time volunteers dedicated to welfare work. In contrast, Tilak

was the editor and publisher of two popular Pune newspapers: the

English-language Mahratta and the Marathi-language Kesari (Lion). In

his newspapers and speeches Tilak rejected the idea of social reform.

He preferred to direct his energies toward the revival of Hinduism and

the use of Hindu religious images and festivals for political organizing

in the region. Over the years, from the 1870s until their deaths in the

20th century, the two younger men, Gokhale and Tilak, fought out their

opposing views—ﬁ rst on social reform and religion, later on politics—

both within Pune’s Sarvajanik Sabha and later on the national stage.

Bombay

In Bombay city, the English educated came from commercial and trad-

ing communities, one of the most visible of which was the Parsis.

Descended from 10th-century Zoroastrian migrants from Iran, the

Bombay Parsis had been early supporters of English-language educa-

tion. Their most famous member in the 19th century, and one of India’s

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BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY

earliest nationalist writers, was Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917). Naoroji

was an early graduate of Elphinstone College who had founded one of

the ﬁ rst Indian business ﬁ rms in London and Liverpool in the 1850s.

Traveling frequently between England and India, he wrote on British-

Indian economic relations and became a mentor in England to Indian

boys sent abroad for education. In the 1890s he became the ﬁ rst Indian

elected to the British Parliament. Another politically prominent Parsi

was Pherozeshah Mehta (1845–1915), a prominent Bombay lawyer.

Mehta began his long career in regional and national politics in the late

1870s, when he was drawn into local efforts to protest the Vernacular

Press Act. He and other members of Bombay’s urban elite formed a local

political association, the Bombay Presidency Association, in 1885.

Madras

In the 19th and early 20th centuries Madras Brahmans dominated the

local English-educated community, and local Brahman communities

Annie Besant, shown here in a sari on a street in India, 1926. Annie Wood Besant (1847–1933)

had been the wife of an Anglican clergyman and associate of an English atheist and social

reformer before she converted to theosophy in 1889 and moved to Madras (now Chennai),

India. Besant, who was the international president of the Theosophical Society from 1907 until

her death, lived at the society’s headquarters in Madras and lectured and wrote extensively on

theosophy and on educational and humanitarian issues in India. She became a strong supporter

of Indian independence, founding the Home Rule League during World War I and serving as the

ﬁ rst woman president of the India National Congress in 1917.

(Library of Congress)

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

164

competed for control over the city’s political activities. G. Subramaniya

Ayyar and M. Viraghava Charia, joint publishers of the leading Madras

newspaper, the Hindu, initially founded a local political association,

the Madras Native Association, in 1878. When disagreements split

that association during the 1883–84 Ilbert Bill controversy, the original

founders reformed it as the Madras Mahajana Sabha (Great Peoples’

Association). Madras politics were further complicated after 1893,

when the English Socialist Annie Besant (1847–1933) moved to the

city. Besant, who became the Theosophical Society’s president in 1907,

actively involved herself in regional (and national) politics on the side

of Indian political self-determination.

Calcutta

Bengal was home to what was probably the oldest political association

in the country. The British Indian Association was a loyalist organiza-

tion of princes, zamindars, and, later, industrialists founded in the

1840s. In 1875 a new political organization, the Indian League, was

founded by members of the English-educated Bengali community who

worked in the city’s new professions of law, education, and journalism.

After a year, it was supplanted by the newly formed Indian Association,

founded by Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1926), a former ICS ofﬁ cer

who had been ﬁ red from the service and had turned instead to col-

lege teaching and journalism. Under Banerjea’s leadership the Indian

Association aggressively pursued public issues of interest to its mem-

bers, among other things helping to organize a multiregional protest by

Indian elites against the 1878 Vernacular Press Act.

The Ilbert Bill

The return of a Liberal government to power in Britain had brought the

marquis of Ripon to India as viceroy in 1880. Ripon began his term in

a mode popular with Westernized Indians by repealing the Vernacular

Press Act of 1878. He also encouraged the growth of primary and sec-

ondary schools and created governing boards in municipalities and dis-

tricts that elected two-thirds of their members. But in 1883 he aroused

the fury of the Anglo-Indian community when his law member, Sir

Courtney Ilbert, proposed modifying an 1873 law to allow certain cases

involving Europeans to be tried by Indian judges. At well-organized

public meetings and in newspaper ads, the Anglo-Indian community

declared the Ilbert Bill “intensely distasteful and humiliating to all

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BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY

Europeans” (Metcalf and Metcalf 2006, 120). In blunter language,

Anglo-Indian associations denounced the idea that “nigger natives”

could be considered their “peers or equals” (Wolpert 1989, 257). In

1884 Ripon’s government gave in and amended the bill to mandate that

if a European’s case was to be tried by an Indian judge, his jury must be

at least half Europeans. For Anglo-Indians this was a great victory. For

Westernized Indians, both the process and the resolution demonstrated

the fundamental racism of Anglo-Indians and the Indian government

in which they served. The bill also demonstrated to the Indian elite the

power and effectiveness of organized public protest.

By the time of the Ilbert Bill controversy, British rule in India had

transformed many aspects of Indian society. The British Raj had intro-

duced British administrative structures and the ideas and practices

of the West to a newly forming urban Indian elite. British economic

structures had transformed Indian agricultural production even as gov-

ernment-subsidized railroads and roads bound the subcontinent more

tightly together. In rural India, these changes left peasants more vul-

nerable than ever both to the economic ﬂ uctuations of the global mar-

ketplace and to the spread of calamitous famine and disease. In urban

India, over the course of the 19th century the new elites of British

Indian towns and cities had adapted themselves to the ofﬁ ce work,

administrative structures, and Western practices of the British Raj. By

the late 19th century these elites had begun to change their focus. From

earlier preoccupations with religious and social reform, acculturation,

and self-improvement, they now wrote and spoke more about the

revival and protection of indigenous religion and culture, about ﬁ nding

ways to participate in India’s imperially controlled government, and

even about nationalism, independence, and swaraj (self-rule).

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166

Toward Freedom

(1885–1920)

This is the ﬁ rst and most essential thing to learn about India—

that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India,

possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political,

social or religious. . . . That men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-Western

Provinces and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to

one great Indian nation, is impossible.

Sir John Strachey, India, 1888 (Embree 1972, 3)

he men who participated in the Indian nationalist movement

from its beginnings in the Indian National Congress in 1885 to

Mohandas Gandhi’s assumption of leadership in the 1920s all came from

the English-educated elite. They agreed broadly on the issues that most

affected them as a class—the need for greater access to the ICS and for

middle-class appointments to the Legislative Councils—and they agreed

on the terrible effects of “the drain” of Indian wealth to Great Britain.

But on the questions of whether the nationalist movement should work

for social reform or Hindu revivalism or whether its members should

see themselves as Her Majesty’s loyal opposition or as freedom ﬁ ghters,

they had no such easy answers. Early nationalists spent as much energy

ﬁ ghting one another over these matters as they did in ﬁ ghting the British.

In the decades between 1885 and 1920, in response to nationalist

pressures British rulers offered a series of constitutional concessions,

giving Indians marginal participation in India’s government while

conceding as little real power as possible. At the same time, British

ofﬁ cials worked to “divide and rule.” To preserve British power, ofﬁ cials

encouraged minority constituencies to deﬁ ne themselves in opposition

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TOWARD FREEDOM

to one another, as Muslims against Hindus, Dravidians against Aryans,

or Untouchables against Brahmans.

In the end, however, despite all their efforts, it was the British them-

selves who brought about the unity of Indian nationalists. Unbridled

demonstrations of imperial power and British racism in both 1905 and

in 1919 brought elite urban Indians not only into unity but looking

outside their own elite class for broader support for their movement

against the British.

The Indian National Congress

In December 1885, 73 mostly self-appointed delegates from all over

British India met in Bombay for a three-day conference. This was the

ﬁ rst meeting of the Indian National Congress. It had originally been

scheduled to meet in Pune, for Ranade and Pune’s Sarvajanik Sabha

were among its leading organizers, but an outbreak of cholera forced

its relocation to Bombay. Its delegates represented every province of

British India; 54 delegates were Hindu (most of whom were Brahman),

two delegates were Muslim, and the rest came from the Parsi or Jain

communities. All were English educated. “Congress,” as it came to be

called, began its existence as a supraregional political association, a

three-day yearly forum through which middle-class Indian men could

petition and memorialize the Indian government, just as regional asso-

ciations had already been doing but now on a wider basis.

The immediate impetus for the meeting came from Allan Octavian

Hume (1829–1912), a retired ICS ofﬁ cial who believed, as he told the

viceroy, Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Lord Dufferin (1826–

1902), that such a gathering would stabilize the English-educated elite.

Hume helped organize the ﬁ rst meeting of Congress, circulating letters

to English-educated graduates to encourage their support and serv-

ing as its ﬁ rst secretary. But many Congress attendees already knew or

knew of each other before the ﬁ rst meeting. Surendranath Banerjea,

W. C. Bonnerji (the ﬁ rst Congress president), Romeshchandra Dutt,

Pherozeshah Mehta, and Badruddin Tyabji had all come under the

inﬂ uence of Dadabhai Naoroji while in England in the 1860s and

1870s. Leaders of regional political associations in Pune, Bombay,

Madras, and Calcutta knew of each other from shared protests against

the 1878 Vernacular Press Act. And Banerjea’s Indian Association had

already organized two national conferences, one in 1883 and one held

at the same time as the Bombay meeting in 1885.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

168

Until Gandhi reorganized it in the 1920s the Indian National

Congress met for only three days each year, each meeting organized by

members from the region in which it was held. It had limited funds, and

for its ﬁ rst nine years its only full-time ofﬁ cer was Hume, its general

secretary. In its ﬁ rst years, Congress grew quickly: from 73 delegates in

1885 to 600 in 1887 and almost 2,000 in 1889. Through Hume’s efforts,

Muslim participation grew to almost 14 percent of the delegates by

1887. Attendance at the 1887 and 1888 sessions was particularly broad

based, with more than half the delegates traveling to the meeting from

outside the region in which it was held.

Congress delegates came from every British Indian province and

spoke many dialects, but they shared the elite status and high-caste

background common to the English-educated elite. They agreed (as did

the English educated generally) that Indians needed greater access to

the ICS and that middle-class Indians should serve on the government’s

Legislative Councils. The ICS was the premier service in India; appoint-

ment within the civil service gave Indians the only direct governmental

power they could have in British India. ICS appointments were chosen

by open competitive examinations, but the exams were held only in

England, and the maximum age for examinees (in 1876) was 19. As

late as 1880 the 900-member ICS had only 16 Indians. In a similar way,

the Legislative Councils also offered Indian members a voice, if not in

government decisions, at least in the debates that preceded them. But

while the councils had had appointed Indian members since the 1860s,

in practice only Indian princes and zamindars were ever nominated.

Seven successive years of Congress oratory and petitions succeeded

in 1892 in having the maximum age for taking the ICS exams raised

to 23. In the same year the Indian Councils Act provided for indirect

elections to the central and regional Legislative Councils in Bengal,

Bombay, and Madras. Through an elaborate procedure local munici-

pal boards, universities, and landowners’ associations (among others)

submitted lists of elected representatives to the government for ﬁ nal

selection. Nevertheless the process brought prominent regional leaders

such as Banerjea and Tilak onto their respective regional councils and

moderate Congress members, such as Mehta and Gokhale, onto the

central Legislative Council. Despite constant Indian pressure, however,

the ICS examinations, the key to Anglo-Indian dominance within the

service, would not be held in India until the 1920s.

While Congress petitions on English-educated issues brought some

limited success, escalating conﬂ icts between social reformers and reli-

gion revivalists split the English-educated elite in the 1890s, and violent

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TOWARD FREEDOM

THE DRAIN

rom the perspective of British imperialists, all the expenses of the

British Empire in India went toward services and projects that

improved India itself. “England receives nothing from India,” wrote

Sir John Strachey, “except in return for English services rendered or

English capital expended” (Sarkar 1983, 27). But for Indian nationalists

nothing was farther from the truth. Against the backdrop of the wide-

spread famines, sickness, and

poverty of late 19th-century

rural India, nationalist leaders

such as Dadabhai Naoroji and

Romeshchandra Dutt put forth

their economic theory of “the

drain.”

Far from beneﬁ ting India,

they argued, British rule was

draining India’s wealth away

from her. Yearly home charges

(funds sent to Great Britain)

drained revenues from India to

pay for the high salaries and

pensions of British civil servants

in India and for the exorbitant

expenses of an Indian army used

by Great Britain throughout the

world. British rule, said nation-

alist economists, had replaced a

prosperous, indigenous Indian

economy with an imperial eco-

nomic network that beneﬁ ted

foreigners (and Great Britain

itself) at the expense of indig-

enous Indians.

Modern scholars have con-

tinued to debate “the drain.”

Some argue that railroads, tech-

nology, and export agriculture

beneﬁ ted India’s economy in

the end. Others assert that the

Dadabhai Naoroji was from the Parsi

community of Bombay (now Mumbai).

He was educated at Elphinstone College

in that city before traveling abroad to

England where he established himself

in business and even won election to

Parliament in 1892. Naoroji mentored

many Indian students who traveled to

England to study in the late 19th cen-

tury, and his economic theories about

the British Empire—especially his theory

of “the drain”—shaped the views of

several generations of Indian national-

ists.

(R. P. Patwardhan, ed., Dadabhai

Naoroji Correspondence, Vol. 2, Part 1:

Correspondence with D. E. Wacha, 1977)

(continues)

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

170

communal clashes divided the broader Indian society. These conﬂ icts

took their toll on Indian political associations. Interest in both Congress

and regional political associations declined in the 1890s, and Muslim

attendance at Congress sessions was cut almost in half. Annual Congress

meetings began attracting fewer delegates from outside the state where

they were held and making up the difference with more local members.

Hindu Race/Hindu Nation

As was true of much of 19th-century society, early Indian nationalists

imagined “the nation” using two different and often contradictory

sets of ideas and images. One strand of 19th-century thought con-

ceived of the nation in terms of citizenship and constitutionalism.

Nations, in this view, were composed of individual citizens living

within a territorial state, their political obligations and rights deﬁ ned

by a constitutional contract between each citizen and that state.

Congress and regional political leaders known collectively to their

contemporaries as the “moderates,” men such as Ranade, Gokhale,

Mehta, or Banerjea, advanced this concept of the nation, citizenship,

and constitutionalism. They spoke the language of British constitu-

tional democracy and presented themselves as the government’s “loyal

opposition,” as leaders of India’s citizenry struggling to obtain for

them their inalienable rights.

Comfortable themselves with a style of life, dress, and habits adapted

to British colonial public life, these leaders enjoyed their new elected or

appointed positions within British government and their status within

elite urban Indian society. They looked forward to middle-class Indians

making gradual gains in inﬂ uence and power within British-ruled India

but were not troubled by the idea that such gains might be far into

the future. They frequently (if not always) supported social reforms;

British Empire drained off as much as 4 percent of India’s national

income in the later decades of the 19th century (Tomlinson 1993, 14).

Sources: Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India 1885–1947 (Madras: Macmillan India,

1983), p. 27; Tomlinson, B. R. The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14.

THE DRAIN (continued)

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THE SCIENCE OF NOSES

he leading exponent of “race science” in India was H. H. Risley

(1851–1911), a British ethnologist who served in India in the Indian

Civil Service from 1873 to 1910. Risley was the census commissioner

in 1901, and after his retirement in 1910, he was elected president of

the (British) Royal Anthropological Institute. Following the anthropo-

metric techniques of the

French anthropologist Paul

Topinard, Risley used a

“nasal index” (a ratio of

the width of a nose to its

height) to divide Indians

into two races—a dark-

skinned Dravidian race and

a fair-skinned Indo-Aryan

race. Using this nose sci-

ence, he proved (to his own

satisfaction and that of con-

temporaries) the existence

of a seven-caste racial

hierarchy in India, with

Dravidians at the “primi-

tive” bottom and Indo-

Aryans at the “civilized”

top. “The social position

of a caste,” he once said,

“varies inversely as its nasal

index” (Trautmann). Race,

not occupation, he con-

cluded, was the true basis

of the Indian caste system.

For late 19th-century “race

scientists” such as Risley,

this type of physiological

measurements served to

conﬁ rm the distinct racial

essences they believed

existed within the Indian

population (and more gen-

erally in the larger world).

Source: Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar,

1997), p. 203.

The “science” of noses. H. H. Risley drew his

ideas on nose measurements from the work of

a contemporary, 19th-century French scholar

Paul Topinard. Writing in his 1885 Elements

of General Anthropology (Éléments

d’anthropologie générale), Topinard developed

a “nasal index” (a ratio of the breadth of the

nose to its height) that enabled him to classify

noses (and their owners) into a series of nose

types. Narrow noses, said Topinard, character-

ized the Europeans (types 1 through 5); medium

noses characterized the “yellow races” (type

6); and broad noses belonged either to Africans

(type 7) or to Melanesians and native Australians

(type 8).

(Paul Topinard, Éléments d’anthropologie

générale, 1885)

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