India under the British administraton
Chart Hatchet
An economic development
The Indies will then be managed by a viceroy and Indian Civil Service. Not very many, approximately 100 ' 000, to dominate a so great unit (4.7 million square kilometers), the British adopts an analog and digital system: two thirds of subcontinent are under direct administration; the third remaining is left to the princes (approximately 600 at the beginning of the XX E century), vassal of the Crown, locally represented by a resident who enjoys a right to watch on the interior matters and external. A true colonial ideology, founded on the “cultural superiority of the conquerors”, develops. When the Victoria queen takes the title of empress of the Indies, in 1876, “imperial” supremacy legitimates any intervention in the princely successions.
The development of the railroads makes it possible to emphasize whole areas specialized in the cultures of export (jute, tea, cotton), which feed the British factories. With the imposition of the monopoly of the cotton fabrics, the “Indians” are from now on manufactured in Lancashire, and the local factories are ruined.
The emergence of a political thought
The development of an anglicized Indian middle-class, but excluded from the political apparatus (in 1879, the number of Indian civils servant is limited to a sixth of manpower) and economically persecuted, leads the birth of two currents, which will continue after independence, one nationalist and to the other Hindu traditionalist.
Unlike the traditionalists, dispersed in a multiplicity of groups, the party of the Congress (founded in 1885 by a British) succeeds in structuring nationalism while resting on two of the first three Indian castes: Brahmans and the vaiçya (commercial caste), castes princely “collaborator” remaining with the variation.
The question is then to know if India is a nation or a simple geographical concept. By dividing Bengal in two entities, one Moslem and the other Hindu woman, Lord Curzon (viceroy of 1898 to 1905) affirms the inexistence of the Indian nation de facto. He thus pushes the Moslems, who constitute the first of the minorities of the Empire (more of the quarter of the population), to organize himself, and the Moslem League is created in 1906.
When the nationalists extend their action to the economic domain by preaching the boycott of the English goods, agitation will become permanent, and the British will answer it by a series of ambiguous reforms: in 1909, the generalization and the reinforcement of the provincial councils, measure counterbalanced by the creation of an electorate separated for the Moslems; then the election in 1919 of the majority of the members of the provincial legislative councils, compensated by a repressive arsenal largely used, as the massacre testifies some to Amritsar, which generalizes the procedures of exception.
It is in this context that, in 1914, the return of Gandhi (lawyer at the bar of London and commercial caste) of South Africa reverses the power struggle with the British.