After the mutiny of 1857, the British
Empire had taken over the subcontinent completely and introduced many reforms
and orders to make India the best place for them to use and rule. During the
time period of 1857-1914, the British not only dwindled the resources of India,
but also used the Indian land as a market for British exports. The drainage of
resources was legitimatized by British as a general valid use of its colony
along with the exploitation of the Indian troops for its imperialistic goals.
The army was chosen after many anthropometric measures and only the martial
races were taken in the army thus discriminating openly among the locals. The
economy of India was patterned to meet the colonial needs and to pay for the
British debts with other countries by using the India’s export surplus. The
locals suffered through this until the ‘World War I’ broke out and the British
started to lose theirpower followed by disruption in the Indian society and
economy. These changes provided the Indian nationalists with a power vacuum to
come into play and launch movements of self-rule and independence of India in
the years to come. The colonial
framework which was established after 1857 started unwinding as a result of
World War 1 in 1920s and set up a ground for decolonization of India with the
imminent of World War II in the 1940s. In this paper, I will try to highlight
how the interwar period reformed the political framework of India with the
change in the economy, state framework, and military, and also howrevolutionary
Indian leaders like Gandhi brought a change in the politics of the
subcontinent.
The west has the craze of dominance
from the start and has waged wars against many nations in order to get more
power. In order to go to the fight field of World War I, the British needed a
strong army and they recruited a huge number of Indian soldiers for this
purpose. The ratio of Indian Soldiers to British soldiers changed from 1:2 to
almost 2:1 during the war because the Punjabi and other martial races, which
were made martial by the British, were used for the ultimate purpose offulfilling
the demands of the lords. According to Jalal and Bose, there were 1.2 million
soldiers in Indian army and nearly 60,000 Indian soldiers were killed fighting
for Britain. This is just an estimate of the loss during the World War I and
this is how the British really used the Indians as their toys who can satisfy
their desires of ruling other nations. With this huge army, there was also a
need of providing them with food and other supplies. These facilities were
provided to them in the war zones, like in the Middle East, and a lot of Indian
regions faced food crisis as the food got exported to the army who were
fighting for the Raj. India’s defense expenditures increased by some 300
percent during the war. The colonial government had to increase the income tax and
custom duties and aggressively raise subscription to war loans. (Jalal &
Bose, 2011). These martial measures during the war totally ruined the economy
of the India and it slowly caused in sucking up of the resources of India
making it a worthless pile of land.
The Indian army during the inter-war
period was kept very active inside India as well in order to stop any kind of
protests, civil unrest and agitations, because the nationalists had started
standing up against the colonial rule for treating their motherland very
brutally. As Marston explains: “The Indian army was called many times during
the 1920s and 1930s as an aid to the civil power. Omissi noted that in 1922,
over a four month period, the army was called out on sixty two occasions” (Marston,
2014). The use of army was definitely a repressive state apparatus which tried
to limit political powers to rise against British or do any protests. Many of
the political leaders considered the army as a sword of the colonial power and
the emergency which was imposed during the war time continued even after that
in the form of Rowlatt Acts. This made the locals very uncomfortable because
their people had fought for British, but they were getting coercive rewards in
return. The people of India then came out to the streets and started nationwidehartals
and huge protests which sometime even got violent. The colonial power had to
impose martial law at times, but the cruelest incident happened in 1919 in
Jallianwalla Bagh where Reginald Dyer ordered to open fire on peaceful crowd of
hundreds of people. “Drawing up his Gurkha troops at the entrance, he fired
until some 370 trapped protestors lay dead and over 1,000 wounded” (Metcalf
& Metcalf, 2006). The violence of the army had reached its peak, and
massacres like this triggered the nationalistic uprising in India where the
politicians then had good example of colonial injustice.
The continuous demand for self-rule
by Indians and the weakening condition of the British power due to the wars
brought a change in the British policy about ruling the subcontinent. Edwin
Montagu announced in 1917 that the objective of British rule in India would be
“gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the
progressive realization of the responsible government in India as an integral
part of the British empire” (Metcalf &Metcalf, 2006). It is quite
interesting to note the phrase “progressive realization of the responsible
government” because the British thought that the locals were not capable enough
to rule themselves therefore it is the colonial power’s responsibility to make
them realize how to rule. Montagu believed that Indian educated people are
intellectually British’s children who had been fed by Britain and would be able
to carry on the legacy if taught more and polished. This is how British tried
to legitimize the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre as well for its ‘moral effect’ and
that Indian are like children who need to be scolded and taught the best way to
live as a civilized nation. In order to make the idea of self-government
practical, Montagu-Chelmsford reforms or the system of diarchy was introduced
where the functions of Indian government were dived into two. This was nothing
close to the Sawaraj, self-rule, because the main state matters like
army, law and order and exports still rested with the center in New Delhi which
was under the control of British, and very little power was given to the
provinces, like health, education, agriculture and some other sectors. This did
not work out very well because British Raj used compulsion along this and
definitely failed to convince even Congress to adopt the plan.
The Indian National Congress and
Muslim League both put a lot of efforts to bring political upheaval and
awareness in Indian public during the inter-war period. In the middle of the
mayhem conditions when the rulers and the locals were both getting violent, a
very different philosophy emerged in the Indian politics in the form of Mahatma
Gandhi’s Satyagraha, truth force, and non-cooperation movements. Gandhi was a
very important political figure of the inter-war period because he best
understood the circumstances and created a nation-wide or rather world-wide
influence on people not only as a political leader but also as a spiritual
leader and philosopher. Gandhi realized that the British have been able to rule
India because they have the support of local people specially those who were in
army, civil offices and police. This is where he came up with his idea of civil
disobedience, as Marston says: “Civil disobedience (by Gandhi) was an attempt
to break down the ingrained response of co-operation, without openly advocating
insubordination within the army” (Marston, 2014). This was the perfect
political move and probably the best response to the British vehemence because
the civil disobedience of Gandhi was always based on his non-violence attitude.
British, who claimed to be morally superior before, did not know how to respond
to these movements because if they used force, they would be going against
their own ideology of moral principles and would also be seen negatively in the
global community. This form of politics in return flipped the political
scenario and made the Indians morally superior to British and forced them to
listen to the demands of Indians.
Muslims and Hindus had quite good
ties after the Lucknow Pact of 1916, and Gandhi got the sanction of Congress to
join the Khilafat movement in 1920 to support the Muslim’s demand for safety of
the Ottoman Khilafat. The alliance of Congress-Khilafat started the
non-cooperation movement throughout India under the leadership of Gandhi. Many
people think that it was the peak of Hindu-Muslim unity in India in the
colonial times, but I personally think that this movement created more gaps and
enforced two separate identities in the subcontinent. Metcalf and Metcalf also
support this idea in chapter 6 of their book A concise History of Modern
South Asia by saying: “ Indeed, the organization of parallel, yet separate,
processions and meetings by the Congress and the Khilafatists only intensified,
and so institutionalized, this distinction (Muslim and Hindus) between
communities” (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2006). An interesting thing to notice here
is that neither Jinnah nor Iqbal joined this movement because they believed it
was useless and impractical as the goals of the movement lied outside of India.
Gandhi called off the non-cooperation in 1922 when a mob killed twenty-two
Indian policemen by putting a police station on fire in Cahuri Chaura and this
was again the end to the short-lived mirage of Hindu-Muslim unity.
One of the major reasons of the
change in the mass political up rise of subcontinent during the inter-war
period was the downfall of the economy of India because of British’s exploitation.
British took the colonial India as a proprietorship which they can use the way
they would like to, as Chatterji writes: “On the eve of the Great War, then,
India was unquestionably imperial Britain's most prized possession. But
Britain's system of power and profit in India was not immutable” (Chatterji,
1992). In this era not only the agrarian sector but also the industrial sector
suffered a major decrease in profit which could be used inside India. Because
so much of the money was used in the defense sector during and after the war,
the local people had to pay more taxes and there was ultimately shortage of
food. “During the short period from 1917-1920 price level rose by nearly 50
percent, with those of the coarse food grains that constituted the staple of
the poor further than those of higher-quality crops” (Metcalf & Metcalf,
2006). The countryside people suffered from this the most because the transport
system got devastated after the war and neither could they bring their products
to the market nor could they get good price for their products. Gandhi joined
hands with the rural people and started Champaran Sayagarha against the force
cultivation of Indigo and peasants refused to pay taxes and government land
revenues. This campaign had two major impacts on the politics of India:
firstly, it united people and created harmony to fight against the British
irrespective of class difference and secondly, this campaign gave birth to
another political wing called the India’s trade Union which solely represented
the trade and commerce of India and were backed up by the Kisan movements in
various parts of India. Meanwhile, Gandhi also encouraged everyone to
participate in the Khadi movement through the All-India spinner Association and
the aim was not only to promote local goods but also another attempt to
unification of Indian people for the cause of liberation from the colonial
powers who were suppressing them in so many different ways.
The economy of the India was taken
over by the British both as a producer market and as well as a buyer market.
Chatterji explains: “In 1913 India was Britain's largest market, taking 16 per
cent of all British exports; she was of course the greatest market for
Britain's most important industry—cotton textiles. Britain was also the largest
supplier of industrial goods to India, and controlled virtually the entire
invisible trade of India” (Chitterji, 1992) This is how important the Indian
market was but, the agrarian sector started suffering very badly after the
price tumble in the west in 1929 and the foreign money was suddenly stopped
because of negative signs of the world market towards Indian exports
predictions. This created a havoc effecting all the commodities and the outflow
and drainage of gold started because the value of currency was at very low
rate. The famines and the Great Depression of 1930s made the relationship
between colonial power, the rulers, and the local people even worse. “The
policy of free-trade in India secured the latter crucial place in the system of
Britain's international settlements; it kept India open for British goods at a
time when other markets were closing against her.” (Chitterji, 1992). India was
literally being used as a source to balance out the trade of the Britain no
matter what the locals suffered through because of this act of insanity. As
Bagchi explains: “Although the external economic relation of Britain and India
had substantially changed since 1914, India was playing some of the balancing
role she traditionally played in the British imperial system” (Bagchi, 1972).
Britain could not just let India go
because it was the best possession they had till the late 1930s. In order to
keep their influence in India, they kept introducing many political proposals
like Cripps Mission, Government of India Act 1935, round table conferences,
Simon commission, elections, etc. Denies Judd writes in “The Lion and the
Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947”: “It is possible to see
the whole process of reform from Morley-Minto measures of 1908-9 to the
government of India Act of 1935 as an astute imperial strategy serving to
disguise Britain’s determination to hang on to India for as long as possible
(Judd, 2004). The British tried violent politics at first which didn’t work
against the peaceful protests and later they turned into various discussions
and towards the end of 1930s, British had pretty much given up on their
persistency to rule Indians by their own choice and policies as the resistance
they got from the local nationalists was hard to handle. None of these proposed
systems by British really worked because the locals saw the British power
declining with time and it reached at very low level during and after World War
II.
In conclusion, the
inter-war period had a lot to offer in terms of change in the political
situations of the subcontinent directly or indirectly effected by the economic
conditions of India. The army was exploited, the resources were used outrageously
and there were many administration gap in the British Raj which caused in
events like the great depression which forced the local people to rise, to
revolt and sometime these uprisings even got violent. The British used force to
stop the locals from these protests initially, but the mass political movements
were successful only after the British got weak because of the wars and also
because of the great leadership of people like Gandhi. After the British gave
up on compromise and coercive measures on locals, the nationalists of the
subcontinent started forcing for a self-rule with the two major parties: Muslim
League representing the Muslims and Congress claiming to represent everyone in
India. The inter-war era was a time of un-tangling of the colonial rule in many
parts of the world including India, and the subcontinent finally got
independence from the cruel colonizers in 1947; although,at the cost of partition
in the land and among people in the form of Pakistan and India.
Bibliography
Bose S., Jalal A. (2011). Modern South Asia. Oxford
University Press.
Metcalf, B., Metcalf, T. (2006). A Concise History of
Modern India. Cambridge University Press.
Marston, D. (2014). The Indian Army and the end of the Raj.
Chatterji, B. (1992). Trade, tariffs, and empire:
Lancashire and British policy in India, 1919-1939. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Bagchi, A. (1972). Private investment in India, 1900-1939.
Cambridge England: University Press.
Judd, D. (2004). The lion and the tiger: The rise and fall
of the British Raj, 1600-1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment