Lecture Notes – Session 1

Ideology:
A set of ideas, principles or beliefs, particularly of political nature but not limited to politics.

Nation State:
An independent state, consisting of a single large group of people sharing the same ideology
and language, culture and history.

Nationalism:
It is an ideology that emphasizes loyalty and devotion to a particular country or nation. It
places national interest above either individual or other group interests. Many historians
consider nationalism to be one of the most important forces in shaping modern history.

Decline of Mughal Empire 1707-48:

“When the aim of the ruling sovereign is the happiness of the people, the country
prospers, the peasants are at ease, and people live in peace. The fear of the king’s
order seizes the hearts of high and low. Now that the last age [kaliyuga] has come,
nobody has an honest desire; the Emperor, seized with a passion for capturing forts,
has given up attending to the happiness of the subjects. The nobles have turned
aside from giving good counsel.”

• Zamindars against the Mughals:

o The zamindars had ‘assumed strength . . . enlisted armies, and laid the
hand of oppression on the country’.
o The zamindars were men with local roots, often lineage heads and
chieftains, who possessed local knowledge, and control over peasant
cultivators.
• Princely rulers against the Mughals:
o A second ‘fault line’ intrinsic to Mughal administration was that of
established princely rulers, who had accepted Mughal power but kept
authority within their own compact domains, rendering tribute but not
subject to Mughal administration.
• Provincial Governors against the Mughals:
o The third ‘fault line’ was that of provincial governors, who were
appointed by the emperor in the normal course as administrators over
areas where they had no pre-existing local connections, but who then
acted autonomously, even while continuing to pay lip service to Mughal
authority.
 o By 1720s the princely states of Hyderabad, Awadh and Bengal had
declared independence from Mughals.
• Bandit chieftain Sikhs also arose against the Mughals.
• Attacks of Nadir Shah on Delhi:
o No episode more shattered imperial confidence and stability than the
attack of the Persian Nadir Shah (r. 1736–47) in 1739, who wrought
havoc alone his routes and unleashed butchery and brutality that left
some 30,000 dead in Delhi alone. His booty, as he returned home,
included Shah Jahan’s fabled peacock throne.
• Attacks of Ahmed Shah Abdali:
o In 1748 and 1757 the Afghan Ahmad Shah Abdali (r. 1747–73), whose
empire reached into Baluchistan, the Makran coast, Sind and much of
the Punjab, attacked Delhi.
• Military Fiscalism in Mughal armies:
o An innovation with far-reaching implications for the working of the new
system of regional states was the recruitment of infantry forces,
handling more efficient artillery and deployed with far greater discipline
and effectiveness than the traditional mounted cavalry of the Mughals.
o The eighteenth-century states welcomed European adventurers to train
these new units of professional soldiers, who, unlike peasants
conscripted by noble overlords for limited periods, were now full-time
mercenary troopers.

The Rise of the English East India Company:

• Founded on 31 December 1600, and chartered by Queen Elizabeth, the
English company was one among several European trading ventures that
sought to tap the riches of the ‘East’.
• Apart from Malabar pepper, which formed the bulk of the Company’s earliest
cargoes, India possessed no spices. To make matters worse, the Indians
had no interest in the commodities England had available for sale, most
notably woollen goods, so that, against the reigning principles of mercantilism,
and to severe disapproval at home, the Company had to export bullion to pay
for its Indian purchases.
• Furthermore, unlike the Dutch, who easily overwhelmed the petty rajas of the
archipelago, the English in seventeenth-century India confronted the
Mughal. The Mughals welcomed the English to offset the predominance of
the Portuguese, and later of the Dutch, as did Indian merchants, who relished
the opportunities afforded for profitable trade.
• The East India Company during the seventeenth century, nevertheless,
created for itself a secure and profitable trade. In place of the lucrative but
limited trade in spices, the English developed markets in Europe for a variety
of Indian produce, including indigo (a blue dye) and saltpetre (used for
 gunpowder). Most valuable, however, were fine quality hand-loomed Indian
textiles.
• With the growth of a consumer economy in a prospering Britain, after 1660,
the demand for Indian fabrics, such as chintz, calico, and muslin increased
rapidly.
• The Company’s imports from India to Europe, worth some £360,000 in 1670,
tripled in value over the subsequent thirty years, and then doubled again to
reach nearly 2 million pounds by 1740.
• Sustaining this trade was a grant awarded in 1617 by the emperor Jahangir
to Sir Thomas Roe, James I’s ambassador to the Mughal court. Under its
terms the English were allowed to establish factories at selected Mughal
ports, most notably Surat in Gujarat. These ‘factories’ were not (in
contradistinction to our current usage) sites of manufacture, but rather
warehouses where goods were collected by resident agents, called factors,
until they could be loaded aboard ship.
• Although the Company’s naval prowess encouraged the Mughals to grant
such trading rights, for the Mughals had no navy of their own, still the
Company, not allowed to fortify its factories, remained wholly dependent on
the goodwill of the Mughal authorities for their trading enterprise.
• By the 1660s, as Mughal power began to falter, the Company found its
factories, especially that in Surat, raided twice by Shivaji, increasingly
vulnerable, and so turned to a policy of armed defence.
• This brought the Company into conflict with the Mughal authorities, who
inflicted a humiliating defeat upon them in 1686. Nevertheless, by 1700 the
Company had secured the three ‘presidency’ capitals – of Madras, Bombay,
and Calcutta – from which its authority was subsequently to expand into the
interior.
• These presidency capitals were not established with the objective of colonial
conquest. The number of Company personnel posted to each never exceeded
a few hundred, while the forts were guarded by ill-trained soldiers, some 300
in Madras, recruited from the streets of London.
• Throughout the eighteenth-century missionaries were refused residence in
the English settlements.
• As the Company shifted its operations there from Surat, Parsi merchants
and artisans, Zoroastrians of Iranian origin, came along with them.
• As the Mughal Empire weakened following the death of Aurangzeb, and the
trade grew ever more profitable, so too did the temptation to gain an
advantage over one’s rivals by political means.
• Conflicts between the British and the French.
• A few hundred French or British soldiers, firing in volleys from a square
formation, could now hold off thousands of Mughal cavalrymen. A contingent
of European troops were thus worth a great deal to an Indian ruler.
The Conquest of Bengal:
• From the early eighteenth century onwards, the trade of Bengal had grown
ever more profitable to the East India Company. By 1750, this rich deltaic
province, the outlet for the trade of the entire Ganges valley, accounted for
75 per cent of the Company’s procurement of Indian goods.
• Dacca (Dhaka), now the capital of Bangladesh, in these terms:
o “Dacca is considered the first manufactory in India and produces the
richest embroideries in gold, silver, and silk . . . Provisions of all sorts
are exceedingly cheap and plentiful in Dacca: the fertility of its soil, and
the advantages of its situation have, long since, made it the centre of
an extensive commerce . . . Here is also the residence of a grand
Nabob, who, at his accession to the throne, conformable to an old
custom, something similar to that of the Doge of Venice on the Adriatic,
enjoys a day’s pleasure on the river, [in a barge] sheathed with silver”.
• By 1765, the administration of justice, or nizamat, was left to the nawab. In
form Bengal remained a Mughal province. In fact, however, it was wholly
under the control of the East India Company, for neither the emperor in
Delhi nor the figurehead nawab exercised any independent authority over the
region.

War against Tipu Sultan of Mysore 1799:

Some local rulers of Mughal India adopted an opposite scheme, that of bypassing
intermediaries and collecting directly from the peasantry. This was the solution
adopted by the Muslim conquest state of Mysore, founded by Haider Ali in 1761.
Haider and his son Tipu Sultan introduced into their state a rigorous revenue
management founded upon the encouragement of peasant agriculture and the
elimination of zamindars and farmers. In so doing they brought Mysore an enviable
degree of prosperity, and the funds to maintain an army of 60,000 men. Yet no more
than those who sought succour by borrowing could the Mysore rulers by their
ruthless centralization of power stave off eventual defeat at the hands of those who,
as we will see, controlled more resources and a larger army. In the end, ‘military
fiscalism’ did not so much preserve India from conquest as open the way to it.
Wellesley first moved against Tipu Sultan in Mysore. Implacably hostile to the British,
backed by a powerful army of infantry and artillery supported by an extensive light
cavalry, Tipu had fought the British to a draw in the 1780s. Although a conquest
state similar in many ways to that of the East India Company’s own, Tipu’s Mysore,
surrounded by British territory and unable to secure support from distant
revolutionary France, simply did not command sufficient resources to hold out
indefinitely. For the British, Tipu was the model of an ‘Oriental despot’, and his defeat
in 1799 provoked great rejoicing in Britain.
Colonising Minds:
• Western knowledge was translated into Urdu to counter the language barrier.
• 1817 – establishment of first English language college in Calcutta, the Hindu
College
• 1830s – this college had enrolled several thousand Indians studying English.
• Eating beef and drinking whiskey, these young Indians derided ‘irrational’
Hindu customs, and few were converted to Christianity as well.
• The so-called ‘Anglicists’, also insisted that Western subjects and the English
language should form the basis of study.
• The British vision of civilised modern world was successfully implemented at
educational level.

Brahmo Samaj 1828:

• Ram Mohan Roy was a Bengali scholar. He was well versed in Sanskrit,
Arabic, Persian and English and also was the former employ of EIC.
• Endeavoured a vision of a rationalist, monotheist and modern India.
• Responded sympathetically to the monotheism of Islam and the ethical
idealism of Christianity.
• 1828 – to propagate his beliefs he founded a society called the Brahmo
Samaj.
• With Governor General Bentinck, he supported the English education and the
abolition of sati.
• He sought to the ancient ‘scriptures’ to devise a ‘pure’ Hinduism.
• He described the centuries of Muslim rule as a time when ‘the civil and
religious rights’ of India’s ‘original inhabitants’ were ‘constantly trampled
upon’.
• Ram Mohan’s radical views provoked intense controversy among Calcutta’s
educated elite. Known as the bhadralok (respectable people).

Ranjit Singh & Anglo-Sikh Wars (1846, 1848-9):

• 1799 – Ranjit Singh pulled together disparate Sikh tribes and incorporating
Muslims and fought against the ‘Bhangi cheifs’ to establish Sikh empire in
Punjab, with a disciplined army of 20,000 infantrymen and 4,000 cavalry.
• Ranjit Singh adopted the administrative arrangements of his empire as of the
Mughals and organised his military to the European system to counter the
modern British army in the region.
• 90 percent of his empire consisted of non-Sikh population and he consciously
secularized his policies.
• 1809 – Treaty of Amritsar was signed between the British and Ranjit.
• 1823 – Ranjit Singh annexed the provinces of Multan, Kashmir and
Peshawar.
• 1830s – the British felt compelled to restrain when Ranjit Singh extended Sikh
power along the Indus.
• 1839 – Ranjit Singh died, but by the end of his reign he had a lac long army
which was considered the most powerful army of Asia at that time.
• 1840 – His son Daleep Singh took over as emperor.
• 1846 – First Anglo-Sikh war.
• 1848-9 – British conquer of Sikh Empire.