Concentrate on the following:
1. All the topics and philosophies discussed during the prelim, midterm and final period.
2. Communism
3. Socialism
4. Social Classes
5. Plato
6. Aristotle
7. Karl Marx
8. Nitzche
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Friday, October 5, 2007
HUM 102 Tips
Concentrate on the following:
1. China, Japan, India health care services particularly the statistical data on hospital beds, Japan Health Insurance, medical personnel.
2. Indian Literature.
3. Hinduism
4. Mahatma Gandhi's Education
1. China, Japan, India health care services particularly the statistical data on hospital beds, Japan Health Insurance, medical personnel.
2. Indian Literature.
3. Hinduism
4. Mahatma Gandhi's Education
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Karl Marx ( A brief lecture and note for My PHI 101 class 1st Sem. AY 2007-2008)
Karl Marx, 1818-1883
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member of Trier society, and man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.
Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical critique of Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed by the Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx's articles, particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to France.
Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was intended to bridge French socialism and the German radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).
Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.
At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
Early in 1848 Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The paper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy and Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship since the Communist League had been virtually disbanded. Marx's paper was suppressed and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his life.
Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was soon convinced that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then devoted himself to the study of political economy in order to determine the causes and conditions of this crisis.
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels who was trying a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The Grundrisse (or Outlines) was not published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his work to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. In Capital, Marx elaborated his version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit in the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III were finished during the 1860s but Marx worked on the manuscripts for the rest of his life and they were published posthumously by Engels.
One reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was incapable of sustained effort that had so characterized his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, he opposed in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, the tendency of his followers Karl Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913) to compromise with state socialism of Lasalle in the interests of a united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.
Marx's health did not improve. He traveled to European spas and even to Algeria in search of recuperation. The deaths of his eldest daughter and his wife clouded the last years of his life. Marx died March 14, 1883 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London. His collaborator and close friend Friedrich Engels delivered the following eulogy three days later:
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep -- but for ever.An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else.And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy.His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
Marx's contribution to our understanding of society has been enormous. His thought is not the comprehensive system evolved by some of his followers under the name of dialectical materialism. The very dialectical nature of his approach meant that it was usually tentative and open-ended. There was also the tension between Marx the political activist and Marx the student of political economy. Many of his expectations about the future course of the revolutionary movement have, so far, failed to materialize. However, his stress on the economic factor in society and his analysis of the class structure in class conflict have had an enormous influence on history, sociology, and study of human culture.
Steven Kreis
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member of Trier society, and man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.
Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical critique of Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed by the Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx's articles, particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to France.
Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was intended to bridge French socialism and the German radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).
Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.
At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
Early in 1848 Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The paper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy and Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship since the Communist League had been virtually disbanded. Marx's paper was suppressed and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his life.
Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was soon convinced that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then devoted himself to the study of political economy in order to determine the causes and conditions of this crisis.
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels who was trying a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The Grundrisse (or Outlines) was not published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his work to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. In Capital, Marx elaborated his version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit in the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III were finished during the 1860s but Marx worked on the manuscripts for the rest of his life and they were published posthumously by Engels.
One reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was incapable of sustained effort that had so characterized his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, he opposed in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, the tendency of his followers Karl Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913) to compromise with state socialism of Lasalle in the interests of a united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.
Marx's health did not improve. He traveled to European spas and even to Algeria in search of recuperation. The deaths of his eldest daughter and his wife clouded the last years of his life. Marx died March 14, 1883 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London. His collaborator and close friend Friedrich Engels delivered the following eulogy three days later:
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep -- but for ever.An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else.And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy.His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
Marx's contribution to our understanding of society has been enormous. His thought is not the comprehensive system evolved by some of his followers under the name of dialectical materialism. The very dialectical nature of his approach meant that it was usually tentative and open-ended. There was also the tension between Marx the political activist and Marx the student of political economy. Many of his expectations about the future course of the revolutionary movement have, so far, failed to materialize. However, his stress on the economic factor in society and his analysis of the class structure in class conflict have had an enormous influence on history, sociology, and study of human culture.
Steven Kreis
Monday, September 24, 2007
Basic Lesson on: Constructing a Critical Essay (For my lit. criticism class BSEDIV)
The first thing to note about constructing a critical essay is that it is not synonymous with doing a "close reading", though the two tasks are similar. The distinction is simply that while a close reading is meant to generate ideas and possible interpretations, a critical essay must utilize those ideas and interpretations to make an argument about the text as whole. Any good critical essay should arise out of one or more close readings of particular passages from the text, which can then be organized, into a coherent argument.
A critical essay usually consists of the following elements, each of which is explained in more detail below:
1. 1. The Thesis: a basic statement of the overall argument of the paper, usually contained within the first paragraph and sometimes re-stated later in the paper.
2. 2. Topic Sentences: each paragraph should contain a statement of the main idea of that paragraph. Taken together, these topic sentences should lay out the reasoning for the overall thesis of the paper.
3. 3. Evidence and Illustration: usually details uncovered in a close reading that lend support to each part of the argument. Every paragraph should contain both reasoning (topic sentences) and evidence or illustration..
4. 4. Questions or counter-arguments: used sparingly, and at critical moments in your argument, asking and answering potentially challenging questions can lend credibility to your paper. It lets the reader know that you aren't ignoring obvious complications or contradictions in the text.
5. 5. Conclusion: the conclusion brings together the evidence collected and explains how your thesis has evolved through the preceding paragraphs. It should explain the implications of your argument for further thinking about the text or issue.
The Thesis:
The thesis is the single most important element of your paper, so make sure you understand what a good thesis is. A good thesis must make an argument about the text that is original, complex, and arguable. That is to say, it cannot be a simple statement of fact, an argument drawn from another source, or an argument that is obvious from a surface reading of a text. It must be complex enough to require further elaboration in the body of the paper.
For example, the following is not a good thesis:1) "Frederick Douglass's narrative is a heart-wrenching account of the cruelties and hardships of slavery."--this is a statement of fact, and not one with which anyone is likely to argue.--the body of such a paper would likely just recount the events in the narrative, which is unnecessary. You can assume that your reader has read and understood the text.
This is also not a good thesis:2) "Learning to read and write becomes Douglass's way out of slavery and its oppression of the mind."--this is not an original argument, and is fairly obvious from Douglass's own statements in the text.
Here's a thesis that might hold up:3) "Frederick Douglass's pursuit of knowledge and his physical resistance to his overseers arise out of his own notions of 'manhood' and his perception of the psychological sources of the master's power over the slave."--this thesis is a statement of opinion, and one that might be intelligently argued by another reader (i.e. I might say that Douglass's resistance is driven by cultural or literary definitions of 'manhood' and that there are other more important sources of the masters' power like economics, religious authority, or access to technology, etc.).--while perhaps not completely original, it does allow for some original combination of evidence and illustration as well as individual reasoning.--it requires further elaboration in the body of the paper (see below)
Topic sentences
If you list your topic sentences in order (this is called a "skeleton outline") they should lay out the reasoning needed to support your thesis. You might try organizing possible topic sentences before you start writing.
For example, here are some possible topic sentences for the "good" thesis (number 3) given above:
"For Douglass, 'manhood' suggests both the ability to control his own body and the ability to communicate his thoughts through speaking and writing."
"Douglass recognizes that in order to have mastery over the body, one must first have mastery over the mind."
"Douglass realizes that once his mind has been set free, he can only suffer all the more acutely unless he can also free himself from the physical oppression."
Note: there would need to be more topic sentences (and paragraphs) than this in the final paper, but these can serve as examples. Note how each one elaborates on and refers back to the original thesis. They are, in effect, "sub-theses" that are needed in order to fully explain the larger argument.
Evidence and illustration
To support each topic sentence, you will want to utilize the details uncovered during your close reading: images, metaphors, allusions, the use of language and multiple meanings, interpretations of mood, tone, etc. These may come from a single passage (which has the benefit of unifying the paper into a tight, rich reading ) or from several passages (which allows for larger patterns of meaning that run throughout the text).
Organizing your evidence will require culling out things that don't add to your argument, taking a stance on particular interpretations, and explaining to your reader why you interpret the passage the way that you do. Don't assume that the reader agrees with you--convince them!
I can't provide a full listing of possible evidence and illustrations for the topic sentences above, but here are some suggestions as to where you might look:
Look at both the passages where Douglass learns to read and the passages describing his fight with Covey. What do these passages tell us about his notions of 'manhood'? How does he seem to define it? He seems to be talking about being "human" and being "masculine", and maybe the two ideas are merged? Cite passages for details.
Particularly in the passages about reading and writing, Douglass seems to equate "being a man" (or just a "human"?) with the ability to think, speak, read, and write. When he is later reduced to the state of a "brute", he seems to lose his ability to do these things (cite passage).
We see that after Douglass learns to read and write he experiences the very misery that the master says is the inevitable fate of an educated "nigger" (cite passage). In the scene with Covey, Douglass finds that mental freedom alone is meaningless without physical freedom (cite passage). So in these passages, "being a man" becomes a matter not only of communicating but also physically resisting (cite passage).
Make sure that in citing passages, you make proper use of quotations and in-text citations. See your assigned grammar and usage handbook for proper format.
Questions or counter-arguments
While you don't want to waste a lot of time going off on tangents unrelated to your topic, you should be prepared to answer potential questions or challenges to your thesis. Read over your paper with a critical eye, asking yourself if you've covered all the bases. Often, allowing a peer to read over the paper will also help identify these potential problems.
Once you've identified possible questions or counter-arguments, try to answer them in your paper. You can even include the question and then answer it, to show your reader that you're aware of the alternate possibilities and have thought it out.
Here are some questions one might ask about our working thesis (see above):
Does Douglass develop his own sense of "manhood" apart from the society around him, or are his ideas, in fact, the ideas that he acquires both from his own (slave) culture, and from white society?
Isn't there a potential conflict between defining "manhood" in terms of "mental freedom" and "physical freedom"? Which should be a slave's priority? Which does Douglass find more important?
Is there anything sexist in Douglass's notion of "manhood"? Are the same means of achieving "humanity" equally open to male and female slaves?
What place do emotional and familial bonds play in Douglass's quest for "manhood"? Are they important to him at all?
You needn't try to address every possible question or counter-argument--only the ones that seem critical to your paper. Do so sparingly and strategically.
Conclusion
Your conclusion should remind the reader of what your original thesis was and show how you've proven it. You want to restate it, but in a way that elaborates it with the evidence that you've provided.
Here's a possible beginning to the conclusion of the hypothesized paper above:
"I have argued that Douglass's discovery of 'the white man's power to enslave the black man' is both a realization of the mental oppression inherent in slavery and a recognition of the physical subjugation that is needed to enforce it. His quest for 'manhood' involves freeing both his mind and his body from captivity, and one cannot happen without the other."
The conclusion may also suggest why this argument is important to our understanding of the text as a whole, or point out further topics or questions that might now be important to pursue. It should convince the reader that the thesis has been worth pursuing. For example:
"Understanding the interdependence of mental and physical in Douglass's narrative allows us to see the true depth and extent of slavery's effect on the individuals who suffered it. It can also help us to recognize the importance of various forms of 'resistance' that may have been less dramatic than Douglass's fight with Covey, but no less necessary or effective."
A critical essay usually consists of the following elements, each of which is explained in more detail below:
1. 1. The Thesis: a basic statement of the overall argument of the paper, usually contained within the first paragraph and sometimes re-stated later in the paper.
2. 2. Topic Sentences: each paragraph should contain a statement of the main idea of that paragraph. Taken together, these topic sentences should lay out the reasoning for the overall thesis of the paper.
3. 3. Evidence and Illustration: usually details uncovered in a close reading that lend support to each part of the argument. Every paragraph should contain both reasoning (topic sentences) and evidence or illustration..
4. 4. Questions or counter-arguments: used sparingly, and at critical moments in your argument, asking and answering potentially challenging questions can lend credibility to your paper. It lets the reader know that you aren't ignoring obvious complications or contradictions in the text.
5. 5. Conclusion: the conclusion brings together the evidence collected and explains how your thesis has evolved through the preceding paragraphs. It should explain the implications of your argument for further thinking about the text or issue.
The Thesis:
The thesis is the single most important element of your paper, so make sure you understand what a good thesis is. A good thesis must make an argument about the text that is original, complex, and arguable. That is to say, it cannot be a simple statement of fact, an argument drawn from another source, or an argument that is obvious from a surface reading of a text. It must be complex enough to require further elaboration in the body of the paper.
For example, the following is not a good thesis:1) "Frederick Douglass's narrative is a heart-wrenching account of the cruelties and hardships of slavery."--this is a statement of fact, and not one with which anyone is likely to argue.--the body of such a paper would likely just recount the events in the narrative, which is unnecessary. You can assume that your reader has read and understood the text.
This is also not a good thesis:2) "Learning to read and write becomes Douglass's way out of slavery and its oppression of the mind."--this is not an original argument, and is fairly obvious from Douglass's own statements in the text.
Here's a thesis that might hold up:3) "Frederick Douglass's pursuit of knowledge and his physical resistance to his overseers arise out of his own notions of 'manhood' and his perception of the psychological sources of the master's power over the slave."--this thesis is a statement of opinion, and one that might be intelligently argued by another reader (i.e. I might say that Douglass's resistance is driven by cultural or literary definitions of 'manhood' and that there are other more important sources of the masters' power like economics, religious authority, or access to technology, etc.).--while perhaps not completely original, it does allow for some original combination of evidence and illustration as well as individual reasoning.--it requires further elaboration in the body of the paper (see below)
Topic sentences
If you list your topic sentences in order (this is called a "skeleton outline") they should lay out the reasoning needed to support your thesis. You might try organizing possible topic sentences before you start writing.
For example, here are some possible topic sentences for the "good" thesis (number 3) given above:
"For Douglass, 'manhood' suggests both the ability to control his own body and the ability to communicate his thoughts through speaking and writing."
"Douglass recognizes that in order to have mastery over the body, one must first have mastery over the mind."
"Douglass realizes that once his mind has been set free, he can only suffer all the more acutely unless he can also free himself from the physical oppression."
Note: there would need to be more topic sentences (and paragraphs) than this in the final paper, but these can serve as examples. Note how each one elaborates on and refers back to the original thesis. They are, in effect, "sub-theses" that are needed in order to fully explain the larger argument.
Evidence and illustration
To support each topic sentence, you will want to utilize the details uncovered during your close reading: images, metaphors, allusions, the use of language and multiple meanings, interpretations of mood, tone, etc. These may come from a single passage (which has the benefit of unifying the paper into a tight, rich reading ) or from several passages (which allows for larger patterns of meaning that run throughout the text).
Organizing your evidence will require culling out things that don't add to your argument, taking a stance on particular interpretations, and explaining to your reader why you interpret the passage the way that you do. Don't assume that the reader agrees with you--convince them!
I can't provide a full listing of possible evidence and illustrations for the topic sentences above, but here are some suggestions as to where you might look:
Look at both the passages where Douglass learns to read and the passages describing his fight with Covey. What do these passages tell us about his notions of 'manhood'? How does he seem to define it? He seems to be talking about being "human" and being "masculine", and maybe the two ideas are merged? Cite passages for details.
Particularly in the passages about reading and writing, Douglass seems to equate "being a man" (or just a "human"?) with the ability to think, speak, read, and write. When he is later reduced to the state of a "brute", he seems to lose his ability to do these things (cite passage).
We see that after Douglass learns to read and write he experiences the very misery that the master says is the inevitable fate of an educated "nigger" (cite passage). In the scene with Covey, Douglass finds that mental freedom alone is meaningless without physical freedom (cite passage). So in these passages, "being a man" becomes a matter not only of communicating but also physically resisting (cite passage).
Make sure that in citing passages, you make proper use of quotations and in-text citations. See your assigned grammar and usage handbook for proper format.
Questions or counter-arguments
While you don't want to waste a lot of time going off on tangents unrelated to your topic, you should be prepared to answer potential questions or challenges to your thesis. Read over your paper with a critical eye, asking yourself if you've covered all the bases. Often, allowing a peer to read over the paper will also help identify these potential problems.
Once you've identified possible questions or counter-arguments, try to answer them in your paper. You can even include the question and then answer it, to show your reader that you're aware of the alternate possibilities and have thought it out.
Here are some questions one might ask about our working thesis (see above):
Does Douglass develop his own sense of "manhood" apart from the society around him, or are his ideas, in fact, the ideas that he acquires both from his own (slave) culture, and from white society?
Isn't there a potential conflict between defining "manhood" in terms of "mental freedom" and "physical freedom"? Which should be a slave's priority? Which does Douglass find more important?
Is there anything sexist in Douglass's notion of "manhood"? Are the same means of achieving "humanity" equally open to male and female slaves?
What place do emotional and familial bonds play in Douglass's quest for "manhood"? Are they important to him at all?
You needn't try to address every possible question or counter-argument--only the ones that seem critical to your paper. Do so sparingly and strategically.
Conclusion
Your conclusion should remind the reader of what your original thesis was and show how you've proven it. You want to restate it, but in a way that elaborates it with the evidence that you've provided.
Here's a possible beginning to the conclusion of the hypothesized paper above:
"I have argued that Douglass's discovery of 'the white man's power to enslave the black man' is both a realization of the mental oppression inherent in slavery and a recognition of the physical subjugation that is needed to enforce it. His quest for 'manhood' involves freeing both his mind and his body from captivity, and one cannot happen without the other."
The conclusion may also suggest why this argument is important to our understanding of the text as a whole, or point out further topics or questions that might now be important to pursue. It should convince the reader that the thesis has been worth pursuing. For example:
"Understanding the interdependence of mental and physical in Douglass's narrative allows us to see the true depth and extent of slavery's effect on the individuals who suffered it. It can also help us to recognize the importance of various forms of 'resistance' that may have been less dramatic than Douglass's fight with Covey, but no less necessary or effective."
Poetry Lecture on the uses and design part 1
The purpose of Poetry is to instruct while it gives pleasure; instruction being the end, and pleasure the means—Illustrated by examples from different species of Poetry—The Didactic—Epic—Tragic—Lyric—the lighter kinds of Poetry, which are calculated as well for the amusement of our leisure as for the ornament and improvement of literature—Sacred Poetry; whence a transition to the immediate object of these Lectures.Though our present meeting be, on some accounts, rather earlier than I could have wished, yet I cheerfully embrace the opportunity which it affords me of assuring you, Gentlemen, that to this undertaking (whether considered as a duty imposed, or as a favour conferred upon me) I bring, if no other accomplishment, at least industry and inclination. I could, indeed, more patiently bear to be accused of wanting genius, fluency, or elegance, than of wanting diligence in the exercise of that office to which your authority has called me, or gratitude in the acceptance of that favour, which (whatever it be in itself) is undoubtedly great, since conferred on me by you. For to judge rightly of obligations of this kind, regard must be had, not only to the favour itself, but to the persons who confer it, and to the person on whom it is conferred. When, therefore, I reflect, that the station to which I am invited, has been adorned by men of the first rank in genius and earning; when I regard you, whose favour can add dignity to the most respectable characters; when, in fine, I consider myself, who could never have expected or hoped from my own merits for any public testimony of your approbation; I receive this appointment as an honour, for which the utmost exertions of labour and assiduity will be but a very inadequate return. This part of my duty, however, though feebly and imperfectly, I would wish you to believe I most willingly perform: for to an ingenuous mind nothing can be more agreeable than the expression, or even the sense of gratitude; and the remembrance of the obligation will rather stimulate than depress. Other considerations have, I must confess, rendered me not a little solicitous: I am appointed to superintend a particular department of science, which you have constantly distinguished by your presence and attention; and a subject is to be discussed, which not only you have judged worthy of your cultivation, and the public countenance of the University, but which has hitherto received in this place all the embellishments of grace and elegance of which it is naturally susceptible. Should it, therefore, fall into neglect or disrepute hereafter, I fear that I shall be compelled to acknowledge the fault to have been mine, and not that of the institution itself.
Friday, September 21, 2007
British-India (My student's report for HUM 102, Asian Civilizations 1st Sem AY 2007-2008)
British India
Anthem
“God Save The King”
Capital
Calcutta (until 1912), New Delhi (after 1912)
Language(s)
Hindustani, English and many others
Government
Emperor of India
Viceroy
Monarchy
1858-1901 -Victoria
1901-1910 -Edward VII
1910-1936 -George V
1936 - Edward VIII
1936-1947 - George VI
1858-1862 - The Viscount Canning
1947 - The Viscount Mountbatten of Burma
Historical era
New Imperialism
Established - August 2, 1858
Disestablished - August 15, 1947
Currency
British Indian rupee
Company Rule in India
On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I of England granted a royal charter to the British East India Company to carry out trade with the East. Ships first arrived in India in 1608, docking at Surat in modern-day Gujarat. Four years later, British traders defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Swally, gaining the favour of the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the process. In 1615, King James I sent Sir Thomas Roe as his ambassador to Jahangir's court, and a commercial treaty was concluded in which the Mughals allowed the Company to build trading posts in India in return for goods from Europe. The Company traded in such commodities as cotton, silk, saltpetre, indigo, and tea.
By the mid-1600s, the Company had established trading posts or "factories" in major Indian cities, such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras in addition to their first factory at Surat (built in 1612). In 1670 King Charles II granted the company the right to acquire territory, raise an army, mint its own money, and exercise legal jurisdiction in areas under its control.
`By the last decade of the 17th century, the Company was arguably its own "nation" on the Indian subcontinent, possessing considerable military might and ruling three presidencies.
The British first established a territorial foothold in the Indian subcontinent when Company-funded soldiers commanded by Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal - Siraj Ud Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Bengal became a British protectorate directly under the rule of the East India Company. Bengal's wealth then flowed to the Company, which attempted to enforce a monopoly on Bengali trade (though smuggling was rife). Bengali farmers and craftsmen were obliged to render their labour for minimal remuneration while their collective tax burden increased greatly. Some believe that as a consequence, the famine of 1769-1773 cost the lives of 10 million Bengalis. A similar catastrophe occurred almost a century later, after Britain had extended its rule across the Indian subcontinent, when 40 million Indians perished from famine. The Company, despite the increase in trade and the revenues coming in from other sources, found itself burdened with massive military expenditures, and its destruction seemed imminent.
Building the Raj: British expansion across India
Lord North's India Bill, The Regulating Act of 1773, by the British Parliament granted Whitehall, the British government administration, supervisory (regulatory) control over the work of the East India Company but did not take power for itself. This was the first step along the road to government control of India. It also established the post of Governor-General of India, the first occupant of which was Warren Hastings. Further acts, such as the Charter Act of 1813 and the Charter Act of 1833, further defined the relationship of the Company and the British government.
Hastings remained in India until 1784 and was succeeded by Cornwallis, who initiated the Permanent Settlement, whereby an agreement in perpetuity was reached with zamindars or landlords for the collection of revenue. For the next fifty years, the British were engaged in attempts to eliminate Indian rivals.
At the turn of the 19th century, Governor-General Lord Wellesley (brother of the Duke of Wellington) began expanding the Company's domain on a large scale, defeating Tippoo Sultan (also spelled Tipu Sultan), annexing Mysore in southern India, and removing all French influence from the subcontinent. In the mid-19th century, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie launched perhaps the Company's most ambitious expansion, defeating the Sikhs in the Anglo-Sikh Wars (and annexing the Punjab with the exception of the Phulkian States) and subduing Burma in the Second Burmese War. He also justified the takeover of small princely states such as Satara, Sambalpur, Jhansi, and Nagpur by way of the doctrine of lapse, which permitted the Company to annex any princely state whose ruler had died without a male heir. The annexation of Oudh in 1856 proved to be the Company's final territorial acquisition, as the following year saw the boiling over of Indian grievances toward the so-called "Company Raj".
Indian Rebellion
On 10 May 1857 soldiers of the British Indian Army (known as "sepoys," from Urdu/Persian sipaahi or sepaahi = "soldier"), drawn from the Indian Hindu and Muslim population, rose against British in Meerut, a cantonment sixty five kilometres northeast of Delhi. The soldiers marched to Delhi to offer their services to the Mughal emperor, and soon much of north and central India was plunged into a year-long insurrection against the British East India Company. Many Indian regiments and Indian kingdoms joined the uprising, while other Indian units and Indian kingdoms backed the British commanders and the HEIC.
Causes of the rebellion
The rebellion or the war for independence had diverse political, economic, military, religious and social causes.
The policy of annexation pursued by Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, based mainly on his "Doctrine of Lapse", which held that princely states would be merged into company-ruled territory in case a ruler died without direct heir. This denied the Indian rulers the right to adopt an heir in such an event; adoption had been pervasive practice in the Hindu states hitherto, sanctioned both by religion and by secular tradition. The states annexed under this doctrine included such major kingdoms as Satara, Thanjavur, Sambhal, Jhansi, Jetpur, Udaipur, and Baghat. Additionally, the company had annexed, without pretext, the rich kingdoms of Sind in 1843 and Oudh in 1856, the latter a wealthy princely state that generated huge revenue and represented a vestige of Mughal authority. This greed for land, especially in a group of small-town and middle-class British merchants, whose parvenu background was increasingly evident and galling to Indians of rank, had alienated a large section of the landed and ruling aristocracy, who were quick to take up the cause of evicting the merchants once the revolt was kindled.
The justice system was considered inherently unfair to the Indians. The official Blue Books — entitled East India (Torture) 1855–1857 — that were laid before the House of Commons during the sessions of 1856 and 1857 revealed that Company officers were allowed an extended series of appeals if convicted or accused of brutality or crimes against Indians.
The economic policies of the East India Company were also resented by the Indians. Most of the gold, jewels, silver and silk had been shipped off to Britain as tax and sometimes sold in open auctions, ridding India of its once abundant wealth in precious stones. The land was reorganised under the comparatively harsh Zamindari system to facilitate the collection of taxes. In certain areas farmers were forced to switch from subsistence farming to commercial crops such as indigo, jute, coffee and tea. This resulted in hardship to the farmers and increases in food prices. Local industry, specifically the famous weavers of Bengal and elsewhere, also suffered under British rule. Import tariffs were kept low, according to traditional British free-market sentiments, and thus the Indian market was flooded with cheap clothing from Britain. Indigenous industry simply could not compete, and where once India had produced much of England's luxury cloth, the country was now reduced to growing cotton which was shipped to Britain to be manufactured into clothing, which was subsequently shipped back to India to be purchased by Indians. This extraordinary quantity of wealth, much of it collected as 'taxes', was absolutely critical in expanding public and private infrastructure in Britain and in financing British expansionism elsewhere in Asia and Africa.
The spark that lit the fire was the result of a British blunder in using new cartridges for the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle that were greased with animal fat, rumoured to now be a combination of pig-fat and cow-fat. This was offensive to the religious beliefs of both Muslim and Hindu sepoys, who refused to use the cartridges and, under provocation, finally mutinied against their British officers.
The rebellion soon engulfed much of North India, including Oudh and various areas that had lately passed from the control of Maratha princes to the company. The unprepared British were terrified, without replacements for the casualties. However, after getting reinforcements, the British army was able to suppress the uprising and restore British control over these areas.
It was a monumental event in history, for both Indians and British alike. The Rebels had achieved (at that time) the impossible in uniting and overthrowing (if only temporarily) an apparently unbeatable army and a now semi-despotic ruling power. Heroic defences of British bases such as the Siege of Lucknow, Siege of Cawnpore and the retaking of rebel held cities as in the Siege of Delhi also passed into history.
Isolated uprisings also occurred at military posts in the centre of the subcontinent. The last major sepoy rebels surrendered on June 21, 1858, at Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh), one of the principal centres of the revolt. A final battle was fought at Sirwa Pass on May 21, 1859, and the defeated rebels fled into Nepal.
Aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion and the formal initiation of the Raj
The rebellion was a major turning point in the history of modern India. In May 1858, the British exiled Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II (r. 1837–57) to Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), after executing most of his family, thus formally liquidating the Mughal Empire. Bahadur Shah Zafar, known as the Poet King, contributed some of Urdu's most beautiful poetry, with the underlying theme of the freedom struggle. The Emperor was not allowed to return and died in solitary confinement in 1862. The Emperor's three sons, also involved in the 1857 Rebellion, were arrested and shot in Delhi by Major William Stephen Raikes Hodson of the British Indian Army.
Cultural and religious centres were closed down, properties and estates of those participating in the uprising were confiscated. At the same time, the British abolished the British East India Company and replaced it with direct rule under the British Crown. In proclaiming the new direct-rule policy to "the Princes, Chiefs, and Peoples of India", Queen Victoria (upon whom the British Parliament conferred the graciously accepted title "Empress of India" in 1877) promised equal treatment under British law, which never materialized.
Many existing economic and revenue policies remained virtually unchanged in the post-1857 period, but several administrative modifications were introduced, beginning with the creation in London of a cabinet post, the Secretary of State for India. The governor-general (called viceroy when acting as representative to the nominally sovereign "princely states" or "native states"), headquartered in Calcutta, ran the administration in India, assisted by executive and legislative councils. Beneath the governor-general were the governors of Provinces of India, who held power over the division and district officials, who formed the lower rungs of the Indian Civil Service. For decades the Indian Civil Service was the exclusive preserve of the British-born, as were the superior ranks in such other professions as law and medicine. This continued until the 1880s when a small but steadily growing number of native-born Indians, educated in British schools on the Subcontinent or in Britain, were able to assume such positions. However, a proposal by Viceroy Ripon and Courtenay Ilbert in 1883 that Indian members of the Civil Service have full rights to preside over trials involving white defendants in criminal cases sparked an ugly racist backlash (see below re "White Mutiny"). Thus an attempt to further include Indians in the system and give them a greater stake in the Raj, ironically, instead exposed the racial gap that already existed, sparking even greater Indian nationalism and reaction against British rule.
The Viceroy of India announced in 1858 that the government would honour former treaties with princely states and renounced the "Doctrine of Lapse", whereby the East India Company had annexed territories of rulers who died without male heirs. About 40 percent of Indian territory and 20–25 percent of the population remained under the control of 562 princes notable for their religious (Islamic, Hindu, Sikh and other) and ethnic diversity. Their propensity for pomp and ceremony became proverbial, while their domains, varying in size and wealth, lagged behind socio-political transformations that took place elsewhere in British-controlled India. A more thorough re-organisation was effected in the constitution of army and government finances. Shocked by the extent of solidarity among Indian soldiers during the rebellion, the government separated the army into the three presidencies. The Indian Councils Act of 1861 restored legislative powers to the Presidencies (elite provinces), which had been given exclusively to the governor-general by the Charter Act of 1833.
British attitudes toward Indians shifted from relative openness to insularity and racism, even against those with comparable background and achievement as well as loyalty. British families and their servants lived in cantonments at a distance from Indian settlements. Private clubs where the British gathered for social interaction became symbols of exclusivity and snobbery that refused to disappear decades after the British had left India. In 1883 the government of India attempted to remove race barriers in criminal jurisdictions by introducing a bill empowering Indian judges to adjudicate offences committed by Europeans. Public protests and editorials in the British press, however, forced the viceroy George Robinson, First Marquess of Ripon, (who served from 1880 to 1884), to capitulate and modify the bill drastically. The Bengali "Hindu intelligentsia" learned a valuable political lesson from this "white mutiny": the effectiveness of well-orchestrated agitation through demonstrations in the streets and publicity in the media when seeking redress for real and imagined grievances.
Effects on economy
Some of the modernization assoicated with the industrial revolution did benefit India during this period. Foreign investors set up jute mills around Calcutta, and Indian merchants set up cotton textile factories in Gujrat and around Bombay. However, this was accompanied by the collapse of traditional industry, which was faced with the ferocious competition of cheap British-made goods.
Post-1857 India also experienced a period of unprecedented calamity when the region was swept by a series of frequent and devastating famines, among the most catastrophic on record. Approximately 25 major famines spread through states such as Tamil Nadu in South India, Bihar in the north, and Bengal in the east in the latter half of the 19th century, killing 30–40 million Indians.
Contemporary observers of the famines such as Romesh Dutt as well as present-day scholars such as Amartya Sen attributed the famines both to uneven rainfall and British economic and administrative policies, which since 1857 had led to the seizure and conversion of local farmland to foreign-owned plantations, restrictions on internal trade, inflationary measures that increased the price of food, and substantial exports of staple crops from India to the United Kingdom (Dutt, 1900 and 1902; Srivastava, 1968; Sen, 1982; Bhatia, 1985). On the other hand some other scholars have argued that, whilst the famines may have been exacerbated by British policy, they were primarily caused by drought and ecological factors.
Some British citizens such as William Digby agitated for policy reforms and better famine relief, but Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, son of the poet Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton and the governing British viceroy in India, opposed such changes in the belief that they would stimulate shirking by Indian workers. The famines continued until independence in 1947, with the Bengal Famine of 1943–44 — among the most devastating — killing 3–4 million Indians during World War II. Famine relief methods were inefficient as they often involved making undernourished people do heavy labor on public works. However, there were some famines (ex. 1874 and 1907) in which English officials acted effectively. During the famine of 1897-1902 the Curzon administration spent £10,000,000 (money of the day) and at its peak 4,500,000 people were on famine relief. From the 1880s onwards British administrators built a series of irrigation canals in India, much of it for the purpose of famine prevention. After 1902 there was not a single famine in India until 1943 in Bengal. 'What the British added was above all the power of a unified an authoritarian state, which acted because it saw the danger of drought and famine to its rule'.[6]. After the major famines the British government conducted "serious investigations" (PJ Marshall, Cambridge History of the British Empire) into the famine. Lord Lytton's administration was particularly negligent when it came to famine relief, with disastrous results. It was Lord Lytton's belief that market forces would see that food got into famine stricken areas, therefore government aid would not be necessary and in fact would inhibit famine relief efforts (Niall Ferguson, Empire and Lady Beatty Balfour, Lord Lytton's Indian Administration). As a result of the calamity of 1877 Lord Lytton lost his job but not before he established the Famine Insurance Grant. The results of this was that the British prematurely assumed that the problem of famine had been solved forever ("The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj" by David Gilmour page 116). This, sadly, proved not to be the case and the complacency that resulted from it contributed to the lack of action by the Elgin. Curzon abhorred the seeming indifference many Britons at home had towards famine in India ("Curzon: Imperial Statesman" by David Gilmour page 261). 'It was the tradegy of 1876-1878 that led to the establishment of a general famine commission under Richard Strachey and the consequent adoption of a famine code' (Dilmour, "Curzon", page 115). A famine code was not adopted in Bengal however, which contributed to the disaster in 1943. In order to limit the effects of famine ‘’Successive British governments were anxious not to add to the burden of taxation”
Beginnings of self-government
The first steps were taken toward self-government in British India in the late 19th century with the appointment of Indian counsellors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the Indian Councils Act of 1892. Municipal Corporations and District Boards were created for local administration; they included elected Indian members.
The Government of India Act of 1909 — also known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Gilbert Elliot, fourth earl of Minto, was viceroy) — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures, known as legislative councils. Indians had previously been appointed to legislative councils, but after the reforms some were elected to them. At the centre, the majority of council members continued to be government-appointed officials, and the viceroy was in no way responsible to the legislature. At the provincial level, the elected members, together with unofficial appointees, outnumbered the appointed officials, but responsibility of the governor to the legislature was not contemplated. Morley made it clear in introducing the legislation to the British Parliament that parliamentary self-government was not the goal of the British government.
The Morley-Minto Reforms were a milestone. Step by step, the elective principle was introduced for membership in Indian legislative councils. The "electorate" was limited, however, to a small group of upper-class Indians. These elected members increasingly became an "opposition" to the "official government". Communal electorates were later extended to other communities and made a political factor of the Indian tendency toward group identification through religion.
For Muslims it was important both to gain a place in all-India politics and to retain their Muslim identity, objectives that required varying responses according to circumstances, as the example of Muhammed Ali Jinnah illustrates. Jinnah, who was born in 1876, studied law in England and began his career as an enthusiastic liberal in Congress on returning to India. In 1913 he joined the Muslim League, which had been shocked by the 1911 annulment of the partition of Bengal into cooperating with Congress to make demands on the British. Jinnah continued his membership in Congress until 1919. During this dual membership period, he was described by a leading Congress spokesperson, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, as the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity".
After World War I
India's important contributions to the efforts of the British Empire in World War I stimulated further demands by Indians and further response from the British. The Congress Party and the Muslim League met in joint session in December 1916. Under the leadership of Jinnah and Pandit Motilal Nehru (father of Jawaharlal Nehru), unity was preached and a proposal for constitutional reform was made that included the concept of separate electorates. The resulting Congress-Muslim League Pact (often referred to as the Lucknow Pact) was a sincere effort to compromise. Congress accepted the separate electorates demanded by the Muslim League, and the Muslim League joined with Congress in demanding self-government. The pact was expected to lead to permanent and constitutional united action.
In August 1917 the British government formally announced a policy of "increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire." Constitutional reforms were embodied in the Government of India Act 1919, also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (Edwin Samuel Montagu was the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for India; the Viscount Chelmsford was viceroy). These reforms represented the maximum concessions the British were prepared to make at that time. The franchise was extended, and increased authority was given to central and provincial legislative councils, but the viceroy remained responsible only to London.
The changes at the provincial level were significant, as the provincial legislative councils contained a considerable majority of elected members. In a system called "dyarchy", based on an approach developed by Lionel Curtis, the nation-building departments of government — agriculture, education, public works, and the like — were placed under ministers who were individually responsible to the legislature. The departments that made up the "steel frame" of British rule — finance, revenue, and home affairs — were retained by executive councillors who were often (but not always) British, and who were responsible to the governor. The act indirectly increased the number of elected Indian members in district boards and municipal corporations, since the authority to regulate local government bodies was placed in the hands of the popularly elected ministers, whose constituients naturally wanted more democracy. Later, tariff protection was finally given to Indian industry.
The 1919 reforms did not satisfy political demands in India. The British repressed opposition and re-enacted restrictions on the press and on movement. An apparently unwitting example of violation of rules against the gathering of people led to the massacre at Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919. This tragedy galvanized such political leaders as Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 – 1964) and Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869 – 1948) and the masses who followed them to press for further action.
The Allies' post-World War I peace settlement with Turkey provided an additional stimulus to the grievances of the Muslims, who feared that one goal of the Allies was to end the caliphate of the Ottoman sultan. After the end of the Mughal Empire, the Ottoman caliph had become the symbol of Islamic authority and unity to Muslims in the British Raj. A pan-Islamic movement, known as the Khilafat Movement, spread in India. It was a mass repudiation of Muslim loyalty to British rule and thus legitimated Muslim participation in the Indian nationalist movement. The leaders of the Khilafat Movement used Islamic symbols to unite the diverse but assertive Muslim community on an all-India basis and bargain with both Congress leaders and the British for recognition of minority rights and political concessions.
Muslim leaders from the Deoband and Aligarh movements joined Gandhi in mobilising the masses for the 1920 and 1921 demonstrations of civil disobedience and non-cooperation in response to the massacre at Amritsar. At the same time, Gandhi endorsed the Khilafat Movement, thereby placing many Hindus behind what had been solely a Muslim demand.
Despite impressive achievements, however, the Khilafat Movement failed. Turkey rejected the caliphate and became a secular state. Furthermore, the religious, mass-based aspects of the movement alienated such Western-oriented constitutional politicians as Jinnah, who resigned from Congress. The movement was given a final blow when the Amir of Afghanistan closed off its borders and many of the participants of the Khilafat movement perished to lack of food and exposure to the elements. Other Muslims also were uncomfortable with Gandhi's leadership. The British historian Sir Percival Spear wrote that "a mass appeal in his Gandhi's hands could not be other than a Hindu one. He could transcend Hindu caste but not community. The Hindu devices he used went sour in the mouths of Muslims". In the final analysis, the movement failed to lay a lasting foundation of Indian unity and served only to aggravate Hindu-Muslim differences among masses that were being politicised. Indeed, as India moved closer to the self-government implied in the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, rivalry over what might be called the spoils of independence sharpened the differences between the communities.
World War II and the end of the Raj
By 1942, Indians were divided over World War II, as the British had unilaterally and without consultation entered India into the war. Some wanted to support the British during the Battle of Britain, hoping for eventual independence through this support. Others were enraged by the British disregard for Indian intelligence and civil rights, and were unsympathetic to the travails of the British people, which they saw as rightful revenge for the enslavement of Indians. The British Indian army, with a strength of 2,250,000 by the end of the war, came to be the largest all-volunteer army in the history of the world . However, even during the war, in July 1942, the Indian National Congress had passed a resolution demanding complete independence from Britain. The draft proposed that if the British did not accede to the demands, massive civil disobedience would be launched. In August 1942 the Quit India Resolution was passed at the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) marking the start of what was the Quit India Movement. The movement was to see massive, and initially peaceful demonstrations and denial of authority, undermining the British War effort. Large-scale protests and demonstrations were held all over the country. Workers remained absent en masse and strikes were called. The movement also saw widespread acts of sabotage, Indian under-ground organization carried out bomb attacks on allied supply convoys, government buildings were set on fire, electricity lines were disconnected and transport and communication lines were severed.
The movement soon became a leaderless act of defiance, with a number of acts that deviated from Gandhi's principle of non-violence. In large parts of the country, the local underground organizations took over the movement. However, by 1943, Quit India had petered out.
However, at the time the war was at its bloodiest in Europe and Asia, the Indian revolutionary Subhash Chandra Bose had escaped from house arrest in Calcutta and ultimately made his way to Germany, and then to Japanese South Asia, to seek Axis help to raise an army to fight against the British control over India. Bose formed what came to be known as the Azad Hind Government as the Provisional Free Indian Government in exile, and organized the Indian National Army with Indian POWs and Indian expatriates in Southeast Asia with the help of the Japanese. Its aim was to reach India as a fighting force that would inspire public resentment and revolts within the Indian soldiers to defeat the Raj. The INA fought hard in the forests of Assam, Bengal and Burma, laying siege to Imphal and Kohima with the Japanese 15th Army. It would ultimately fail, owing to disrupted logistics, poor arms and supplies from the Japanese, and lack of support and training. However, Bose's audacious actions and radical initiative energized a new generation of Indians.
Many historians have argued that it was the INA and the mutinies it inspired among the British Indian Armed forces that was the true driving force for India's independence [8][9] [10]. The stories of the Azad Hind movement and its army that came to public attention during the trials of soldiers of the INA in 1945, were seen as so inflammatory that, fearing mass revolts and uprisings — not just in India, but across its empire — the British Government forbade the BBC to broadcast their story. Newspapers reported at the time a summary execution of INA soldiers held at Red Fort. During and after the trial, mutinies broke out in the British Indian Army, most notably in the Royal Indian Navy; these found public support throughout India, from Karachi to Bombay and from Vizag to Calcutta.
These revolts, faced by the weakened post-war Raj, coupled with the fact that the faith in the British Indian Armed forces had been lost, ultimately shaped the decision to end the Raj. By early 1946, all political prisoners had been released. British openly adopted a political dialogue with the Indian National Congress for the eventual independence of India. On 15 August 1947 the transfer of Power took place. At midnight on 14 August 1947 Pakistan (including modern Bangladesh) was granted independence. India was granted independence the following day.
Most people would give these dates as the end of the British Raj. However, some people argue that it continued until 1950 in India when it adopted a republican constitution.
Nationalist India Movement
The first spurts of nationalistic sentiment that rose amongst Congress members were when the desire to be represented in the bodies of government, to have a say, a vote in the lawmaking and issues of administration of India. Congressmen saw themselves as loyalists, but wanted an active role in governing their own country, albeit as part of the Empire. This trend was personified by Dadabhai Naoroji, who went as far as contesting, successfully, an election to the British House of Commons, becoming its first Indian member.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak was the first Indian nationalist to embrace Swaraj as the destiny of the nation. Tilak deeply opposed the British education system that ignored and defamed India's culture, history and values. He resented the denial of freedom of expression for nationalists, and the lack of any voice or role for ordinary Indians in the affairs of their nation. For these reasons, he considered Swaraj as the natural and only solution. His popular sentence "Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it" became the source of inspiration for Indians.
In 1907, the Congress was split into two. Tilak advocated what was deemed as extremism. He wanted a direct assault by the people upon the British Raj, and the abandonment of all things British. He was backed by rising public leaders like Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai, who held the same point of view. Under them, India's three great states - Maharashtra, Bengal and Punjab shaped the demand of the people and India's nationalism. The moderates, led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji held firm to calls for negotiations and political dialogue. Gokhale criticized Tilak for encouraging acts of violence and disorder. But the Congress of 1906 did not have public membership, and thus Tilak and his supporters were forced to leave the party.
But with Tilak's arrest, all hopes for an Indian offensive were stalled. The Congress lost credit with the people, while Muslims were alarmed with the rise of Tilak's Hindu nationalism, and formed the All India Muslim League in 1906, considered the Congress as completely unsuitable for Indian Muslims. A Muslim deputation met with the Viceroy, Lord Minto (1905–10), seeking concessions from the impending constitutional reforms, including special considerations in government service and electorates. The British recognised some of Muslim League's petitions by increasing the number of elective offices reserved for Muslims in the Government of India Act 1909. The Muslim League insisted on its separateness from the Hindu-dominated Congress, as the voice of a "nation within a nation."
Anthem
“God Save The King”
Capital
Calcutta (until 1912), New Delhi (after 1912)
Language(s)
Hindustani, English and many others
Government
Emperor of India
Viceroy
Monarchy
1858-1901 -Victoria
1901-1910 -Edward VII
1910-1936 -George V
1936 - Edward VIII
1936-1947 - George VI
1858-1862 - The Viscount Canning
1947 - The Viscount Mountbatten of Burma
Historical era
New Imperialism
Established - August 2, 1858
Disestablished - August 15, 1947
Currency
British Indian rupee
Company Rule in India
On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I of England granted a royal charter to the British East India Company to carry out trade with the East. Ships first arrived in India in 1608, docking at Surat in modern-day Gujarat. Four years later, British traders defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Swally, gaining the favour of the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the process. In 1615, King James I sent Sir Thomas Roe as his ambassador to Jahangir's court, and a commercial treaty was concluded in which the Mughals allowed the Company to build trading posts in India in return for goods from Europe. The Company traded in such commodities as cotton, silk, saltpetre, indigo, and tea.
By the mid-1600s, the Company had established trading posts or "factories" in major Indian cities, such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras in addition to their first factory at Surat (built in 1612). In 1670 King Charles II granted the company the right to acquire territory, raise an army, mint its own money, and exercise legal jurisdiction in areas under its control.
`By the last decade of the 17th century, the Company was arguably its own "nation" on the Indian subcontinent, possessing considerable military might and ruling three presidencies.
The British first established a territorial foothold in the Indian subcontinent when Company-funded soldiers commanded by Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal - Siraj Ud Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Bengal became a British protectorate directly under the rule of the East India Company. Bengal's wealth then flowed to the Company, which attempted to enforce a monopoly on Bengali trade (though smuggling was rife). Bengali farmers and craftsmen were obliged to render their labour for minimal remuneration while their collective tax burden increased greatly. Some believe that as a consequence, the famine of 1769-1773 cost the lives of 10 million Bengalis. A similar catastrophe occurred almost a century later, after Britain had extended its rule across the Indian subcontinent, when 40 million Indians perished from famine. The Company, despite the increase in trade and the revenues coming in from other sources, found itself burdened with massive military expenditures, and its destruction seemed imminent.
Building the Raj: British expansion across India
Lord North's India Bill, The Regulating Act of 1773, by the British Parliament granted Whitehall, the British government administration, supervisory (regulatory) control over the work of the East India Company but did not take power for itself. This was the first step along the road to government control of India. It also established the post of Governor-General of India, the first occupant of which was Warren Hastings. Further acts, such as the Charter Act of 1813 and the Charter Act of 1833, further defined the relationship of the Company and the British government.
Hastings remained in India until 1784 and was succeeded by Cornwallis, who initiated the Permanent Settlement, whereby an agreement in perpetuity was reached with zamindars or landlords for the collection of revenue. For the next fifty years, the British were engaged in attempts to eliminate Indian rivals.
At the turn of the 19th century, Governor-General Lord Wellesley (brother of the Duke of Wellington) began expanding the Company's domain on a large scale, defeating Tippoo Sultan (also spelled Tipu Sultan), annexing Mysore in southern India, and removing all French influence from the subcontinent. In the mid-19th century, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie launched perhaps the Company's most ambitious expansion, defeating the Sikhs in the Anglo-Sikh Wars (and annexing the Punjab with the exception of the Phulkian States) and subduing Burma in the Second Burmese War. He also justified the takeover of small princely states such as Satara, Sambalpur, Jhansi, and Nagpur by way of the doctrine of lapse, which permitted the Company to annex any princely state whose ruler had died without a male heir. The annexation of Oudh in 1856 proved to be the Company's final territorial acquisition, as the following year saw the boiling over of Indian grievances toward the so-called "Company Raj".
Indian Rebellion
On 10 May 1857 soldiers of the British Indian Army (known as "sepoys," from Urdu/Persian sipaahi or sepaahi = "soldier"), drawn from the Indian Hindu and Muslim population, rose against British in Meerut, a cantonment sixty five kilometres northeast of Delhi. The soldiers marched to Delhi to offer their services to the Mughal emperor, and soon much of north and central India was plunged into a year-long insurrection against the British East India Company. Many Indian regiments and Indian kingdoms joined the uprising, while other Indian units and Indian kingdoms backed the British commanders and the HEIC.
Causes of the rebellion
The rebellion or the war for independence had diverse political, economic, military, religious and social causes.
The policy of annexation pursued by Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, based mainly on his "Doctrine of Lapse", which held that princely states would be merged into company-ruled territory in case a ruler died without direct heir. This denied the Indian rulers the right to adopt an heir in such an event; adoption had been pervasive practice in the Hindu states hitherto, sanctioned both by religion and by secular tradition. The states annexed under this doctrine included such major kingdoms as Satara, Thanjavur, Sambhal, Jhansi, Jetpur, Udaipur, and Baghat. Additionally, the company had annexed, without pretext, the rich kingdoms of Sind in 1843 and Oudh in 1856, the latter a wealthy princely state that generated huge revenue and represented a vestige of Mughal authority. This greed for land, especially in a group of small-town and middle-class British merchants, whose parvenu background was increasingly evident and galling to Indians of rank, had alienated a large section of the landed and ruling aristocracy, who were quick to take up the cause of evicting the merchants once the revolt was kindled.
The justice system was considered inherently unfair to the Indians. The official Blue Books — entitled East India (Torture) 1855–1857 — that were laid before the House of Commons during the sessions of 1856 and 1857 revealed that Company officers were allowed an extended series of appeals if convicted or accused of brutality or crimes against Indians.
The economic policies of the East India Company were also resented by the Indians. Most of the gold, jewels, silver and silk had been shipped off to Britain as tax and sometimes sold in open auctions, ridding India of its once abundant wealth in precious stones. The land was reorganised under the comparatively harsh Zamindari system to facilitate the collection of taxes. In certain areas farmers were forced to switch from subsistence farming to commercial crops such as indigo, jute, coffee and tea. This resulted in hardship to the farmers and increases in food prices. Local industry, specifically the famous weavers of Bengal and elsewhere, also suffered under British rule. Import tariffs were kept low, according to traditional British free-market sentiments, and thus the Indian market was flooded with cheap clothing from Britain. Indigenous industry simply could not compete, and where once India had produced much of England's luxury cloth, the country was now reduced to growing cotton which was shipped to Britain to be manufactured into clothing, which was subsequently shipped back to India to be purchased by Indians. This extraordinary quantity of wealth, much of it collected as 'taxes', was absolutely critical in expanding public and private infrastructure in Britain and in financing British expansionism elsewhere in Asia and Africa.
The spark that lit the fire was the result of a British blunder in using new cartridges for the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle that were greased with animal fat, rumoured to now be a combination of pig-fat and cow-fat. This was offensive to the religious beliefs of both Muslim and Hindu sepoys, who refused to use the cartridges and, under provocation, finally mutinied against their British officers.
The rebellion soon engulfed much of North India, including Oudh and various areas that had lately passed from the control of Maratha princes to the company. The unprepared British were terrified, without replacements for the casualties. However, after getting reinforcements, the British army was able to suppress the uprising and restore British control over these areas.
It was a monumental event in history, for both Indians and British alike. The Rebels had achieved (at that time) the impossible in uniting and overthrowing (if only temporarily) an apparently unbeatable army and a now semi-despotic ruling power. Heroic defences of British bases such as the Siege of Lucknow, Siege of Cawnpore and the retaking of rebel held cities as in the Siege of Delhi also passed into history.
Isolated uprisings also occurred at military posts in the centre of the subcontinent. The last major sepoy rebels surrendered on June 21, 1858, at Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh), one of the principal centres of the revolt. A final battle was fought at Sirwa Pass on May 21, 1859, and the defeated rebels fled into Nepal.
Aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion and the formal initiation of the Raj
The rebellion was a major turning point in the history of modern India. In May 1858, the British exiled Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II (r. 1837–57) to Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), after executing most of his family, thus formally liquidating the Mughal Empire. Bahadur Shah Zafar, known as the Poet King, contributed some of Urdu's most beautiful poetry, with the underlying theme of the freedom struggle. The Emperor was not allowed to return and died in solitary confinement in 1862. The Emperor's three sons, also involved in the 1857 Rebellion, were arrested and shot in Delhi by Major William Stephen Raikes Hodson of the British Indian Army.
Cultural and religious centres were closed down, properties and estates of those participating in the uprising were confiscated. At the same time, the British abolished the British East India Company and replaced it with direct rule under the British Crown. In proclaiming the new direct-rule policy to "the Princes, Chiefs, and Peoples of India", Queen Victoria (upon whom the British Parliament conferred the graciously accepted title "Empress of India" in 1877) promised equal treatment under British law, which never materialized.
Many existing economic and revenue policies remained virtually unchanged in the post-1857 period, but several administrative modifications were introduced, beginning with the creation in London of a cabinet post, the Secretary of State for India. The governor-general (called viceroy when acting as representative to the nominally sovereign "princely states" or "native states"), headquartered in Calcutta, ran the administration in India, assisted by executive and legislative councils. Beneath the governor-general were the governors of Provinces of India, who held power over the division and district officials, who formed the lower rungs of the Indian Civil Service. For decades the Indian Civil Service was the exclusive preserve of the British-born, as were the superior ranks in such other professions as law and medicine. This continued until the 1880s when a small but steadily growing number of native-born Indians, educated in British schools on the Subcontinent or in Britain, were able to assume such positions. However, a proposal by Viceroy Ripon and Courtenay Ilbert in 1883 that Indian members of the Civil Service have full rights to preside over trials involving white defendants in criminal cases sparked an ugly racist backlash (see below re "White Mutiny"). Thus an attempt to further include Indians in the system and give them a greater stake in the Raj, ironically, instead exposed the racial gap that already existed, sparking even greater Indian nationalism and reaction against British rule.
The Viceroy of India announced in 1858 that the government would honour former treaties with princely states and renounced the "Doctrine of Lapse", whereby the East India Company had annexed territories of rulers who died without male heirs. About 40 percent of Indian territory and 20–25 percent of the population remained under the control of 562 princes notable for their religious (Islamic, Hindu, Sikh and other) and ethnic diversity. Their propensity for pomp and ceremony became proverbial, while their domains, varying in size and wealth, lagged behind socio-political transformations that took place elsewhere in British-controlled India. A more thorough re-organisation was effected in the constitution of army and government finances. Shocked by the extent of solidarity among Indian soldiers during the rebellion, the government separated the army into the three presidencies. The Indian Councils Act of 1861 restored legislative powers to the Presidencies (elite provinces), which had been given exclusively to the governor-general by the Charter Act of 1833.
British attitudes toward Indians shifted from relative openness to insularity and racism, even against those with comparable background and achievement as well as loyalty. British families and their servants lived in cantonments at a distance from Indian settlements. Private clubs where the British gathered for social interaction became symbols of exclusivity and snobbery that refused to disappear decades after the British had left India. In 1883 the government of India attempted to remove race barriers in criminal jurisdictions by introducing a bill empowering Indian judges to adjudicate offences committed by Europeans. Public protests and editorials in the British press, however, forced the viceroy George Robinson, First Marquess of Ripon, (who served from 1880 to 1884), to capitulate and modify the bill drastically. The Bengali "Hindu intelligentsia" learned a valuable political lesson from this "white mutiny": the effectiveness of well-orchestrated agitation through demonstrations in the streets and publicity in the media when seeking redress for real and imagined grievances.
Effects on economy
Some of the modernization assoicated with the industrial revolution did benefit India during this period. Foreign investors set up jute mills around Calcutta, and Indian merchants set up cotton textile factories in Gujrat and around Bombay. However, this was accompanied by the collapse of traditional industry, which was faced with the ferocious competition of cheap British-made goods.
Post-1857 India also experienced a period of unprecedented calamity when the region was swept by a series of frequent and devastating famines, among the most catastrophic on record. Approximately 25 major famines spread through states such as Tamil Nadu in South India, Bihar in the north, and Bengal in the east in the latter half of the 19th century, killing 30–40 million Indians.
Contemporary observers of the famines such as Romesh Dutt as well as present-day scholars such as Amartya Sen attributed the famines both to uneven rainfall and British economic and administrative policies, which since 1857 had led to the seizure and conversion of local farmland to foreign-owned plantations, restrictions on internal trade, inflationary measures that increased the price of food, and substantial exports of staple crops from India to the United Kingdom (Dutt, 1900 and 1902; Srivastava, 1968; Sen, 1982; Bhatia, 1985). On the other hand some other scholars have argued that, whilst the famines may have been exacerbated by British policy, they were primarily caused by drought and ecological factors.
Some British citizens such as William Digby agitated for policy reforms and better famine relief, but Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, son of the poet Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton and the governing British viceroy in India, opposed such changes in the belief that they would stimulate shirking by Indian workers. The famines continued until independence in 1947, with the Bengal Famine of 1943–44 — among the most devastating — killing 3–4 million Indians during World War II. Famine relief methods were inefficient as they often involved making undernourished people do heavy labor on public works. However, there were some famines (ex. 1874 and 1907) in which English officials acted effectively. During the famine of 1897-1902 the Curzon administration spent £10,000,000 (money of the day) and at its peak 4,500,000 people were on famine relief. From the 1880s onwards British administrators built a series of irrigation canals in India, much of it for the purpose of famine prevention. After 1902 there was not a single famine in India until 1943 in Bengal. 'What the British added was above all the power of a unified an authoritarian state, which acted because it saw the danger of drought and famine to its rule'.[6]. After the major famines the British government conducted "serious investigations" (PJ Marshall, Cambridge History of the British Empire) into the famine. Lord Lytton's administration was particularly negligent when it came to famine relief, with disastrous results. It was Lord Lytton's belief that market forces would see that food got into famine stricken areas, therefore government aid would not be necessary and in fact would inhibit famine relief efforts (Niall Ferguson, Empire and Lady Beatty Balfour, Lord Lytton's Indian Administration). As a result of the calamity of 1877 Lord Lytton lost his job but not before he established the Famine Insurance Grant. The results of this was that the British prematurely assumed that the problem of famine had been solved forever ("The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj" by David Gilmour page 116). This, sadly, proved not to be the case and the complacency that resulted from it contributed to the lack of action by the Elgin. Curzon abhorred the seeming indifference many Britons at home had towards famine in India ("Curzon: Imperial Statesman" by David Gilmour page 261). 'It was the tradegy of 1876-1878 that led to the establishment of a general famine commission under Richard Strachey and the consequent adoption of a famine code' (Dilmour, "Curzon", page 115). A famine code was not adopted in Bengal however, which contributed to the disaster in 1943. In order to limit the effects of famine ‘’Successive British governments were anxious not to add to the burden of taxation”
Beginnings of self-government
The first steps were taken toward self-government in British India in the late 19th century with the appointment of Indian counsellors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the Indian Councils Act of 1892. Municipal Corporations and District Boards were created for local administration; they included elected Indian members.
The Government of India Act of 1909 — also known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Gilbert Elliot, fourth earl of Minto, was viceroy) — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures, known as legislative councils. Indians had previously been appointed to legislative councils, but after the reforms some were elected to them. At the centre, the majority of council members continued to be government-appointed officials, and the viceroy was in no way responsible to the legislature. At the provincial level, the elected members, together with unofficial appointees, outnumbered the appointed officials, but responsibility of the governor to the legislature was not contemplated. Morley made it clear in introducing the legislation to the British Parliament that parliamentary self-government was not the goal of the British government.
The Morley-Minto Reforms were a milestone. Step by step, the elective principle was introduced for membership in Indian legislative councils. The "electorate" was limited, however, to a small group of upper-class Indians. These elected members increasingly became an "opposition" to the "official government". Communal electorates were later extended to other communities and made a political factor of the Indian tendency toward group identification through religion.
For Muslims it was important both to gain a place in all-India politics and to retain their Muslim identity, objectives that required varying responses according to circumstances, as the example of Muhammed Ali Jinnah illustrates. Jinnah, who was born in 1876, studied law in England and began his career as an enthusiastic liberal in Congress on returning to India. In 1913 he joined the Muslim League, which had been shocked by the 1911 annulment of the partition of Bengal into cooperating with Congress to make demands on the British. Jinnah continued his membership in Congress until 1919. During this dual membership period, he was described by a leading Congress spokesperson, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, as the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity".
After World War I
India's important contributions to the efforts of the British Empire in World War I stimulated further demands by Indians and further response from the British. The Congress Party and the Muslim League met in joint session in December 1916. Under the leadership of Jinnah and Pandit Motilal Nehru (father of Jawaharlal Nehru), unity was preached and a proposal for constitutional reform was made that included the concept of separate electorates. The resulting Congress-Muslim League Pact (often referred to as the Lucknow Pact) was a sincere effort to compromise. Congress accepted the separate electorates demanded by the Muslim League, and the Muslim League joined with Congress in demanding self-government. The pact was expected to lead to permanent and constitutional united action.
In August 1917 the British government formally announced a policy of "increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire." Constitutional reforms were embodied in the Government of India Act 1919, also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (Edwin Samuel Montagu was the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for India; the Viscount Chelmsford was viceroy). These reforms represented the maximum concessions the British were prepared to make at that time. The franchise was extended, and increased authority was given to central and provincial legislative councils, but the viceroy remained responsible only to London.
The changes at the provincial level were significant, as the provincial legislative councils contained a considerable majority of elected members. In a system called "dyarchy", based on an approach developed by Lionel Curtis, the nation-building departments of government — agriculture, education, public works, and the like — were placed under ministers who were individually responsible to the legislature. The departments that made up the "steel frame" of British rule — finance, revenue, and home affairs — were retained by executive councillors who were often (but not always) British, and who were responsible to the governor. The act indirectly increased the number of elected Indian members in district boards and municipal corporations, since the authority to regulate local government bodies was placed in the hands of the popularly elected ministers, whose constituients naturally wanted more democracy. Later, tariff protection was finally given to Indian industry.
The 1919 reforms did not satisfy political demands in India. The British repressed opposition and re-enacted restrictions on the press and on movement. An apparently unwitting example of violation of rules against the gathering of people led to the massacre at Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919. This tragedy galvanized such political leaders as Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 – 1964) and Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869 – 1948) and the masses who followed them to press for further action.
The Allies' post-World War I peace settlement with Turkey provided an additional stimulus to the grievances of the Muslims, who feared that one goal of the Allies was to end the caliphate of the Ottoman sultan. After the end of the Mughal Empire, the Ottoman caliph had become the symbol of Islamic authority and unity to Muslims in the British Raj. A pan-Islamic movement, known as the Khilafat Movement, spread in India. It was a mass repudiation of Muslim loyalty to British rule and thus legitimated Muslim participation in the Indian nationalist movement. The leaders of the Khilafat Movement used Islamic symbols to unite the diverse but assertive Muslim community on an all-India basis and bargain with both Congress leaders and the British for recognition of minority rights and political concessions.
Muslim leaders from the Deoband and Aligarh movements joined Gandhi in mobilising the masses for the 1920 and 1921 demonstrations of civil disobedience and non-cooperation in response to the massacre at Amritsar. At the same time, Gandhi endorsed the Khilafat Movement, thereby placing many Hindus behind what had been solely a Muslim demand.
Despite impressive achievements, however, the Khilafat Movement failed. Turkey rejected the caliphate and became a secular state. Furthermore, the religious, mass-based aspects of the movement alienated such Western-oriented constitutional politicians as Jinnah, who resigned from Congress. The movement was given a final blow when the Amir of Afghanistan closed off its borders and many of the participants of the Khilafat movement perished to lack of food and exposure to the elements. Other Muslims also were uncomfortable with Gandhi's leadership. The British historian Sir Percival Spear wrote that "a mass appeal in his Gandhi's hands could not be other than a Hindu one. He could transcend Hindu caste but not community. The Hindu devices he used went sour in the mouths of Muslims". In the final analysis, the movement failed to lay a lasting foundation of Indian unity and served only to aggravate Hindu-Muslim differences among masses that were being politicised. Indeed, as India moved closer to the self-government implied in the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, rivalry over what might be called the spoils of independence sharpened the differences between the communities.
World War II and the end of the Raj
By 1942, Indians were divided over World War II, as the British had unilaterally and without consultation entered India into the war. Some wanted to support the British during the Battle of Britain, hoping for eventual independence through this support. Others were enraged by the British disregard for Indian intelligence and civil rights, and were unsympathetic to the travails of the British people, which they saw as rightful revenge for the enslavement of Indians. The British Indian army, with a strength of 2,250,000 by the end of the war, came to be the largest all-volunteer army in the history of the world . However, even during the war, in July 1942, the Indian National Congress had passed a resolution demanding complete independence from Britain. The draft proposed that if the British did not accede to the demands, massive civil disobedience would be launched. In August 1942 the Quit India Resolution was passed at the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) marking the start of what was the Quit India Movement. The movement was to see massive, and initially peaceful demonstrations and denial of authority, undermining the British War effort. Large-scale protests and demonstrations were held all over the country. Workers remained absent en masse and strikes were called. The movement also saw widespread acts of sabotage, Indian under-ground organization carried out bomb attacks on allied supply convoys, government buildings were set on fire, electricity lines were disconnected and transport and communication lines were severed.
The movement soon became a leaderless act of defiance, with a number of acts that deviated from Gandhi's principle of non-violence. In large parts of the country, the local underground organizations took over the movement. However, by 1943, Quit India had petered out.
However, at the time the war was at its bloodiest in Europe and Asia, the Indian revolutionary Subhash Chandra Bose had escaped from house arrest in Calcutta and ultimately made his way to Germany, and then to Japanese South Asia, to seek Axis help to raise an army to fight against the British control over India. Bose formed what came to be known as the Azad Hind Government as the Provisional Free Indian Government in exile, and organized the Indian National Army with Indian POWs and Indian expatriates in Southeast Asia with the help of the Japanese. Its aim was to reach India as a fighting force that would inspire public resentment and revolts within the Indian soldiers to defeat the Raj. The INA fought hard in the forests of Assam, Bengal and Burma, laying siege to Imphal and Kohima with the Japanese 15th Army. It would ultimately fail, owing to disrupted logistics, poor arms and supplies from the Japanese, and lack of support and training. However, Bose's audacious actions and radical initiative energized a new generation of Indians.
Many historians have argued that it was the INA and the mutinies it inspired among the British Indian Armed forces that was the true driving force for India's independence [8][9] [10]. The stories of the Azad Hind movement and its army that came to public attention during the trials of soldiers of the INA in 1945, were seen as so inflammatory that, fearing mass revolts and uprisings — not just in India, but across its empire — the British Government forbade the BBC to broadcast their story. Newspapers reported at the time a summary execution of INA soldiers held at Red Fort. During and after the trial, mutinies broke out in the British Indian Army, most notably in the Royal Indian Navy; these found public support throughout India, from Karachi to Bombay and from Vizag to Calcutta.
These revolts, faced by the weakened post-war Raj, coupled with the fact that the faith in the British Indian Armed forces had been lost, ultimately shaped the decision to end the Raj. By early 1946, all political prisoners had been released. British openly adopted a political dialogue with the Indian National Congress for the eventual independence of India. On 15 August 1947 the transfer of Power took place. At midnight on 14 August 1947 Pakistan (including modern Bangladesh) was granted independence. India was granted independence the following day.
Most people would give these dates as the end of the British Raj. However, some people argue that it continued until 1950 in India when it adopted a republican constitution.
Nationalist India Movement
The first spurts of nationalistic sentiment that rose amongst Congress members were when the desire to be represented in the bodies of government, to have a say, a vote in the lawmaking and issues of administration of India. Congressmen saw themselves as loyalists, but wanted an active role in governing their own country, albeit as part of the Empire. This trend was personified by Dadabhai Naoroji, who went as far as contesting, successfully, an election to the British House of Commons, becoming its first Indian member.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak was the first Indian nationalist to embrace Swaraj as the destiny of the nation. Tilak deeply opposed the British education system that ignored and defamed India's culture, history and values. He resented the denial of freedom of expression for nationalists, and the lack of any voice or role for ordinary Indians in the affairs of their nation. For these reasons, he considered Swaraj as the natural and only solution. His popular sentence "Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it" became the source of inspiration for Indians.
In 1907, the Congress was split into two. Tilak advocated what was deemed as extremism. He wanted a direct assault by the people upon the British Raj, and the abandonment of all things British. He was backed by rising public leaders like Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai, who held the same point of view. Under them, India's three great states - Maharashtra, Bengal and Punjab shaped the demand of the people and India's nationalism. The moderates, led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji held firm to calls for negotiations and political dialogue. Gokhale criticized Tilak for encouraging acts of violence and disorder. But the Congress of 1906 did not have public membership, and thus Tilak and his supporters were forced to leave the party.
But with Tilak's arrest, all hopes for an Indian offensive were stalled. The Congress lost credit with the people, while Muslims were alarmed with the rise of Tilak's Hindu nationalism, and formed the All India Muslim League in 1906, considered the Congress as completely unsuitable for Indian Muslims. A Muslim deputation met with the Viceroy, Lord Minto (1905–10), seeking concessions from the impending constitutional reforms, including special considerations in government service and electorates. The British recognised some of Muslim League's petitions by increasing the number of elective offices reserved for Muslims in the Government of India Act 1909. The Muslim League insisted on its separateness from the Hindu-dominated Congress, as the voice of a "nation within a nation."
India: The Aryan Settlement and the Vedic Age
The Aryan Settlement and the Vedic Age
About 1500 BC, India was invaded by Indo European people. These people came from area between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Between 2500 and 2000 BC, many Indo Europeans migrated all over Eurasia. Some went to Europe and became the Romans and the Greeks, some settled in Turkey and became the Hittites. Others migrated south east instead. Some of them stopped in Iran, while others continued southeast to Pakistan and India. The slow migration did not arrive in northern India until about 1500 BC. In India the Indo Europeans are called the Aryans. The Aryans, a nomadic people from Central Asia, settled in the upper reaches of the Indus, Yamuna and Gangetic plains. Some people have disputed the arrival of the Indo Europeans. Some may say it did not happen. But there are written records of the language that these people brought with them to India, Sanskrit. We can read Sanskrit and we can easily see that many words in Sanskrit are basically the same as in other Indo European languages. In addition recent genetic evidence supports the arrival of the Indo Europeans. In addition to their language the Aryans also brought their gods with them to India. These Gods form the basis of the Vedas. The Aryans are important to Indian history because they originated the earliest form of the sacred Vedas ( orally transmitted texts of hymns and devotions to gods, manuals of sacrifice for their worship, and philosophical speculation.
The Aryans first settled along the Indus River, in the same place where the Harappa people had lived. They settled down and mixed with the local Indian people. They lived their from about 1500 to 800 BC. About 800 BC the Aryans learned how to use iron for weapons and tools. They probably learned to work iron from the people of West Asia, the Assyrians, who had learned it from the Indo European Hittites. Once they learned how to use their new weapons to conquer more of India and moved to the south and east into the Ganges river valley. They settled their not long after 800 BC. After the Aryans moved into the Ganges Valley about 800 BC, they were further from West Asia and has less contact with West Asian people. They began to mix more with the Indian people and the Indian gods became mixed with the Aryan gods. The Aryan conquest of the Ganges is remembered in the Mahabharata, first told about this time. But still the Aryans did not control all India. Southern India was ruled by a bunch of independent kings who did not have to what the Aryans wanted. Stories of fights between the Aryans and southerners are told in the Ramayana.
The Vedas, which are considered the core of Hinduism, provide much information about the Aryans. The major gods of the Vedic peoples remain in the pantheon of present-day Hindus; the core rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death retain their Vedic form. The Vedas also contain the seeds of great epic literature and philosophical traditions in India. Some examples are the Mahabharata and Ramayana as mentioned above. Another example is the Upanishads, philosophical treatises that were composed between the 8th and 5th century.
As the Aryans slowly settled into agriculture and moved southeast through the Gangetic Plain, they relinquished their seminomadic style of living and changed their social and political structures. Instead of a warrior leading a tribe, with a tribal assembly as a check on his power, an Aryan chieftain ruled over territory, with its society divided into hereditary groups. This structure became the beginning of the caste system, which has survived in India until the present day. The four castes that emerged from this era were the Brahmans (priests), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), the Vaisyas (merchants, farmers, and traders), and the Sudras (artisans, laborers, and servants).
In the 500’s BC, part of north western India (modern Pakistan) was conquered by the Persians under their kings Cyrus and Darius. The Persians were also Indo Europeans, but they had left their homeland later and settled in modern Iran. But the Persians never really controlled India much, they made the Indians pay tribute gold to Persia. but they did not really tell them what to do. Meanwhile, the Aryans continued to rule north eastern India in the 400’s BC.
About 1500 BC, India was invaded by Indo European people. These people came from area between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Between 2500 and 2000 BC, many Indo Europeans migrated all over Eurasia. Some went to Europe and became the Romans and the Greeks, some settled in Turkey and became the Hittites. Others migrated south east instead. Some of them stopped in Iran, while others continued southeast to Pakistan and India. The slow migration did not arrive in northern India until about 1500 BC. In India the Indo Europeans are called the Aryans. The Aryans, a nomadic people from Central Asia, settled in the upper reaches of the Indus, Yamuna and Gangetic plains. Some people have disputed the arrival of the Indo Europeans. Some may say it did not happen. But there are written records of the language that these people brought with them to India, Sanskrit. We can read Sanskrit and we can easily see that many words in Sanskrit are basically the same as in other Indo European languages. In addition recent genetic evidence supports the arrival of the Indo Europeans. In addition to their language the Aryans also brought their gods with them to India. These Gods form the basis of the Vedas. The Aryans are important to Indian history because they originated the earliest form of the sacred Vedas ( orally transmitted texts of hymns and devotions to gods, manuals of sacrifice for their worship, and philosophical speculation.
The Aryans first settled along the Indus River, in the same place where the Harappa people had lived. They settled down and mixed with the local Indian people. They lived their from about 1500 to 800 BC. About 800 BC the Aryans learned how to use iron for weapons and tools. They probably learned to work iron from the people of West Asia, the Assyrians, who had learned it from the Indo European Hittites. Once they learned how to use their new weapons to conquer more of India and moved to the south and east into the Ganges river valley. They settled their not long after 800 BC. After the Aryans moved into the Ganges Valley about 800 BC, they were further from West Asia and has less contact with West Asian people. They began to mix more with the Indian people and the Indian gods became mixed with the Aryan gods. The Aryan conquest of the Ganges is remembered in the Mahabharata, first told about this time. But still the Aryans did not control all India. Southern India was ruled by a bunch of independent kings who did not have to what the Aryans wanted. Stories of fights between the Aryans and southerners are told in the Ramayana.
The Vedas, which are considered the core of Hinduism, provide much information about the Aryans. The major gods of the Vedic peoples remain in the pantheon of present-day Hindus; the core rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death retain their Vedic form. The Vedas also contain the seeds of great epic literature and philosophical traditions in India. Some examples are the Mahabharata and Ramayana as mentioned above. Another example is the Upanishads, philosophical treatises that were composed between the 8th and 5th century.
As the Aryans slowly settled into agriculture and moved southeast through the Gangetic Plain, they relinquished their seminomadic style of living and changed their social and political structures. Instead of a warrior leading a tribe, with a tribal assembly as a check on his power, an Aryan chieftain ruled over territory, with its society divided into hereditary groups. This structure became the beginning of the caste system, which has survived in India until the present day. The four castes that emerged from this era were the Brahmans (priests), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), the Vaisyas (merchants, farmers, and traders), and the Sudras (artisans, laborers, and servants).
In the 500’s BC, part of north western India (modern Pakistan) was conquered by the Persians under their kings Cyrus and Darius. The Persians were also Indo Europeans, but they had left their homeland later and settled in modern Iran. But the Persians never really controlled India much, they made the Indians pay tribute gold to Persia. but they did not really tell them what to do. Meanwhile, the Aryans continued to rule north eastern India in the 400’s BC.
Indian Literature (My student's report for HUM 102, Asian Civilizations, 1st Sem AY 2007-2008)
I. Beginnings
The earliest Indian literary works that survive are religious and heroic texts written in Sanskrit or in languages related to it. These texts were produced between about the 16th century bc and the 1st century ad by a people known as the Aryans. The Aryans were cattle herders who were originally nomadic, traveling from place to place. They eventually settled and became cultivators of the land, establishing kingdoms in north India.
A Religious Texts
Mathura Buddha Many of the earliest texts of Indian literature were religious writings of Buddhism. This Buddha figure carved out of sandstone is from Mathura, a city in northern India that was at the center of Buddhist sculptural activity from the 2nd century bc to the 6th century ad.Corbis/Angelo Hornak
The sacred Vedas were composed in Old Sanskrit by Aryan poet-seers between about 1500 bc and about 1000 bc. The Vedas are compilations of two major literary forms: hymns of praise to nature deities and ritual chants to accompany Aryan religious rituals. There are four Vedas: the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda. Considered divine revelations received by the poets, the Vedas constitute the fundamental scripture of the Hindu religion and are used in the sacramental rites of Hinduism.
The Vedas were passed from generation to generation by the spoken word, not by the written word, because Hindus believe that mantras, the utterances of the Vedic hymns out loud, are sacred cosmic powers embodied in sound. The Vedas were not written down until long after they were originally composed. Priests in modern India still recite the Vedas out loud.
After the Vedas were compiled, the Hindu priests composed the Brahmanas, which detail information about rituals. Appended to the Brahmanas are theological texts known as Aranyakas, and attached to these are the Upanishads. The Upanishads were composed between the 8th century bc and the 5th century bc by a group of sages who questioned the usefulness of ritual religion. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (Upanishad of the Great Forest, 8th century bc?), an important early Upanishad, consists of dialogues between teachers and their students about the individual soul’s unity with a divine essence that pervades the universe. The Upanishads are India’s oldest philosophical treatises and form the foundational texts of major schools of Hindu philosophy (see Indian Philosophy).
The major religious texts of Buddhism were compiled in three collections known as the Tipitaka (meaning “three baskets”). The Tipitaka, written in the Pali language, includes the teachings of the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The most important of these texts include the Jatakas (Stories of the Births of the Buddha), which tell 547 stories of Buddha’s former births. In the tales, Buddha recounts how he was reborn in the form of animals, human beings, and nature deities as he worked toward enlightenment and, ultimately, toward release from the cycle of rebirths. This release is the aspiration of all Buddhists. The Jatakas and the major narratives and philosophical texts of early Buddhism eventually spread along with Buddhism to Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and the countries of Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Vietnam.
India’s third ancient religion was Jainism, which was founded by Mahavira. The early literature of Jainism flourished mainly in Prakrit dialects. Buddhist and Jain authors wrote many works in Sanskrit as well.
B. Heroic Texts
The most celebrated ancient heroic texts of India are the Mahabharata (The Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty) and the Ramayana (The Way of Rama). These epics were composed in Sanskrit verse over several centuries and transmitted orally by bards. They describe how the Aryans established control over India and depict Aryan-Hindu life in northern India.
The written version of the Mahabharata is attributed to the legendary poet-editor Vyasa, but it took shape over several centuries from 400 bc to ad 400. The epic tells the tale of a dispute between two branches of the Bharata clan over the right to rule the kingdom. The dispute leads to a great war that involves all the Aryan clans and nearly results in their total destruction. The poet Valmiki, who lived around the 3rd century bc, put the Ramayana into form. This epic tells the story of the hero Rama, prince of Ayodhya and incarnation of the god Vishnu. Rama willingly accepts exile in the forest to redeem a promise made by his father. Rama’s wife Sita is then kidnapped, and Rama rescues her by slaying her abductor, the demon king Ravana.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana provided the themes for important later literary works in Indian and Southeast Asian languages. These epics have been kept alive through various performance forms—from Ramlila plays in the Hindi language in north India (see Asian Theater) to the Kathakali dance-drama of Kerala (in south India) to the Wayang puppet plays of the island of Java. Recently, Hindi versions of both epics were made for Indian television, and the epics continue to be the most popular traditional literary texts in India.
A major reason for the popularity of the epics is that their characters—heroes and gods in human form—convey the central ethical teachings and cultural values of Hinduism. These teachings and values are encapsulated in the term dharma, meaning “that which is right.” In fact, the Bhagavad-Gita (Song of the Lord), the authoritative text of religious ethics in Hinduism, forms part of the Mahabharata. In this dramatic dialogue, the god Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, teaches the warrior Arjuna the right way to act in an ethical crisis. Arjuna, he says, should follow the guidelines of unselfish action and duty according to his place in society.
II. CLASSICAL LITERATURE
Gupta Dynasty Emerging around ad 320, the Gupta Empire united much of northern India. It reached its height in the late 300s, and flourished for nearly a century. Hinduism became a more coherent and codified religion because of the efforts of the Gupta kings, who fused elements of Buddhism with Hinduism and emphasized the theistic nature of the religion, particularly the role of the god Vishnu.© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
The dominant classical literary tradition in India developed in the Sanskrit language in the first few centuries ad. This literature had its great flowering in the era of the Gupta dynasty of north India, from 320 to 550. This was a time of great achievement in philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. Primarily reflecting the values of Hinduism, classical Sanskrit literature was nurtured at courts of kings and aristocrats and in scholarly gatherings; it expressed the interests of warriors (kshatriya) and scholars and priests (brahman), the elite of the four social classes (varna) of Hindu society. The other two social classes are merchants (vaisya) and laborers (sudra). (In Hinduism, a person’s social class is determined by birth. Each social class is further subdivided into communities called caste. Each caste is ranked as more pure or less pure than other castes. The caste system has been a traditional part of Indian society for centuries, although in modern times it has lost some force.)
Kavya was the major form of classical literature in Sanskrit. The term kavya denoted works that were composed primarily for pleasure and that employed complex literary conventions and elaborate metrical schemes. Kavya works aimed to depict the spheres of politics, commerce, and erotic pleasure. At the same time, these works subordinated these realms of human experience to the ethical ideals of dharma and the Hindu religious goal of moksha, liberation from karma and rebirth. Also important in kavya literature is the idea of rasa (mood), the experience of the essential mood or flavor of a work of art. The major kavya genres—epic, lyric, drama, and various types of fiction—were similar to the chief genres of premodern European literature.
Kalidasa, who lived in the late 4th century and early 5th century, is considered India’s preeminent classical poet. His epic poems include Raghuvamsa (Dynasty of Raghu) and Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger), which is a beautiful lyric poem about separated lovers. The most famous of Kalidasa’s works is his poetic drama Shakuntala (also known as Abhijnanashakuntala, Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection). This drama tells the story of a love affair between a king and a woodland maiden named Shakuntala. Yet it is more than that. In this work, the poet transforms a simple tale into a lyrical and universal drama of the passion, separation, suffering, and reunion of lovers. Shakuntala had a profound impact on German author Johann Wolfgang Goethe and on other European writers who encountered it in translation in the 18th century.
Sanskrit drama, a rich pageant of mime, dance, music, and lyrical texts set in the courts of kings and aristocrats, was a productive classical genre. In addition to Kalidasa’s plays, noteworthy classical dramas include the lively urban comedy Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart) by the 5th-century writer Shudraka and the romantic Malati-Madhava (Malati and Madhava) by the 8th-century writer Bhavabhuti.
Foremost among the works of fiction in classical Sanskrit is the Panchatantra (The Five Strategies) by Vishnusharman. This work is a collection of stories in prose and verse that were composed between the 3rd century bc and the 4th century ad. The stories, which feature animals as the characters, teach lessons about human conduct. Two major 7th-century prose romances are Kadambari by Bana and Dashakumaracharita (The Adventures of the Ten Princes) by Dandin. The popular work Kathasaritsagara (Ocean to the Rivers of Stories), by the 11th-century writer Somadeva, is a collection of witty tales in verse about the love affairs and schemes of merchants, princes, and other adventurers. The Panchatantra and the Kathasaritsagara both use the technique of telling stories within the framework of a main story. This approach, and the technique of using animals as characters, later migrated to European literature through Arab translators and travelers.
Kalidasa Kalidasa was one of the great Sanskrit-language writers of ancient India. He is best known for Shakuntala (Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection), a lyrical play about a king and his love for a woodland maiden.Dinodia Picture Agency
The brief lyric verse form called the muktaka (independent verse) is perhaps the quintessential genre of classical Sanskrit poetry. A muktaka is a short poem consisting of four lines of verse, each with an identical pattern of syllables. (A line in a muktaka is called a pada, meaning “quarter” in Sanskrit.) Sanskrit poets composed such poems in a variety of meters. The 7th-century writer Bhartrihari wrote epigrams on wisdom and worldly conduct in this genre. The 7th-century writer Amaru used the muktaka form for his erotic vignettes in the Amarusataka (The Century of Love). The verses of these works are still memorized by people interested in Sanskrit literature.
Along with the courtly literature, Sanskrit also nurtured the Puranas, a genre of mythological narratives that were written well into the medieval era. According to tradition, each Purana is supposed to deal with five topics: the creation of the universe, the destruction and re-creation of the universe, the genealogy of the gods and holy sages, the reigns of the Manus (legendary Hindu figures), and the histories of the kings who trace their ancestry to the sun and moon.
In southern India, beginning in the 1st century ad, a magnificent body of nonreligious poetry was written in the Tamil language. The Tamil poets—both men and women—treat sexual love and the heroic ideals of the Tamil people through symbolic landscape images, powerful language, and delicate psychological touches. The early Tamil poems became the foundation of literary traditions in other languages of south India. They later influenced medieval poetry of religious devotion in all the Indian languages.
The literature produced in Tamil between the 3rd and 6th centuries ad is dominated by Jain and Buddhist values combined with Tamil views of the sacred. Tirukkural (The Sacred Short Sayings, 4th century ad?), containing Tiruvalluvar’s brief verses on ethical behavior, has a strongly Jain flavor; it remains a treasured Tamil classic. In the epic Cilappatikaram (The Narrative of the Ankle Bracelet, 5th century?), the Jain monk Ilanko depicts the transformation of the chaste wife Kannaki into a goddess after she avenges the unjust death of her husband. In the Buddhist poet Cattanar’s long poem Manimekalai (The Girdle of Gems, 6th century?), the beautiful heroine Manimekalai rejects worldly life and becomes a Buddhist nun.
Poet-saints called Nayanars and Alvars, who led popular movements of devotion for the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu, wrote the Tevaram and the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, respectively, between the 6th and 8th centuries. These hymns served the cause of bhakti, a new aspect of religion that dominated Indian literature in the medieval period. Bhakti literature is discussed below. The hymns of the Nayanar and Alvar poets are sung in temple rituals in southern India to this day.
III. MEDIEVAL LITERATURE: THE RISE OF THE REGIONAL LANGUAGES
By the 10th century the older Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and dialects had grown into full-blown languages. Each region also began to develop its own distinctive culture. As a result, regional literatures developed in each of the new regional languages, under the patronage of local rulers.
Buddhism had weakened as a religious force in India, but the philosophies of Hinduism and Jainism were still strong. From the 12th century onwards, Indian literature shows the influence of yet another religion, Islam. During medieval times, a succession of Islamic dynasties conquered many territories in north and central India. Some Indian languages were influenced by Islamic religion and culture as well as by the Persian and Arabic languages and the literatures of these two tongues. These influences affected the development of the Hindi language, resulting in the emergence of Urdu, a particular form of Hindi. The Urdu language has a large number of Persian and Arabic words, and is written in the Arabic script.
Although the literatures of the regional languages were as diverse as the languages and subcultures they represented, they also shared a number of characteristics. For example, the older Sanskrit myths, epics, and kavya poems served as sources for some of the best works in the new languages. But also, for the first time in Indian literature, unique versions of local myths, legends, romances, and epics emerged.
A Bhakti: Devotional Literature
Indian Miniature Painting This piece, Radha and Krishna in a Pavillion (1760?), from India’s Punjab Hills, is an illustration of a traditional story of Krishna, a Hindu god, and his lover, Radha. Krishna, the eighth incarnation of the supreme Hindu god Vishnu, serves as one of the central deities in Hinduism. It is an example of the style of Indian miniature painting that was popular from the 16th to the 19th century.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York
The most important genre of the medieval era was the lyric poetry of authors who belonged to Hindu movements dedicated to bhakti. Bhakti was an aspect of religion that involved passionate, emotional devotion to a particular god. Bhakti authors, who are revered as saints, addressed the devotional poems that they wrote to the major Hindu gods and goddesses, especially Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, and the Goddess (Devi). These poems are among the earliest and most popular literary works in each of the regional languages.
Mira Bai Legend holds that 16th-century Indian poet Mira Bai was so devoted to the god Krishna that when she died, her body flowed into an image of the god. Her writings demonstrate her love for Krishna.Dinodia Picture Agency
Bhakti lyric poems share a number of characteristics. Unlike earlier Indian literature in Sanskrit, they are works of a personal and emotional character. Sung by devotees, the poems often speak from the perspectives of marginalized and excluded groups in Indian society, voicing social criticism. Some of the major bhakti poets were women, and men of the lower castes were also represented.
Notable early bhakti writers include the poets Basava and Mahadevi of the Virashaiva sect. In their Kannada-language poems of devotion to the god Shiva, called vacanas (utterances), these authors criticize social injustice and conventional morality. Other bhakti writers were Tukaram and Bahinabai, who composed poems in the Marathi language; Kabir, Tulsidas, and Surdas, who wrote in dialects of Hindi; and the Vaishnava poets Vidyapati and Chandidas, who wrote devotional poems in Bengali, celebrating the love of Krishna and his beloved, Radha. One of India’s best-known female poets is the bhakti poet Mira Bai, a 16th-century writer who composed poignant songs in Rajasthani-Hindi about her love for the god Krishna.
B Other Literary Forms
The great literary works of medieval India include biographies on the bhakti saints. The Tamil work Periyapuranam (Great Narrative), by the 12th-century writer Cekkilar, tells about the lives of the Tamil Nayanar saints. Chakradhara’s Lilacharitra (Narrative of the Divine Play, 1280?) in Marathi is about the Mahanubhava saints. Palkuriki Somanatha’s Basavapurana (Narrative of Basava, 13th century) in Telugu is about the Virashaiva saints.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana epics provided the themes for some of the best works in the regional languages. The 12th-century Tamil Iramavataram (Descent of Rama) by Kampan and the 16th-century Hindi Ramcharitmanas (The Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama) by Tulsidas are literary masterpieces of their languages. Both of these works are retellings of the Ramayana story.
Each Indian regional language has romances, folk epics, and ballads focusing on local heroes, heroines, gods, and goddesses. Some of these works are transmitted mainly in oral traditions and are not attributed to any individual. Works of this type include the epics of the heroes Pabuji and Devnarayan in the Rajasthani language, and the Hindi epics Candayan and Dhola. The Pabuji epic describes the exploits of the Rajput warrior Pabuji, who dies in battle and is later worshiped as a god. The Dhola epic treats the themes of the exploits of King Nal and the birth of his son Dhola, the adventures of Dhola, and the beautiful princess Maru’s love for Dhola. The principal characters in many of the oral narratives belong to the lower castes in the Hindu caste system. In the Devnarayan story, Devnarayan, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, is born as a cowherd and fights against Rajput warriors to avenge the deaths of heroes of the cowherd caste. Chandaini, also known as Lorik-Chanda, describes the love affair of the heroine Chandaini, a married woman, with the cowherd Lorik, who is also married.
Some epics are attributed to specific authors. The Hindi Prthviraj Raso (Heroic Narrative of King Prthviraj), by Chand Bardai, sings the exploits of the 12th-century King Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi, including his resistance to the invader from Central Asia, Muhammad of Ghur. Padumavat (1540), a Hindi romance based on Hindu legends but written by the Sufi Muslim poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, illustrates the blurring of boundaries between Hindu and Muslim cultures in this period.
Medieval India
The Gupta Empire faced many challengers. Until about ad 500 it was able to defeat internal and external enemies. In the mid-5th century the White Huns, a nomadic people from Central Asia, moved onto the Indian plains and were defeated by the Guptas. The Huns invaded India again in ad 510, when Gupta strength was in decline. This time the invasion was successful, forcing the Guptas into the northeastern part of their former empire. The Huns established their rule over much of northwest India, extending to present-day western Uttar Pradesh. However, they in turn were defeated by enemies to the west a short time later. The Buddhist monasteries and the cities of this region never recovered from the onslaught of the Huns. By ad 550 both the Hun kingdom and the Gupta Empire had fallen.
The absence of these centralizing powers left India to be ruled by regional kingdoms. These kingdoms often warred with each other and had fairly short spans of power. They developed a political system that emphasized the tribute of smaller chieftains. Later, starting in the 11th century and especially in the south, they legitimized this rule by establishing great royal temples, supported by grants of land and literally hundreds of Brahmans. Literature and art continued to flourish, particularly in south and central India. The distinctive style of temple architecture and sculpture that developed in the 7th and 8th centuries can be seen in the pyramid-shaped towers and heavily ornamented walls of shrines at Māmallapuram (sometimes called Mahabalipuram) and Kānchipuram south of Chennai, and in the cave temples carved from solid rock at Ajanta and Ellora in Mahārāshtra. The religious tradition of bhakti (passionate devotion to a Hindu god), which emerged in Tamil Nādu in the 6th century and spread north over the next nine centuries, was expressed in poetry of great beauty. With the decline of Buddhism in much of peninsular India (it continued in what is now Bangladesh), Hinduism developed new and profound traditions associated with the philosophers Shankara in the early 800s and Ramanuja in about 1100.
The regional kingdoms were not small, but only Harsha, who ruled from 606 to 647, attempted to create an expansive empire. From his kingdom north of Delhi, he shifted his base east to present-day central Uttar Pradesh. After extending his influence as far west as the Punjab region, he tried to move south and was defeated by the Chalukya king Pulakeshin II of Vātāpi (modern Bādāmi) in about 641. By then the Pallava dynasty had established a powerful kingdom on the east coast of the southern Indian peninsula at Kānchipuram. During the course of the next half century the Pallavas and the neighboring Chalukyas of the Deccan Plateau struggled for control of key peninsular rivers, each alternately sacking the other’s capital. The eventual waning of the Pallavas by the late 8th century allowed the Cholas and the Pandya dynasty to rule virtually undisturbed for the next four centuries.
Elsewhere in India, the 8th century saw continued power struggles among states. Harsha died in 647 bc and his kingdom contracted to the west, creating a power vacuum in the east that was quickly filled by the Pala dynasty. (The Palas ruled the Bengal region and present-day southern Bihār state from the 8th through the 12th centuries.) Harsha’s capital of Kanauj was conquered by the Gurjara-Pratiharas, who were based in central India, and who managed to extend their rule west to the borders of Sind (in what is now Pakistan). The Gurjara-Pratiharas fought with the Rashtrakutas for control of the trade routes of the Ganges. The Rashtrakutas controlled the Deccan Plateau from their capital in Ellora, near present-day Aurangābād. Their frequent military campaigns into north and central India kept the small kingdoms ruled by Muslims in Sind and southern Punjab confined. The Western Chalukyas also fought with, and were finally overthrown by, the Rashtrakutas in the 8th century.
The kingdoms persisted despite this protracted warfare because they were more or less equally matched in resources, administrative and military capacities, and leadership. Although particular dynasties did not last long, these kingdoms, which shifted the center of rule in India to areas south of the Vindhya Range, had a remarkable stability, lasting in one form or other in particular regions for centuries.
The kingdoms of the south, especially the Pallavas and Cholas, had links with Southeast Asia. Temples in the style of the early-8th-century Pallavas were built in Java soon after those in the Pallava kingdom. In pursuit of trade, the Cholas made successful naval expeditions at the end of the 10th century to Ceylon, the region of Bengal, Sumatra, and Malaya. They also established direct trade with China. By the 12th century the cities of the southwestern coast of India, in what is now Kerala and southern Karnātaka, housed Jewish and Arab traders who drew on a network centered in the Persian Gulf and reaching through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea and Italy.
The earliest Indian literary works that survive are religious and heroic texts written in Sanskrit or in languages related to it. These texts were produced between about the 16th century bc and the 1st century ad by a people known as the Aryans. The Aryans were cattle herders who were originally nomadic, traveling from place to place. They eventually settled and became cultivators of the land, establishing kingdoms in north India.
A Religious Texts
Mathura Buddha Many of the earliest texts of Indian literature were religious writings of Buddhism. This Buddha figure carved out of sandstone is from Mathura, a city in northern India that was at the center of Buddhist sculptural activity from the 2nd century bc to the 6th century ad.Corbis/Angelo Hornak
The sacred Vedas were composed in Old Sanskrit by Aryan poet-seers between about 1500 bc and about 1000 bc. The Vedas are compilations of two major literary forms: hymns of praise to nature deities and ritual chants to accompany Aryan religious rituals. There are four Vedas: the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda. Considered divine revelations received by the poets, the Vedas constitute the fundamental scripture of the Hindu religion and are used in the sacramental rites of Hinduism.
The Vedas were passed from generation to generation by the spoken word, not by the written word, because Hindus believe that mantras, the utterances of the Vedic hymns out loud, are sacred cosmic powers embodied in sound. The Vedas were not written down until long after they were originally composed. Priests in modern India still recite the Vedas out loud.
After the Vedas were compiled, the Hindu priests composed the Brahmanas, which detail information about rituals. Appended to the Brahmanas are theological texts known as Aranyakas, and attached to these are the Upanishads. The Upanishads were composed between the 8th century bc and the 5th century bc by a group of sages who questioned the usefulness of ritual religion. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (Upanishad of the Great Forest, 8th century bc?), an important early Upanishad, consists of dialogues between teachers and their students about the individual soul’s unity with a divine essence that pervades the universe. The Upanishads are India’s oldest philosophical treatises and form the foundational texts of major schools of Hindu philosophy (see Indian Philosophy).
The major religious texts of Buddhism were compiled in three collections known as the Tipitaka (meaning “three baskets”). The Tipitaka, written in the Pali language, includes the teachings of the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The most important of these texts include the Jatakas (Stories of the Births of the Buddha), which tell 547 stories of Buddha’s former births. In the tales, Buddha recounts how he was reborn in the form of animals, human beings, and nature deities as he worked toward enlightenment and, ultimately, toward release from the cycle of rebirths. This release is the aspiration of all Buddhists. The Jatakas and the major narratives and philosophical texts of early Buddhism eventually spread along with Buddhism to Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and the countries of Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Vietnam.
India’s third ancient religion was Jainism, which was founded by Mahavira. The early literature of Jainism flourished mainly in Prakrit dialects. Buddhist and Jain authors wrote many works in Sanskrit as well.
B. Heroic Texts
The most celebrated ancient heroic texts of India are the Mahabharata (The Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty) and the Ramayana (The Way of Rama). These epics were composed in Sanskrit verse over several centuries and transmitted orally by bards. They describe how the Aryans established control over India and depict Aryan-Hindu life in northern India.
The written version of the Mahabharata is attributed to the legendary poet-editor Vyasa, but it took shape over several centuries from 400 bc to ad 400. The epic tells the tale of a dispute between two branches of the Bharata clan over the right to rule the kingdom. The dispute leads to a great war that involves all the Aryan clans and nearly results in their total destruction. The poet Valmiki, who lived around the 3rd century bc, put the Ramayana into form. This epic tells the story of the hero Rama, prince of Ayodhya and incarnation of the god Vishnu. Rama willingly accepts exile in the forest to redeem a promise made by his father. Rama’s wife Sita is then kidnapped, and Rama rescues her by slaying her abductor, the demon king Ravana.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana provided the themes for important later literary works in Indian and Southeast Asian languages. These epics have been kept alive through various performance forms—from Ramlila plays in the Hindi language in north India (see Asian Theater) to the Kathakali dance-drama of Kerala (in south India) to the Wayang puppet plays of the island of Java. Recently, Hindi versions of both epics were made for Indian television, and the epics continue to be the most popular traditional literary texts in India.
A major reason for the popularity of the epics is that their characters—heroes and gods in human form—convey the central ethical teachings and cultural values of Hinduism. These teachings and values are encapsulated in the term dharma, meaning “that which is right.” In fact, the Bhagavad-Gita (Song of the Lord), the authoritative text of religious ethics in Hinduism, forms part of the Mahabharata. In this dramatic dialogue, the god Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, teaches the warrior Arjuna the right way to act in an ethical crisis. Arjuna, he says, should follow the guidelines of unselfish action and duty according to his place in society.
II. CLASSICAL LITERATURE
Gupta Dynasty Emerging around ad 320, the Gupta Empire united much of northern India. It reached its height in the late 300s, and flourished for nearly a century. Hinduism became a more coherent and codified religion because of the efforts of the Gupta kings, who fused elements of Buddhism with Hinduism and emphasized the theistic nature of the religion, particularly the role of the god Vishnu.© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
The dominant classical literary tradition in India developed in the Sanskrit language in the first few centuries ad. This literature had its great flowering in the era of the Gupta dynasty of north India, from 320 to 550. This was a time of great achievement in philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. Primarily reflecting the values of Hinduism, classical Sanskrit literature was nurtured at courts of kings and aristocrats and in scholarly gatherings; it expressed the interests of warriors (kshatriya) and scholars and priests (brahman), the elite of the four social classes (varna) of Hindu society. The other two social classes are merchants (vaisya) and laborers (sudra). (In Hinduism, a person’s social class is determined by birth. Each social class is further subdivided into communities called caste. Each caste is ranked as more pure or less pure than other castes. The caste system has been a traditional part of Indian society for centuries, although in modern times it has lost some force.)
Kavya was the major form of classical literature in Sanskrit. The term kavya denoted works that were composed primarily for pleasure and that employed complex literary conventions and elaborate metrical schemes. Kavya works aimed to depict the spheres of politics, commerce, and erotic pleasure. At the same time, these works subordinated these realms of human experience to the ethical ideals of dharma and the Hindu religious goal of moksha, liberation from karma and rebirth. Also important in kavya literature is the idea of rasa (mood), the experience of the essential mood or flavor of a work of art. The major kavya genres—epic, lyric, drama, and various types of fiction—were similar to the chief genres of premodern European literature.
Kalidasa, who lived in the late 4th century and early 5th century, is considered India’s preeminent classical poet. His epic poems include Raghuvamsa (Dynasty of Raghu) and Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger), which is a beautiful lyric poem about separated lovers. The most famous of Kalidasa’s works is his poetic drama Shakuntala (also known as Abhijnanashakuntala, Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection). This drama tells the story of a love affair between a king and a woodland maiden named Shakuntala. Yet it is more than that. In this work, the poet transforms a simple tale into a lyrical and universal drama of the passion, separation, suffering, and reunion of lovers. Shakuntala had a profound impact on German author Johann Wolfgang Goethe and on other European writers who encountered it in translation in the 18th century.
Sanskrit drama, a rich pageant of mime, dance, music, and lyrical texts set in the courts of kings and aristocrats, was a productive classical genre. In addition to Kalidasa’s plays, noteworthy classical dramas include the lively urban comedy Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart) by the 5th-century writer Shudraka and the romantic Malati-Madhava (Malati and Madhava) by the 8th-century writer Bhavabhuti.
Foremost among the works of fiction in classical Sanskrit is the Panchatantra (The Five Strategies) by Vishnusharman. This work is a collection of stories in prose and verse that were composed between the 3rd century bc and the 4th century ad. The stories, which feature animals as the characters, teach lessons about human conduct. Two major 7th-century prose romances are Kadambari by Bana and Dashakumaracharita (The Adventures of the Ten Princes) by Dandin. The popular work Kathasaritsagara (Ocean to the Rivers of Stories), by the 11th-century writer Somadeva, is a collection of witty tales in verse about the love affairs and schemes of merchants, princes, and other adventurers. The Panchatantra and the Kathasaritsagara both use the technique of telling stories within the framework of a main story. This approach, and the technique of using animals as characters, later migrated to European literature through Arab translators and travelers.
Kalidasa Kalidasa was one of the great Sanskrit-language writers of ancient India. He is best known for Shakuntala (Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection), a lyrical play about a king and his love for a woodland maiden.Dinodia Picture Agency
The brief lyric verse form called the muktaka (independent verse) is perhaps the quintessential genre of classical Sanskrit poetry. A muktaka is a short poem consisting of four lines of verse, each with an identical pattern of syllables. (A line in a muktaka is called a pada, meaning “quarter” in Sanskrit.) Sanskrit poets composed such poems in a variety of meters. The 7th-century writer Bhartrihari wrote epigrams on wisdom and worldly conduct in this genre. The 7th-century writer Amaru used the muktaka form for his erotic vignettes in the Amarusataka (The Century of Love). The verses of these works are still memorized by people interested in Sanskrit literature.
Along with the courtly literature, Sanskrit also nurtured the Puranas, a genre of mythological narratives that were written well into the medieval era. According to tradition, each Purana is supposed to deal with five topics: the creation of the universe, the destruction and re-creation of the universe, the genealogy of the gods and holy sages, the reigns of the Manus (legendary Hindu figures), and the histories of the kings who trace their ancestry to the sun and moon.
In southern India, beginning in the 1st century ad, a magnificent body of nonreligious poetry was written in the Tamil language. The Tamil poets—both men and women—treat sexual love and the heroic ideals of the Tamil people through symbolic landscape images, powerful language, and delicate psychological touches. The early Tamil poems became the foundation of literary traditions in other languages of south India. They later influenced medieval poetry of religious devotion in all the Indian languages.
The literature produced in Tamil between the 3rd and 6th centuries ad is dominated by Jain and Buddhist values combined with Tamil views of the sacred. Tirukkural (The Sacred Short Sayings, 4th century ad?), containing Tiruvalluvar’s brief verses on ethical behavior, has a strongly Jain flavor; it remains a treasured Tamil classic. In the epic Cilappatikaram (The Narrative of the Ankle Bracelet, 5th century?), the Jain monk Ilanko depicts the transformation of the chaste wife Kannaki into a goddess after she avenges the unjust death of her husband. In the Buddhist poet Cattanar’s long poem Manimekalai (The Girdle of Gems, 6th century?), the beautiful heroine Manimekalai rejects worldly life and becomes a Buddhist nun.
Poet-saints called Nayanars and Alvars, who led popular movements of devotion for the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu, wrote the Tevaram and the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, respectively, between the 6th and 8th centuries. These hymns served the cause of bhakti, a new aspect of religion that dominated Indian literature in the medieval period. Bhakti literature is discussed below. The hymns of the Nayanar and Alvar poets are sung in temple rituals in southern India to this day.
III. MEDIEVAL LITERATURE: THE RISE OF THE REGIONAL LANGUAGES
By the 10th century the older Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and dialects had grown into full-blown languages. Each region also began to develop its own distinctive culture. As a result, regional literatures developed in each of the new regional languages, under the patronage of local rulers.
Buddhism had weakened as a religious force in India, but the philosophies of Hinduism and Jainism were still strong. From the 12th century onwards, Indian literature shows the influence of yet another religion, Islam. During medieval times, a succession of Islamic dynasties conquered many territories in north and central India. Some Indian languages were influenced by Islamic religion and culture as well as by the Persian and Arabic languages and the literatures of these two tongues. These influences affected the development of the Hindi language, resulting in the emergence of Urdu, a particular form of Hindi. The Urdu language has a large number of Persian and Arabic words, and is written in the Arabic script.
Although the literatures of the regional languages were as diverse as the languages and subcultures they represented, they also shared a number of characteristics. For example, the older Sanskrit myths, epics, and kavya poems served as sources for some of the best works in the new languages. But also, for the first time in Indian literature, unique versions of local myths, legends, romances, and epics emerged.
A Bhakti: Devotional Literature
Indian Miniature Painting This piece, Radha and Krishna in a Pavillion (1760?), from India’s Punjab Hills, is an illustration of a traditional story of Krishna, a Hindu god, and his lover, Radha. Krishna, the eighth incarnation of the supreme Hindu god Vishnu, serves as one of the central deities in Hinduism. It is an example of the style of Indian miniature painting that was popular from the 16th to the 19th century.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York
The most important genre of the medieval era was the lyric poetry of authors who belonged to Hindu movements dedicated to bhakti. Bhakti was an aspect of religion that involved passionate, emotional devotion to a particular god. Bhakti authors, who are revered as saints, addressed the devotional poems that they wrote to the major Hindu gods and goddesses, especially Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, and the Goddess (Devi). These poems are among the earliest and most popular literary works in each of the regional languages.
Mira Bai Legend holds that 16th-century Indian poet Mira Bai was so devoted to the god Krishna that when she died, her body flowed into an image of the god. Her writings demonstrate her love for Krishna.Dinodia Picture Agency
Bhakti lyric poems share a number of characteristics. Unlike earlier Indian literature in Sanskrit, they are works of a personal and emotional character. Sung by devotees, the poems often speak from the perspectives of marginalized and excluded groups in Indian society, voicing social criticism. Some of the major bhakti poets were women, and men of the lower castes were also represented.
Notable early bhakti writers include the poets Basava and Mahadevi of the Virashaiva sect. In their Kannada-language poems of devotion to the god Shiva, called vacanas (utterances), these authors criticize social injustice and conventional morality. Other bhakti writers were Tukaram and Bahinabai, who composed poems in the Marathi language; Kabir, Tulsidas, and Surdas, who wrote in dialects of Hindi; and the Vaishnava poets Vidyapati and Chandidas, who wrote devotional poems in Bengali, celebrating the love of Krishna and his beloved, Radha. One of India’s best-known female poets is the bhakti poet Mira Bai, a 16th-century writer who composed poignant songs in Rajasthani-Hindi about her love for the god Krishna.
B Other Literary Forms
The great literary works of medieval India include biographies on the bhakti saints. The Tamil work Periyapuranam (Great Narrative), by the 12th-century writer Cekkilar, tells about the lives of the Tamil Nayanar saints. Chakradhara’s Lilacharitra (Narrative of the Divine Play, 1280?) in Marathi is about the Mahanubhava saints. Palkuriki Somanatha’s Basavapurana (Narrative of Basava, 13th century) in Telugu is about the Virashaiva saints.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana epics provided the themes for some of the best works in the regional languages. The 12th-century Tamil Iramavataram (Descent of Rama) by Kampan and the 16th-century Hindi Ramcharitmanas (The Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama) by Tulsidas are literary masterpieces of their languages. Both of these works are retellings of the Ramayana story.
Each Indian regional language has romances, folk epics, and ballads focusing on local heroes, heroines, gods, and goddesses. Some of these works are transmitted mainly in oral traditions and are not attributed to any individual. Works of this type include the epics of the heroes Pabuji and Devnarayan in the Rajasthani language, and the Hindi epics Candayan and Dhola. The Pabuji epic describes the exploits of the Rajput warrior Pabuji, who dies in battle and is later worshiped as a god. The Dhola epic treats the themes of the exploits of King Nal and the birth of his son Dhola, the adventures of Dhola, and the beautiful princess Maru’s love for Dhola. The principal characters in many of the oral narratives belong to the lower castes in the Hindu caste system. In the Devnarayan story, Devnarayan, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, is born as a cowherd and fights against Rajput warriors to avenge the deaths of heroes of the cowherd caste. Chandaini, also known as Lorik-Chanda, describes the love affair of the heroine Chandaini, a married woman, with the cowherd Lorik, who is also married.
Some epics are attributed to specific authors. The Hindi Prthviraj Raso (Heroic Narrative of King Prthviraj), by Chand Bardai, sings the exploits of the 12th-century King Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi, including his resistance to the invader from Central Asia, Muhammad of Ghur. Padumavat (1540), a Hindi romance based on Hindu legends but written by the Sufi Muslim poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, illustrates the blurring of boundaries between Hindu and Muslim cultures in this period.
Medieval India
The Gupta Empire faced many challengers. Until about ad 500 it was able to defeat internal and external enemies. In the mid-5th century the White Huns, a nomadic people from Central Asia, moved onto the Indian plains and were defeated by the Guptas. The Huns invaded India again in ad 510, when Gupta strength was in decline. This time the invasion was successful, forcing the Guptas into the northeastern part of their former empire. The Huns established their rule over much of northwest India, extending to present-day western Uttar Pradesh. However, they in turn were defeated by enemies to the west a short time later. The Buddhist monasteries and the cities of this region never recovered from the onslaught of the Huns. By ad 550 both the Hun kingdom and the Gupta Empire had fallen.
The absence of these centralizing powers left India to be ruled by regional kingdoms. These kingdoms often warred with each other and had fairly short spans of power. They developed a political system that emphasized the tribute of smaller chieftains. Later, starting in the 11th century and especially in the south, they legitimized this rule by establishing great royal temples, supported by grants of land and literally hundreds of Brahmans. Literature and art continued to flourish, particularly in south and central India. The distinctive style of temple architecture and sculpture that developed in the 7th and 8th centuries can be seen in the pyramid-shaped towers and heavily ornamented walls of shrines at Māmallapuram (sometimes called Mahabalipuram) and Kānchipuram south of Chennai, and in the cave temples carved from solid rock at Ajanta and Ellora in Mahārāshtra. The religious tradition of bhakti (passionate devotion to a Hindu god), which emerged in Tamil Nādu in the 6th century and spread north over the next nine centuries, was expressed in poetry of great beauty. With the decline of Buddhism in much of peninsular India (it continued in what is now Bangladesh), Hinduism developed new and profound traditions associated with the philosophers Shankara in the early 800s and Ramanuja in about 1100.
The regional kingdoms were not small, but only Harsha, who ruled from 606 to 647, attempted to create an expansive empire. From his kingdom north of Delhi, he shifted his base east to present-day central Uttar Pradesh. After extending his influence as far west as the Punjab region, he tried to move south and was defeated by the Chalukya king Pulakeshin II of Vātāpi (modern Bādāmi) in about 641. By then the Pallava dynasty had established a powerful kingdom on the east coast of the southern Indian peninsula at Kānchipuram. During the course of the next half century the Pallavas and the neighboring Chalukyas of the Deccan Plateau struggled for control of key peninsular rivers, each alternately sacking the other’s capital. The eventual waning of the Pallavas by the late 8th century allowed the Cholas and the Pandya dynasty to rule virtually undisturbed for the next four centuries.
Elsewhere in India, the 8th century saw continued power struggles among states. Harsha died in 647 bc and his kingdom contracted to the west, creating a power vacuum in the east that was quickly filled by the Pala dynasty. (The Palas ruled the Bengal region and present-day southern Bihār state from the 8th through the 12th centuries.) Harsha’s capital of Kanauj was conquered by the Gurjara-Pratiharas, who were based in central India, and who managed to extend their rule west to the borders of Sind (in what is now Pakistan). The Gurjara-Pratiharas fought with the Rashtrakutas for control of the trade routes of the Ganges. The Rashtrakutas controlled the Deccan Plateau from their capital in Ellora, near present-day Aurangābād. Their frequent military campaigns into north and central India kept the small kingdoms ruled by Muslims in Sind and southern Punjab confined. The Western Chalukyas also fought with, and were finally overthrown by, the Rashtrakutas in the 8th century.
The kingdoms persisted despite this protracted warfare because they were more or less equally matched in resources, administrative and military capacities, and leadership. Although particular dynasties did not last long, these kingdoms, which shifted the center of rule in India to areas south of the Vindhya Range, had a remarkable stability, lasting in one form or other in particular regions for centuries.
The kingdoms of the south, especially the Pallavas and Cholas, had links with Southeast Asia. Temples in the style of the early-8th-century Pallavas were built in Java soon after those in the Pallava kingdom. In pursuit of trade, the Cholas made successful naval expeditions at the end of the 10th century to Ceylon, the region of Bengal, Sumatra, and Malaya. They also established direct trade with China. By the 12th century the cities of the southwestern coast of India, in what is now Kerala and southern Karnātaka, housed Jewish and Arab traders who drew on a network centered in the Persian Gulf and reaching through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea and Italy.
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