Universities, colleges and schools proliferated in the towns and cities, most of them opened by Indian initiative. The horrific scale of the famines of the 1880s and 1890s showed how limited any economic growth had been, but the stagnation of the early 19th century had been broken. Some industries developed, notably Indian-owned textile manufacturing in western India. A small, but significant, minority of them could profit from such opportunities to sell surplus crops and acquire additional land. The railways, the vastly increased capacity of steamships, and the opening of the Suez Canal linked Indian farmers with world markets to a much greater degree. Thereafter a great railway system was constructed - 28,000 miles of track being laid by 1904 - and major canal schemes were instituted that more than doubled the area under irrigation in the last 20 years of the century. Imports of Western technology had been limited before the 1850s. The British had much more to offer Indians. Yet beneath the trappings of conservatism, Indian society changed much more rapidly in the second half of the 19th century than it had done in the first. When the soldiers refused to acknowledge British authority, the way was left open for disaffected princes and aristocrats, and for village and town people with grievances, to revolt alongside the soldiers. The spark that ignited the soldiers' great fear - that their cherished status was to be undermined - was the rumour concerning the use of pig and cow fat, forbidden in the Muslim and Hindu religions respectively, as lubricant on the cartridges for the new rifles. Supplies of more flexible soldiers who would not stand on their privileges were becoming available in Nepal and the Punjab, and the Bengal army was told it must modernise - by accepting obligations to serve outside India, and by using a new rifle. They would not go overseas and they required an elaborate train of camp followers, and by 1857 the British high command was losing patience with this. Over many years the Bengal army had fought faithfully for the British, but on their own terms. To be a soldier in the Bengal army had become an occupation to which high status was attached. The Bengal army was recruited not from Bengal itself but from northern India, especially from Awadh. These people were the soldiers, or sepoys, of the Bengal army, whose mutiny eventually set off the 1857 rebellion. These upheavals would probably have become more intense in the mid 19th century, but could have been contained if the British had not alienated a group of people on whom their security depended. Northern India had a long tradition of spasmodic disorder and resistance to government. They also fed fears of a Christian offensive and of forced conversions. Western influences were limited in the towns, but the first Christian missions had appeared there, and new colleges had opened, which seemed to be an unwelcome intrusion to many devout Hindus and Muslims. Taxes were high throughout the region, and there were few opportunities for the enterprising to make a profit. In the most recent British acquisition of all, the kingdom of Awadh (Oudh), annexed in 1856, not only had the ruler been deposed but many landowners had lost control over what they regarded as their estates. It took time for winners to emerge in this situation, people who had been able to extract gains from the new order, and who would compensate for those who had lost out. Early British occupation was disruptive: aristocracies lost power and influence to the new rulers, the conditions under which land was held could be changed, and taxation was more rigorously enforced. In the countryside the vital issues were the control of the land, the amount of tax the peasant farmers had to pay, and the opportunities they had to find outlets for their surplus crops. Whatever the British may have intended, their early rule seems generally to have consolidated the hold of what they regarded as 'traditional' intellectuals, rather than displacing them by new ones, and the authority of Brahmins and of doctrines of caste separation grew stronger, not weaker. This was especially true in the old bases of British trade, such as Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, where a new Indian intelligentsia had begun to take root. European influences were strongest in the towns of India.
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