Indian History · Chronicle X of XI
The Company and the Raj
From Plassey and Company rule through 1857 and the Raj to Gandhi, independence and Partition.
The Company's ConquestMilitary
Robert Clive's victory at Plassey wins the East India Company control of rich Bengal.
Through bribery and battle, Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey and installed a puppet in his place. The trading company became the effective ruler of India's wealthiest province, gaining the right to collect its taxes. A merchant corporation had begun to conquer a subcontinent, funding its expansion from Indian revenue itself.
Company RulePolitical
The Company spreads its rule across India, reshaping land, revenue and trade to its own profit.
Over the following decades the Company annexed kingdom after kingdom by war and by treaty. New systems of land tax, such as the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, and floods of cheap British cloth transformed the economy — enriching the Company while ruining Indian weavers and burdening the peasantry. A foreign corporation now governed most of India.
The Great RebellionMilitary
A mutiny of Indian soldiers flares into a vast uprising against Company rule across the north.
Sparked by a rumour that cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat, offending Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike, the sepoys of the Company's army rose in revolt. The rebellion spread into a broad uprising of princes, soldiers and peasants, who rallied around the aged Mughal emperor. After savage fighting on both sides, the British crushed it — but the old order had been shattered.
The British RajPolitical
The Crown abolishes the Company and rules India directly; in 1877 Victoria is proclaimed Empress of India.
After the rebellion, Britain abolished the East India Company and brought India under the direct rule of the Crown — the Raj. The last Mughal emperor was exiled, and in 1877 Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. A British viceroy governed the vast territory, its railways, army and civil service binding the subcontinent into a single imperial possession.
The Rise of NationalismPolitical
Educated Indians found the Indian National Congress, giving voice to a growing demand for self-rule.
A new class educated in English began to demand a share in governing their own land. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, at first sought only reform, but grew into the great vehicle of the freedom movement. The clumsy partition of Bengal in 1905 inflamed opinion and pushed the Congress toward a bolder call for self-rule, or swaraj.
The Freedom StruggleMilitary
British troops fire on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar, a slaughter that turns millions against the Raj.
At Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, soldiers under General Dyer fired without warning on a peaceful gathering penned in a walled garden, killing hundreds. The massacre destroyed Indian faith in British justice and became a turning point. It thrust forward a new leader who would transform the freedom struggle: Mohandas Gandhi.
The Freedom StrugglePolitical
Gandhi marches to the sea to make salt in defiance of British law, igniting mass non-violent resistance.
Gandhi forged a new weapon: satyagraha, non-violent civil disobedience by millions. In 1930 he walked 240 miles to the sea to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly, a simple act that electrified the nation and drew the world's eyes. Through boycotts, marches and cheerful acceptance of prison, the freedom movement became a mass struggle no empire could long resist.
Independence and PartitionPolitical
India wins its freedom, but is split into India and Pakistan amid vast migration and bloodshed.
Exhausted by war and unable to hold India, Britain withdrew in August 1947. But freedom came with a terrible price: the land was partitioned into a mainly Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. Some fifteen million people fled across the new borders and perhaps a million died in the communal violence — a triumph and a tragedy inseparably bound together.
