Muhammad Ali Jinnah محمد علی جناح
Governor-General of Pakistan
In office 14 August 1947 – 11 September 1948
Monarch	George VI
Prime Minister	Liaquat Ali Khan
Preceded by	The Earl Mountbatten of Burma (as Viceroy of India)
Succeeded by	Khawaja Nazimuddin
Speaker of the National Assembly
In office 11 August 1947 – 11 September 1948
Deputy	Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan
President of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan
Deputy	Liaquat Ali Khan
Preceded by	Office created
Succeeded by	Liaquat Ali Khan
Personal details
Born	Mahomedali Jinnahbhai 25 December 1876 Karachi, British India (now Pakistan)
Died	11 September 1948 (aged 71) Karachi, Pakistan
Political party	Indian National Congress (1906–1920) All-India Muslim League (1913–1947) Muslim League (1947–1948)
Spouse(s)	Emibai Jinnah (1892–1893) Maryam Jinnah (1918–1929)
Children	Dina (by Maryam Jinnah)
Alma mater	Inns of Court School of Law
Profession	Lawyer
Religion	Islam
Signature

Muhammad Ali Jinnah^[a] ( Audio (help·info), born Mahomedali Jinnahbhai; 25 December 1876 – 11 September 1948) was a lawyer, politician and statesman, and the founder of Pakistan.^[1] Jinnah served as leader of the All-India Muslim League from 1913 until Pakistan’s independence on 14 August 1947, and as Pakistan’s first Governor-General from independence until his death. He is revered in Pakistan as Quaid-i-Azam ^[b] (Great Leader) and Baba-i-Qaum ^[c] (Father of the Nation) and his birthday is observed as a national holiday.

Born in Karachi and trained as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn in London, Jinnah rose to prominence in the Indian National Congress in the first two decades of the 20th century. In these early years of his political career, Jinnah advocated Hindu–Muslim unity, helping to shape the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the All-India Muslim League, a party in which Jinnah had also become prominent. Jinnah became a key leader in the All India Home Rule League, and proposed a fourteen-point constitutional reform plan to safeguard the political rights of Muslims should a united British India become independent. In 1920, however, Jinnah resigned from the Congress when it agreed to follow a campaign of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, advocated by the influential leader, Mohandas Gandhi.

By 1940, Jinnah had come to believe that Indian Muslims should have their own state. In that year, the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, passed the Lahore Resolution, demanding a separate nation. During the Second World War, the League gained strength while leaders of the Congress were imprisoned, and in the elections held shortly after the war, it won most of the seats reserved for Muslims. Ultimately, the Congress and the Muslim League could not reach a power-sharing formula for a united India, leading all parties to agree to separate independence for a predominately Hindu India, and for a Muslim-majority state, to be called Pakistan.

As the first Governor-General of Pakistan, Jinnah worked to establish the new nation’s government and policies, and to aid the millions of Muslim refugees who had emigrated from the new nation of India after the separation, personally supervising the establishment of refugee camps. Jinnah died at age 71 in September 1948, just over a year after Pakistan gained independence from the British Raj. He left a deep and respected legacy in Pakistan, though he is less well thought of in India. According to his biographer, Stanley Wolpert, he remains Pakistan’s greatest leader.

Early years

Background

Jinnah was born Mahomedali Jinnahbhai,^[d] most likely in 1876,^[e] to Jinnahbhai Poonja and his wife Mithibai, in Wazir Mansion, Karachi.^[2] Jinnah’s birthplace is in Sindh, a region today part of Pakistan, but then within the Bombay Presidency of British India. His father was a prosperous Gujarati merchant who had been born to a family of weavers in the village of Paneli in the princely state of Gondal; his mother was also of that village. They had moved to Karachi about 1875, having married before their departure. Karachi was then enjoying an economic boom: the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant it was 200 nautical miles closer to Europe for shipping than Bombay.^[3][4]

Jinnah’s family was of the Ismaili Khoja branch of Shi’a Islam,^[5] though Jinnah later followed the Twelver Shi’a teachings.^[6] Jinnah was the second child;^[7][8] he had three brothers and three sisters, including his younger sister Fatima Jinnah. The parents were native Gujarati speakers, and the children also came to speak Kutchi, Sindhi and English.^[9] Except for Fatima, little is known of his siblings, where they settled or if they met with their brother as he advanced in his legal or political careers.^[10]

As a boy, Jinnah lived for a time in Bombay with an aunt and may have attended the Gokal Das Tej Primary School there, or possibly a madrasa, later on moving to the Cathedral and John Connon School. In Karachi, he attended the Sindh-Madrasa-tul-Islam and the Christian Missionary Society High School.^[11][12] He gained his matriculation from Bombay University at the high school. In his later years and especially after his death, a large number of stories about the boyhood of Pakistan’s founder were circulated: that he spent all his spare time at the police court, listening to the proceedings, and that he studied his books by the glow of street lights for lack of other illumination. His official biographer, Hector Bolitho, writing in 1954, interviewed surviving boyhood associates, and obtained a tale that the young Jinnah discouraged other children from playing marbles in the dust, urging them to rise up, keep their hands and clothes clean, and play cricket instead.^[13]

In England

Lincoln’s Inn, seen in 2006

In 1892, Sir Frederick Leigh Croft, a business associate of Jinnahbhai Poonja, offered young Jinnah a London apprenticeship with his firm, Graham’s Shipping and Trading Company. He accepted the position despite the opposition of his mother, who before he left, had him enter an arranged marriage with a girl two years his junior from the ancestral village of Paneli, Emibai Jinnah. Jinnah’s mother and first wife both died during his absence in England.^[14] Although the apprenticeship in London was considered a great opportunity for Jinnah, one reason for sending him overseas was a legal proceeding against his father, which placed the family’s property at risk of being sequestered by the court. In 1893, the Jinnahbhai family moved to Bombay.^[11]

Soon after his arrival in London, Jinnah gave up the apprenticeship in order to study law, enraging his father, who had, before his departure, given him enough money to live for three years. The aspiring barrister joined Lincoln’s Inn, later stating that the reason he chose Lincoln’s over the other Inns of Court was that over the main entrance to Lincoln’s Inn were the names of the world’s great lawgivers, including Muhammad. Jinnah’s biographer Stanley Wolpert notes that there is no such inscription, but instead inside is a mural showing Muhammad and other lawgivers, and speculates that Jinnah may have edited the story in his own mind to avoid mentioning a pictorial depiction which would be offensive to many Muslims.^[15] Jinnah’s legal education at the Inns of Court followed the apprenticeship system, which had been in force there for centuries. To gain knowledge of the law, he followed an established barrister and learned from what he did, as well as from studying lawbooks.^[16] During this period, he shortened his name to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.^[17]

During his student years in England, Jinnah was influenced by 19th-century British liberalism, like many other future Indian independence leaders. This political education included exposure to the idea of the democratic nation, and progressive politics.^[18] He became an admirer of the Parsi Indian political leaders Dadabhai Naoroji and Sir Pherozeshah Mehta. Naoroji had become the first Member of Parliament of Indian extraction shortly before Jinnah’s arrival, triumphing with a majority of three votes in Finsbury Central. Jinnah listened to his maiden speech in the House of Commons from the visitor’s gallery.^[19][20]

The Western world not only inspired Jinnah in his political life, but also greatly influenced his personal preferences, particularly when it came to dress. Jinnah abandoned Indian garb for Western-style clothing, and throughout his life he was always impeccably dressed in public. He came to own over 200 suits, which he wore with heavily starched shirts with detachable collars, and as a barrister took pride in never wearing the same silk tie twice.^[21] Even when he was dying, he insisted on being formally dressed, “I will not travel in my pyjamas.”^[10] In his later years he was usually seen wearing a Karakul hat which subsequently came to be known as the “Jinnah cap”.^[22]

Dissatisfied with the law, Jinnah briefly embarked on a stage career with a Shakespearean company, but resigned after receiving a stern letter from his father.^[23] In 1895, at age 19, he became the youngest Indian to be called to the bar in England.^[8] Although he returned to Karachi, he remained there only a short time before moving to Bombay.^[23]

Legal and early political career

Barrister

Jinnah as barrister

Aged twenty, Jinnah began his practice in Bombay, the only Muslim barrister in the city.^[8] English had become his principal language and would remain so throughout his life. His first three years in the law, from 1897 to 1900, brought him few briefs. His first step towards a brighter career occurred when the acting Advocate General of Bombay, John Molesworth MacPherson, invited Jinnah to work from his chambers.^[24][25] In 1900, P. H. Dastoor, a Bombay presidency magistrate, left the post temporarily and Jinnah succeeded in getting the interim position. After his six-month appointment period, Jinnah was offered a permanent position on a 1,500 rupee per month salary. Jinnah politely declined the offer, stating that he planned to earn 1,500 rupees a day—a huge sum at that time—which he eventually did.^[24][25][26] Nevertheless, as Governor-General of Pakistan, he would refuse to accept a large salary, fixing it at 1 rupee per month.^[27]

As a lawyer, Jinnah gained fame for his skilled handling of the 1907 “Caucus Case“. This controversy arose out of Bombay municipal elections, which Indians alleged were rigged by a “caucus” of Europeans to keep Sir Pherozeshah Mehta out of the council. Jinnah gained great esteem from leading the case for Sir Pherozeshah, himself a noted barrister. Although Jinnah did not win the Caucus Case, he posted an successful record, becoming well known for his advocacy and legal logic.^[28][29] In 1908, his factional foe in the Indian National Congress, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, was arrested for sedition. Before Tilak unsuccessfully represented himself at trial, he engaged Jinnah in an attempt to secure his release on bail. Jinnah did not succeed, but obtained an acquittal for Tilak when he was charged with sedition again in 1916.^[30]

One of Jinnah’s fellow barristers from the Bombay High Court remembered that “Jinnah’s faith in himself was incredible”; he recalled that on being admonished by a judge with “Mr. Jinnah, remember that you are not addressing a third-class magistrate” Jinnah shot back “My Lord, allow me to warn you that you are not addressing a third-class pleader.”^[31] Another of his fellow barristers described him:

He was what God made him, a great pleader. He had a sixth sense: he could see around corners. That is where his talents lay … he was a very clear thinker … But he drove his points home—points chosen with exquisite selection—slow delivery, word by word.^[28][32]

Rising leader

Jinnah in 1910

In 1857, many Indians had risen in revolt against British rule. In the aftermath of the conflict, some Anglo-Indians, as well as Indians in Britain, called for greater self-government for the subcontinent, resulting in the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Most founding members had been educated in Britain, and were content with the minimal reform efforts being made by the government.^[33] Muslims were not enthusiastic about calls for democratic institutions in British India, as they constituted a quarter to a third of the population, outnumbered by the Hindus.^[34] Early meetings of the Congress contained a minority of Muslims, mostly from the elite.^[35]

Jinnah began political life by attending the Congress’s twentieth annual meeting, in Bombay in December 1904.^[36] He was a member of the moderate group in the Congress, favouring Hindu–Muslim unity in achieving self-government, and following such leaders as Mehta, Naoroji, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale.^[37] They were opposed by leaders such as Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai, who sought quick action towards freedom.^[38] In 1906, a delegation of Muslim leaders headed by the Aga Khan called on the new Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, to assure him of their loyalty and to ask for assurances that in any political reforms they would be protected from the “unsympathetic [Hindu] majority”.^[39] Dissatisfied with this, Jinnah wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper Gujarati, asking what right the members of the delegation had to speak for Indian Muslims, as they were unelected and self-appointed.^[37] When many of the same leaders met in Dacca in December of that year to form the All-India Muslim League to advocate for their community’s interests, Jinnah was again opposed. The Aga Khan later wrote that it was “freakishly ironic” that Jinnah, who would lead the League to independence, “came out in bitter hostility toward all that I and my friends had done … He said that our principle of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself.”^[40] In its earliest years, however, the League was not influential; Minto refused to consider it as the Muslim community’s representative, and it was ineffective in preventing the 1911 repeal of the partition of Bengal, an action seen as a blow to Muslim interests.^[41]

Although Jinnah initially opposed separate electorates for Muslims, he used this means to gain his first elective office in 1909, as Bombay’s Muslim representative on the Imperial Legislative Council. He was a compromise candidate when two older, better-known Muslims who were seeking the post deadlocked. The council, which had been expanded to 60 members as part of reforms enacted by Minto, recommended legislation to the Viceroy. Only officials could vote in the council; non-official members, such as Jinnah, had no vote. Throughout his legal career, Jinnah practised probate law (with many clients from India’s nobility), and in 1911 introduced the Wakf Validation Act to place Muslim religious trusts on a sound legal footing under British Indian law. Two years later, the measure passed, the first act sponsored by non-officials to pass the council and be enacted by the Viceroy.^[42][43] Jinnah was also appointed to a committee which helped to establish the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun.^[44]

In December 1912, Jinnah addressed the annual meeting of the Muslim League, although he was not yet a member. He joined the following year, although he remained a member of the Congress as well and stressed that League membership took second priority to the “greater national cause” of a free India. In April 1913, he again went to Britain, with Gokhale, to meet with officials on behalf of the Congress. Gokhale, a Hindu, later stated that Jinnah “has true stuff in him, and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu–Muslim Unity”.^[45] Jinnah led another delegation of the Congress to London in 1914, but due to the start of the First World War found officials little interested in Indian reforms. By coincidence, he was in Britain at the same time as a man who would become a great political rival of his, Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu lawyer who had become well-known for advocating satyagraha, non-violent non-cooperation, while in South Africa. Jinnah attended a reception for Gandhi, and returned home to India in January 1915.^[46]

Break from the Congress

Jinnah’s moderate faction in the Congress was undermined by the deaths of Mehta and Gokhale in 1915; he was further isolated by the fact that Naoroji was in London, where he remained until his death in 1917. Nevertheless, Jinnah worked to bring the Congress and League together. In 1916, with Jinnah now president of the Muslim League, the two organisations signed the Lucknow Pact, setting quotas for Muslim and Hindu representation in the various provinces. Although the pact was never fully implemented, its signing ushered in a period of cooperation between the Congress and the League.^[47][35]

During the war, Jinnah joined other Indian moderates in supporting the British war effort, hoping that Indians would be rewarded with political freedoms. Jinnah played an important role in the founding of the All India Home Rule League in 1916. Along with political leaders Annie Besant and Tilak, Jinnah demanded “home rule” for India—the status of a self-governing dominion in the Empire similar to Canada, New Zealand and Australia, although, with the war, Britain’s politicians were not interested in considering Indian constitutional reform. British Cabinet minister Edwin Montagu recalled Jinnah in his memoirs, “young, perfectly mannered, impressive-looking, armed to the teeth with dialectics, and insistent on the whole of his scheme”.^[48]

In 1918, Jinnah married his second wife Rattanbai Petit (“Ruttie”), 24 years his junior. She was the fashionable young daughter of his friend Sir Dinshaw Petit, of an elite Parsi family of Bombay.^[18] There was great opposition to the marriage from Rattanbai’s family and the Parsi community, as well as from some Muslim religious leaders. Rattanbai defied her family and nominally converted to Islam, adopting (though never using) the name Maryam Jinnah, resulting in a permanent estrangement from her family and Parsi society. The couple resided in Bombay, and frequently travelled across India and Europe. The couple’s only child, daughter Dina Jinnah, was born on 15 August 1919.^[18][49] The couple separated prior to Ruttie’s death in 1929, and subsequently Jinnah’s sister Fatima looked after him and his child.^[50]

Relations between Indians and British were strained in 1919 when the Imperial Legislative Council extended emergency wartime restrictions on civil liberties; Jinnah resigned from it when it did. There was unrest across India, which worsened after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, in which British troops fired upon a protest meeting, killing hundreds. In the wake of Amritsar, Gandhi, who had returned to India and become a widely respected leader and highly influential in the Congress, called for satyagraha against the British. Gandhi’s proposal gained broad Hindu support, and was also attractive to many Muslims of the Khilafat faction. These Muslims, supported by Gandhi, sought retention of the Uthman caliphate (which supplied spiritual leadership to many Muslims). The caliph was the Ottoman Emperor, who would be deprived of both offices following his nation’s defeat in the First World War. Gandhi had achieved considerable popularity among Muslims because of his work during the war on behalf of killed or imprisoned Muslims.^[51][52][53] Unlike Jinnah and other leaders of the Congress, Gandhi did not wear western-style clothing, did his best to use an Indian language instead of English, and was deeply rooted in Indian culture. Gandhi’s local style of leadership gained great popularity with the Indian people. Jinnah criticised Gandhi’s Khilafat advocacy, which he saw as an endorsement of religious zealotry.^[54] Jinnah regarded Gandhi’s proposed satyagraha campaign as political anarchy, and believed that self-government should be secured through constitutional means. He opposed Gandhi, but the tide of Indian opinion was against him. At the 1920 session of the Congress in Nagpur, Jinnah was shouted down by the delegates, who passed Gandhi’s proposal, pledging satyagraha until India was free. Jinnah did not attend the subsequent League meeting, held in the same city, which passed a similar resolution. Because of the action of the Congress in endorsing Gandhi’s campaign, Jinnah resigned from it, leaving all positions except in the Muslim League.^[55][56]

Wilderness years; interlude in England

Jinnah devoted much of his time to his law practice in the early 1920s, but remained politically involved. The alliance between Gandhi and the Khilafat faction did not last long, and the campaign of resistance proved less effective than hoped, as India’s institutions continued to function. Jinnah sought alternative political ideas, and contemplated organising a new political party as a rival to the Congress. In September 1923, Jinnah was elected as Muslim member for Bombay in the new Central Legislative Assembly. He showed considerable skill as a parliamentarian, organising many Indian members to work with the Swaraj Party, and continued to press demands for full responsible government. In 1925, as recognition for his legislative activities, he was offered a knighthood by Lord Reading, who was retiring from the Viceroyalty. He replied: “I prefer to be plain Mr. Jinnah.”^[57]

In 1927, the British Government, under Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, undertook a decennial review of Indian policy mandated by the Government of India Act 1919. The review began two years early as Baldwin feared he would lose the next election (which he did, in 1929). The Cabinet was influenced by minister Winston Churchill, who strongly opposed self-government for India, and members hoped that by having the commission appointed early, the policies for India which they favoured would survive their government. The resulting commission, led by Liberal MP John Simon, though with a majority of Conservatives, arrived in India in March 1928.^[58] They were met with a boycott by India’s leaders, Muslim and Hindu alike, angered at the British refusal to include their representatives on the commission. A minority of Muslims, though, withdrew from the League, choosing to welcome the Simon Commission and repudiating Jinnah. Most members of the League’s executive council remained loyal to Jinnah, attending the League meeting in December 1927 and January 1928 which confirmed him as the League’s permanent president. At that session, Jinnah told the delegates that “A constitutional war has been declared on Great Britain. Negotiations for a settlement are not to come from our side … By appointing an exclusively white Commission, [Secretary of State for India] Lord Birkenhead has declared our unfitness for self-government.”^[59]

Birkenhead in 1928 challenged Indians to come up with their own proposal for constitutional change for India; in response, the Congress convened a committee under the leadership of Motilal Nehru.^[1] The Nehru Report favoured constituencies based on geography on the ground that being dependent on each other for election would bind the communities closer together. Jinnah, though he believed separate electorates, based on religion, necessary to ensure Muslims had a voice in the government, was willing to compromise on this point, but talks between the two parties failed. He put forth proposals that he hoped might satisfy a broad range of Muslims and reunite the League, calling for mandatory representation for Muslims in legislatures and cabinets. These became known as his Fourteen Points. He could not secure adoption of the Fourteen Points, as the League meeting in Delhi at which he hoped to gain a vote instead dissolved into chaotic argument.^[60]

After Baldwin was defeated at the 1929 British parliamentary election, Ramsey MacDonald of the Labour Party became prime minister. MacDonald desired a conference of Indian and British leaders in London to discuss India’s future, a course of action supported by Jinnah. Three Round Table Conferences followed over as many years, none of which resulted in a settlement. Jinnah was a delegate to the first two conferences, but was not invited to the last.^[61] He remained in Britain for most of the period 1930 through 1934, practising as a barrister before the Privy Council, where he dealt with a number of Indian-related cases. His biographers disagree over why he remained so long in Britain—Wolpert asserts that had Jinnah been made a Law Lord, he would have stayed for life, and that Jinnah alternatively sought a parliamentary seat.^[62][63] Early biographer Hector Bolitho denied that Jinnah sought to enter the British Parliament,^[62] while Jaswant Singh deems Jinnah’s time in Britain as a break or sabbatical from the Indian struggle.^[64] Bolitho called this period “Jinnah’s years of order and contemplation, wedged in between the time of early struggle, and the final storm of conquest”.^[65]

In 1931, Fatima Jinnah joined her brother in England. From then on, Muhammad Jinnah would receive personal care and support from her as he aged and began to suffer from the lung ailments which would kill him. She lived and travelled with him, and became a close advisor. Muhammad Jinnah’s daughter, Dina, was educated in England and India. Jinnah later became estranged from Dina after she decided to marry Christian businessman, Neville Wadia, and when he urged her to marry a Muslim, she reminded him that he had married a woman not raised in his faith. Jinnah continued to correspond cordially with his daughter, but their personal relationship was strained, and she did not come to Pakistan in his lifetime, but only for his funeral.^[66][67]

Return to politics

Beginning in 1933, Indian Muslims, especially from the United Provinces, began to urge Jinnah to return to India and take up again his leadership of the Muslim League, an organisation which had fallen into inactivity.^[68] He remained titular president of the League,^[f] but declined to travel to India to preside over its 1933 session in April, writing that he could not possibly return there until the end of the year.^[69] Among those who met with Jinnah to seek his return was Liaquat Ali Khan, who would be a major political associate of Jinnah in the years to come and the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. At Jinnah’s request, Liaquat discussed the return with a large number of Muslim politicians and confirmed his recommendation to Jinnah.^[70][71] In early 1934, Jinnah relocated to the subcontinent, though he shuttled between London and India on business for the next few years, selling his house in Hampstead and closing his legal practice in Britain.^[72][73]

Muslims of Bombay elected Jinnah, though then absent in London, as their representative to the Central Legislative Assembly in October 1934.^[74][75] The British Parliament’s Government of India Act 1935 gave considerable power to India’s provinces, with a weak central parliament in New Delhi, which had no authority over such matters as foreign policy, defence, and much of the budget. Full power remained in the hands of the Viceroy, however, who could dissolve legislatures and rule by decree. The League reluctantly accepted the scheme, though expressing reservations about the weak parliament. The Congress was much better prepared for the provincial elections in 1937, and the League failed to win a majority even of the Muslim seats in any of the provinces where members of that faith held a majority. It did win a majority of the Muslim seats in Delhi, but could not form a government anywhere, though it was part of the ruling coalition in Bengal. The Congress and its allies formed the government even in the North-West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P.), where the League won no seats despite the fact that almost all residents were Muslim.^[76]

According to Singh, “the events of 1937 had a tremendous, almost a traumatic effect upon Jinnah”.^[77] Despite his beliefs of twenty years that Muslims could protect their rights in a united India through separate electorates, provincial boundaries drawn to preserve Muslim majorities, and by other protections of minority rights, Muslim voters had failed to unite, with the issues Jinnah hoped to bring forward lost amid factional fighting.^[77][78] Singh notes the effect of the 1937 elections on Muslim political opinion, “when the Congress formed a government with almost all of the Muslim MLAs sitting on the Opposition benches, non-Congress Muslims were suddenly faced with this stark reality of near total political powerlessness. It was brought home to them, like a bolt of lightning, that even if the Congress did not win a single Muslim seat … as long as it won an absolute majority in the House, on the strength of the general seats, it could and would form a government entirely on its own …”^[79]

In the next two years, Jinnah worked to build support among Muslims for the League. He secured the right to speak for the Muslim-led Bengal and Punjabi provincial governments in the central government in New Delhi (“the centre”). He worked to expand the league, reducing the cost of membership to two annas (⅛ of a rupee), half of what it cost to join the Congress. He restructured the League along the lines of the Congress, putting most power in a Working Committee, which he appointed.^[80] By December 1939, Liaquat estimated that the League had three million two-anna members.^[81]

Struggle for Pakistan

Background to independence

Until the late 1930s, most Muslims of the British Raj expected, upon independence, to be part of a unitary state encompassing all of British India, as did the Hindus and others who advocated self-government.^[82] Despite this, other nationalist proposals were being made. In a speech given at Allahabad to a League session in 1930, Sir Muhammad Iqbal called for a state for Muslims in India. Choudhary Rahmat Ali published a pamphlet in 1933 advocating a state “Pakistan” in the Indus Valley, with other names given to Muslim-majority areas elsewhere in India.^[83] Jinnah and Iqbal corresponded in 1936 and 1937; in subsequent years, Jinnah credited Iqbal as his mentor, and used Iqbal’s imagery and rhetoric in his speeches.^[84]

Although many leaders of the Congress sought a strong central government for an Indian state, some Muslim politicians, including Jinnah, were unwilling to accept this without powerful protections for their community.^[82] Other Muslims supported the Congress, which officially advocated a secular state upon independence, though the traditionalist wing (including politicians such as Madan Mohan Malaviya and Vallabhbhai Patel) believed that an independent India should enact laws such as banning the killing of cows and making Hindi a national language. The failure of the Congress leadership to disavow Hindu communalists worried Congress-supporting Muslims. Nevertheless, the Congress enjoyed considerable Muslim support up to about 1937.^[85]

Other events which separated the communities following the elections included the failed attempt to form a coalition government including the Congress and the League in the United Provinces following the 1937 election.^[86] According to historian Ian Talbot, “The provincial Congress governments made no effort to understand and respect their Muslim populations’ cultural and religious sensibilities. The Muslim League’s claims that it alone could safeguard Muslim interests thus received a major boost. Significantly it was only after this period of Congress rule that it [the League] took up the demand for a Pakistan state …”^[75]

Balraj Puri in his journal article about Jinnah suggests that the Muslim League president, after the 1937 vote, turned to the idea of partition in “sheer desperation”.^[87] Historian Akbar S. Ahmed suggests that Jinnah abandoned hope of reconciliation with the Congress as he “rediscover[ed] his own [Islamic] roots, his own sense of identity, of culture and history, which would come increasingly to the fore in the final years of his life”.^[12] Jinnah also increasingly adopted Muslim dress in the late 1930s.^[88] In the wake of the 1937 balloting, Jinnah demanded that the question of power sharing be settled on an all-India basis, and that he, as president of the League, be accepted as the sole spokesman for the Muslim community.^[89]

Second World War and Lahore Resolution

On 3 September 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced the commencement of war with Nazi Germany.^[90] The following day, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, without consulting Indian political leaders, announced that India had entered the war along with Britain. There were widespread protests in India. After meeting with Jinnah and with Gandhi, Linlithgow announced that negotiations on self-government were suspended for the duration of the war.^[91] The Congress on 14 September demanded immediate independence with a constituent assembly to decide a constitution; when this was refused, its eight provincial governments resigned on 10 November and governors in those provinces thereafter ruled by decree for the remainder of the war. Jinnah, on the other hand, was more willing to accommodate the British, and they in turn increasingly recognised him and the League as the representatives of India’s Muslims.^[92] Jinnah later stated, “after the war began, … I was treated on the same basis as Mr. Gandhi. I was wonderstruck why I was promoted and given a place side by side with Mr. Gandhi.”^[93] Although the League did not actively support the British war effort, neither did they try to obstruct it.^[94]

With the British and Muslims to some extent cooperating, the Viceroy asked Jinnah for an expression of the Muslim League’s position on self-government, confident that it would differ greatly from that of the Congress. To come up with such a position, the League’s Working Committee met for four days in February 1940 to set out terms of reference to a constitutional sub-committee. The Working Committee asked that the sub-committee return with a proposal that would result in “independent dominions in direct relationship with Great Britain” where Muslims were dominant.^[95] On 6 February, Jinnah informed the Viceroy that the Muslim League would be demanding partition instead of the federation contemplated in the 1935 Act. The Lahore Resolution (sometimes called the “Pakistan Resolution”, although it does not contain that name), based on the sub-committee’s work, embraced the Two-Nation Theory and called for a union of the Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest of British India, with complete autonomy. Similar rights were to be granted the Muslim-majority areas in the east, and unspecified protections given to Muslim minorities in other provinces. The resolution was passed by the League session in Lahore on 23 March 1940.^[96][97]

Gandhi’s reaction to the Lahore Resolution was muted; he called it “baffling”, but told his disciples that Muslims, in common with other people of India, had the right to self-determination. Leaders of the Congress were more vocal; Jawaharlal Nehru (son of Motilal) referred to Lahore as “Jinnah’s fantastic proposals” while Chakravarti Rajagopalachari deemed Jinnah’s views on partition “a sign of a diseased mentality”.^[98] Linlithgow met with Jinnah in June 1940,^[99] soon after Winston Churchill became the British prime minister, and in August offered both the Congress and the League a deal whereby in exchange for full support for the war, Linlithgow would allow Indian representation on his major war councils. The Viceroy promised a representative body after the war to determine India’s future, and that no future settlement would be imposed over the objections of a large part of the population. This was satisfactory to neither the Congress nor the League, though Jinnah was pleased that the British had moved towards recognising Jinnah as the representative of the Muslim community’s interests.^[100] Jinnah was reluctant to make specific proposals as to the boundaries of Pakistan, or its relationships with Britain and with the rest of the subcontinent, fearing that any precise plan would divide the League.^[101]

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 brought the United States into the war. In the following months, the Japanese advanced in southeast Asia, and the British Cabinet sent a mission led by Sir Stafford Cripps to try to conciliate the Indians and cause them to fully back the war. Cripps proposed giving some provinces what was dubbed the “local option” to remain outside of an Indian central government either for a period of time or permanently, to become dominions on their own or be part of another confederation. The Muslim League was far from certain of winning the legislative votes that would be required for mixed provinces such as Bengal and Punjab to secede, and Jinnah rejected the proposals as not sufficiently recognising Pakistan’s right to exist. The Congress also rejected the Cripps plan, demanding immediate concessions which Cripps was not prepared to give.^[102][103] Despite the rejection, Jinnah and the League saw the Cripps proposal as recognising Pakistan in principle.^[104]

Jinnah and Gandhi, 1944

The Congress followed the failure of the Cripps mission by demanding, in August 1942, that the British immediately “Quit India“, proclaiming a mass campaign of satyagraha until they did. The British promptly arrested most major leaders of the Congress and imprisoned them for the remainder of the war. Gandhi, however, was placed on house arrest in one of the Aga Khan’s palaces prior to his release for health reasons in 1944. With the Congress leaders absent from the political scene, Jinnah warned against the threat of Hindu domination and maintained his Pakistan demand without going into great detail about what that would entail. Jinnah also worked to increase the League’s political control at the provincial level.^[105][106] He helped to found the newspaper Dawn in the early 1940s in Delhi; it helped to spread the League’s message and eventually became the major English-language newspaper of Pakistan.^[107]

In September 1944, Jinnah and Gandhi, who had by then been released from his palatial prison, met at the Muslim leader’s home on Malabar Hill in Bombay. Two weeks of talks followed, which resulted in no agreement. Jinnah insisted on Pakistan being conceded prior to the British departure, and to come into being immediately on their departure, while Gandhi proposed that plebiscites on partition occur sometime after a united India gained its independence.^[108] In early 1945, Liaquat and the Congress leader Bhulabhai Desai met, with Jinnah’s approval and agreed that after the war, the Congress and the League should form an interim government and that the members of the Executive Council of the Viceroy should be nominated by the Congress and the League in equal numbers. When the Congress leadership was released from prison in June 1945, they repudiated the agreement and censured Desai for acting without proper authority.^[109]

Postwar

Field Marshal the Viscount Wavell succeeded Linlithgow as Viceroy in 1943. In June 1945, following the release of the Congress leaders, Wavell called for a conference, and invited the leading figures from the various communities to meet with him at Simla. He proposed a temporary government along the lines which Liaquat and Desai had agreed. However, Wavell was unwilling to guarantee that only the League’s candidates would be placed in the seats reserved for Muslims. All other invited groups submitted lists of candidates to the Viceroy. Wavell cut the conference short in mid-July without further seeking an agreement; with a British general election imminent, Churchill’s government did not feel it could proceed.^[110]

Jinnah in 1945

The British people returned Clement Attlee and his Labour Party later in July. Attlee and his Secretary of State for India, Lord Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, immediately ordered a review of the Indian situation.^[111] Jinnah had no comment on the change of government, but called a meeting of his Working Committee and issued a statement calling for new elections in India. The League held influence at the provincial level in the Muslim-majority states mostly by alliance, and Jinnah believed that, given the opportunity, the League would improve its electoral standing and lend added support to his claim to be the sole spokesman for the Muslims. Wavell returned to India in September after consultation with his new masters in London; elections, both for the centre and for the provinces, were announced soon after. The British indicated that formation of a constitution-making body would follow the votes.^[112]

The Muslim League declared that they would campaign on a single issue: Pakistan.^[113] Speaking in Ahmedabad, Jinnah echoed this, “Pakistan is a matter of life or death for us.”^[114] In the December 1945 elections for the Constituent Assembly of India, the League won every seat reserved for Muslims. In the provincial elections in January 1946, the League took 75% of the Muslim vote, an increase from 4.4% in 1937.^[115] According to his biographer Bolitho, “This was Jinnah’s glorious hour: his arduous political campaigns, his robust beliefs and claims, were at last justified.”^[116] Wolpert wrote that the League election showing “appeared to prove the universal appeal of Pakistan among Muslims of the subcontinent”.^[117] The Congress dominated the central assembly nevertheless, though it lost four seats from its previous strength.^[117]

In February 1946, the British Cabinet resolved to send a delegation to India to negotiate with leaders there. This Cabinet Mission included Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence. The highest-level delegation to try to break the deadlock, it arrived in New Delhi in late March. Little negotiation had been done since the previous October because of the elections in India.^[118] The British in May released a plan for a united Indian state comprising substantially autonomous provinces, and called for “groups” of provinces formed on the basis of religion. Matters such as defence, external relations and communications would be handled by a central authority. Provinces would have the option of leaving the union entirely, and there would be an interim government with representation from the Congress and the League. Jinnah and his Working Committee accepted this plan in June, but it fell apart over the question of how many members of the interim government the Congress and the League would have, and over the Congress’s desire to include a Muslim member in its representation. Before leaving India, the British ministers stated that they intended to inaugurate an interim government even if one of the major groups was unwilling to participate.^[119]

Nehru (left) and Jinnah walk together at Simla, 1946

The Congress soon joined the new Indian ministry. The League was slower to do so, not entering until October 1946. In agreeing to have the League join the government, Jinnah abandoned his demands for parity with the Congress and a veto on matters concerning Muslims. The new ministry met amid a backdrop of rioting, especially in Calcutta.^[120] The Congress wanted the Viceroy to immediately summon the constituent assembly and begin the work of writing a constitution, and felt that the League ministers should either join in the request or resign from the government. Wavell attempted to save the situation by flying leaders such as Jinnah, Liaquat, and Jawaharlal Nehru to London in December 1946. At the end of the talks, participants issued a statement that the constitution would not be forced on any unwilling parts of India.^[121] On the way back from London, Jinnah and Liaquat stopped in Cairo for several days of pan-Islamic meetings.^[122]

The Congress endorsed the joint statement from the London conference over angry dissent from some elements. The League refused to do so, and took no part in the constitutional discussions.^[121] Jinnah had been willing to consider some continued links to Hindustan (as the Hindu-majority state which would be formed on partition was sometimes referred to), such as a joint military or communications. However, by December 1946, he insisted on a fully sovereign Pakistan with dominion status.^[123]

Following the failure of the London trip, Jinnah was in no hurry to reach an agreement, figuring that time would allow him to gain the undivided provinces of Bengal and Punjab for Pakistan, but these wealthy, populous provinces had sizeable non-Muslim minorities, complicating a settlement.^[124] The Attlee ministry desired a rapid British departure from India, but had little confidence in Wavell to achieve that end. Beginning in December 1946, British officials began looking for a viceregal successor to Wavell, and soon fixed on Admiral Lord Mountbatten of Burma, a war leader popular among Conservatives as the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and among Labour for his political views.^[122]

Mountbatten and independence

On 20 February 1947, Attlee announced Mountbatten’s appointment, and that Britain would transfer power in India not later than June 1948.^[125] Mountbatten took office as Viceroy on 24 March 1947, two days after his arrival in India.^[126] By then, the Congress had come around to the idea of partition. Nehru stated in 1960, “the truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years … The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.”^[127] Leaders of the Congress decided that having loosely tied Muslim-majority provinces as part of a future India was not worth the loss of the powerful government at the centre which they desired.^[128] However, the Congress insisted that if Pakistan were to become independent, Bengal and Punjab would have to be divided.^[129]

Louis and Edwina Mountbatten with Jinnah, 1947

Mountbatten had been warned in his briefing papers that Jinnah would be his “toughest customer” who had proved a chronic nuisance because “no one in this country [India] had so far gotten into Jinnah’s mind”.^[130] The men met over six days beginning on 5 April. The sessions began lightly when Jinnah, photographed between Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, quipped “A rose between two thorns” which the Viceroy took, perhaps gratuitously, as evidence that the Muslim leader had pre-planned his joke, but had expected the vicereine to stand in the middle.^[131] Mountbatten was not favourably impressed with Jinnah, repeatedly expressing frustration to his staff about Jinnah’s insistence on Pakistan in the face of all argument.^[132]

Jinnah feared that at the end of the British presence in India, they would turn control over to the Congress-dominated constituent assembly, putting Muslims at a disadvantage in attempting to win autonomy. He demanded that Mountbatten divide the army prior to independence, which would take at least a year. Mountbatten had hoped that the post-independence arrangements would include a common defence force, but Jinnah saw it as essential that a sovereign state should have its own forces. Mountbatten met with Liaquat the day of his final session with Jinnah, and concluded, as he told Attlee and the Cabinet in May, that “it had become clear that the Muslim League would resort to arms if Pakistan in some form were not conceded.”^[133][134] The Viceroy was also influenced by negative Muslim reaction to the constitutional report of the assembly, which envisioned broad powers for the post-independence central government.^[135]

On 2 June, the final plan was given by the Viceroy to Indian leaders: on 15 August, the British would turn over power to two dominions. The provinces would vote on whether to continue in the existing constituent assembly, or to have a new one, that is, to join Pakistan. Bengal and Punjab would also vote, both on the question of which assembly to join, and on partition. A boundary commission would determine the final lines in the partitioned provinces. Plebiscites would take place in the North-West Frontier Province (which did not have a League government despite an overwhelmingly Muslim population), and in the majority-Muslim Sylhet district of Assam, adjacent to eastern Bengal. On 3 June, Mountbatten, Nehru, Jinnah and Sikh leader Baldev Singh made the formal announcement by radio.^{[136][137][138]} Jinnah concluded his address with “Pakistan zindabad ” (Long live Pakistan), which was not in the script.^[139] In the weeks which followed Punjab and Bengal cast the votes which resulted in partition. Sylhet and the N.W.F.P. voted to cast their lots with Pakistan, a decision joined by the assemblies in Sind and Baluchistan.^[138]

On 4 July 1947, Liaquat asked Mountbatten on Jinnah’s behalf to recommend to the British king, George VI, that Jinnah be appointed Pakistan’s first governor-general. This request angered Mountbatten, who had hoped to have that position in both dominions—he would be India’s first post-independence governor-general—but Jinnah felt that Mountbatten would be likely to favour the new Hindu-majority state because of his closeness to Nehru. In addition, the governor-general would initially be a powerful figure, and Jinnah did not trust anyone else to take that office. Although the Boundary Commission, led by British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, had not yet reported, there were already massive movements of populations between between the nations-to-be, as well as sectarian violence. Jinnah arranged to sell his house in Bombay and procured a new one in Karachi. On 7 August, Jinnah, with his sister and close staff, flew from Delhi to Karachi in Mountbatten’s plane, and as the plane taxied, he was heard to murmur, “That’s the end of that.”^{[140][141][142]}. On 11 August, he presided over the new constituent assembly for Pakistan at Karachi, and addressed them, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan … You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”^[143] On 14 August, Pakistan became independent; Jinnah led the celebrations in Karachi. One observer wrote, “here indeed is Pakistan’s King Emperor, Archbishop of Canterbury, Speaker and Prime Minister concentrated into one formidable Quaid-e-Azam.”^[144]

Governor-General

The Radcliffe Commission, dividing Bengal and Punjab, completed its work and reported to Mountbatten on 12 August; the last Viceroy held the maps until the 17th, not wanting to spoil the independence celebrations in both nations. There had already been ethnically charged violence and movement of populations; publication of the Radcliffe Line dividing the new nations sparked mass migration, murder, and ethnic cleansing. Many on the “wrong side” of the lines fled or were murdered, or murdered others, hoping to make facts on the ground which would reverse the commission’s verdict. Radcliffe wrote in his report that he knew that neither side would be happy with his award; he declined his fee for the work.^[145] Christopher Beaumont, Radcliffe’s private secretary, later wrote that Mountbatten “must take the blame—though not the sole blame—for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished”.^[146] As many as 14,500,000 people relocated between India and Pakistan during and after partition.^[146] Jinnah did what he could for the eight million people who migrated to Pakistan; although by now over 70 and frail from lung ailments, he travelled across West Pakistan and personally supervised the provision of aid.^[147] According to Ahmed, “What Pakistan needed desperately in those early months was a symbol of the state, one that would unify people and give them the courage and resolve to succeed.”^[148]

Along with Liaquat and Abdur Rab Nishtar, Jinnah represented Pakistan’s interests in the Division Council to appropriately divide public assets between India and Pakistan.^[149] Pakistan was supposed to receive one-sixth of the pre-independence government’s assets, carefully divided by agreement, even specifying how many sheets of paper each side would receive. The new Indian state, however, was slow to deliver, hoping for the collapse of the nascent Pakistani government, and reunion. Few members of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police Service had chosen Pakistan, resulting in staff shortages. Crop growers found their markets on the other side of an international border. There were shortages of machinery, not all of which was made in Pakistan. In addition to the massive refugee problem, the new government sought to save abandoned crops, establish security in a chaotic situation, and provide basic services. According to economist Yasmeen Niaz Mohiuddin in her study of Pakistan, “although Pakistan was born in bloodshed and turmoil, it survived in the initial and difficult months after partition only because of the tremendous sacrifices made by its people and the selfless efforts of its great leader.”^[150]

The Indian Princely States, of which there were several hundred, were advised by the departing British to choose whether to join Pakistan or India. Most did so prior to independence, but the holdouts contributed to what have become lasting divisions between the two nations.^[151] Indian leaders were angered at Jinnah’s courting the princes of Jodhpur, Bhopal and Indore to accede to Pakistan—these princely states did not border Pakistan, and each had a Hindu-majority population.^[152] The coastal princely state of Junagadh, which did not border Pakistan and which had a majority-Hindu population, did accede to Pakistan in September 1947, with its ruler’s nawab, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, personally delivering the accession papers to Jinnah. India occupied the principality in November, and the Bhuttos settled in Pakistan, beginning the politically powerful Bhutto family.^[153]

The most contentious of the disputes was, and continues to be, that over the princely state of Kashmir. It had a Muslim-majority population and a Hindu maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, who stalled his decision on which nation to join. With the population in revolt in October 1947, aided by Pakistani irregulars, the maharaja acceded to India; Indian troops were airlifted in. Jinnah objected to this action, and ordered that Pakistani troops move into Kashmir. The Pakistani Army was still commanded by British officers, and the commanding officer, General Sir Douglas Gracey, refused the order, stating that he would not move into what he considered the territory of another nation without approval from higher authority, which was not forthcoming. Jinnah withdrew the order. This did not stop the violence there, which has broken into war between India and Pakistan from time to time since.^[151][154]

Some historians allege that Jinnah’s courting the rulers of Hindu-majority states and his gambit with Junagadh are evidence of ill-intent towards India, as Jinnah had promoted separation by religion, yet tried to gain the accession of Hindu-majority states.^[155] In his book Patel: A Life, Rajmohan Gandhi asserts that Jinnah hoped for a plebiscite in Junagadh, knowing Pakistan would lose, in the hope the principle would be established for Kashmir.^[156] Despite a United Nations resolution for a plebiscite in Kashmir, this has never occurred.^[154]

In January 1948, the Indian government finally agreed to pay Pakistan its share of British India’s assets. They were impelled by Gandhi, who threatened a fast until death. Only days later, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu who believed that Gandhi was pro-Muslim. Jinnah made a brief statement of condolence, calling Gandhi “one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community”.^[157]

In March, Jinnah, despite his declining health, made his only post-independence visit to East Pakistan. In a speech before a crowd estimated at 300,000, Jinnah stated (in English) that Urdu alone should be the national language, believing a single language was needed for a nation to remain united. The Bengali-speaking people of East Pakistan strongly opposed this policy, and in 1971 the official language issue was a factor in the region’s secession to form Bangladesh.^[158]

Illness and death

From the 1930s, Jinnah suffered from tuberculosis; only his sister and a few others close to him were aware of his condition. Jinnah believed public knowledge of his lung ailments would hurt him politically. In a 1938 letter, he wrote to a supporter that “you must have read in the papers how during my tours … I suffered, which was not because there was anything wrong with me, but the irregularities [of the schedule] and over-strain told upon my health”.^[159][160] Many years later, Mountbatten stated that if he had known Jinnah was so ill, he would have stalled, hoping Jinnah’s death would avert partition.^[161] Fatima Jinnah later wrote, “even in his hour of triumph, the Quaid-e-Azam was gravely ill … He worked in a frenzy to consolidate Pakistan. And, of course, he totally neglected his health …”^[162] Jinnah worked with a tin of Craven “A” cigarettes at his desk, of which he had smoked 50 or more a day for the previous 30 years, as well as a box of Cuban cigars. He took longer and longer rest breaks in the private wing of Government House in Karachi, where only he, Fatima and the servants were allowed.^[163]

In June 1948, he and Fatima flew to Quetta, in the mountains of Baluchistan, where the weather was cooler than in Karachi. He could not completely rest there, addressing the officers at the Command and Staff College saying, “you, along with the other Forces of Pakistan, are the custodians of the life, property and honour of the people of Pakistan.”^[164] He returned to Karachi for the 1 July opening ceremony for the State Bank of Pakistan, at which he spoke; a reception by the Canadian trade commissioner that evening in honour of Dominion Day was the last public event he ever attended.^[165]

On 6 July 1948, Jinnah returned to Quetta, but at the advice of doctors, soon journeyed to an even higher retreat at Ziarat. Jinnah had always been reluctant to undergo medical treatment, but realising his condition, the Pakistani government sent the best doctors it could find to treat him. Tests confirmed tuberculosis, and showed evidence of lung cancer. Jinnah was informed, and asked for full information on his disease and for care in how his sister was told. He was treated with the new “miracle drug” of streptomycin, but it did not help. Jinnah’s condition continued to deteriorate despite the Eid prayers of his people. He was moved to the lower altitude of Quetta on 13 August, the eve of Independence Day, for which a statement ghost-written for him was released. Despite an increase in appetite (he then weighed just over 36 kilograms [79 lb]), it was clear to his doctors that if he was to return to Karachi in life, he would have to do so very soon. Jinnah, however, was reluctant to go, not wishing his aides to see him as an invalid on a stretcher.^[166]

By 9 September, Jinnah had also developed pneumonia. Doctors urged him to return to Karachi, where he could receive better care, and with his agreement, he was flown there on 11 September. Dr. Ilahi Bux, his personal physician, believed that Jinnah’s change of mind was caused by foreknowledge of death. The plane landed at Karachi, to be met by Jinnah’s limousine, and an ambulance into which Jinnah’s stretcher was placed. The ambulance broke down on the road into town, and the Governor-General and those with him waited for another to arrive; he could not be placed in the car as he could not sit up. They waited by the roadside in oppressive heat as trucks and buses passed by, unsuitable for transporting the dying man and with their occupants not knowing of Jinnah’s presence. After an hour, the replacement ambulance came, and transported Jinnah to Government House, arriving there over two hours after the landing. Jinnah died at 10:20 pm at his home in Karachi on 11 September 1948, just over a year after Pakistan’s creation.^[167][168]

Indian Prime Minister Nehru stated upon Jinnah’s death, “How shall we judge him? I have been very angry with him often during the past years. But now there is no bitterness in my thought of him, only a great sadness for all that has been … he succeeded in his quest and gained his objective, but at what a cost and with what a difference from what he had imagined.”^[169] Jinnah was buried on 12 September 1948 amid official mourning in both India and Pakistan; a million people gathered for his funeral. Indian Governor-General Rajagopalachari cancelled an official reception that day, in honour of the late leader. Today, Jinnah rests in a large marble mausoleum, Mazar-e-Quaid, in Karachi.^{[170][171][172]}

Aftermath

Dina Wadia, Jinnah’s daughter, remained in India after independence before ultimately settling in New York City. In the 1965 presidential election, Fatima Jinnah, by then known as Madar-e-Millat (“Mother of the Nation”), became the presidential candidate of a coalition of political parties that opposed the rule of President Ayub Khan, but was not successful.^[173]

The Jinnah House in Malabar Hill, Bombay, is in the possession of the Government of India, but the issue of its ownership has been disputed by the Government of Pakistan.^[174] Jinnah had personally requested Prime Minister Nehru to preserve the house, hoping one day he could return to Mumbai. There are proposals for the house be offered to the government of Pakistan to establish a consulate in the city as a goodwill gesture, but Dina Wadia has also asked for the property.^[174][175]

After Jinnah died, his sister Fatima asked the court to execute Jinnah’s will under Shia Islamic law.^[176] This subsequently became the part of argument in Pakistan about Jinnah’s religious affiliation. Vali Nasr says Jinnah “was an Ismaili by birth and a Twelver Shia by confession, though not a religiously observant man.”^[177] In a 1970 legal challenge, Hussain Ali Ganji Walji claimed Jinnah had converted to Sunni Islam, but the High Court rejected this claim in 1976, effectively accepting the Jinnah family as Shia.^[178] Publicly, Jinnah had a non-sectarian stance and “was at pains to gather the Muslims of India under the banner of a general Muslim faith and not under a divisive sectarian identity.”^[176] In 1970, a Pakistani court decision stated that Jinnah’s “secular Muslim faith made him neither Shia nor Sunni”,^[176] and in 1984 the court maintained that “the Quaid was definitely not a Shia”.^[176] Liaquat H. Merchant elaborates that “he was also not a Sunni, he was simply a Muslim”.^[176]

Legacy and historical view

Jinnah’s legacy is Pakistan. According to Mohiuddin, “He was and continues to be as highly honored in Pakistan as [first US president] George Washington is in the United States … Pakistan owes its very existence to his drive, tenacity, and judgment … Jinnah’s importance in the creation of Pakistan was monumental and immeasurable.”^[179] Wolpert, giving a speech in honour of Jinnah in 1998, deemed him Pakistan’s greatest leader.^[180]

According to Singh, “With Jinnah’s death Pakistan lost its moorings. In India there will not easily arrive another Gandhi, nor in Pakistan another Jinnah.”^[181] Malik writes, “As long as Jinnah was alive, he could persuade and even pressure regional leaders toward greater mutual accommodation, but after his death, the lack of consensus on the distribution of political power and economic resources often turned controversial.”^[182] According to Mohiuddin, “Jinnah’s death deprived Pakistan of a leader who could have enhanced stability and democratic governance … The rocky road to democracy in Pakistan and the relatively smooth one in India can in some measure be ascribed to Pakistan’s tragedy of losing an incorruptible and highly revered leader so soon after independence.”^[183]

Tomb of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Karachi

Jinnah is depicted on all Pakistani rupee currency, and is the namesake of many Pakistani public institutions. The former Quaid-i-Azam International Airport in Karachi, now called the Jinnah International Airport, is Pakistan’s busiest. One of the largest streets in the Turkish capital Ankara, Cinnah Caddesi, is named after him, as is the Mohammad Ali Jenah Expressway in Teheran, Iran. The royalist government of Iran also released a stamp commemorating the centennial of Jinnah’s birth in 1976. In Chicago, a portion of Devon Avenue was named “Mohammed Ali Jinnah Way”. The Mazar-e-Quaid, Jinnah’s mausoleum, is among Karachi’s landmarks.^[184] The “Jinnah Tower” in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India, was built to commemorate Jinnah.^[185]

There is a considerable amount of scholarship on Jinnah which stems from Pakistan; according to Akbar S. Ahmed, it is not widely read outside the country and usually avoids even the slightest criticism of Jinnah.^[186] According to Ahmed, nearly every book about Jinnah outside Pakistan mentions that he drank alcohol, but this is omitted from books inside Pakistan. Ahmed suggests that depicting the Quaid drinking alcohol would weaken Jinnah’s Islamic identity, and by extension, Pakistan’s. Some sources allege he gave up alcohol near the end of his life.^[75][187]

According to historian Ayesha Jalal, while there is a tendency towards hagiography in the Pakistani view of Jinnah, in India he is viewed negatively.^[188] Ahmed deems Jinnah “the most maligned person in recent Indian history … In India, many see him as the demon who divided the land.”^[189] Even many Indian Muslims see Jinnah negatively, blaming him for their woes as a minority in that state.^[190] Some historians such as Jalal and H. M. Seervai assert that Jinnah never wanted partition of India—it was the outcome of the Congress leaders being unwilling to share power with the Muslim League. They contend that Jinnah only used the Pakistan demand in an attempt to mobilise support to obtain significant political rights for Muslims.^[191] Jinnah has gained the admiration of Indian nationalist politicians such as Lal Krishna Advani, whose comments praising Jinnah caused an uproar in his Bharatiya Janata Party.^[192]

The view of Jinnah in the West has been shaped to some extent by his portrayal in Sir Richard Attenborough‘s 1982 film, Gandhi. The film was dedicated to Nehru and Mountbatten, and was given considerable support by Nehru’s daughter, the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi. It portrays Jinnah (played by Alyque Padamsee) as a scowling, villainous figure, who seems to act out of jealousy of the title character. Padamsee later stated that his portrayal was not historically accurate.^[193]

In a journal article on Pakistan’s first governor-general, historian R. J. Moore wrote that Jinnah is universally recognised as central to the creation of Pakistan.^[194] Wolpert summarises the profound effect that Jinnah had on the world:

Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.^[195]

Notes

References

Bibliography

Books

• Ahmed, Akbar S. (1997). Jinnah, Pakistan, and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14966-2.
• Bolitho, Hector (1954). Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan. London: John Murray.
• Cohen, Stephen Philip (2004). The Idea of Pakistan. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. ISBN 978-0-8157-1503-0.
• Gandhi, Rajmohan (1990). Patel: A Life. Ahmedabad: Navajivan. ASIN B0006EYQ0A.
• Hibbard, Scott (1994). Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India, and the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-9669-X.
• Jalal, Ayesha (1994). The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (paperback ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45850-4.
• Jinnah, Fatima (1987). My Brother. Quaid-i-Azam Academy. ISBN 978-969-413-036-1.
• Khan, Yasmin (2008) [2007]. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (paperback ed.). New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12078-3.
• Malik, Iftikar H. (2008). The History of Pakistan. The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-34137-3.
• Mohiuddin, Yasmeen Niaz (2007). Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-85109-801-9.
• Singh, Jaswant (2009). Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-547927-0.
• Wolpert, Stanley (1984). Jinnah of Pakistan. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503412-7.

Journals and other media

• Moore, R. J. (1983). “Jinnah and the Pakistan Demand”. Modern Asian Studies (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press) 17 (4): 529–561. doi:10.1017/S0026749X00011069. JSTOR 312235.
• Puri, Balraj (1–7 March 2008). “Clues to understanding Jinnah”. Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai: Sameeksha Trust) 43 (9): 33–35. JSTOR 40277204.

External links

Find more about Muhammad Ali Jinnah at Wikipedia’s sister projects
	Media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Travel guides from Wikivoyage

• “Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah”. Government of Pakistan Website. Retrieved 23 October 2012.
• “Jinnah’s speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan”. pakistani.org. 11 August 1947. Retrieved 23 October 2012.

India Indian Empire
Colony of the United Kingdom
↓ 1858–1947 → → → →
Flag Star of India
Anthem God Save the King/Queen
The British Indian Empire in 1936
Capital		Calcutta (1858–1912) New Delhi (1912–1947) Simla (Summer)
Languages		English, Hindustani and many local languages
Government		Constitutional Monarchy
Emperor (1876–1947)
-	1858–1901	Victoria 1
-	1901–1910	Edward VII
-	1910–1936	George V
-	1936	Edward VIII
-	1936–1947	George VI
Viceroy 2
-	1858–1862	Charles Canning (first)
-	1947	Louis Mountbatten (last)
Legislature		Imperial Legislative Council
History
-	Indian Rebellion of 1857	10 May 1857
-	Government of India Act 1858	2 August 1858
-	Indian Independence Act 1947	15 August 1947
-	Partition of India	15 August 1947
Currency		British Indian rupee
Preceded by Succeeded by Company rule in India Mughal Empire Ahom Kingdom Dominion of India Dominion of Pakistan British Burma Hyderabad State
Today part of		India  Pakistan  Bangladesh  Burma
1: Reigned as Empress of India from 1 May 1876, before that as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 2: Viceroy and Governor-General of India

Colonial India

Imperial Entities of India
Dutch India	1604–1825
Danish India	1620–1869
French India	1759–1954
Portuguese India 1510–1961
Casa da Índia	1434–1833
Portuguese East India Company	1628–1633
British India 1613–1947
East India Company	1612–1757
Company rule in India	1757–1857
British Raj	1858–1947
British rule in Burma	1824–1942
1765–1947/48
Partition of India	1947
v t e

The British Raj (rāj, lit. “reign” in Hindi)^[1] was British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947.^[2] The term can also refer to the period of dominion.^[2][3] The region under British control, commonly called India in contemporary usage, included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom^[4] (contemporaneously British India), as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. The region was less commonly also called the Indian Empire by the British.^[5] As “India”, it was a founding member of the League of Nations, and a participating nation in the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and 1936.

The system of governance was instituted in 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria^[6] (who in 1876 was proclaimed Empress of India), and lasted until 1947, when the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states, the Union of India (later the Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern half of which, still later, became the People’s Republic of Bangladesh). At the inception of the Raj in 1858, Lower Burma was already a part of British India; Upper Burma was added in 1886, and the resulting union, Burma, was administered as a province until 1937, when it became a separate British colony which gained its own independence in 1948.

The budget of the Raj covered municipal affairs, the police, the small but highly trained Indian Civil Service that ran government operations, and the Indian Army. It was paid entirely by Indians through taxes, especially on farmland and on salt. The large, well-trained Indian Army played major roles in both World Wars; the rest of the time it trained to fight off a possible Russian invasion through Afghanistan. The great majority of the Indian people were very poor farmers; economic growth at 1% a year was neutralized by population growth of 1%.

Geographical extent

The British raja extended over almost all present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with exceptions such as Goa and Pondicherry. In addition, at various times, it included Aden (from 1858 to 1937),^[7] Lower Burma (from 1858 to 1937), Upper Burma (from 1886 to 1937), British Somaliland (briefly from 1884 to 1898), and Singapore (briefly from 1858 to 1867). Burma was separated from India and directly administered by the British Crown from 1937 until its independence in 1948. The Trucial States of the Persian Gulf were theoretically princely states of British India until 1946 and used the rupee as their unit of currency.

Among other countries in the region, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was ceded to Britain in 1802 under the Treaty of Amiens. Ceylon was a British crown colony but not part of British India. The kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan, having fought wars with the British, subsequently signed treaties with them and were recognised by the British as independent states.^[8][9] The Kingdom of Sikkim was established as a princely state after the Anglo-Sikkimese Treaty of 1861; however, the issue of sovereignty was left undefined.^[10] The Maldive Islands were a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965 but not part of British India.

British India and the Native States

The British Indian Empire in 1893

India during the British Raj was made up of two types of territory: British India and the Native States (or Princely States). In its Interpretation Act 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions:

(4.) The expression “British India” shall mean all territories and places within Her Majesty’s dominions which are for the time being governed by Her Majesty through the Governor-General of India or through any governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India.
(5.) The expression “India” shall mean British India together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty exercised through the Governor-General of India, or through any governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India.^[11]

In general the term “British India” had been used (and is still used) to also refer to the regions under the rule of the British East India Company in India from 1600 to 1858.^[12] The term has also been used to refer to the “British in India”.^[13]

The terms “Indian Empire” “Empire of India” (like the term “British Empire”) was not used in legislation. The monarch was known as Empress or Emperor of India and the term was often used in Queen Victoria’s Queen’s Speeches and Prorogation Speeches. The passports issued by British India government, have the words Indian Empire on the cover and on the inside and Empire of India on the inside.^[14] In addition, an order of knighthood the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire was set up in 1878.

Suzerainty over 175 princely states, some of the largest and most important, was exercised (in the name of the British Crown) by the central government of British India under the Viceroy; the remaining approximately 500 states were dependents of the provincial governments of British India under a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, or Chief Commissioner (as the case might have been).^[15] A clear distinction between “dominion” and “suzerainty” was supplied by the jurisdiction of the courts of law: the law of British India rested upon the laws passed by the British Parliament and the legislative powers those laws vested in the various governments of British India, both central and local; in contrast, the courts of the Princely States existed under the authority of the respective rulers of those states.^[15]

Major provinces

At the turn of the 20th century, British India consisted of eight provinces that were administered either by a Governor or a Lieutenant-Governor. The following table lists their areas and populations (but does not include those of the dependent Native States) circa 1907:^[16]

During the partition of Bengal (1905–1911), a new province, Assam and East Bengal was created as a Lieutenant-Governorship. In 1911, East Bengal was reunited with Bengal, and the new provinces in the east became: Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.^[16]

Minor provinces

In addition, there were a few minor provinces that were administered by a Chief Commissioner:^[17]

Princely states

1909 Map of the British Indian Empire, showing British India in two shades of pink and the princely states in yellow.

A Princely State, also called a Native State or an Indian State, was a nominally sovereign entity with an indigenous Indian ruler, subject to a subsidiary alliance. There were 565 princely states when India and Pakistan became independent from Britain in August 1947. The princely states did not form a part of British India (i.e. the presidencies and provinces), as they were not directly under British rule. The larger ones had treaties with Britain that specified which rights the princes had; in the smaller ones the princes had few rights. Within the princely states external affairs, defence and most communications were under British control. The British also exercised a general influence over the states’ internal politics, in part through the granting or withholding of recognition of individual rulers. Although there were nearly 600 princely states, the great majority were very small and contracted out the business of government to the British. Some two hundred of the states had an area of less than 25 square kilometres (10 square miles).^[18]

Organization

Sir Charles Wood (1800–1885) was President of the Board of Control of the East India Company from 1852 to 1855; he shaped British education policy in India, and was Secretary of State for India 1859–66

Lord Salisbury was Secretary of State for India 1874–78

Lord Canning, the last Governor-General of India under Company rule and the first Viceroy of India under Crown rule.

Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (usually called the Indian Mutiny by the British), the Government of India Act 1858 made changes in the governance of India at three levels:

1. in the imperial government in London,
2. in the central government in Calcutta, and
3. in the provincial governments in the presidencies (and later in the provinces).^[19]

In London, it provided for a cabinet-level Secretary of State for India and a fifteen-member Council of India, whose members were required, as one prerequisite of membership, to have spent at least ten years in India and to have done so no more than ten years before.^[20] Although the Secretary of State formulated the policy instructions to be communicated to India, he was required in most instances to consult the Council, but especially so in matters relating to spending of Indian revenues. The Act envisaged a system of “double government” in which the Council ideally served both as a check on excesses in imperial policy-making and as a body of up-to-date expertise on India. However, the Secretary of State also had special emergency powers that allowed him to make unilateral decisions, and, in reality, the Council’s expertise was sometimes outdated.^[21] From 1858 until 1947, twenty seven individuals served as Secretary of State for India and directed the India Office; these included: Sir Charles Wood (1859–1866), Marquess of Salisbury (1874–1878) (later Prime Minister of Britain), John Morley (1905–1910) (initiator of the Minto-Morley Reforms), E. S. Montagu (1917–1922) (an architect of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms), and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence (1945–1947) (head of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India). The size of the advisory Council was reduced over the next half-century, but its powers remained unchanged. In 1907, for the first time, two Indians were appointed to the Council.^[22] They were K.G. Gupta and Syed Hussain Bilgrami.

In Calcutta, the Governor-General remained head of the Government of India and now was more commonly called the Viceroy on account of his secondary role as the Crown’s representative to the nominally sovereign princely states; he was, however, now responsible to the Secretary of State in London and through him to Parliament. A system of “double government” had already been in place during the Company’s rule in India from the time of Pitt’s India Act of 1784. The Governor-General in the capital, Calcutta, and the Governor in a subordinate presidency (Madras or Bombay) was each required to consult his advisory council; executive orders in Calcutta, for example, were issued in the name of “Governor-General-in-Council” (i.e. the Governor-General with the advice of the Council). The Company’s system of “double government” had its critics, since, from the time of the system’s inception, there had been intermittent feuding between the Governor-General and his Council; still, the Act of 1858 made no major changes in governance.^[23] However, in the years immediately thereafter, which were also the years of post-rebellion reconstruction, the Viceroy Lord Canning found the collective decision-making of the Council to be too time-consuming for the pressing tasks ahead, so he requested the “portfolio system” of an Executive Council in which the business of each government department (the “portfolio”) was assigned to and became the responsibility of a single Council member.^[22] Routine departmental decisions were made exclusively by the member; however, important decisions required the consent of the Governor-General and, in the absence of such consent, required discussion by the entire Executive Council. This innovation in Indian governance was promulgated in the Indian Councils Act 1861.

If the Government of India needed to enact new laws, the Councils Act allowed for a Legislative Council—an expansion of the Executive Council by up to twelve additional members, each appointed to a two-year term—with half the members consisting of British officials of the government (termed official) and allowed to vote, and the other half, comprising Indians and domiciled Britons in India (termed non-official) and serving only in an advisory capacity.^[24] All laws enacted by Legislative Councils in India, whether by the Imperial Legislative Council in Calcutta or by the provincial ones in Madras and Bombay, required the final assent of the Secretary of State in London; this prompted Sir Charles Wood, the second Secretary of State, to describe the Government of India as “a despotism controlled from home”.^[22] Moreover, although the appointment of Indians to the Legislative Council was a response to calls after the 1857 rebellion, most notably by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for more consultation with Indians, the Indians so appointed were from the landed aristocracy, often chosen for their loyalty, and far from representative.^[25] Even so, the “… tiny advances in the practise of representative government were intended to provide safety valves for the expression of public opinion which had been so badly misjudged before the rebellion”.^[26] Indian affairs now also came to be more closely examined in the British Parliament and more widely discussed in the British press.^[27]

Timeline of notable events

History 1858 to 1914

Aftermath of the Indian rebellion of 1857

Shaken by the events of the Indian rebellion of 1857, Britain dissolved the East India Company and transferred ruling power over India to the Crown. The princely states were mostly kept intact, though they lost their private armies and were more closely watched. The all-British units were doubled in number. After the rebellion, the British became more circumspect regarding rapid modernisation. Much thought was devoted to the causes of the rebellion, and from it three main lessons were drawn. At a more practical level, it was felt that there needed to be more communication and camaraderie between the British and Indians—not just between British army officers and their Indian staff but in civilian life as well. The Indian army was completely reorganised: units composed of the Muslims and Brahmins of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, who had formed the core of the rebellion, were disbanded.^[40] New regiments, like the Sikhs and Baluchis, composed of Indians who, in British estimation, had demonstrated steadfastness, were formed. The Indian units lost their artillery. From then on, the Indian army was to remain unchanged in its organisation until 1947.^[41] The 1861 Census had revealed that the British population in India was 125,945. Of these only about 41,862 were civilians as compared with about 84,083 European officers and men of the Army.^[42] In 1880, the standing Indian Army consisted of 66,000 British soldiers, 130,000 Natives, and 350,000 soldiers in the princely armies.^[43]

Viceroy Lord Canning meets Maharaja Ranbir Singh of Jammu & Kashmir, 9 March 1860.

Administrative control of India came under the prestigious Indian Civil Service which had administrative control over all districts outside the princely states. At first all-British, it included increasing proportions of Indians, and totalled about 1000 men. They were very well organised, well-educated and professional, and avoided the bribes and inside deals that had made for great wealth among the officials of the defunct East India Company.^[44]

The British decided that both the princes and the large land-holders, by not joining the rebellion, had proved to be, in Lord Canning’s words, “breakwaters in a storm”.^[40] They too were rewarded in the new British Raj by being officially recognised in the treaties each state now signed with the Crown.^[41] At the same time, it was felt that the peasants, for whose benefit the large land-reforms of the United Provinces had been undertaken, had shown disloyalty, by, in many cases, fighting for their former landlords against the British. Consequently, no more land reforms were implemented for the next 90 years: Bengal and Bihar were to remain the realms of large land holdings (unlike the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh).^[41]

Legal modernisation

Singha argues that after 1857 the colonial government strengthened and expanded its infrastructure via the court system, legal procedures, and statutes. New legislation merged the Crown and the old East India Company courts and introduced a new penal code as well as new codes of civil and criminal procedure, based largely on English law. In the 1860s–1880s the Raj set up compulsory registration of births, deaths, and marriages, as well as adoptions, property deeds, and wills. The goal was to create a stable, usable public record and verifiable identities. However there was opposition from both Muslim and Hindu elements who complained that the new procedures for census-taking and registration threatened to uncover female privacy. Purdah rules prohibited women from saying their husband’s name or having their photograph taken. An all-India census was conducted between 1868 and 1871, often using total numbers of females in a household rather than individual names. Select groups which the Raj reformers wanted to monitor statistically included those reputed to practice female infanticide, prostitutes, lepers, and eunuchs.^[45]

Increasingly officials discovered that traditions and customs in India were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily. There were few new social interventions, especially not in matters dealing with religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows).^[41] Indeed, Murshid argues that women were in some ways more restricted by the modernisation of the laws. They remained tied to the strictures of their religion, caste, and customs, but now with an overlay of British Victorian. Their inheritance rights to own and manage property were curtailed; the new English laws were somewhat harsher. Court rulings restricted the rights of second wives and their children regarding inheritance. A woman had to belong to either a father or a husband to have any rights.^[46]

Education

During the time of the East India Company, Thomas Babington Macaulay had made schooling a priority for the Raj in his famous minute of February 1835 and succeeded in implementing ideas previously put forward by Lord William Bentinck (the governor general between 1828 and 1835). Bentinck favoured the replacement of Persian by English as the official language, the use of English as the medium of instruction, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers. He was inspired by utilitarian ideas and called for “useful learning.” However, Bentinck’s proposals were rejected by London officials.^[47][48] Under Macaulay, thousands of elementary and secondary schools were opened though they usually had an all-male student body. Universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established in 1857, just before the Rebellion. By 1890 some 60,000 Indians had matriculated, chiefly in the liberal arts or law. About a third entered public administration, and another third became lawyers. The result was a very well educated professional state bureaucracy. By 1887 of 21,000 mid-level civil service appointments, 45% were held by Hindus, 7% by Muslims, 19% by Eurasians (European father and Indian mother), and 29% by Europeans. Of the 1000 top -level positions, almost all were held by Britons, typically with an Oxbridge degree.^[49] The government, often working with local philanthropists, opened 186 universities and colleges of higher education by 1911; they enrolled 36,000 students (over 90% men). By 1939 the number of institutions had doubled and enrolment reached 145,000. The curriculum followed classical British standards of the sort set by Oxford and Cambridge and stressed English literature and European history. Nevertheless by the 1920s the student bodies had become hotbeds of Indian nationalism.^[50]

Economic history

The Indian economy grew at about 1% per year from 1880 to 1920, and the population also grew at 1%.^[51] The result was, on average, no long-term change in per capita income levels, though cost of living had grown higher. Agriculture was still dominant, with most peasants at the subsistence level. Extensive irrigation systems were built, providing an impetus for switching to cash crops for export and for raw materials for Indian industry, especially jute, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and tea.^[52] India’s global share of GDP fell drastically from above 20% to less than 5% in the colonial period.^[53] Fact also remains that India has “third world” status after decolonizing, compared to the way its riches and trade attracted European and Middle Eastern invaders and traders in 18th century. Historians have been bitterly divided on issues of economic history, with the Nationalist school (following Nehru) arguing that India was poorer at the end of British rule than at the beginning and that impoverishment occurred because of the British.^[54]

Industry

The entrepreneur Jamsetji Tata (1839–1904) began his industrial career in 1877 with the Central India Spinning, Weaving, and Manufacturing Company in Bombay. While other Indian mills produced cheap coarse yarn (and later cloth) using local short-staple cotton and cheap machinery imported from Britain, Tata did much better by importing expensive longer-stapled cotton from Egypt and buying more complex ring-spindle machinery from the United States to spin finer yarn that could compete with imports from Britain.^[55]

In the 1890s, he launched plans to move into heavy industry using Indian funding. The Raj did not provide capital, but aware of Britain’s declining position against the U.S. and Germany in the steel industry, it wanted steel mills in India so it is did promise to purchase any surplus steel Tata could not otherwise sell.^[56] The Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), now headed by his son Dorabji Tata (1859–1932), opened its plant at Jamshedpur in Bihar in 1908. It used American technology, not British^[57] and became the leading iron and steel producer in India, with 120,000 employees in 1945. TISCO became India’s proud symbol of technical skill, managerial competence, entrepreneurial flair, and high pay for industrial workers.^[58] The Tata family, like most of India’s big businessmen, were Indian nationalists but did not trust the Congress because it seemed too aggressively hostile to the Raj, too socialist, and too supportive of trade unions.^[59]

Railways

Extent of Great Indian Peninsular Railway network in 1870. The GIPR was one of the largest rail companies at that time.

The railway network in 1909, when it was the fourth largest railway network in the world.

India built a modern railway system in the late 19th century which was the fourth largest in the world. The railways at first were privately owned and operated. It was run by British administrators, engineers and craftsmen. At first, only the unskilled workers were Indians.^[60]

The East India Company (and later the colonial government) encouraged new railway companies backed by private investors under a scheme that would provide land and guarantee an annual return of up to five percent during the initial years of operation. The companies were to build and operate the lines under a 99 year lease, with the government having the option to buy them earlier.^[61]

Two new railway companies, Great Indian Peninsular Railway (GIPR) and East Indian Railway (EIR) began in 1853–54 to construct and operate lines near Bombay and Calcutta. The first passenger railway line in North India between Allahabad and Kanpur opened in 1859.

In 1854 Governor-General Lord Dalhousie formulated a plan to construct a network of trunk lines connecting the principal regions of India. Encouraged by the government guarantees, investment flowed in and a series of new rail companies were established, leading to rapid expansion of the rail system in India.^[62] Soon several large princely states built their own rail systems and the network spread to the regions that became the modern-day states of Assam, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. The route mileage of this network increased from 1,349 kilometres (838 mi) in 1860 to 25,495 kilometres (15,842 mi) in 1880 – mostly radiating inland from the three major port cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.^[63] Most of the railway construction was done by Indian companies supervised by British engineers. The system was heavily built, using a wide gauge, sturdy tracks and strong bridges. By 1900 India had a full range of rail services with diverse ownership and management, operating on broad, metre and narrow gauge networks. In 1900 the government took over the GIPR network, while the company continued to manage it. In the First World War, the railways were used to transport troops and grains to the ports of Bombay and Karachi en route to Britain, Mesopotamia, and East Africa. With shipments of equipment and parts from Britain curtailed, maintenance became much more difficult; critical workers entered the army; workshops were converted to making artillery; some locomotives and cars were shipped to the Middle East. The railways could barely keep up with the increased demand.^[64] By the end of the war, the railways had deteriorated for lack of maintenance and were not profitable. In 1923, both GIPR and EIR were nationalised.

“The most magnificent railway station in the world.” Victoria Terminus, Bombay, was completed in 1888.

Headrick shows that until the 1930s, both the Raj lines and the private companies hired only European supervisors, civil engineers, and even operating personnel, such as locomotive engineers. The government’s Stores Policy required that bids on railway contracts be made to the India Office in London, shutting out most Indian firms. The railway companies purchased most of their hardware and parts in Britain. There were railway maintenance workshops in India, but they were rarely allowed to manufacture or repair locomotives. TISCO steel could not obtain orders for rails until the war emergency.^[65]

The Second World War severely crippled the railways as rolling stock was diverted to the Middle East, and the railway workshops were converted into munitions workshops.^[66] After independence in 1947, forty-two separate railway systems, including thirty-two lines owned by the former Indian princely states, were amalgamated to form a single nationalised unit named the Indian Railways.

India provides an example of the British Empire pouring its money and expertise into a very well built system designed for military reasons (after the Mutiny of 1857), and with the hope that it would stimulate industry. The system was overbuilt and too expensive for the small amount of freight traffic it carried. However, it did capture the imagination of the Indians, who saw their railways as the symbol of an industrial modernity—but one that was not realised until after Independence. Christensen (1996) looks at of colonial purpose, local needs, capital, service, and private-versus-public interests. He concludes that making the railways a creature of the state hindered success because railway expenses had to go through the same time-consuming and political budgeting process as did all other state expenses. Railway costs could therefore not be tailored to the timely needs of the railways or their passengers.^[67]

Policies

In the second half of the 19th century, both the direct administration of India by the British crown and the technological change ushered in by the industrial revolution had the effect of closely intertwining the economies of India and Great Britain.^[68] In fact many of the major changes in transport and communications (that are typically associated with Crown Rule of India) had already begun before the Mutiny. Since Dalhousie had embraced the technological revolution underway in Britain, India too saw rapid development of all those technologies. Railways, roads, canals, and bridges were rapidly built in India and telegraph links equally rapidly established in order that raw materials, such as cotton, from India’s hinterland could be transported more efficiently to ports, such as Bombay, for subsequent export to England.^[69] Likewise, finished goods from England, were transported back, just as efficiently, for sale in the burgeoning Indian markets. Massive railway projects were begun in earnest and government railway jobs and pensions attracted a large number of upper caste Hindus into the civil service for the first time. The Indian Civil Service was prestigious and paid well, but it remained politically neutral.^[70] Imports of British cotton covered 55% of the Indian market by 1875.^[71] Industrial production as it developed in European factories was unknown until the 1850s when the first cotton mills were opened in Bombay, posing a challenge to the cottage-based home production system based on family labour.^[72]

The Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners, 1896

Taxes in India decreased during the colonial period for most of India’s population; with the land tax revenue claiming 15% of India’s national income during Mogul times compared with 1% at the end of the colonial period. The percentage of national income for the village economy increased from 44% during Mogul times to 54% by the end of colonial period. India’s per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it later increased to $618, by 1947^[73]

New middle class, Indian National Congress, 1860s–1890s

By 1880 a new middle class had arisen in India and spread thinly across the country.^[74] Moreover, there was a growing solidarity among its members, created by the “joint stimuli of encouragement and irritation.”^[74] The encouragement felt by this class came from its success in education and its ability to avail itself of the benefits of that education such as employment in the Indian Civil Service.^[75] It came too from Queen Victoria‘s proclamation of 1858 in which she had declared, “We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects.”^[76] Indians were especially encouraged when Canada was granted dominion status in 1867 and established an autonomous democratic constitution.^[76] Lastly, the encouragement came from the work of contemporaneous Oriental scholars like Monier Monier-Williams and Max Müller, who in their works had been presenting ancient India as a great civilisation.^[74] Irritation, on the other hand, came not just from incidents of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from governmental actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns (e.g. in the Second Anglo-Afghan War) and the attempts to control the vernacular press (e.g. in the Vernacular Press Act of 1878).^[74]

It was, however, Viceroy Lord Ripon‘s partial reversal of the Ilbert Bill (1883), a legislative measure that had proposed putting Indian judges in the Bengal Presidency on equal footing with British ones, that transformed the discontent into political action.^[75] On 28 December 1885, professionals and intellectuals from this middle-class—many educated at the new British-founded universities in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, and familiar with the ideas of British political philosophers, especially the utilitarians assembled in Bombay. The seventy men founded the Indian National Congress; Womesh Chandra Bonerjee was elected the first president. The membership comprised a westernised elite, and no effort was made at this time to broaden the base.

During its first twenty years, the Congress primarily debated British policy toward India; however, its debates created a new Indian outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, by the restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and by the use of Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India.^[77]

Social Reformers, Moderates vs. the Extremists: 1870s–1907

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a constitutional social reformer and moderate nationalist, was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1905.

Social reform was in the air by the 1880s. For example, Pandita Ramabai, poet, Sanskrit scholar, and a champion of the emancipation of Indian women, took up the cause of widow remarriage, especially of Brahamin widows, later converted to Christianity.^[78] By 1900 reform movements had taken root within the Indian National Congress. Congress member Gopal Krishna Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society, which lobbied for legislative reform (for example, for a law to permit the remarriage of Hindu child widows), and whose members took vows of poverty, and worked among the untouchable community.^[79]

Congress “extremist” Bal Gangadhar Tilak speaking in 1907 as the party split into the Moderates and the Extremists. Seated at the table is Aurobindo Ghosh and to his right (in the chair) is Lala Lajpat Rai, both allies of Tilak.

By 1905 a deep gulf opened between the moderates, led by Gokhale, who downplayed public agitation, and the new “extremists” who not only advocated agitation, but also regarded the pursuit of social reform as a distraction from nationalism. Prominent among the extremists was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who attempted to mobilise Indians by appealing to an explicitly Hindu political identity, displayed, for example, in the annual public Ganapati festivals that he inaugurated in western India.^[80]

Partition of Bengal: 1905–1911

The viceroy Lord Curzon (1899–1905) was unusually energetic in pursuit of efficiency and reform.,^[81] His agenda included the creation of the North-West Frontier Province; small changes in the Civil Service; speeding up the operations of the secretariat; setting up a gold standard to ensure a stable currency; creation of a Railway Board; irrigation reform; reduction of peasant debts; lowering the cost of telegrams; archaeological research and the preservation of antiquities; improvements in the universities; police reforms; upgrading the roles of the Native States; a new Commerce and Industry Department; promotion of industry; revised land revenue policies; lowering taxes; setting up agricultural banks; creating an Agricultural Department; sponsoring agricultural research; establishing an Imperial Library; creating an Imperial Cadet Corps; new famine codes; and, indeed, reducing the smoke nuisance in Calcutta.^[82]

Viceroy Curzon, (1899–1905); he promoted many reforms but his partitioning of Bengal into Muslim and Hindu states outraged Hindus

Trouble emerged for Curzon when he divided the largest administrative subdivision in British India, the Bengal Presidency, into the Muslim-majority province of East Bengal and Assam and the Hindu-majority province of West Bengal (present-day Indian states of West Bengal, Bihār, and Orissa). Curzon’s act, the Partition of Bengal—which some considered administratively felicitous, communally charged, sowed the seeds of division among Indians and, which had been contemplated by various colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck, but never acted upon—was to transform nationalist politics as nothing else before it. The Hindu elite of Bengal, among them many who owned land in East Bengal that was leased out to Muslim peasants, protested fervidly.^[83]

Sir Surendranath Banerjee, a Congress moderate, who led the opposition to the partition of Bengal with the Swadeshi movement to buy Indian-made cloth

The large Bengali Hindu middle-class (the Bhadralok), upset at the prospect of Bengalis being outnumbered in the new Bengal province by Biharis and Oriyas, felt that Curzon’s act was punishment for their political assertiveness. The pervasive protests against Curzon’s decision took the form predominantly of the Swadeshi (“buy Indian”) campaign led by two-time Congress president, Surendranath Banerjee, and involved boycott of British goods.^[84]

Cover of a 1909 issue of the Tamil magazine, Vijaya showing “Mother India” with her diverse progeny and the rallying cry “Vande Mataram”

The rallying cry for both types of protest was the slogan Bande Mataram (“Hail to the Mother”), which invoked a mother goddess, who stood variously for Bengal, India, and the Hindu goddess Kali. Sri Aurobindo never went beyond the law when he edited the Bande Mataram magazine; it preached freedom but within the bounds of peace as far as possible. Its goal was Passive Resistance.^[85] The unrest spread from Calcutta to the surrounding regions of Bengal when students returned home to their villages and towns. Some engaged in robbery to fund terrorist activities such as bombing public buildings, but the conspiracies generally failed in the face of intense police work.^[86]

In 1906 the civil police (completely separate from the Army) comprised 29,000 officers and 138,000 men.^[87] Arnold shows that in the Madras presidency the armed police were divided into the district reserves and the striking forces. Armed with seven-foot metal tipped lathis and smoothbore muskets, and tear gas after 1940, they repressed the disturbances of 1930–33. Special striking forces included the Malabar Special Police, armed with Enfield rifles. It was established to handle the Moplah rebellion of 1921 and was used throughout the presidency. The Presidency General Reserve was established in 1931.^[88]

The Swadeshi boycott movement cut imports of British textiles by 25%. The swadeshi cloth, although more expensive and somewhat less comfortable than its Lancashire competitor, was worn as a mark of national pride by people all over India.^[89]

Muslim League: 1906

1909 Prevailing Religions, Map of British India, 1909, showing the prevailing majority religions based on the Census of 1901

The Hindu protests against the partition of Bengal led the Muslim elite in India to organise in 1906 the All India Muslim League. The League favoured the partition of Bengal, since it gave them a Muslim majority in the eastern half. In 1905, when Tilak and Lajpat Rai attempted to rise to leadership positions in the Congress, and the Congress itself rallied around symbolism of Kali, Muslim fears increased. The Muslim elite, including Dacca Nawab and Khwaja Salimullah, expected that a new province with a Muslim majority would directly benefit Muslims aspiring to political power.^[90]

Hakim Ajmal Khan, a founder of the Muslim League, became the president of the Indian National Congress in 1921.

Minto-Morley Reforms: 1909–1915

Lord Minto, the Conservative viceroy met with the Muslim delegation in June 1906. The Minto-Morley Reforms of 1909 called for separate Muslim electorates.

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 Indian Councils Act 1909, known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Minto was viceroy) — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures. Upper class Indians, rich lanndowners and businessmen were favoured. The Moslem community was made a separate electorate and granted double representation. The goals were quite conservative but they did advance the elective principle.^[39]

The partition of Bengal was rescinded in 1911 and announced at the Delhi Durbar at which King George V came in person and was crowned Emperor of India. He announced the capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi, a Moslem stronghold. Morley was especially vigilant in crushing revolutionary groups^[91]

History 1914–1947

First World War, Lucknow Pact: 1914–1918

The First World War would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. Some 1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of the British Indian Army took part in the war, primarily in Iraq and the Middle East. Their participation had a wider cultural fallout as news spread how bravely soldiers fought and died alongside British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia.^[92] India’s international profile rose during the 1920s, as it became a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and participated, under the name, “Les Indes Anglaises” (British India), in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp.^[93] Back in India, especially among the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the war led to calls for greater self-government for Indians.^[92]

After the 1906 split between the moderates and the extremists, organised political activity by the Congress had remained fragmented until 1914, when Bal Gangadhar Tilak was released from prison and began to sound out other Congress leaders about possible re-unification. That, however, had to wait until the demise of Tilak’s principal moderate opponents, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, in 1915, whereupon an agreement was reached for Tilak’s ousted group to re-enter the Congress.^[92] In the 1916 Lucknow session of the Congress, Tilak’s supporters were able to push through a more radical resolution which asked for the British to declare that it was their, “aim and intention … to confer self-government on India at an early date.”^[92] Soon, other such rumblings began to appear in public pronouncements: in 1917, in the Imperial Legislative Council, Madan Mohan Malaviya spoke of the expectations the war had generated in India, “I venture to say that the war has put the clock … fifty years forward … (The) reforms after the war will have to be such, … as will satisfy the aspirations of her (India’s) people to take their legitimate part in the administration of their own country.”^[92]

The 1916 Lucknow Session of the Congress was also the venue of an unanticipated mutual effort by the Congress and the Muslim League, the occasion for which was provided by the wartime partnership between Germany and Turkey. Since the Turkish Sultan, or Khalifah, had also sporadically claimed guardianship of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and since the British and their allies were now in conflict with Turkey, doubts began to increase among some Indian Muslims about the “religious neutrality” of the British, doubts that had already surfaced as a result of the reunification of Bengal in 1911, a decision that was seen as ill-disposed to Muslims.^[94] In the Lucknow Pact, the League joined the Congress in the proposal for greater self-government that was campaigned for by Tilak and his supporters; in return, the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in the provincial legislatures as well as the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1916, the Muslim League had anywhere between 500 and 800 members and did not yet have its wider following among Indian Muslims of later years; in the League itself, the pact did not have unanimous backing, having largely been negotiated by a group of “Young Party” Muslims from the United Provinces (UP), most prominently, two brothers Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, who had embraced the Pan-Islamic cause;^[94] however, it did have the support of a young lawyer from Bombay, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was later to rise to leadership roles in both the League and the Indian freedom movement. In later years, as the full ramifications of the pact unfolded, it was seen as benefiting the Muslim minority élites of provinces like UP and Bihar more than the Muslim majorities of Punjab and Bengal, nonetheless, at the time, the “Lucknow Pact,” was an important milestone in nationalistic agitation and was seen so by the British.^[94]

During 1916, two Home Rule Leagues were founded within the Indian National Congress by Tilak and Annie Besant, respectively, to promote Home Rule among Indians, and also to elevate the stature of the founders within the Congress itself.^[95] Mrs. Besant, for her part, was also keen to demonstrate the superiority of this new form of organised agitation, which had achieved some success in the Irish home rule movement, to the political violence that had intermittently plagued the subcontinent during the years 1907–1914.^[95] The two Leagues focused their attention on complementary geographical regions: Tilak’s in western India, in the southern Bombay presidency, and Mrs. Besant’s in the rest of the country, but especially in the Madras Presidency and in regions like Sind and Gujarat that had hitherto been considered politically dormant by the Congress.^[95] Both leagues rapidly acquired new members – approximately thirty thousand each in a little over a year – and began to publish inexpensive newspapers. Their propaganda also turned to posters, pamphlets, and political-religious songs, and later to mass meetings, which not only attracted greater numbers than in earlier Congress sessions, but also entirely new social groups such as non-Brahmins, traders, farmers, students, and lower-level government workers.^[95] Although they did not achieve the magnitude or character of a nation-wide mass movement, the Home Rule leagues both deepened and widened organised political agitation for self-rule in India. The British authorities reacted by imposing restrictions on the Leagues, including shutting out students from meetings and banning the two leaders from travelling to certain provinces.^[95]

The year 1915 also saw the return of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to India. Already known in India as a result of his civil liberties protests on behalf of the Indians in South Africa, Gandhi followed the advice of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale and chose not to make any public pronouncements during the first year of his return, but instead spent the year travelling, observing the country first-hand, and writing.^[96] Earlier, during his South Africa sojourn, Gandhi, a lawyer by profession, had represented an Indian community, which, although small, was sufficiently diverse to be a microcosm of India itself. In tackling the challenge of holding this community together and simultaneously confronting the colonial authority, he had created a technique of non-violent resistance, which he labelled Satyagraha (or, Striving for Truth).^[97] For Gandhi, Satyagraha was different from “passive resistance“, by then a familiar technique of social protest, which he regarded as a practical strategy adopted by the weak in the face of superior force; Satyagraha, on the other hand, was for him the “last resort of those strong enough in their commitment to truth to undergo suffering in its cause.”^[97] Ahimsa or “non-violence,” which formed the underpinning of Satyagraha, came to represent the twin pillar, with Truth, of Gandhi’s unorthodox religious outlook on life.^[97] During the years 1907–1914, Gandhi tested the technique of Satyagraha in a number of protests on behalf of the Indian community in South Africa against the unjust racial laws.^[97]

Also, during his time in South Africa, in his essay, Hind Swaraj, (1909), Gandhi formulated his vision of Swaraj, or “self-rule” for India based on three vital ingredients: solidarity between Indians of different faiths, but most of all between Hindus and Muslims; the removal of untouchability from Indian society; and the exercise of swadeshi – the boycott of manufactured foreign goods and the revival of Indian cottage industry.^[96] The first two, he felt, were essential for India to be an egalitarian and tolerant society, one befitting the principles of Truth and Ahimsa, while the last, by making Indians more self-reliant, would break the cycle of dependence that was not only perpetrating the direction and tenor of the British rule in India, but also the British commitment to it.^[96] At least until 1920, the British presence itself, was not a stumbling block in Gandhi’s conception of swaraj; rather, it was the inability of Indians to create a modern society.^[96]

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  Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers with the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia during World War I.

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  Sepoy Khudadad Khan, the first Indian to be awarded the Victoria Cross, the British Empire’s highest war-time medal for gallantry. Khan, who hailed from Chakwal District, Punjab, in present-day Pakistan, died in 1971.

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  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (seated in carriage, on the right, eyes downcast, with black flat-top hat) receives a big welcome in Karachi in 1916 after his return to India from South Africa.

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  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, seated, third from the left, was a supporter of the Lucknow Pact, which, in 1916, ended the three-way rift between the Extremists, the Moderates and the League.

Satyagraha, Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms: 1917–1919

Gandhi made his political debut in India in 1917 in Champaran district in Bihar, near the Nepal border, where he was invited by a group of disgruntled tenant farmers who, for many years, had been forced into planting indigo (for dyes) on a portion of their land and then selling it at below-market prices to the British planters who had leased them the land.^[98] Upon his arrival in the district, Gandhi was joined by other agitators, including a young Congress leader, Rajendra Prasad, from Bihar, who would become a become a loyal supporter of Gandhi and go on to play a prominent role in the Indian freedom movement. When Gandhi was ordered to leave by the local British authorities, he refused on moral grounds, setting up his refusal as a form of individual Satyagraha. Soon, under pressure from the Viceroy in Delhi who was anxious to maintain domestic peace during war-time, the provincial government rescinded Gandhi’s expulsion order, and later agreed to an official enquiry into the case. Although, the British planters eventually gave in, they were not won over to the farmers’ cause, and thereby did not produce the optimal outcome of a Satyagraha that Gandhi had hoped for; similarly, the farmers themselves, although pleased at the resolution, responded less than enthusiastically to the concurrent projects of rural empowerment and education that Gandhi had inaugurated in keeping with his ideal of swaraj. The following year Gandhi launched two more Satyagrahas – both in his native Gujarat – one in the rural Kaira district where land-owning farmers were protesting increased land-revenue and the other in the city of Ahmedabad, where workers in an Indian-owned textile mill were distressed about their low wages. The satyagraha in Ahmedabad took the form of Gandhi fasting and supporting the workers in a strike, which eventually led to a settlement. In Kaira, in contrast, although the farmers’ cause received publicity from Gandhi’s presence, the satyagraha itself, which consisted of the farmers’ collective decision to withhold payment, was not immediately successful, as the British authorities refused to back down. The agitation in Kaira gained for Gandhi another lifelong lieutenant in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organised the farmers, and who too would go on to play a leadership role in the Indian freedom movement.^[99] Champaran, Kaira, and Ahmedabad were important milestones in the history of Gandhi’s new methods of social protest in India.

In 1916, in the face of new strength demonstrated by the nationalists with the signing of the Lucknow Pact and the founding of the Home Rule leagues, and the realisation, after the disaster in the Mesopotamian campaign, that the war would likely last longer, the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, cautioned that the Government of India needed to be more responsive to Indian opinion.^[100] Towards the end of the year, after discussions with the government in London, he suggested that the British demonstrate their good faith – in light of the Indian war role – through a number of public actions, including awards of titles and honours to princes, granting of commissions in the army to Indians, and removal of the much-reviled cotton excise duty, but, most importantly, an announcement of Britain’s future plans for India and an indication of some concrete steps. After more discussion, in August 1917, the new Liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, announced the British aim 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 realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”^[100] Although the plan envisioned limited self-government at first only in the provinces – with India emphatically within the British Empire – it represented the first British proposal for any form of representative government in a non-white colony.

Earlier, at the onset of World War I, the reassignment of most of the British army in India to Europe and Mesopotamia, had led the previous Viceroy, Lord Harding, to worry about the “risks involved in denuding India of troops.”^[92] Revolutionary violence had already been a concern in British India; consequently, in 1915, to strengthen its powers during what it saw was a time of increased vulnerability, the Government of India passed the Defence of India Act, which allowed it to intern politically dangerous dissidents without due process, and added to the power it already had – under the 1910 Press Act – both to imprison journalists without trial and to censor the press.^[101] It was under the Defence of India act that the Ali brothers were imprisoned in 1916, and Annie Besant, a European woman, and ordinarily more problematic to imprison, in 1917.^[101] Now, as constitutional reform began to be discussed in earnest, the British began to consider how new moderate Indians could be brought into the fold of constitutional politics and, simultaneously, how the hand of established constitutionalists could be strengthened. However, since the Government of India wanted to ensure against any sabotage of the reform process by extremists, and since its reform plan was devised during a time when extremist violence had ebbed as a result of increased governmental control, it also began to consider how some of its war-time powers could be extended into peace time.^[101]

Consequently, in 1917, even as Edwin Montagu, announced the new constitutional reforms, a committee chaired by a British judge, Mr. S. A. T. Rowlatt, was tasked with investigating “revolutionary conspiracies,” with the unstated goal of extending the government’s war-time powers.^[100] The Rowlatt committee presented its report in July 1918 and identified three regions of conspiratorial insurgency: Bengal, the Bombay presidency, and the Punjab.^[100] To combat subversive acts in these regions, the committee recommended that the government use emergency powers akin to its war-time authority, which included the ability to try cases of sedition by a panel of three judges and without juries, exaction of securities from suspects, governmental overseeing of residences of suspects,^[100] and the power for provincial governments to arrest and detain suspects in short-term detention facilities and without trial.^[102]

With the end of World War I, there was also a change in the economic climate. By year’s end 1919, 1.5 million Indians had served in the armed services in either combatant or non-combatant roles, and India had provided £146 million in revenue for the war.^[103] The increased taxes coupled with disruptions in both domestic and international trade had the effect of approximately doubling the index of overall prices in India between 1914 and 1920.^[103] Returning war veterans, especially in the Punjab, created a growing unemployment crisis,^[104] and post-war inflation led to food riots in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal provinces,^[104] a situation that was made only worse by the failure of the 1918–19 monsoon and by profiteering and speculation.^[103] The global influenza epidemic and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 added to the general jitters; the former among the population already experiencing economic woes,^[104] and the latter among government officials, fearing a similar revolution in India.^[105]

To combat what it saw as a coming crisis, the government now drafted the Rowlatt committee’s recommendations into two Rowlatt Bills.^[102] Although the bills were authorised for legislative consideration by Edwin Montagu, they were done so unwillingly, with the accompanying declaration, “I loathe the suggestion at first sight of preserving the Defence of India Act in peace time to such an extent as Rowlatt and his friends think necessary.”^[100] In the ensuing discussion and vote in the Imperial Legislative Council, all Indian members voiced opposition to the bills. The Government of India was, nevertheless, able to use of its “official majority” to ensure passage of the bills early in 1919.^[100] However, what it passed, in deference to the Indian opposition, was a lesser version of the first bill, which now allowed extrajudicial powers, but for a period of exactly three years and for the prosecution solely of “anarchical and revolutionary movements,” dropping entirely the second bill involving modification the Indian Penal Code.^[100] Even so, when it was passed, the new Rowlatt Act aroused widespread indignation throughout India, and brought Gandhi to the forefront of the nationalist movement.^[102]

Meanwhile, Montagu and Chelmsford themselves finally presented their report in July 1918 after a long fact-finding trip through India the previous winter.^[106] After more discussion by the government and parliament in Britain, and another tour by the Franchise and Functions Committee for the purpose of identifying who among the Indian population could vote in future elections, the Government of India Act 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was passed in December 1919.^[106] The new Act enlarged both the provincial and Imperial legislative councils and repealed the Government of India’s recourse to the “official majority” in unfavourable votes.^[106] Although departments like defence, foreign affairs, criminal law, communications, and income-tax were retained by the Viceroy and the central government in New Delhi, other departments like public health, education, land-revenue, local self-government were transferred to the provinces.^[106] The provinces themselves were now to be administered under a new dyarchical system, whereby some areas like education, agriculture, infrastructure development, and local self-government became the preserve of Indian ministers and legislatures, and ultimately the Indian electorates, while others like irrigation, land-revenue, police, prisons, and control of media remained within the purview of the British governor and his executive council.^[106] The new Act also made it easier for Indians to be admitted into the civil service and the army officer corps.

A greater number of Indians were now enfranchised, although, for voting at the national level, they constituted only 10% of the total adult male population, many of whom were still illiterate.^[106] In the provincial legislatures, the British continued to exercise some control by setting aside seats for special interests they considered cooperative or useful. In particular, rural candidates, generally sympathetic to British rule and less confrontational, were assigned more seats than their urban counterparts.^[106] Seats were also reserved for non-Brahmins, landowners, businessmen, and college graduates. The principal of “communal representation,” an integral part of the Minto-Morley reforms, and more recently of the Congress-Muslim League Lucknow Pact, was reaffirmed, with seats being reserved for Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, and domiciled Europeans, in both provincial and Imperial legislative councils.^[106] The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms offered Indians the most significant opportunity yet for exercising legislative power, especially at the provincial level; however, that opportunity was also restricted by the still limited number of eligible voters, by the small budgets available to provincial legislatures, and by the presence of rural and special interest seats that were seen as instruments of British control.^[106] Its scope was unsatisfactory to the Indian political leadership, famously expressed by Annie Beasant as something “unworthy of England to offer and India to accept”.^{[107][citation not found]}

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre or “Amritsar massacre”, took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the predominantly Sikh northern city of Amritsar. After days of unrest Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer forbade public meetings and on Sunday 13 April 1919 fifty British Indian Army soldiers commanded by Dyer began shooting at an unarmed gathering of thousands of men, women, and children without warning. Casualty estimates vary widely, with the Government of India reporting 379 dead, with 1,100 wounded.^[108] The Indian National Congress estimated three times the number of dead. Dyer was removed from duty but he became a celebrated hero in Britain among people with connections to the Raj.^[109] Historians consider the episode was a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India.^[110]

Raghaven argues that the massacre caused a reevaluation the Army’s role, to make it more pragmatic and nuanced rather than rely on brute force to overawe or punish the natives. The new policy became minimum force. The army was retrained and developed suitable tactics such as crowd control.^[111]

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  Gandhi at the time of the Kheda Satyagraha, 1918.

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  Edwin Montagu, left, the Secretary of State for India, whose report, led to the Government of India Act 1919, also known as the Montford Reforms or the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.

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  Headlines about the Rowlatt Bills (1919) from a nationalist newspaper in India. Although all non-official Indians on the Legislative Council voted against the Rowlatt Bills, the government was able to force their passage by using its majority.^[102]

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  The Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919, a few months after the massacre which had occurred on 13 April.

Noncooperation, Khilafat, Simon Commission, Jinnah’s fourteen points: 1920s

In 1920, after the British government refused to back down, Gandhi began his campaign of noncooperation, prompting many Indians to return British awards and honours, to resign from civil service, and to again boycott British goods. In addition, Gandhi reorganised the Congress, transforming it into a mass movement and opening its membership to even the poorest Indians. Although Gandhi halted the noncooperation movement in 1922 after the violent incident at Chauri Chaura, the movement revived again, in the mid-1920s.

The visit, in 1928, of the British Simon Commission, charged with instituting constitutional reform in India, resulted in widespread protests throughout the country.^[112] Earlier, in 1925, non-violent protests of the Congress had resumed too, this time in Gujarat, and led by Patel, who organised farmers to refuse payment of increased land taxes; the success of this protest, the Bardoli Satyagraha, brought Gandhi back into the fold of active politics.^[112]

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  Mahatma Gandhi with Dr. Annie Besant en route to a meeting in Madras in September, 1921. Earlier, in Madurai, on 21 September 1921, Gandhi had adopted the loin-cloth for the first time as a symbol of his identification with India’s poor.

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  An early 1920s poster advertising a Congress non-cooperation “Public Meeting” and a “Bonfire of Foreign Clothes” in Bombay, and expressing support for the “Karachi Khilafat Conference.”

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  Hindus and Muslims, displaying the flags of both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, collecting clothes to be later burnt as a part of the non-cooperation movement initiated by Gandhi.

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  Photograph of the staff and students of the National College, Lahore, founded in 1921 by Lala Lajpat Rai for students preparing for the non-cooperation movement. Standing, fourth from the right, is future revolutionary Bhagat Singh.

Demand for complete independence, Salt March: 1929–1931

At midnight on 31 December 1929, during its annual session in Lahore, the Indian National Congress, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, raised the flag of independent India for the first time, and afterwards issued a demand for Purna Swaraj (Sanskrit: “complete independence”), which Nehru was to later refer to as “a tryst with destiny.” The declaration was drafted by the Congress Working Committee, which included Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. Gandhi subsequently led an expanded movement of civil disobedience, culminating in 1930 with the Salt Satyagraha, in which thousands of Indians defied the tax on salt, by marching to the sea and making their own salt by evaporating seawater. Although, many, including Gandhi, were arrested, the British government eventually gave in, and in 1931 Gandhi travelled to London to negotiate new reform at the Round Table Conferences.

In local terms British control rested on the Indian Civil Service, but it faced growing difficulties. Fewer and fewer young men in Britain were interested in joining, and the continuing distrust of Indians resulted in a declining base in terms of quality and quantity. By 1945 Indians were numerically dominant in the ICS and at issue was loyal divided between the Empire and independence.^[113] The finances of the Raj depended on land taxes, and these became problematic in the 1930s. Epstein argues that after 1919 it became harder and harder to collect the land revenue. The Raj’s suppression of civil disobedience after 1934 temporarily increased the power of the revenue agents but after 1937 they were forced by the new Congress-controlled provincial governments to hand back confiscated land. Again the outbreak of war strengthened them, in the face of the Quit India movement the revenue collectors had to rely on military force and by 1946–47 direct British control was rapidly disappearing in much of the countryside.^[114]

Government of India Act: 1931–1937

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to the right of Mahatma Gandhi at the Second round Table Conference in London, October 1931. Fourth from the left in the foreground is Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, representative of the “Depressed Classes.”

In 1935, after the Round Table Conferences, Parliament passed the Government of India Act 1935, which authorised the establishment of independent legislative assemblies in all provinces of British India, the creation of a central government incorporating both the British provinces and the princely states, and the protection of Muslim minorities. The future Constitution of independent India was based on this act.^[115] However, it divided the electorate into 19 religious and social categories, e.g., Moslems, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Depressed Classes, Landholders, Commerce and Industry, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, etc., each of which was given separate representation in the Provincial Legislative Assemblies. A voter could cast a vote only for candidates in his own category.

The 1935 Act provided for more autonomy for Indian provinces, with the goal of cooling off nationalist sentiment. The act provided for a national parliament and an executive branch under the purview of the British government, but the rulers of the princely states managed to block its implementation. These states remained under the full control of their hereditary rulers, with no popular government. \To prepare for elections Congress built up its grass roots membership from 473,000 in 1935 to 4.5 million in 1939.^[116]

In the 1937 elections Congress won victories in seven of the eleven provinces of British India.^[117] Congress governments, with wide powers, were formed in these provinces. The widespread voter support for the Indian National Congress surprised Raj officials, who previously had seen the Congress as a small elitist body.^[118]

World War II, Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution: 1938–1941

While the Muslim League was a small elite group in 1927 with only 1300 members, it grew rapidly once it became an organisation that reached out to the masses, reaching 500,000 members in Bengal in 1944, 200,000 in Punjab, and hundreds of thousands elsewhere. Jinnah now was well positioned to negotiate with the British from a position of power.^[119] With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on India’s behalf without consulting Indian leaders, leading the Congress provincial ministries to resign in protest. The Muslim League, in contrast, supported Britain in the war effort and maintained its control of the government in three major provinces, Bengal, Sind and the Punjab.

Jinnah repeatedly warned that Muslims would be unfairly treated in an independent India dominated by the Congress. On 24 March 1940 in Lahore, the League passed the “Lahore Resolution“, demanding that, “the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” Although there were other important national Muslim politicians such as Congress leader Ab’ul Kalam Azad, and influential regional Muslim politicians such as A. K. Fazlul Huq of the leftist Krishak Praja Party in Bengal, Sikander Hyat Khan of the landlord-dominated Punjab Unionist Party, and Abd al-Ghaffar Khan of the pro-Congress Khudai Khidmatgar (popularly, “red shirts”) in the North West Frontier Province, the British, over the next six years, were to increasingly see the League as the main representative of Muslim India.^[120]

The Congress was secular and strongly opposed having any religious state. It insisted there was a natural unity to India, and repeatedly blamed the British for “divide and rule” tactics based on prompting Muslims to think of themselves as alien from Hindus. Jinnah rejected the notion of a united India, and emphasised that religious communities were more basic than an artificial nationalism. He proclaimed the Two-Nation Theory,^[121] stating at Lahore on 22 March 1940:

“Islam and Hinduism … are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, litterateurs. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspect on life and of life are different … To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built for the government of such a state.”^[122]

• 

  Mahatma Gandhi and Rajendra Prasad (left) on their way to meet the viceroy Lord Linlithgow (13 October 1939) after the outbreak of World War II.

• 

  Chaudhari Khaliquzzaman (left) seconding the 1940 Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League with Jinnah (right) presiding, and Liaquat Ali Khan centre.

• 

  Newly arrived Indian troops on the quayside in Singapore, November 1941

• 

  Indian Army Sikh personnel in action during the successful Operation Crusader in Western Desert Campaign in North Africa in December 1941.

Army expansion

Sherman tank of the 9th Royal Deccan Horse, 255th Indian Tank Brigade, Burma 1945

While the regular Indian army in 1939 included about 220,000 native troops, it expanded tenfold during the war,^[123] and small naval and air force units were created. Over two million Indians volunteered for military service in the British Army. They played a major role in numerous campaigns, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Casualties were moderate (in terms of the world war), with were 24,000 killed; 64,000 wounded; 12,000 missing (probably dead), and 60,000 captured at Singapore in 1942.^[124]

London paid most of the cost of the Indian Army, which had the effect of erasing India’s national debt. It ended the war with a surplus of £1,300 million. In addition, heavy British spending on munitions produced in India (such as uniforms, rifles, machine-guns, field artillery, and ammunition) led to a rapid expansion of industrial output, such as textiles (up. 16%), steel (up. 18%), chemicals (up. 30%). Small warships were built, and an aircraft factory opened in Bangalore. The railway system, with 700,000 employees, was taxed to the limit as demand for transportation soared.^[125]

INA

The soldiers captured at Singapore had the option of going to Japanese POW camps or joining the Indian National Army, headed by Subhas Chandra Bose but under Japanese control. Most joined the INA coming to a total of 50000 soldiers^[126] and fought in Burma; about 10,000 survived the war.^[127]

On some ideological conflict leading to Tripuri Crisis for the election of the Congress President,^[128] Bose resigned from the Congress in 1939 and turned to Germany and Japan to liberate India by force.^[129] With Japanese sponsorship he organised the Indian National Army. From the onset of the war, the Japanese secret service had promoted unrest in South east Asia to destabilise the British war effort,^[130] and set up several puppet governments in the captured regions. For India Japan created the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India), presided by Bose.^[131] After early Japanese success in Burma, the reinforced British Indian Army in 1945 first halted and then reversed the Japanese U Go offensive, and launched its Burma Campaign.

Sir Stafford Cripps negotiating with Gandhi March 1942

Cripps Mission, Quit India Resolution: 1942–1945

The British government sent the Cripps’ mission in 1942 to secure Indian nationalists’ cooperation in the war effort in exchange for a promise of independence as soon as the war ended. Top officials in Britain, most notably Prime Minister Winston Churchill, did not support the Cripps Mission and negotiations with the Congress soon broke down.^[132]

Women’s procession in Bombay during the “Quit India” movement, 1942

Congress in July 1942 launched the “Quit India” movement in demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British from India or face nationwide civil disobedience. On 8 August the Raj arrested all national, provincial and local Congress leaders, holding tens of thousands of them until 1945. The country erupted in violent demonstrations led by students and later by peasant political groups, especially in Eastern United Provinces, Bihar, and western Bengal. The large war-time British Army presence crushed the movement in a little more than six weeks;^[133] nonetheless, a portion of the movement formed for a time an underground provisional government on the border with Nepal.^[133] In other parts of India, the movement was less spontaneous and the protest less intensive, however it lasted sporadically into the summer of 1943. It did not slow down the British war effort or recruiting for the army.^[134]

Elections, Cabinet Mission, Direct Action Day: 1946

In January 1946, a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain.^[135] The mutinies came to a head with mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, followed by others in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi. Although the mutinies were rapidly suppressed, they had the effect of spurring the new Labour government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick Lawrence, and including Sir Stafford Cripps, who had visited four years before.^[135]

Also in early 1946, new elections were called in India. Earlier, at the end of the war in 1945, the colonial government had announced the public trial of three senior officers of Bose’s defeated Indian National Army who stood accused of treason. Now as the trials began, the Congress leadership, although ambivalent towards the INA, chose to defend the accused officers.^[136] The subsequent convictions of the officers, the public outcry against the convictions, and the eventual remission of the sentences, created positive propaganda for the Congress, which only helped in the party’s subsequent electoral victories in eight of the eleven provinces.^[137] The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of the partition. Jinnah proclaimed 16 August 1946, Direct Action Day, with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a Muslim homeland in British India. The following day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and quickly spread throughout India. Although the Government of India and the Congress were both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India’s prime minister.^[138]

• 

  Members of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India meeting Muhammad Ali Jinnah. On the extreme left is Lord Pethick Lawrence; on the extreme right, Sir Stafford Cripps.

• 

  Khan Sahib Qazi Zafar Hussain, member of the Muslim rural elite of Punjab, who during the 1946 Punjab Provincial Assembly Election, supported Punjab Muslim League.

• 

  Dead and wounded after the Direct Action Day which developed into pitched battles as Muslim and Hindu mobs attacked and killed each other across Calcutta in 1946.

The Plan for Partition: 1947

Later that year, the Labour government in Britain, its exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, and conscious that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support, nor the reliability of native forces for continuing to control an increasingly restless India,^[139][140] decided to end British rule of India, and in early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948.

As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated. With the British army unprepared for the potential for increased violence, the new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power, allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan for independence. In June 1947, the nationalist leaders, including Sardar Patel, Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad on behalf of the Congress, Jinnah representing the Muslim League, B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines in stark opposition to Gandhi’s views. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan; the plan included a partition of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal.

• 

  Percentage of Hindus by district. Map of British Indian Empire, 1909.

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  Percentage of Muslims by district. Map of British Indian Empire, 1909.

Violence, Partition, Independence: 1947

On 14 August 1947, the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor General in Karachi. The following day, 15 August 1947, India, now a smaller Union of India, became an independent country with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru assuming the office of the prime minister, and the viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, staying on as its first Governor General.^[141]

The great majority of Indians remained in place with independence, but in border areas millions of people (Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu) relocated across the newly drawn borders. In Punjab, where the new border lines divided the Sikh regions in half, there was much bloodshed; in Bengal and Bihar, where Gandhi’s presence assuaged communal tempers, the violence was more limited. In all, somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people on both sides of the new borders, both among the refugee and resident populations of the three faiths, died in the violence.^[142]

Ideological impact

At independence and since India has maintained such central British institutions as parliamentary government, one-person, one-vote and the rule of law through nonpartisan courts. They retained as well the institutional arrangements of the Raj such as district administration, universities and stock exchanges. One major change was the rejection of separate princely states. Metcalf shows that over the course of two centuries, British intellectuals and Indian specialists made the highest priority bringing peace, unity and good government to India. They offered many competing methods to reach the goal. For example, Cornwallis recommended turning Bengali Zamindar into the sort of English landlords that controlled local affairs in England. Munro proposed to deal directly with the peasants. Sir William Jones and the Orientalists promoted Sanskrit, while Macaulay promoted the English language.^[143] Zinkin argues that in the long-run, what matters most about the legacy of the Raj is the British political ideologies which the Indians took over after 1947, especially the belief in unity, democracy, the rule of law and a certain equality beyond caste and creed. Zinkin sees this not just in the Congress party but also among Hindu Nationalists in the Bharatya Janata Party, which specifically emphasises Hindu traditions.^[144][145]

Economic impact

In 1780 the conservative British politician Edmund Burke raised the issue of India’s position: he vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray (1998) continues this line of attack, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of “plunder” and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India. Ray accuses the British of depleting the food and money stocks and of imposing high taxes that helped cause the terrible famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal.^[147]

P. J. Marshall shows that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy. Marshall argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past. The British largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century. Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation.^[148] Instead of the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, Marshall presents the interpretation (supported by many scholars in India and the West) that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent cooperation with Indian elites. Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still rejected by many historians.^[149]

Famines, epidemics, and public health

According to Angus Maddison, “The British contributed to public health by introducing smallpox vaccination, establishing Western medicine and training modern doctors, by killing rats, and establishing quarantine procedures. As a result, the death rate fell and the population of India grew by 1947 to more than two-and-a- half times its size in 1757.”^[150]

Victims of the Great Famine of 1876–78 in India

During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–1878, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died^[164] and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people died.^[165] Recent research, including work by Mike Davis and Amartya Sen,^[166] attributes most of the effects of these famines to British policy in India. An El Niño event caused the Indian famine of 1876–1878.^[167]

Having been criticised for the badly bungled relief-effort during the Orissa famine of 1866,^[168] British authorities began to discuss famine policy soon afterwards, and in early 1868 Sir William Muir, Lieutenant-Governor of the North Western Provinces, issued a famous order stating that:^[169]

“… every District officer would be held personally responsible that no deaths occurred from starvation which could have been avoided by any exertion or arrangement on his part or that of his subordinates.”

The first cholera pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. 10,000 British troops and countless Indians died during this pandemic.^[170] Estimated deaths in India between 1817 and 1860 exceeded 15 million persons. Another 23 million died between 1865 and 1917.^[171] The Third Pandemic of plague started in China in the middle of the 19th century, spreading disease to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone.^[172] Waldemar Haffkine, who mainly worked in India, became the first microbiologist to developed and deploy vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1925 the Plague Laboratory in Bombay was renamed the Haffkine Institute.

Fevers ranked as one of the leading causes of death in India in the 19th century.^[173] Britain’s Sir Ronald Ross, working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calcutta, finally proved in 1898 that mosquitoes transmit malaria.^[174]

In 1881 around 120,000 leprosy patients existed in India. The central government passed the Lepers Act of 1898, which provided legal provision for forcible confinement of leprosy sufferers in India.^[175] Under the direction of Mountstuart Elphinstone a program was launched to propagate smallpox vaccination.^[176] Mass vaccination in India resulted in a major decline in smallpox mortality by the end of the 19th century.^[177] In 1849 nearly 13% of all Calcutta deaths were due to smallpox.^[178] Between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths from smallpox.^[179]

Sir Robert Grant directed his attention to establishing a systematic institution in Bombay for imparting medical knowledge to the natives.^[180] In 1860, Grant Medical College became one of the four recognised colleges for teaching courses leading to degrees (alongside Elphinstone College, Deccan College and Government Law College, Mumbai).

See also

British Empire portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: British Raj

• Company rule in India
• Indian independence movement
• Imperialism in Asia

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Masood Ashraf Raja
Native name	مسعود اشرف راجہ
Born	1965 Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Residence	Denton, Texas
Nationality	Pakistani
Education	Doctor of Philosophy
Alma mater	Florida State University
Occupation	Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature
Employer	University of North Texas
Website
http://masoodraja.com

Originally from Pakistan, Masood Ashraf Raja (Urdu: مسعود اشرف راجہ) is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory at the University of North Texas^[1] and the editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies,^[2] a journal that he founded in 2009.^[3] Besides teaching and writing about issues of postcoloniality, globalization, and political Islam, Raja also actively participates in the public debates^[4] through his public writing on his two blogs^[5] as well as other popular and scholarly websites.^[6] Raja moved to the United States in 1996,^[7] after ten years of service in the Pakistan Army as an Infantry officer.^[8] Raja graduated with a Masters in literature from Belmont University^[9] in 2002, and earned his Ph.D.^[10] in Postcolonial Studies from Florida State University^[11] in 2006, where he studied with Robin Truth Goodman.^[12] While at Belmont University, Raja was awarded the Graduate Writing Award and at Florida State he was awarded the Davis Award for Best Graduate Student and Davis Award for best dissertation in 2005 and 2006 respectively.^[13] A strong proponent of peace, social justice, and human rights, Raja hopes to foster a better understanding between his primary culture and rest of the world. Raja’s last monograph, Constructing Pakistan, (Oxford University Press, 2010),^[14] is an interesting explanation of the rise of Muslim national political identity during the British Raj and offers an innovative explanation of the genesis of the idea of Pakistan. Raja has also published extensively in his area of study and on general academic topics in various academic journals and anthologies.^[15] Raja is also a member of the Advisory Committee (2009–12) of PMLA,^[16] the premier journal of literature and languages and was also recently elected to a five-year term on the Executive Committee of the South Asian Studies Group, Modern Language Association.^[17] Besides his academic and popular writings, Raja has also actively presented his views at academic conferences^[18] as well as through public talks.^[19]

Recently, Raja has also contributed his views on various issues related to the Islamic world and Pakistan to newspapers such as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on a story on Osama bin Laden^[20] and to Aljazeera English on a story about the Blasphemy law in Pakistan.^[21] Having recently won a million dollar grant from the US State Department, Raja is now also the Director of a partnership program between University of North Texas and the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad.^[22]

Masood Ashraf Raja continues to contribute his thoughts on issues of social justice, political Islam, and issues of Human rights.^[23]

Publications

Raja has published extensively on issues related to postcolonial studies, political Islam, and about Pakistan and the region. Besides his academic work, Raja also writes poetry^[24] and fiction.^[25]

References

External links

• Pakistaniaat: A journal of Pakistan Studies, Editor
• Postcolonial Space

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