• 1600 – Charter granted to British East India Company

• 1757 – Clive conquers Bengal

• 1857 – “The Mutiny”

• 1757-1857 – “Company Raj”

• 1857-1947 – “Crown Raj”

Sir Thomas Roe at Agra 1615Seeking Protection for British “Factory”

Robert Clive accepting Bengal in 1757

King George-V Delhi Durbar 1905

King George-V Delhi Durbar 1905

Brief History of Colonialism• European colonialism (second wave) did NOT begin as

state-led imperial conquest. It began in India and was the result of the maneuvers of a private organization, the British East India Company, to control trade and commerce in India and the Indian Ocean.

• 17th and 18th century encounter of Europeans with Indians was not clearly marked by the sense of white racial supremacy that later came to define European colonialism.

• Colonial-Orientalist scholarship: the making of histories and the defining of traditions

• Colonial administration: enumeration and classification of people; creation of “religion” as a category and as the primary marker of identity.

• The “high noon” of colonialism in the 19th century was marked by the now fully articulated justification of a “Civilizing Mission” (expressed in colonial education as well as in missionary activity); by the late 19th century most of Africa and Asia were under some form of European Colonial rule

Some effects of Colonialism on colonized societies

• Reconfiguration of identities, privileging Religion as primary marker of public identity; colonial codification of religious law

• Categorization and codification of Religious traditions; creation of textually based normative definitions of what is “legitimately” and “authentically” Islamic and what is not; exclusion of many important strands within religious traditions

• For instance, Sufism and local variation are considered “low” and “adulterated” Islam, while certain Arabic texts, including the Quran and some arbitrarily chosen legal books, define what is normative Islam

• European Christian missionary activity as well as Western criticisms of “inferior” non-western traditions, especially Islam, resulted in a variety of reactions from the colonized – defenses, apologies, counter-attacks

• Movements spring up in response to the material, moral and intellectual threat of Western domination; amongst Muslims in particular the desire is to prove to both themselves and the West that Islam can be an effective modern force, a challenge to European style modernity

• Territorial nationalism; Muslims (and everyone else in Africa & Asia) in pre-colonial times lived in empires and kingdoms with shifting and porous boundaries; territorial nationalism was imported from Europe (with intense criticism) and did not fit easily with older identity configurations such as a universal Muslim Umma

Significant Changes

• Modern Science & Technology

• Centralized Administration

• An “English” Education

• British Legal Systems

• Racism & Theories of Racial Difference

• Monolithic Social Classifications

British relationship with Muslim India over time:

• India is a Muslim Empire (by virtue of having been ruled by Turko-Persian dynasties professing Islam – especially the Mughals); Muslim Emperors are lauded for strength and valour

• India as an essentially Hindu country taken over by Muslim “conquerors” (discovery of “Ancient Indian Civilization” as a parallel to “Greco-Roman Civilization” and Islam as the nemesis of both – Edward Gibbon’s “History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire” very important.)

• Indo-Muslim rulers now judged by British historians according to their “tolerance” for their Hindu subjects

• The identity of Ancient Hindu/Sanskritic Civilization is taken up by the “Hindus” to assert an identity for themselves as defined against Indian Muslims

• Muslim elite (Ahsraf) is displaced (slowly) after British takeover and is outrun in the race for British patronage by newly emerging Hindu communities

• The uprising of 1857 is blamed by the British squarely on the Indians

• Status and prosperity of middle and upper-class Muslims rapidly deteriorates and various segments from among them respond in different ways to this crisis

How did the British colonial presence divide India into “Hindu-Majority” and “Muslim-Minority”?

• They wrote histories and social analyses of India, in which they identified a “Hindu” India and a “Muslim” India.

• They codified religious law for Hindus and Muslims and in the process made “Hindu” and “Muslim” into rigid, textually defined entities.

• Enumeration and classification for administrative purposes.

• Christian Missionary activity sparked resistance among Indians and spurred them on to defending and defining their own religious traditions in public to counter missionary activity.

The Colonial Civilizing Mission

Brigadier General John Jacob in the early 1800s asserted:

“We hold India, then, by being in reality, as in reputation, a superior race to the Asiatic; and if this natural superiority did not exist, we should not, and could not, retain the country for one week. IF, then, we are really a morally superior race, governed by higher motives and possessing higher attributes than the Asiatics, the more the natives of India are able to understand us, and the more we improve their capacity for so understanding, the firmer will become our power. Away, then with the assumption of equality; and let us accept our true position of a dominant race. So placed, let us establish our rule by setting them a high example, by making them feel the value of truth and honesty, and by raising their moral and intellectual powers.”

Macaulay’s Minute on Education 1835

• We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

How did Indian Muslims respond to British policies and Orientalist scholarship?

• Western-oriented reform + Loyalism to British Rule (Sayyid Ahmed Khan & the Aligarh movement)

• Islamic Universalism + anti-colonial activism (Jamaluddin al-Afghani)

• Indian nationalism + shunning of Western education (The Deoband movement)

• Western-oriented reform + Indian nationalism (Shibli & Iqbal)