Political Warfare in British Colonial India

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Political warfare in British colonial India

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Political warfare in British colonial India aided a British minority in maintaining control over
large parts of present day India, Pakistan, and Burma.
The East India Company obtained a foothold in India in 1695 and from that start expanded the
territory it controlled until it was the primary power in the subcontinent. After the Indian Rebellion
of 1857 the British Government nationalised the Company creating the British Raj. The Company
lost all its administrative powers; its Indian possessions, including its armed forces, were taken over
by the Crown pursuant to the provisions of the Government of India Act 1858. A new British
government department, the India Office, was created to handle the governance of India, and its
head, the Secretary of State for India, was entrusted with formulating Indian policy. The GovernorGeneral of India gained a new title (Viceroy of India), and implemented the policies devised by the
India Office. As a result of their relatively small presence in the country the British resorted to
many methods to retain control of India.
Contents
1 Economic manipulation
2 Indian Civil Service
3 Political Manipulation
4 Direct and Indirect Rule
5 Proxies
6 Religion as a tool of power
7 Subversion
8 References
Economic manipulation
Once it had established its factories (trading bases) in India the East India Company started to
highlight the benefits of trade with them to the local merchant classes in Surat and Bengal. This
helped lure the merchant class away from local rulers to the East India Company as when it
persuaded local financiers to abandon the Bengali nawab in 1756.[1]
The East India Company recruited James Steuart in 1772 to help advise on the political aspects of
the Indian and Bengali economy. Steuart recommended creating a central bank and making local
bankers and moneylenders directors to soak their pooled wealth back into the economy, as well as a
more efficient system of taxation to keep that wealth from falling back into their hands. While this
policy was not adopted, the Company did establish a more universal currency based on the sicca
rupee to restrain the power of the shroff moneylenders.[2]
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Later when the Company had increased its power and influence in the subcontinent it started acting
as a government. In 1793, Lord Cornwallis abolished the right of local landholders to collect dues
on trade which cut back on the feudal powers of the princes, limiting their martial strength and
turning them into landlords.[3]
Indian Civil Service

After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the new British administration created a close partnership with
certain land-holders and princes to strengthen their grip on power. This was either to create a
hierarchy of racial types arose, "each arranged into appropriate social classes, whose spiritual and
material improvement were entrusted to the paternal direction of gentlemanly rulers"[4] or 'a single
hierarchy all its subjects, Indian and British'.[5]
The Army and the Civil Service were the main instruments of British power, staffed by only a small
number of white officials. This imperial service became, "a large vested interest of the educated
upper middle class. By 191314, for example, the Government of India devoted no less than 53
million pounds (65 percent of the total budget of 82 million pounds) to the army and civil
administration. Imperial service enabled the mainly southern, professional and public-school
culture to reproduce itself abroad and also...create facsimiles among elites in the new colonies
established. The Indians in the Civil Service were to be brought up as gentleman and an "Eton in
India" was established, thereby perpetuating a political ruling class of Indians owing their position
to England.[6] The native Indians in the Civil Service became the bridge by which Englishmen
governed the masses or as the official Zachary Macaulay said in 1834, we "must 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 taste, opinions, in morals, and in intellect."[7]
The Indian civil service held nearly every senior, non-military, position in the government and
through the creation of a new ruling caste, and propaganda, "invented an ideology of imperial
service and amassed a scholarly literature in which Indias history, society, economy and culture
were interpreted as a story of chaos from which only the "steel frame" of Civilian [Indian Civil
Service] rule had been able to save them."[8]
In 1885 after the founding of the Indian National Congress, native Indians began campaigning
against the power of the Indian Civil Service by attacking it with a slogan that stressed the
"unBritishness of British rule." In response, the Service rejected the idea of more Indians in its
ranks, but instead offered concessions to allow more Indians in local legislative councils; however
as the ICS integrated the councils, they carefully included members of different religions and castes
to inhibit effectiveness and largely neutralise any check on their power.[8] In addition, membership
to the legislative councils was by appointment, rather than election, and the councils were restricted
to a consultative role.[9]
Political Manipulation
The East India Company increased its power in India by playing local rulers off against each other
and the declining Moghul Empire.
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Lord Dalhousie, the Company Governor General between 1848 and 1856 established a principle,
the Doctrine of Lapse, that if any princely state or territory under the direct influence
(paramountcy) of the British East India Company would automatically be annexed if the ruler was
either "manifestly incompetent or died without a direct heir".[10] This allowed the Company to
remove rulers it viewed as troublesome.
After the Indian Mutiny and the transition of rule from the East India Company to the Crown, the
British attempted to prevent future disturbances by strengthening indigenous elites in some regions
of the colony and allowing them to rule local lands along supposedly traditional lines.[11]
Parallel developments affected the Indian Civil Service after the Companys system of patronage
came to an end with Company rule; there was renewed effort to tie the Indian landholders to the
princes and the Raj, endorsing their power and privilege, revitalising the nobility, and then tying it
to the Queen by proclaiming her empress of India.[12] In this way, Britain increased the power of
local nobility and made it known to them that their power came from the Queen. "Many of them
[princes] owe their very existence to British justice and arms...The situation of these feudatory
States, checker boarding all India as they do, is a safeguard. It is like establishing a vast network of
friendly fortresses in debatable territory."[13] Also, to appease some of the nobles' concerns in the
aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, princes were allowed to adopt heirs rather than have their estates
automatically ceded to British control at their death.[14]
Direct and Indirect Rule

Direct rule required replacing of pre-existing political institutions and replacing them centralised,
territory-wide, and bureaucratic legal-administrative institutions that were controlled by colonial
officials.[15] Indirect rule was a form of colonial domination via collaboration with indigenous
intermediaries who controlled regional political institutions.[15]
Colonial India was a mix of the two types of rule. While the Civil Service ran a large portion of the
country, "in peripheral regions, chiefs, princes, sultans, and other indigenous leaders controlled
"customary" legal-administrative institutions that were organised along patrimonial lines."[15]
Leading colonial officials believed indirect rule was more adaptive and culturally sensitive, far
superior to direct rule, in that indirect rule allowed for social development through gradual change
from within rather than shattering the social fabric, producing opposition from the local populace.
[16] Indirect rule is less confrontational and more collaborative, therefore a better means for
domination.[16]
The colonial administration recognised around 600 semi-autonomous princely states, nominally
advised by a British resident; the states possessed one quarter of the countrys population.[17]
British administrators also employed tax collectors and landlords even in the more "directly" ruled
regions of the country and paid for the landlords loyalty with large tracts of land and some power
to collect taxes for personal use.[17]
When they didnt need to resort to martial strength, the East India Company, and later the British
Foreign Office, Indian Civil Service or military resorted to bribery and tributes to woo local rulers.
In the early 1800s they presented the ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, with five English dray
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horses, which would have been larger than any horse he had seen before, horses being one of his
many loves.[18] When the state of Punjab eventually became aggressive in 1843, the British
conquered it, taking Kashmir and putting it under a ruler more amenable to the British.[19] The
Punjab was official annexed in 1849.[20]
Proxies
In the areas north of India, it was dangerous for a European to travel. The British military often
used Indian trained cartographers and intelligence officers called pundits to scout for them.[21]
These pundits often posed as Muslim or Buddhist holy men, with their map making tools disguised
as prayer beads and a prayer wheel.[22] Political intelligence was passed to the Foreign Office
through these pundits gathering topographical intelligence, and by British frontier officers.[23]
Religion as a tool of power

The Company banned some Hindu practices like sati and thuggee, which they found particularly
abhorrent, and began to allow Hindu widows to remarry in 1856.[24] Governor-General Dalhousie
had begun to allow Christian converts to inherit ancestral property starting in 1850.[20] Though
overall, the East India Company men were not "eager to anglicise India, fearing to offend the
educated class on whose support they depended, and arouse religious antagonism."[25] In 1813,
though they had been forced to admit Christian missionaries, the Company tried to avoid being
seen as a proponent of the missions.[25] A publication during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 states that
the East India Company even manifested disfavour towards Christianity to obtain the confidence of
Hindus.[26]
Examining religion from a more political aspect, the Company codified Muslim and Hindu law to
take the flexibility out of the laws traditional practice, to strengthen the Companys indirect rule
and entrench the local elites.[27] Initially, the British in the East India Company favoured the
Hindus over the Muslims as government agents because the Hindus were generally less hostile to
their presence; the Company systematically removed Muslims from positions of power over its
tenure in India.[28] However, by 1893 Hindu power in the Indian National Congress was growing at
rate disquieting to the British, so they reversed their traditional policies and began encouraging
Muslims to enter the political process to make the body less effective.[29]
Subversion
For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, political warfare and subversion were used by the
Russians to destabilise British rule in India, as well as by the British to retain a hold on those
conquered subjects. This political contest, largely using proxies, is called The Great Game. The
term was coined by British officer Captain Arthur Conolly in the early 19th century and made
famous by Rudyard Kiplings book Kim. The Game took place from the Caucuses to Tibet and
south to India, with the wealth and control of India as the ultimate goal.[30]
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In the 185758 Indian Mutiny of native soldiers serving in the armed forces of the East India
Company, many British suspected Russian or Persian agents of having a hand in spreading rumours
that sparked the conflict; the core of the rumours were that the British had smeared pig and cow fat
on the ammo cartridges used by the sepoys.[31] The fat on the cartridges, which would have to be
opened by mouth prior to being loaded into a rifle, would have spiritually desecrated the Muslim or
Hindu soldiers.[20]
References
1. Cain, Peter (2001). British Imperialism: 16882000. 2nd ed. Longman. p. 94.
2. Kelly, Duncan (2009). Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought. Oxford
University Press, USA. pp. 14455.
3. Kelly, Duncan (2009). Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought. Oxford
University Press, USA. p. 157.
4. Cain, Peter (2001). British Imperialism: 16882000. 2nd ed. Longman. p. 285.
5. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, P50
6. Peter, Cain (2001). British Imperialism: 16882000. 2nd ed. Longman. pp. 28688.
7. Stockwell, Sarah (2008). The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 141.
9. Smith, Simon (1998). British Imperialism 17501970. Cambridge University Press. p. 56.
10. Keay, John. India: A History. Grove Press Books, distributed by Publishers Group West. United States:
2000 ISBN 0-8021-3797-0, p. 433.
11. Lange, Matthew (2009). Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State
Power. University of Chicago Press. p. 24.
12. Cain, Peter (2001). British Imperialism: 16882000. 2nd ed. Longman. pp. 28788.
13. Lewis, Martin Deming (1965). The British in India: Imperialism or Trusteeship?. D.C. Heath and
Company. p. 73.
18. Hopkirk, Peter (1992). The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. Kodansha
International. p. 133.
26. Embree, Ainslie (1963). 1857 in India Mutiny or War of Independence?. D.C. Heath and Company.
p. 25.
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28. Lewis, Martin Deming (1965). The British in India: Imperialism or Trusteeship?. D.C. Heath and
Company. p. 81.
29. Lewis, Martin Deming (1965). The British in India: Imperialism or Trusteeship?. D.C Heath and
Company. p. 83.
International. pp. 12.
International. pp. 28992.
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