How India Finally Won a 200-year Fight for Independence

Every August 15, India celebrates Independence Day. The holiday marks the end of British colonization in 1947— and the return of Indian self-governance after nearly two centuries of foreign rule. But how did British control start? And how did it finally end? Rudrangshu Mukherjee: What I want to emphasize, contrary to the popular narrative that is very prevalent, there was no British conquest of India. There were British conquests of India. That plural is very important. Rudrangshu: The British did not conquer the whole of the Indian subcontinent, massive as it is, in one fell swoop act of military conquest. They conquered India bit by bit, as if they were taking away bits of the political and economic jigsaw puzzle and bringing it under their control. On the last day of the year 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted the British East India Company a charter to trade on the subcontinent. The company exported valuable Indian goods to Europe for a high profit. When the Mughal Empire began disintegrating in the 18th century, the East India Company exploited the political unrest in order to safeguard its bottom line. To protect and increase profits, the company began to “fortify” its settlements—essentially seizing military control over small areas of land in the eastern region of Bengal. It was an early step in the British East India Company’s power grab in the region. And it led to one of the era’s first major conflicts. At the Battle of Plassey, the East India Company defeated and ousted the nawab of Bengal, establishing a puppet ruler in his place. Less than a century later, the British East India Company controlled territory in nearly every region of India. But not without fights along the way. Rudrangshu: British conquests of India were always met with resistance. Wherever they tried to conquer, they had to fight and defeat. From around 1783 to 1900, we have a rough count of this, there were more than 100 peasant insurgencies against British rule. Anticolonial resistance coalesced with the Rebellion of 1857—an uprising of Indian soldiers, called sepoys by the British, against their employer, the British East India Company. Rudrangshu: These mutinies had a very recognizable pattern. They took over the ammunition. And then they began to destroy all government buildings and offices. And then, following that, they attacked the residences of the white people. The British ultimately crushed the rebellion. The East India Company, financially devastated by the conflict, was ousted in favor of direct British rule. Queen Victoria was now the empress of India. Resistance continued. In 1885 a group of Indian intellectuals founded the Indian National Congress as a political alternative to colonial rule. The Congress Party offered a glimpse into what Indian self-rule could look like. Rudrangshu: The name is significant. It is identifying itself as Indian—not located or not related to one part of India, whole of India—and national. So it has within it the idea of nationalism. India, Indians standing for itself and for themselves. In 1905 the British partitioned Bengal into two regions—a Hindu-majority west and a Muslim-majority east—ostensibly in order to make the area easier to govern. Backlash across India culminated in the Swadeshi Movement, a boycott of British goods and culture. Twenty years later, this ideal would form the basis of Mahatma Gandhi’s noncooperation movement, a campaign of nonviolent resistance via economic and political boycotts. Rudrangshu: He argued that the British continue to rule in India because large numbers of Indians cooperate with the British. Let’s stop cooperating with the British. In 1930 Gandhi led a second boycott movement, this time specifically against a British tax on salt. And in 1942 he gave the call for another boycott, the Quit India Movement—but he was arrested, along with other leaders of the Indian National Congress, before he could see it to fruition. But the protests went on without Gandhi or the Congress Party leaders. Rudrangshu: The British became increasingly aware that India was becoming impossible to rule because of the growing animosity against British rule. This massive movement intersected with the onset of World War II and the wartime depletion of British funds. Managing a colony bent on revolution became untenable. At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947—after hundreds of uprisings, a world war, and a new British prime minister—foreign rule ended on the Indian subcontinent. India’s new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, welcomed a new era. Rudrangshu: “Years ago, we made a tryst with destiny.” That’s how he began his speech. We had promised ourselves to get freedom. And now that we have got freedom, we have freed ourselves from British rule, we want to build a new India. But the joy of independence was accompanied by the agony of partition—the forcible separation of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan—and its violent aftermath. The region was finally free from British rule. But it was no longer united.