Knight - Britain in India, 1858-1947

Britains Indian empire comprised the territories of contemporary India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. The Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore were transferred in 1867 from British India to the Colonial Office which also controlled Ceylon/Sri Lanka. This immense tapering territory was about one thousand nine hundred miles both east to west and north to south, roughly the same size as Europe without Russia. Within this region there was great geographical diversity. In the north were the Himalayas, the worlds highest mountain range, from which flowed three of the earths great rivers, the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra. In peninsular India there was the high, dry tableland of the Deccan. In the west there were the 100,000 square miles of the Thar Desert. In the east at Cherrapunji a record 805 inches of rain was recorded in 1861.

This was an empire, not a unitary state with a single system of taxation and administration. New British provinces had been and would be added to the three presidency governments of Bengal, based in the capital city of Calcutta, and Madras and Bombay. What was called the Indian army was in fact the armies of these presidencies, with the commander-in-chief of the Bengal army exercising authority over the armies of Madras and Bombay. Elsewhere, the most important province was the Punjab, whose British officials thought of themselves as the most dynamic and innovative.

Scattered throughout the subcontinent were a large number of states under their Indian rulers. A semi-official work in the 1890s put the number by then at 688. Many were small and most were insignificant and grouped into agencies under British supervision. However, a dozen or so were large and important, uneasy survivors of the age of conquest and annexation. Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizam, had an area of 72,000 square miles and was the most heavily populated of these states, comprising nearly ten million people. Kashmir was almost the size of modern Britain but with a population of only 1.5 million. The government of Mysore, a state about the size of Belgium, was among the most sophisticated. The states had lost their external sovereignty, but retained varying degrees of domestic independence. They comprised two-fifths of India, but only one-fifth of the population.

The first census was published in 1872, giving a daunting total population of 241 million. Of these, 186 million were in British India, 54 million in the states, and three-quarters of a million in the Portuguese and French enclaves. There were also 121,000 Europeans, of whom 60,00070,000 were from British Army regiments, and 64,000 were Eurasians (mixed race). An official summarized the main divisions in the Indian population as 41 million Muslims, 16 million high-caste Hindus (Brahmans and Rajputs) 111 million mixed-population Hindus and 17.5 million aborigines; with other small minorities, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsis and Jews. Though there were scores of minor languages, the major ones numbered about fifteen. Censuses were to become important instruments of government policy. They not only extracted information from the population, but also classified people in increasingly refined ways and forced them to choose identities. By 1901 a paper slip had been created for each person and manually sorted into pigeonholes for each different statistical tabulation needed. By then Indians were 80 per cent of all subjects of the British Empire. Much was made of their complex variety, which could be held to justify foreign rule as an external arbiter.