India Under the British Empire: The Story of Repression and the Fight for Independence

Rehan Rosha, Year 13, Churchill

British involvement in Indian affairs started as far back as 1615 when the East India Company (EIC) acquired its first territory in Bombay (present-day Mumbai). For its first century in India, the EIC was not concerned with the idea of building an empire there; instead, it was focused on trade within India and amongst the surrounding South-East Asian countries. However, the 18th century saw the gradual decline of the ruling Mughal Empire, causing the EIC to shift its focus from trade to territory. The following decades saw them rapidly gain and rule large areas of land throughout the subcontinent, either directly or indirectly, using excessive military force. The EIC started its rule over India in 1757, and by 1818, it stood as the largest governing force in India with its very own army and judiciary, functioning as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown.

In 1833, the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery in the British Empire and compensated slave owners for the economic blow this caused. However, the act conveniently left out slavery under the East India Company. Sources suggest that the EIC began transporting and using slave labour in 1620, but this ended with the Indian Slavery Act of 1843. This act was passed under the EIC, outlawing slavery and economic transactions associated with it. As a result, the EIC stopped transporting slaves and instead started transporting indentured labourers, workers within a system of unfree labour who were bound by a forced contract (indenture). The Indian indenture system allowed two million Indians to be transported and used for slave labour around the world. The EIC alone exported over a million Indian indentured labourers to British, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies, as well as to South Africa and Trinidad & Tobago. The Indian indenture system was finally banned in 1917, long after the EIC began profiting from it. Shockingly, The Economist stated that the reason for the ban was “because of pressure from Indian nationalists and declining profitability, rather than from humanitarian concerns”.

Fortunately, the EIC was dissolved in 1858 by the British government as a direct result of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The rebellion is another example of the EIC, and Britain as a whole, violating the civil and human rights of Indians. Although both sides committed tragic atrocities, many sources note how the retaliation from the EIC was significantly worse and more gruesome than the acts committed by the Indian rebels. The EIC responded to the massacres of British women and children with acts of torture as well as sexual assault. In areas of Northern India, sources put the death toll of Indians at around 150,000, 100,000 of which were civilians. Some sources even state that British troops forced many Muslim or Hindu rebels to eat pork or beef. From this, we can see that the state of civil rights under the EIC was appalling. However, the 1858 Government of India Act passed by the Parliament meant that the British government still had the right to govern India, under the British Raj. The British Raj presided over India until 1947 (when India achieved independence). In this period of time, the British Raj helped advance India’s infrastructure; For example, in 1860, universities in Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), and Calcutta were built. Additionally, railways previously built by the EIC were extended, and the construction of new canals and irrigation systems boosted the economy and the quality of life in those areas.

However, rule under the British Raj was not all positive. During the First World War, the Governor-General of India passed the Defence of India Act in 1915. The act was an emergency criminal law to reduce and prevent nationalist and revolutionary activities. The act provided the executive with frighteningly broad powers: For example, they could imprison citizens without a fair trial, and restrict the writings, speech, and movement of any Indian, both of which were clearly violations of several fundamental and inalienable civil rights. If there were any positive impacts of this act, it would be that it brought Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi into the mainstream of the Indian struggle for independence.

The act was succeeded by the infamous Rowlatt Acts, also known as the Black Act, which indefinitely extended the aforementioned executive powers, worsening the civil situation in India. The purpose of this act was similar to the previous one, in that it was used to curb the rapidly growing nationalist sentiments throughout India. It did this by allowing the police to arrest anybody without having to provide a reason, imprison any person suspected of terrorism for up to two years without any trial, control the press, search any facility or home and carry out arrests without warrants, and place indefinite detentions without trial. If there were to be a trial, there would be no jury, and the accused was not allowed to know who the accuser was or what evidence was being presented, completely disregarding the idea of the right to a fair trial. In addition, those who were convicted were not allowed to take part in any political, educational, or religious activities whatsoever.

On 13 April 1919, Acting Brigadier-General Reginald Dwyer, convinced that there could be an uprising very soon, banned all meetings and gatherings. However, that information did not travel very far. Later that day, thousands of people gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh to celebrate the Sikh and Hindu festival of Baisakhi, and to peacefully protest the arrest and deportation of Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew, two national leaders. Unfortunately, Dyer saw this as a threat and surrounded Jallianwala Bagh with his troops, blocking most of the exits. He then ordered his men to fire without warning, sending 1,650 bullets into a group of unarmed protesters. Although no detailed casualty count was carried out, a social services society estimated that at least 379 people died, with around 1,100 injured and 192 seriously injured. However, the Indian National Congress puts the death toll at 1,000 with 1,500 injured. Dyer’s actions were lauded by those who profited from the British Raj.

This included many members of the House of Lords and even Rudyard Kipling who stated that Dyer “did his duty as he saw it”. Nevertheless, Dyer was widely denounced by the House of Commons, causing them to censure him the following year. The massacre restrained the British Army and caused it to develop less violent tactics for crowd control and use minimal force when they could. Britain is yet to formally apologise for the massacre, although they expressed “regret” in 2019.

Since 1882, the British Raj prohibited any Indian from collecting or selling salt, a staple ingredient in their diets. Instead, they had to buy it from the empire at incredibly high prices, with a very heavy tax also imposed on the mineral. As a response to this, Gandhi organised a peaceful protest, a satyagraha in Hindi. On March 2, 1930, Gandhi and his followers marched from Ahmedabad to the coastal town of Dandi, covering around 240 miles, with the intent of collecting salt from the ocean as a form of civil disobedience against the salt monopoly held by the British Raj. During the march, Gandhi addressed large crowds as more and more Indians marched with him. By the time the group reached Dandi, Gandhi had amassed a following of tens of thousands of Indians, all peacefully marching to the salt flats.

This march inspired millions of Indians all over the sub-continent to engage in their own satyagrahas and peacefully protest against British rule. During this time, the British Raj arrested over 60,000 protesters, with Gandhi himself being arrested on May 5, 1930. However, this did not quell the protests. On May 21, Sarojini Naidu, a female Indian poet, led a group of 2,500 protesters to the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat. Once they arrived, they were turned away by the police, causing the protesters to sit down for 28 hours, even as hundreds of them were being arrested. Naidu said to her followers “You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten, but you must not resist: you must not even raise a hand to ward off blows”, echoing the peaceful and anti-violent sentiment carried out by Gandhi. However, later that day, the protesters tried to pull away the fencing surrounding the salt pans. This caused the police to react violently, clubbing and whipping the protesters. American journalist Webb Miller was an eyewitness to the retaliation, and in his report he wrote: “Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. … Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.” This report was initially censored by the British government, but was allowed to pass after Miller threatened to expose the censorship. Eventually, the report appeared in 1,350 newspapers around the world. After the protest, the Viceroy of India wrote the following in a letter to King George: “Your Majesty can hardly fail to have read with amusement the accounts of the severe battles for the Salt Depot in Dharasana. The police for a long time tried to refrain from action. After a time this became impossible, and they had to resort to sterner methods. A good many people suffered minor injuries in consequence.” This incident left many questioning the legitimacy and intent of the British Raj, with many historians believing that this was one of the final nails in their coffin.

Now comes the time where I must criticise the beloved Harrovian, Sir Winston Churchill, for his actions leading up to and causing the Bengal famine of 1943. Between January and July of 1943, Churchill and his War Cabinet diverted tonnes of wheat and rice away from the starving Indians in Bengal (present-day eastern India and Bangladesh) and instead used those resources to increase already large stockpiles in Europe. Ships filled with wheat from Australia were also diverted away from India and directed to the Mediterranean and Balkans to fill up buffer stocks in the event of an invasion in Greece and Yugoslavia. Further east of Bengal was Japanese-occupied Burma (present-day Myanmar). To prevent a possible invasion by Japanese forces, Churchill carried out a scorched earth policy, where the police seized and destroyed rice stocks, removed ships from eastern harbours and prevented any more ships from docking and unloading cargo. This heavily exacerbated an already terrible famine. Churchill commented the following about the famine: “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits”. Soon, British officials took note of the famine and quickly wrote to Churchill, notifying him that it was his policies that were causing the famine. As a response, Churchill wrote on the margin of the report “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”, a grim reflection of how the British government felt about the famine and India as a whole. At the time, the two leading newspapers in India, The Statesmen and Amrita Bazar Patrika, were told to “calm public fears about the food supply” and keep in line with the official statement from the British Raj that there was no rice shortage. There was incredibly strict censorship - newspapers couldn’t even use the word ‘famine’. The Statesman later remarked that the British Raj and UK government as a whole “seems virtually to have withheld from the British public knowledge that there was a famine in Bengal at all”. However, in August of 1943, The Statesman began publishing very graphic images of the true situation and The Guardian even called the situation “horrible beyond description”. The British Raj was not allowed to use its sterling reserves or its own ships to buy and import food, and requests for food aid from the British Raj were constantly shut down by Churchill and the War Cabinet. However, they did allow a relatively small supply of wheat specifically for western India (not Bengal) in exchange for rice shipments from Bengal to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). All this inaction, animosity, and hatred towards India created one of the worst famines of all time, leaving a death toll of up to 4 million Indians, and an indelible stain on the most celebrated figure of the 20th century.

Thankfully, Gandhi led India to independence from the British only four years later, putting a final end to the involvement of Britain in Indian affairs. In 1947, the British government partitioned India into 3

separate sections - India, West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan), and East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). This partition was based on religion, with the Muslim population going to the two Pakistans, while the Hindu population stayed in India. Although the partition itself was a large controversy and led to even more death, that is a story for another day.

The history of British involvement in India spans more than 300 years. Even today, there are debates about whether or not the United Kingdom should pay reparations or apologise for their acts of injustice. As of now, there has yet to be a formal apology. However, I don’t think the UK needs to apologise or pay any financial compensation. Instead, the UK government needs to acknowledge the unjust and inhumane actions carried out by the British Raj and the British Empire around the world. There needs to be a clear recognition of this era in history, rather than dismissal of events and falsification of facts. Ultimately, the UK is responsible for what happened, but that doesn’t mean the sins of the past must be repaid today. The time for that is long gone — we cannot force today’s Britain to tend to the wounds created by the Britain over 70 years ago. However, there are other ways in which we can begin to acknowledge what happened and move on. For example, the British Empire as a whole could be taught in UK schools so that future generations can better understand the history of their country and of the world, instead of pretending that it never happened.We must recognise our history and learn from it. Otherwise, how far we can progress as a society is incredibly limited.