Dan Snow's History Hit - The Foundations of Modern India

Episode Date: April 3, 2022

The greatest anti-imperial rebellion of the nineteenth century, The Indian Rebellion of 1857, witnessed mass violence against the British. Ninety years later, Indian freedom was founded on a deadly fratricide that singularly spared the outgoing masters. As a result, India’s founding fathers were tasked with how to steer the new nation in a context rife with hatred and violence.Shruti Kapila, Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the major history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India - from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got some Indian history on now. We've got the very brilliant Associate Professor of History, Shruti Kapila, on the podcast. She's from the University of Cambridge and she's on to talk about Indian political thought from, well basically from the mid-19th century, so the great Indian rebellion or the Indian mutiny right the way through, in fact right the way through to the present day, but particularly looking at how the Indians were successful in getting rid of the Brits, ideas around nationalism and liberalism. Fascinating stuff. We've got lots more podcasts available on Indian history. We've got some TV shows actually on Indian history. You can get them all at History Hit TV. Just follow the link,

which is in the description of this podcast. You click on there with your little old finger, then it takes you through to History Hit hit tv for a very small subscription you join the team at history hit tv which is the world's best history show what can i say you get two weeks free if you do it today you're gonna love it in the meantime folks here is professor shruti kapila shruti thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. It's great to be with you here. I'm someone who's studied and read a lot about India in the long 18th century. And into the middle of the 19th century, what political ideas are current in South Asia in the middle of the 19th century? And then we'll talk about how they maybe change later in that century? Well, that's a great question and a great jumping off point, because the mid-19th century is both the high watermark of imperial liberalism, so the Mokolle,

the mills, and as it were, a reformed new government based on English education in India, which is to kind of create a class of Indians who would do the work of empire, as it were. But at the same time, it is a high watermark of the largest anti-colonial rebellion and the greatest violence that the British will see outside of the Crimean War, which is, of course, the Indian rebellions, the mutiny, the uprising in 1857. And so in a way, it's a contradictory moment, and it's a moment of departure. And in a way, you could say that 90 years later is a complete opposite of what happens, which is in 1947, when the British finally leave India. So 1857, Indians killed the British men,

women, children, in large numbers in that rebellion. And 90 years later, the British were singularly spared in the fratricide that, you know, takes place between Hindus and Muslims in the partition. So in the mid-19th century, the British then were governing through a kind of distant form of government in which they were not enmeshed in Indian social relations, were not planning on impeding or interfering, as it were, in Hindu-Muslim relations, a barring, as it were, to keep the peace. And Indians were great at taking up liberal ideas. I mean, India produced a huge range of canonical thinkers on liberalism in the 19th century, including the first Asian member of

parliament in Britain, Naoroji. But it all changes in the 20th century, and that's my contention. So just quickly, though, on the Indian rebellion, what's spurring that? Is there an Indian identity? Is that like a proto-nationalism? Are people starting to think of themselves as, or is it a wistful nostalgia for Mughal rule? Or is it just the boss is in front of me, that's the enemy I've got up in my grill? It's an open moment, which is why it defies consensus.

It looks both forwards and backwards. So it has been reinterpreted as the first sort of war of independence by Indian nationalists, as well as, as you mentioned, most of the rebels were asking for the restoration of the Mughal rule, both Hindu and Muslim and tribal leaders. So it looks backward in the sense that it's kind of a restorative moment as well. Yet, it does not quite cohere in any significant ideology for something, but it coheres around a deep anti-British sentiment. So it's easier to define what it is against than what it stands for, and which is why it is so protean for both British imperial historians, as well as

Indian nationalists to read what they wish to in it. Okay, so then we get the 19th century, I think something we find a bit tricky in India, but also all around the world today is this link between liberalism and nationalism in the 19th century. It was actually nationalism was a kind of vehicle for liberalism all the other way around. So building a kind of liberal state was seen as a kind of nationalist aspiration. Is that true of India? Have I characterized that correctly? Yes. I mean, Indians take up liberalism and liberal ideas very early on. And there's two remarkable books written by, in fact, Cambridge historians, both unfortunately dead.

One, English Utilitarians in India by Eric Stokes, which actually talks that India is the laboratory for liberalism, Rick Stokes, which actually talks that India is the laboratory for liberalism, that it's made in India by colonial officials and scholar officials and is transported back to Britain. So in a way, the reformed decade of the 1830s in Britain is preceded in experiments in government and power in India. And that's Stokes' contention. So India is very central to the liberal making of the world. And secondly, by Chris Bailey, who writes about the Indian sort of intervention in the world of liberalism, that actually Indians remade liberalism and constituted it in the light of their own experiences, in the light of their own colonized status, to talk about a much more interventionist state, a kind of state that we see a lot more around today, but liberalism in one version stood for kind of the right but slight fit between individuals and institutions, then Indian liberalism was all for actually a much more interventionist state for development, for progress and the like.

And so these, in a way, were ideas of government and power and liberty being both about free trade, but also about Indians demanding representation from the British, certainly from the late 19th century onwards, in governments, in civic bodies and the like. But all that kind of world of polite petitioning, if I can put it like that, and high-mindedness of English-educated elites, and particularly Indian lawyers who were the kind of vanguard of Indian liberalism, that's all upturned in the first mass moment of anti-colonialism in the opening decades of the 20th century. You could say that liberalism, in a way, is given a death knell by Indian ideologues in the early 20th century. Okay, so initially, was it coherent to be a nationalist and a liberal?

Ah, yes, the nationalist question. Yes, so absolutely, you know, so you had imperial liberalism, which was, you know, about the legitimacy of empire. And then you had liberal nationalists in India. So the first, as it were, political party, non-Western political party in the world, the Indian National Congress, is very much around, based on nationalist principles, surrounded by and as it were, cohered by liberalism. And the founding figure, as I said, of that moment is also the first Asian MP in the British Parliament, Naoroji, in the 1880s. So it's a kind of confluence of Indo-British ideas. And you also have actually British radicals who are part of the founding moment, people like Hume, who are senior kind of bureaucrats within the colonial establishment, but who are very critical

of colonial rule, and who then join the Indian National Congress. So it's a much more hybrid, if I can use the word, moment in the 1880s, which is demanding a kind of greater responsibility from the imperial state and has a proto-nationalist and, in fact, liberal nationalist script written into it, which wants to work together with British imperial institutions for greater rights and representation for Indians. greater rights and representation for Indians. So greater rights representation, greater economic development, etc. But to do that, an idea that therefore that power has to be devolved, to be transferred to this idea of a kind of Indian nation. Yes, I mean, what the Indian intellectuals and political figures of that ilk were doing was speaking back to the British in their own terms. So the phrase was that this was illiberal rule in India. So that this was sort of the British were liberal at home,

but illiberal in India. And so this was a kind of way in speaking back to the empire about that. And the key theme is the 19th century Victorian Holocaust, as they've been called. The key themes were the kind of recurrent and devastating famines. And the idea was that through statistical amateur, through numbers, really showing how India had been impoverished by the British in the century-long rule. Political economy becomes a centerpiece. It's greater rights and representation, but it's also about famine, control over the economy, greater kind of say in the profits of empire, as it were,

back home in the domestic order. And thirdly, the big one, the race issue, because Indians were trained up as lawyers, they'd studied in Oxbridge and come back, but they were not allowed to sit on juries where the British or Europeans were there for capital offenses. So they could not, as it were, even cast judgment as a member of a jury on questions where homicide or other issues were involved. So they wanted, as it were, racial parity at this point. then start devolving in a way which some would say was a complete policy of divide and rule, because they set up competition between Hindus and Muslims through representation, which is only granted on this communal religious basis. That's one of the big debates in this period is, do the British do that deliberately, a cunning ploy to set South Asians against each other?

Or is it a clumsy, top-down analysis of South Asian society? Do you think, oh, here's some groups we can work with. Let's give representation, as you say, communally to them? Well, yes. I mean, I think there's a marked shift from the early 19th century to the late 19th century, where in the early 19th century, the British were quite happy to even marry Indian women. And there was a degree of social relationships between the races. But after the mutiny, there is a kind of distant rule, a very kind of strong arm rule, but very distant and very kind of segregated in cities and institutions. And the idea, therefore, was that you could, through new administrative measures, pick out select elites from key groups, and they could represent their

interests according to group identity. And I think it's not about whether this was well-meaning or not well-meaning. The point of it was that it was deeply political and consequential for the future of South Asia. And so how does that change our thinking? Let's progress, let's take that liberal nationalism into the early 20th century. Where do we end up with? So what you have is that the British want to give a degree of representation to Muslims, primarily because there is a feeling, perhaps rightly so, that they had been kind of marginalized over the course of the 19th century. And the idea is to kind of create a degree of what I call separate electorates in the Indian system, in the Indian history, which is to kind of have small representation in the civic bodies, such as the Municipal Corporation of Bombay, where you would have elections where Muslims would be represented by Muslim colleges and likewise Hindus, but also language issues around Urdu

and Hindi. And the idea becomes highly competitive. So what happens is that Hindus and Muslims are set up in a kind of competition for goods, for institutional goods and institutional representation. And this comes at the high liberal moment through the Montague Chemsford reforms or the Molle Minto reforms. I mean, there were a series of reforms which amplified this way of thinking. But the moment of it is around the proposed partition of Bengal, when Curzon wants to partition Bengal for administrative purposes towards a majority Muslim area. And that really sparks the first mass moment of anti-colonialism and mass politics in India in the early opening years of the 20th century.

So take me through that. Bengal, North East India today, you have Bangladesh that sits there next to what people would call today West Bengal. Why was Kherson trying to partition it? Why was he trying to carve out a majority Muslim state? Basically, the consequence of what you just talked about before. Yeah, I mean, his idea was to kind of make it administratively more efficient, at least that was a self representation. But he had underestimated the political restiveness this was going to cause. And it really sparks violent, actually anti-colonial mobilization, primarily in the cities, not just in the Bengal region, but the Bombay region, but also Punjab. And it also opens up a massive debate in Indian politics, that whether violence is a kind of correct means for political transformation, as opposed to

constitutional measures of talking, petitioning, and trying to argue and reason with the British on their own terms. And that debate is consequential, because of course, the proposed partition is withdrawn by Kyrsten after it. But at the same time, the anti-colonial movement also fails, and a large number of these leaders are then put in prison. And in a way, Indian politics, I would say, goes both global. So a lot of the people who had young students, who had been kind of passionate about it, who had thrown perhaps bombs, there had been assassinations, there had been a large number of big kind of visible events on the back, very much like our moment today of a major pandemic in Western India. So there was a huge amount of

restiveness against the coercive politics of the colonial state, which then take on a very violent form from the period of about 1905 to 1908. And it's called the Home Rule League moment in India or the Home Rule movement in India. And it also demands a much more kind of native control, Indian control of economics at this moment. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Indian resistance to British rule. More coming up. In April 1982, armed forces from the United Kingdom and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands.

This month, 40 years later, we are dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this conflict was all about and what it was like to fight on either side. To see Harriers were flying over when they attacked us. They trusted us and we felt we had let them down. I really don't know whom I would be now if I had not gone through that experience when I was 19 years old. You can't take a submarine prisoner you have to find it you have to destroy it and if goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. To follow along, tune in every Friday to the Warfare podcast from History Hit.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. It's very interesting, the different threads in that period of Indian

history with non-violence. Non-violence becomes synonymous with this anti-colonial moment. And yet there are acts of violence and continued acts of violence here, whether it's quit India during the Second World War. The British state in India remains terrified of its ability to coerce. That's right. I mean, this moment of 1905 or 1908 is also redolent with the repetition of the mutiny because it is the 50th year of the Indian mutiny. And, you know, there are journalists like Valentine Kyrill, the editor of the London Times, who's actually reporting all of this back in lurid colors to the British press, saying, well, actually, you know, this is not a society that can be governed because it also now has a huge new violent undercurrent, which is religious, fanaticized kind of violence against

the British. So there's a kind of way in which there is imperial fear, imperial anxiety. And at the same time, there is a remaking of Indian politics, which, as you rightly point out, goes in two vectors, a nonviolent register, which is associated with Mahatma Gandhi above all. But Gandhi is at this point in South Africa and would come back to India 10 years later after this moment, would want to steer this kind of anti-colonial violence towards a much more kind of non-violent, but nevertheless anti-British, anti-colonial state politics. So you have three major moments, 1905-08, 1920-21, which is Gandhi's first big moment, which is the non-cooperation movement, which actually stitches together a Hindu-Muslim coalition

against the empire after the fall of the caliphate. And then you have the 1930s, Saul Satyagraha, and 1942, Quit India. But they're all marked, barring 1931, marked by moments of violence. And of course, the final one in 1947, when Indians kill each other with great passion. Talk to me about Gandhi then and where his ideas are shaped and how he's able to spread them so successfully. So after this moment, I'm sorry to kind of fixate on it, but it's a kind of defining moment because Indian ideologues have to rethink the nature of politics, the nature of colonial rule, the nature of freedom after this failure. And Gandhi encounters a large number of diasporic Indian students in a secret society in Hampstead,

which is training actually men to assassinate. And there was a major assassination in Kensington soon after his visit. And Gandhi is struck by the passion of these young men to kind of sacrifice their lives. struck by the passion of these young men to kind of sacrifice their lives. He shares with them that the colonial state or the liberal state or the ideas of contract and mediation that liberalism brings is not just inadequate, but is actually morally wrong way of conducting a good society. So they all share a kind of deep skepticism of the modern state to govern political life. But Gandhi wants to steer it towards a kind of more ethicalicism of the modern state to govern political life. But Gandhi wants to steer it towards a kind of more ethical politics of nonviolence, which he absolutely undeniably

engenders and lays down the foundations and grammar for Indian political protest, which is nonviolent. But he is constantly shadowed throughout by a militant radicalism, which can be religious, and in fact, loses his life in 1948, precisely to a Hindu militant on that basis. How should we weigh up the impact of these two strains within the anti-colonial moment? Yeah, so Gandhi is not a pacifist in a negative sense, though non-cooperation as well as non-violence are negative terms. Actually, Gandhi is wrestling with the fact that violence is the essential question of politics. And he's departing, all Indian ideologues are departing from the Western liberal tradition, which says that the state is the rightful holder and author of violence. They're actually saying, no, individuals have capacities for violence. It's a human capacity.

It is not a mediated capacity, which we hand out to the state for our own security, which in a way empowers the individual to kind of act more politically, more violently, if you wish to. But also Gandhi is saying that this is why we have to be responsible. Each one of us has to be responsible on the question of violence. So they all share a skepticism of the state, precisely because this colonial state is so powerful. It has depoliticized and defanged all sources of violence in Indian society that these figures reappropriate the question of violence

as an individual capacity, including the apostle of nonviolence, Gandhi. And Gandhi wants to steer it to say, well, you know, we need to be disciplined around the question of violence. The temptation to violence is always too great, especially towards our own. And the other ways in which these figures depart from Western political ideas is that the foreigner is no longer the subject or has no potency for enmity. So the empire loses its kind of hold on Indians, not because it's not powerful, but the Indians decide in a conscious move, which I show in my book, that the enemy can only be born out of intimacy, out of familiarity. book, that the enemy can only be born out of intimacy, out of familiarity. And the British are truly externalized in this way of thinking. So it has consequences in the sense precisely because violence will become intimate, fratricidal, and fraternal, as opposed to this kind of

departure you see where the British are spared in 1947. They are the only people to kind of, you know, walk unscathed in that moment of catastrophic violence. Having said that, Gandhi does, as I say, lay down the grammar for protest because he allows individuals to just get up, go, walk, demonstrate, not cooperate, not give taxes. That remains potent in India today. We've seen it quite recently with the farmers protests in India against Prime Minister Modi. So these are kind of foundational acts, thoughts and events. I'd love to talk about Modi actually at the end, if that's okay. And can we trace his brand of, I'm going to call it Hindu nationalism for want of a better shorthand.

Can you help me track the development of that from the anti-colonial period? So Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, which was a term invented by the kind of progenitor of this philosophy, was actually an Indian radical who had spent time in London, Savarkar, who had written the first historical account in English of the Indian mutiny using the same military sources in the India office that imperial historians had written. And he had coined that word Indian War of Independence, which is now totemic of these events in India. But in the interwar period, due to various events, he creates a new philosophy called Hinduness, which is not simply the realization of a religious identity.

It is more precisely to be understood as a kind of political Hinduness. And here violence plays a very important theme in that violence is seen to be a dynamic force for not just good, but for transformation. And he takes issue in the long history of India with both Buddhism and Islam for neutering, as it were, political Hinduness. And it's his acolyte who would assassinate Gandhi in 1948, precisely for being so-called weak on the question of partition and the formation of Pakistan and for Hindu-Muslim amity. So Modi belongs to this strand of thinking, which originated in secret societies, had a secret organization in the interwar period. You could say it was conspiratorial to a large extent, but was fully organized. It was highly masculine, where ideas of celibacy, much like Modi, who was a single man, are revered precisely because they kind of make a man strong. And it's all very serious. It's all kind of, you know, taught through military exercise

and daily discipline and intellectual even formation of young men in India. So there's RSS, which is the large body through which Modi has risen. And it's really in the 1980s that they become a political force in India, an electoral force in India on the question of Hindu-Muslim relations, of course. And in a way, Modi is, whether it is in reshaping the imperial architecture in Central Delhi, I mean, the British imperial architecture by Edward Lutyens, which is being redone at this moment, British imperial architecture by Edward Lutyens, which is being redone at this moment. Modi is really trying to undo the political settlement of India in 1947, which saw it as a liberal-secular compact and wants to kind of create a new India, which is stridently politically Hindu, first and foremost. How would Gandhi be remembered now, then, in Modi's India?

As a great psychoanalyst of India says, Gandhi for every Indian is an encounter with the self. How would Gandhi be remembered now, then, in Modi's India? nor can his assassin. The assassin has also not been fully incorporated nor fully expelled. So he haunts the BJP in that manner because he is the father of the nation. He is the figure who is most revered in India. But his assassin is a figure who is increasingly celebrated in the ranks of the BJP. So he's an ambivalent figure for a figure like Modi. He cannot seem to be openly defying him. So you see him kind of paying obeisance to him ritually at every moment. But of course, there's a strong undercurrent in his party, which is very pro the assassin. So Gandhi has become, in a way, again, symbolic of that psychic division, the political division at the heart of India, which goes back to the anti-colonial moments of the early 20th

century. Wonderful. Well, that was a tour de force. Thank you very much for charging through all that with us. What's the name of your book? Violent Fraternity, Indian Political Thought in the Global Age. It's out with Princeton Press. Go and get it, everyone. Thank you, Shruti. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake.

Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Please head over there and do that. It really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please head over there, do that. Really, really appreciate it.