Expecting nothing in Return
The First World War would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. Some 1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of the British Indian Army took part in the war, primarily in Iraq and the Middle East. Shortly before the outbreak of war, the Government of India had indicated that they could furnish two divisions plus a cavalry brigade, with a further division in case of emergency. Their participation had a wider cultural fallout as news spread of how bravely soldiers fought and died alongside British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia. India’s international profile rose during the 1920s, as it became a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and participated, under the name “Les Indes Anglaises” (British India), in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp.
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007) p. D. N. Panigrahi (2004). India’s partition: the story of imperialism in retreat. Recruitment was especially active in the Punjab province of British India, under the leadership of Premier Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, who believed in cooperating with the British to achieve eventual independence for the Indian nation. Brookings Institution Press. p. Stephen P. Cohen (2004). The Idea of Pakistan.
Wright, Edmund (2015), A Dictionary of World History, Oxford University Press, p. Lowe, Lisa (2015), The Intimacies of Four Continents, Duke University Press, p. Glanville, Luke (2013), Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History, University of Chicago Press, p. The suppression of the Mutiny after a year of fighting was followed by the break-up of the East India Company, the exile of the deposed emperor and the establishment of the British Raj, and direct rule of the Indian subcontinent by the British. Pykett, Lyn (2006), Wilkie Collins, Oxford World’s Classics: Authors in Context, Oxford University Press, p. Fair, C. Christine (2014), Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, Oxford University Press, p.
In 1917, as Montagu and Chelmsford were compiling their report, a committee chaired by a British judge, Sidney Rowlatt, was tasked with investigating “revolutionary conspiracies”, with the unstated goal of extending the government’s wartime powers. Although all non-official Indians on the Legislative Council voted against the Rowlatt Bills, the government was able to force their passage by using its majority. With the end of World War I, there was also a change in the economic climate. The Rowlatt Committee presented its report in July 1918 and identified three regions of conspiratorial insurgency: Bengal, the Bombay presidency, and the Punjab. Headlines about the Rowlatt Bills (1919) from a nationalist newspaper in India.
In addition, Gandhi reorganised the Congress, transforming it into a mass movement and opening its membership to even the poorest Indians. The visit, in 1928, of the British Simon Commission, charged with instituting constitutional reform in India, resulted in widespread protests throughout the country. Although Gandhi halted the non-cooperation movement in 1922 after the violent incident at Chauri Chaura, the movement revived again, in the mid-1920s. Earlier, in 1925, non-violent protests of the Congress had resumed too, this time in Gujarat, and led by Patel, who organised farmers to refuse payment of increased land taxes; the success of this protest, the Bardoli Satyagraha, brought Gandhi back into the fold of active politics.
Mike Davis writes that much of the economic activity in British India was for the benefit of the British economy and was carried out relentlessly through repressive British imperial policies and with negative repercussions for the Indian population. This is reified in India’s large exports of wheat to Britain: despite a major famine that claimed between 6 and 10 million lives in the late 1870s, these exports remained unchecked. A colonial government committed to laissez-faire economics refused to interfere with these exports or provide any relief.
