India: A History

by John Keay

Historically it was Europe, not India, which consistently made religion grounds for war and the state an instrument of persecution.

If time is the locomotion of history, place could be the gradient against which it is pitted.

But if for Europe geography decreed fragmentation, for India it intended integrity.

Settlement was not uniform and integration not easily achieved because what geography had so obligingly joined together, hydrography put asunder.

According to the earliest of several accounts, the Flood which afflicted India’s people was a natural occurrence. Manu, Noah’s equivalent, survived it thanks to a simple act of kindness.

And when the extent of its cultural reach was found to embrace a host of other sites, many of them well beyond the valley of the Indus, it was renamed after one of these sites as the Harappan civilisation.

geographical India is not now, and never has been, a single politico-cultural entity. In fact, its current three-way division between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, far from denying some intrinsic unity, is a notable simplification of its traditional plurality.

Clearly Harappan settlements were not just India’s first cities and townships but its first, indeed the world’s first, planned cities and townships.

the Harappans may have been the first in the world to use wheeled transport. Numerous toy carts in terracotta and bronze testify to their pride in this technological breakthrough, and the generous street widths of their cities were presumably dictated by the consequent traffic.

But in the Indian subcontinent the first great experiment in urban living, in political organisation and in commercial enterprise disappeared without trace beneath the sand and the silt. In the land of reincarnation there was to be no rebirth for the bustling and ingenious world of the Harappans. History would have to begin again with a very different group of people.

Buddhism was not a belief system, not a rival faith to the post-Vedic cults and practices which prevailed under brahmanical direction, but more a complementary discipline. About gods, worship, offerings, prayers, priests and ritual, the Buddha claimed no special knowledge. He offered merely heightened insight, not divine revelation. It was his followers in the generations to come who would elevate the Buddha and other semi-enlightened ones (Boddhisatvas) into deities, thus claiming for Buddhism the authority and the supernatural paraphernalia of a religion.

His long reign came to an end when Ajatashatru, one of his sons, either seized the throne and starved his father to death or was nominated his successor so that the aged Bimbisara, having renounced the throne, could starve himself to death. Both practices appear to have been standard.

In other words, the crucial distinction was not between different belief systems but between different lifestyles. The individual was defined purely by his relationship to the rest of society. Not doctrine but conduct was what mattered.

nearby have been found suitably massive statues of Wima Kadphises and of Kanishka himself. Unfortunately both have been decapitated. While for the Greeks, thanks to their coins, we have notable heads but few torsos, for the Kushanas we have notable torsos but few heads.

in C674, after what was undoubtedly a glorious reign, Chach ‘died and went to hell’, this being the invariable fate of even the noblest infidel in Muslim histories.

Muslim writers who chronicled the successes of Mahmud were often scandalised by the hordes of celebrants, musicians, dancing-girls and servants who were attached to Indian places of worship.

Once again Babur dug deep to rally his men, this time by appealing to their Islamic convictions. Since the rajputs were infidels, the war was designated a jihad. Cowardice thus became apostasy while death assumed the welcome guise of martyrdom.

‘Sovereignty does not regard the relation of father and son,’ explained Jahangir in his enlightening but decidedly naive memoir. ‘A king, it is said, should deem no man his relation.’

As a separate state under its own Maratha maharajas, Kolhapur would outlive both the Mughals and the peshwas and survive even the British, only to surrender its autonomy at Independence.

Most unusually, when peace was concluded in 1769, no territories changed hands and no indemnity was mentioned. For the first time since Child’s ‘Mughal War’ the British had been militarily checked by an Indian regime.

When Maratha forces swooped into southern Karnataka and laid siege to his great fort of Srirangapatnam (Seringapatam) near Mysore, he immediately turned to his British allies. They turned away. Haidar repeatedly invoked the defensive alliance, and Madras repeatedly prevaricated. Albion’s perfidy, of which Haidar had no doubt heard from his French employees, was amply demonstrated. He damned the British as ‘the most faithless and usurping of all mankind’ and, if not already rabidly Anglophobe, both father and son now became so.

Tipu blamed his French allies for his failure to win a more convincing victory. Their support in the war had been negligible and their separate peace had been an act of treachery. To further overtures from Pondicherry he therefore replied by insisting on direct dealings with Versailles. In a refreshing reversal of roles, an Indian ruler was about to take the diplomatic game to the court of a European sovereign.

In a now clichéd procedure, a minor was installed as maharaja of the much-reduced Nagpur state and was then shackled with all the paraphernalia of British clientage.

Although subject to increasing regulation and direction by the British government after 1776, the East India Company remained a business concern, run from stately offices in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, whose directors were primarily answerable to their stockholders.

In that ‘the century beginning 1780 saw the beginnings of extensive deforestation in the subcontinent’,1 the ‘Axe Britannica’ may bear as much responsibility as the ‘Tax Britannica’ for the desolated aspect of India’s post-colonial rural economy.

By one reckoning there was not a single year between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War – the accepted duration of the Pax Britannica – when British-led forces were not engaged in hostilities somewhere in the world.

The First Afghan War is usually ranked as the worst disaster to overtake the British in the East prior to Japan’s World War II invasion of Malaya and capture of Singapore exactly a century later.

The story that Napier, in one of the shortest telegraphs ever sent, announced his victory with a single Latin verb is apparently apocryphal. ‘Peccavi’ (meaning ‘I have sinned [i.e. Sind]’), was not unworthy of Napier’s wit, but it was in fact the caption given him by the magazine Punch;

Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had led the first British diplomatic mission to Afghanistan in 1809, then been the last British Resident at the court of the peshwa in 1816 and later wrote that eminent history of India, likened Britain’s post-Afghanistan conduct in Sind to that of ‘a bully who had been kicked in the streets and went home to beat his wife’.

To avoid friction with Ranjit Singh, Dost Muhammad had been demonised; to avoid crossing his Sikh kingdom in the Panjab, the ‘Army of the Indus’ had marched to Afghanistan so circuitously; and to pre-empt a Sind – Sikh alliance, the amirs had been deposed. Novel though it was, the British were tiptoeing round the sensibilities of an Indian ruler.

The British, generally so restrained in their language and so disciplined in the field, were very different. They could make hostility look like friendship and conquest like a favour. It was difficult to rally support against such tactics.

It could in fact be argued that it was Congress which badly miscalculated; by withholding its support for the war, indeed endeavouring to exploit Britain’s wartime predicament, it practically obliged the British to play along with the Pakistan idea.

Mountbatten nevertheless pursued a proposal whereby power would be transferred to the provinces and the princely states, who might then choose whether to join India, Pakistan or neither. This was quite unacceptable to Nehru, who foresaw a ‘Balkanisation’ of India.

To preserve the tottering interim government, Mountbatten also brought forward the deadline to 15 August 1947. Ten weeks would suffice for the constitutional, social, military and infrastructural vivisection of a subcontinent.

In all, east to west and west to east, perhaps ten million fled for their lives in the greatest exodus in recorded history. The killings spread to Delhi itself where non-Muslims, who a few days earlier had been amongst the throng so cheerfully hailing Independence, hailing Nehru and Mountbatten, now turned on their Muslim neighbours with knife and club.

In addition to ‘partition’ – a decidedly flimsy term with a hint of impermanence about it – words like ‘vivisection’ (Gandhi’s coinage), ‘amputation’ (another Delhi favourite) and ‘surgical separation’ (as of conjoined twins – Pakistan’s preference) were freely bandied about.

But of all the contradictions that beset Pakistan and prejudiced its chances of equilibrium, the most serious was the most obvious. Its two halves were hopelessly incompatible and were so far apart as to be barely within non-stop flying distance of one another. Other than mosques and madrassahs, the four north-western provinces had almost nothing in common with East Bengal.

Naturally his action was universally condemned and he himself executed. But his point was not lost. The RSS and its allies were soon exonerated, Muslims in India continued to be treated with suspicion or worse, and Delhi was more paranoid than ever about the ‘inroads of Pakistan’.

The British high commissioner had expressed similar sentiments, reporting in 1950 that ‘West Pakistan is prepared to fight the “cold war” with India to the last Bengali.’