In mid-August, the British received fresh troops and new supplies from Punjab. The attack became more intense. A month later, Shahjehanabad was captured and sacked. Bahadur Shah and members of his family, the proud descendants of Taimur the Lame and Ghengis Khan, fled down the Yamuna to take shelter in Humayun’s grand tomb. They were soon discovered. Many Mughal princes were executed. Three of them, including the brave Mirza Mughal, were shot dead near the archway still called Khuni Darwaza or Gate of Blood. The emperor was exiled to rangoon.
The city of Delhi was in ruins. Within the Red Fort, many of the Mughal structures were destroyed to make way for the barracks, which we can still see today. A few years later, a large part of the old city was cleared to build the railways. Only a few structures remained to remind one of Shah Jehan’s dream. This was the end of India’s third cycle of urbanization. It began with the sacking of Prithviraj Chauhan’s Delhi and ended six and a half centuries later with the sacking of Mughal Delhi.
The next cycle, However, had already begun in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. After the fall of Delhi, the British put down the other centres of rebellion one by one. Tens of thousands were executed as punishment. There were many extraordinarily brave people such as Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi who waged war against the British but the rebels were too uncoordinated to win.
Did you know?
Rani Laxmibai was only tweny-two years old when she fought the British, the most powerful empire of that time. For all its fame, the fort at Jhansi is a modest one. It still has two of Rani Laxmibai’s cannon, of a design that was old-fashioned even in the mid-nineteenth century. It stood no chance against the British and yet, she had the audacity to defy them!
Many Indians were either indifferent to this rebellion or supported the British. Maybe they thought that if the British left, India would once again become chaotic like it had been in the eighteenth century. Maybe they thought the future did not lie in the old order of rulers. The year 1857 saw another kind of revolution. Three federal examining universities on the pattern of London University were established in the cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. By the time India became independent in 1947, twenty-five such institutions were set up. The universities created an educated middle class that formed the forefront of the next round of resistance to British rule.
The rebellion of 1857 brought the East India Company to its end. Its territories in India were put directly under government control. The Governor-General was replaced with a Viceroy, a representative of the Crown. The ratio of Europeans to Indians in the army was pushed up to 1:3 from 1:9. That is, for every three Indians, there was now one European in the army.
The British stopped taking over Indian kingdoms and instead gave them a permanent standing under the Crown. This framework survived till 1947. The Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 stated that the British would no longer try and impose their religion and customs on the local people.
Interestingly, the Queen’s Proclamation was read out not in calcuatta, Bombay, Madras or Delhi. It was read out in Allahabad, at the Triveni Sangam, the place where the Yamuna meets the Ganga and is said to be joined by the invisible Saraswati flowing underground. It is here that Ram is said to have crossed the river and visited the sage Bharadhwaj before going on exile to the forests of central India. There is even a tree under which ram is said to have rested. It was also here that Xuan Zang saw the great gathering of the Kumbha Mela in the seventh century CE. Overlooking the temple and the merging rivers is the fort built by Emperor Akbar which has a Mauryan column with the inscriptions of three emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jehangir. In short, this was the heart of Indian civilization. The British seemed to have finally understood the nature of Indian nationhood.
If you visit the Saraswati Ghat in Allahabad at dawn in January during the annual Magh Mela or the Kumbha Mela, you can see tens of thousands of people of all ages, genders, classes, castes and sects take a dip in the confluence of rivers. They chant Vedic hymns composed thousands of years ago on the banks of the ancient Saraswati, still alive in the memory of the people.
The column built in memory of the Queen’s Proclamation is a short walk from Saraswati Ghat and stands neglected in an overgrown park. The locals have forgotten about the significance of the place. This is sad because the modern Indian State is the direct outcome of this Proclamation. After Independence, the government capped the column with a replica of the national emblem, the Mauryan lions and the wheel.
Although colonial expansion became less open after 1858, a large gap remained between the Indians and the British. This is visible even in urban planning. British towns were spacious ‘white-towns’ while the towns of the locals were crowded ‘black-towns’. It is not unusual for rulers to live separately from the ruled. We notice this in the citadel of Dholavira as well as the Red Fort of Shahjehanabad. But both sections still lived within the same cultural context. However, there was now a large cultural gap between the British and the locals.
It would be many decades before a small bunch of Indians with a Western education was allowed into places like the Civil Lines of Allahabad. Till recently, remains from this era were still visible in the large, crumbling bungalows of Allahabad’s Civil Lines. But now, the area is turning into a jumble of malls, shops and apartment blocks.
THE STEAM MONSTERS
By 1820, India’s population was 111 million but its share in world GDP had fallen to 16 per cent. China’s share at this time was 33 per cent! Combined, they still accounted for half of the global economy. Because of the Industrial revolution, Britain enjoyed a per capita income that was three times higher than that of the two Asian countries. This means that though the GDP shares of India and China were greater than that of Britain’s, the people of Britain, on an average, were better off than the Asians. As the nineteenth century wore on, the gap between the Europeans and the Asians became wider. By the time India became independent in 1947, its share fell to a mere 4 per cent of the world GDP.
Though India’s share had gone down, the second half of the nineteenth century saw big changes in the country’s economic and geographic landscape. How did this happen? The British introduced the railways in India! There were many reasons behind this—some to do with trade and some to do with the military. Through the 1830s and 1840s, there were many discussions and proposals for the project. The government didn’t have enough resources to take up something so huge and they thought they could ask private operators to raise the money. But not many were interested.
The discussions went on for several years and then came F.W. Simms, a railway engineer. A number of routes were surveyed under his supervision. He argued that a Delhi-Calcutta line would save the military at least 50,000 pounds a year, a very large sum in those days. The government decided to give generous guarantees to convince investors to put in money into the railways.
The very first railway line in the subcontinent ran 21 miles (34 km) from Bombay to Thane. The formal inauguration took place at Bori Bandar on 16 April 1854 when 14 carriages with 400 guests left the station ‘amidst the loud applause of a vast multitude and the salute of 21 guns’. A year later, a train left Howrah (a town across the river from Calcutta) and steamed up to Hooghly. This was the first line in the east. Two years later, the first line in the south was established by the Madras Railway Company. By 1859, there was a line set up between Allahabad and Kanpur
An Indian railways map of March 1868 shows that by this time, Howrah (i.e. Calcutta) had been connected to Delhi and this line then went on to Lahore. The Lahore-Multan line had also been built, some of it with the use of the four-thousand-year-old Harappan bricks you read about earlier. From Multan, you could use the Indus Steam Flotilla to sail down to Karachi. In the west, Bombay was connected to Ahmedabad and Nagpur but the link to the Delhi-Calcutta line was still not complete. The link between Madras and Bombay was also still being built near Sholapur. There were a number of side lines that were already being used or were being built.
All this work was
happening with the technology available at that time and the difficult terrain of Central India. In spite of this, work proceeded at a brisk pace and in the 1870s, an average of 468 miles (749 kms) was being added per year. In 1878, 900 miles (1440 km) were added in a single year! This is amazing by any standard. By 1882, the country’s railway connected all major cities and the Victorian engineers were feeling confident enough to build into the steep Himalayan hillsides in order to connect hill stations like Darjeeling and Simla.
The laying of the railways was not always a smooth process. In fact, much of it was built in a hurry by different companies, agencies and princely states. They used different standards and gauges. They also had different objectives in mind. This caused quite a few operational difficulties and even now, problems caused by this lack of uniformity frequently crop up.
Agricultural products could now be exported and manufactured imports could be brought in cheaply. In many places, the artisans and merchants were affected badly because people stopped buying local products or using the old caravan routes. The Marwari merchants of Rajasthan, for example, were forced to leave their homes and look for opportunities elsewhere. Many moved to Calcutta where their descendants became successful businessmen. Their old Ancestral homes can still be seen in towns like Mandawa and Jhunjhunu in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan.
In the meantime, new towns came up along the railway routes and some communities took advantage of this rapid growth. One such group was the Anglo-Indians or the Eurasians who joined the railways in large numbers. At one point, the Anglo-Indians of India had their own distinct culture, with their own cuisine, love for music and sport, and their way of speaking English. But now, they have more or less merged into the Indian Christian population. Many of them migrated to Australia and Canada and they, too, have become one with the population there.
Just as the Internet or mobile technology now connects us all, the railways connected people in those times. Since it carried people and goods from across the country, it allowed them to come together and interact.
The social reformer and religious leader Swami Vivekananda used trains to travel the country in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Mahatma Gandhi did the same as he tried to get to know India again after he returned from South Africa.
By 1924, 576 million passenger trips were being made per year. Of course, this does not mean that train journeys were always enjoyable. Especially for the second and third class passengers. A report listed out the following complaints of third class passengers in 1903:
Overcrowding of carriages and insufficiency of trains
Use of cattle trucks and goods wagons for pilgrims
Absence of latrines in the coaches
Absence of arrangements for meals and insufficient drinking water
Absence of comfortable waiting halls
Inadequate booking facilities
Harassment at checking and examination of tickets
Bribery and exactions at stations, platforms and in the train
Want of courtesy and sympathetic treatment of passengers by railway staff
Sound familiar? Many of these complaints still ring true! Thankfully, people are not made to travel in cattle trucks now but the phrase can still make one angry—remember Shashi Tharoor made a comment about travelling in ‘cattle class’ when he was minister, and got into trouble!
BOMBAY THEN AND NOW—STILL THE SAME!
The period between the Revolt of 1857 and the First World War was the time when the British were at their most powerful. This was obvious in Calcutta, the empire’s Eastern capital, where luxurious and large buildings were built by the government, banks, companies and the rich people. Many of these, like the High Court, the Writers’ Building, the Chartered Bank Building, the General Post Office and Guillander House, still exist. There’s also the Raj Bhavan, once the palace of the Governor-General, which is now home to the Governor of West Bengal.
Just as Calcutta was basking in all this attention, Bombay, too, was becoming a very important city for the British. Bombay was not a new settlement. The area had been a major port even in ancient times; the seventh-century cave temples of Elephanta Island tell us this. But the modern city originated from when the Portuguese occupied the area in the sixteenth century.
At this stage, Bombay was a group of several marshy islands. The name of these islands are still used in Bombay as names of neighbourhoods—Colaba, Mahim, Parel, Worli, Mazagaon. The islands passed into British hands in 1662 as part of the dowry received by King Charles II on his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. They were then leased to the East India Company for ten pounds a year.
In the beginning, the Marathas prevented the British from expanding into the mainland. But by the late eighteenth century, the British were in a strong position and Bombay became an important port for trading. The British governor started a series of civil engineering works, loosely called the Hornby Vellard Project, to connect the various islands by landfills and causeways. By 1838, the seven southern islands were combined to form a single Bombay Island. By 1845, the Mahim causeway connected Mahim to Bandra on the island of Salsette. Though the main islands have all been joined, linkages are still being built to this day. The latest is the Bandra-Worli Sealink, which opened in 2009 to connect South Mumbai to the suburbs.
One of the first people to take advantage of the new Bombay were the Parsis, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees from Iran who had settled along the Gujarat coast. They first moved to Bombay to work for the British as shipbuilders but, by the 1830s, grew very rich by becoming part of the opium trade with China.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Bombay was smaller than Calcutta or Madras. But in the 1860s, things changed. The American Civil War broke out and the American north blocked the ports of the American South. This meant that the mills of Lancashire, in England, could not get raw cotton. And so, they looked to western India for the material. The newly built railway network transported cotton directly from the fields to the Bombay port. New cotton mills began to be built in Bombay itself. The opium trade with China also boomed at the same time, with 37,000 chests being shipped out every year.
With all this new money, both the government and the wealthy merchants of the city started building new structures; the grander the better. The cotton trade was booming. The buying and selling of Land had also become a profitable business. An informal stock exchange appeared under a tree in front of the Town Hall. People from other parts of the country moved in by tens of thousands, and crowded slums came up.
A traveller writing about this commented, ‘To ride home to Malabar Hill along the sands of Back Bay was to encounter sights and odours too horrible to describe… to travel by train from Bori Bunder to Byculla, or to go to Mody Bay, was to see in the foreshore the latrine of the whole population of Native Town.’ The location of the slums of Bombay have changed over the last one-and-a-half centuries but anyone who has travelled in Mumbai’s suburban trains will know what the above comment means!
In 1865, the American Civil War ended and the prices of shares and cotton in Bombay crashed. By 1866, several of the city’s banks and real estate companies failed and many rich people were left without any money. The city was full of half-built projects that were abandoned. But the boom years had given Bombay a new status and even now, the spirit of those times is alive. Strike up a conversation with the street vendors of Nariman Point or the Fort and they will give you tips for the stock market!
THE MAN WHO FLOATED LOGS
By the 1860s, the British surveyors had an accurate map of the subcontinent and were beginning to wonder what was there beyond the Himalayas. This was not just because they were curious; it was because the russians had started to invade Central Asia. The ‘Great Game’ had begun.
The problem was that the Tibetan authorities did not want to let in Europeans inside their borders—a few who had tried had been tortured and killed. The Survey of India decided to use Indian spies disguised as traders and pilgrims. The
first among this group was a young schoolteacher from the Kumaon hills, Nain Singh. In 1865, he crossed from Nepal into Tibet along with a party of traders. A few days after the crossing, the traders slipped away one night with most of Nain Singh’s money, leaving him alone in a strange land.
Fortunately, they hadn’t stolen his most valuable possessions, concealed in a box with a false bottom—a sextant, a thermometer, a chronometer, a compass and a container of mercury. He also had with him a Buddhist rosary but this one had 100 beads instead of the usual 108. Nain Singh planned to measure distance by slipping one bead for every 100 paces walked. He also had a prayer wheel which contained hidden slips of paper on which he recorded compass bearings and distances.
Nain Singh begged his way across the cold and empty landscape. In January 1865, he finally entered the forbidden city of Lhasa. He pretended to be a pilgrim and even made a brief visit to the Dalai Lama of that time. He supported himself by teaching local merchants the Indian system of keeping accounts. But he knew that his life would be in danger the minute he was discovered—after all, he’d witnessed the beheading of a Chinese man who had arrived in Lhasa without permission! Nain Singh stopped appearing in public too often after this incident. At night, he would climb out quietly from the window on to the roof of the small inn where he stayed. Then, he would use his sextant to determine latitude by measuring the angular altitude of the stars. He also used his thermometer to record the boiling point of water as the higher the altitude, the lower the boiling point. Using this method, he estimated that Lhasa was about 3420 metres above sea level. The modern measurement is 3540 metres—not bad, huh?
The Incredible History of India's Geography Page 17
