Ian Copland

CHRISTIANITY AS AN ARM OF EMPIRE: THE AMBIGUOUS CASE OF INDIA UNDER THE COMPANY, c. 1813–1858

For many years it was widely assumed that there was a close connection between the rapid expansion of European imperial power and acquisition of territory overseas during the nineteenth century, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the congruent Protestant Christian missionary project to save the ‘heathens’ of these places by persuading them to embrace the ‘redeeming’ message of the Gospels. Over the past several decades, however, the thesis that empire-building and Christian evangelizing were mutually supportive activities has come under sustained attack from a group of British historians led by Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter – to the point where the Stanley–Porter revisionist line now occupies centre-stage. This article shows that, contrary to the dominant consensus, the relationship between church – in the form of the missionary societies – and state – in the shape of the English East India Company, initially cool, gradually warmed as the two parties came to realize that they had a common interest in providing ‘civilizing’ Western education to the Indian elites. Indeed it provocatively suggests that the colonial state might well, in time, have given its endorsement and even its support to the spread of Christianity had not the Mutiny intervened in 1857. However the analysis of the benefits generated by this South Asian partnership finds, paradoxically, that it undermined the Company’s authority, and may well have deterred many Indians from converting to Christianity – which had come to be widely seen as a privileged and imperialist religion.

The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East Punjab Massacres of 1947

Event During the spring, summer and autumn of 1947 Indias richest province, the Punjab, played host to a massive human catastrophe. The trigger for the catastrophe was Britains parting gift to its Indian subjects of partition. Confronted by a seemingly intractable demand by the All-India Muslim League for a separate Muslim homeland—Pakistan—a campaign which since 1946 had turned increasingly violent, the British government early in 1947 accepted viceroy Lord Mountbattens advice that partition was necessary to arrest the countrys descent into civil war. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi notably excepted, the leadership of the Congress party came gradually and reluctantly to the same conclusion. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehrus deputy, likened it to the cutting off of a diseased limb. But in accepting the ‘logic’ of the Leagues ‘two-nation’ theory, the British applied it remorselessly. They insisted that partition would have to follow the lines of religious affiliation, not the boundaries of provinces. In 1947 League president Muhammad Ali Jinnah was forced to accept what he had contemptuously dismissed in 1944 as a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, a Pakistan bereft of something like half of Bengal and the Punjab and most of Assam.

‘Communalism’ in Princely India: The Case of Hyderabad, 1930–1940

The time has come when the communal holocaust must be confined to the Indian States, the time has come when both the Hindu and Muslim newspapers must be prevented from blowing communalism into British India. There was a time when our politicians like Gokhale rightly used to take pride in Indian States being free from communalism, which was a vice in British India.... But the table appears to have been turned. C. S. Ranga Iyer, I934.

What's in a name? India's tryst with secularism

It has always been the claim of Indias politicians that their country is a ‘secular’ state. However, although the Preamble to the Constitution of 1950 proclaims India to be ‘democratic’, it makes no mention of secularism. Fobbed off at the time as of no consequence, this omission was quite deliberate and reflected an awareness on the part of the designers of the constitution, notably Nehru and Ambedkar, that its provisions under ‘freedom of religion’ did not amount to what they understood to be ‘real’ secularism, namely the kind of polity famously embodied in the 1791 First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the Non-Brahmin Movement 1902-10

The British Indian empire, like the empires before it, depended on a measure of collaboration with the ruled. But the rajs systems of collaboration were neither static nor uniform. In the decade after 1900 some of the Indian princes, and the Maharaja of Kolhapur in particular, worked closely with the British to stem the rising tide of militant nationalism. This essay attempts to uncover the reasons for this collaboration-reasons which suggest that collaboration was always a conditional bargain, reflecting the immediate interests of both sides.

A History of State and Religion in India

Offering the first long-duration analysis of the relationship between the state and religion in South Asia, this book looks at the nature and origins of Indian secularism. It interrogates the proposition that communalism in India is wholly a product of colonial policy and modernisation, questions whether the Indian state has generally been a benign, or disruptive, influence on public religious life, and evaluates the claim that the region has spawned a culture of practical toleration.

The Production and Containment of Communal Violence: Scenarios from Modern India

Perspectives Indian nationalists embraced the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 in part because it appeared to offer a solution to the intractable ‘communal problem’ that had plagued the last three-quarters of a century of British rule; and at first the surgery of Partition seemed to make a difference. The incidence of overt ‘communalism’, in the shape of inter-ethnic collective violence between groups self-identified as ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, fell sharply after 1947 and remained low throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. But the remission did not last. Seventy-five significant communal incidents were recorded in 1955. The annual figure for 1965 was 173, for 1975 it was 205 and for 1985, 525. After a relative lull in the late 1980s, there was a further escalation in the last years of the twentieth century and in the first quinquennium of the twenty-first during which over 3,000 people were killed in the post-Ayodhya riots of 1992–93 and at least 1000 in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. The level of communal violence in India today is greater, by a good margin, than it was in the late colonial era, and riots afflict far more of the country. No less than a quarter of India’s 450 districts are now classified by the HomeMinistry as ‘hypersensitive’. It is a worthy conceit. If we can work out why and how communal riots begin, and if we can figure out why they occur frequently in some places and rarely in others, we ought to have a better chance of stopping or containing future irruptions.

What to do about cows? Princely versus British approaches to a South Asian dilemma

For more than a millennium, cow slaughter has been a source of bitter contention in South Asia. Hindus revere the animal; Muslims like to eat it and, until recently, the cow has been the preferred animal of sacrifice at the Islamic festival of ‘Id-ul-Adha¯. This paper looks at how, over the twentieth century, Indian governments of differing type and ideological colour—British and princely during the late colonial period and Congress nationalist after 1947—have tried to mediate this vexed question. It finds that while policies differed widely, there was a tendency for all governments in the early twentieth century to be guided by social custom and local opinion, so that in the small Muslim-ruled state of Mangrol, which had an official ban, the Muslims who killed cows occasionally for food were never prosecuted so long as they kept their activities discreet—but this ‘discretionary’ option became politically unviable once the country embraced democracy.

Cows, Congress and the Constitution: Jawaharlal Nehru and the Making of Article 48

ABSTRACT Added late to the draft Indian Constitution, Article 48 specifically mandated the Indian state to criminalise the killing of cows, a provision that, as well as being arguably at odds with at least three of the documents Directive Principles, was implicitly anti-Muslim. The provision was adopted, almost without demur, by a Constituent Assembly dominated by the Congress at a time when discrimination against the Indian Muslim minority in other fields was rife. With hindsight, the making of Article 48 can be seen as the first victory in post-colonial India of the nascent Hindu Right, preceding as it did even the formation of the countrys first effective Hindu political party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. This paper investigates how, and why, the cause of cow protection came to be supported (and effectively sponsored) in the Assembly by senior members of a supposedly secular Congress parliamentary caucus headed by staunch anti-communalist, agnostic and Muslim sympathiser, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Louis Fischer and Edgar Snow: Roosevelt's Emissaries in India, 1942

Abstract In the absence of direct diplomatic links with India because it was part of the British Empire, President Roosevelt of the United States found means to monitor the political situation there when the Cripps Mission to India of March–April 1942, which offered a small measure of reform, ended in failure as predicted. His ‘emissaries’ in India, Louis Fischer and Edgar Snow amongst others, uncovered a very different version of the failure of the Cripps Mission. Their articles, published from September 1942 onwards, let their American readers and Churchills information bureaux know that British propaganda had been shown up for what it really was—a bid to retain British control of India.