The British rule over India left behind more than partitioned borders. It entrenched the politics of division. From creating categories to harden identities to the stereotypes that demonise, colonial tools of control have been repurposed into modern-day conflicts. What began as a means to consolidate imperial rule survives in the form of fault lines. The Empire ended, but its divisions endure
In 1808, Robert Dundas, the head of the British Board of Control in India overseeing the East India Company’s administration, explained to Governor-General Lord Minto that they were not averse to introducing Christianity. But he argued nothing could be more unwise than any imprudent or injudicious attempt to induce it by alarming means. Dundas said the knowledge of Christianity should be imparted to the natives, but the means shall be free from any political danger.
Five years later, the Evangelicals seized their chance to lobby for missionary activity when the company’s charter was up for renewal in 1813. Charles Grant, a former East India Company director, argued that Asiatic territories were not given to them merely to draw profit but to ‘diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, vice, and misery, the light and the benign influences of Truth’.
The Committee of the Protestant Society called for the speedy and universal promulgation of Christianity throughout the East. Evangelicals sent 837 petitions urging an end to the exclusion of missionaries from India, with around half a million people as signatories. Twelve of these petitions remain in the British House of Lords library.
Missionaries and the Push to Anglicize India
Historian Niall Ferguson writes that nearly all petitions had the same preamble, citing the ‘deplorable state of moral darkness’ and the influence of the ‘most abominable and degrading superstitions.’ They argued that Indians have a pre-eminent claim on the most compassionate feelings and benevolent services of British Christians. Ferguson notes one group of petitioners beheld with poignant grief the ‘horrible rites and the degrading immorality’ among the population of India, now their fellow subjects. The group hoped to introduce Indians to the religious and sound blessings the inhabitants of Great Britain enjoy.
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In 1813, a new East India Act paved the way for missionary activities and the appointment of a bishop and three archdeacons for India. By 1832, there were 58 Church Missionary Society preachers in India. The subcontinent was a battleground for the missionaries. As Christ’s soldiers, they thought they were struggling against the forces of darkness. ‘Theirs is a cruel religion,’ said member of Parliament William Wilberforce. ‘All practices of this religion have to be removed.’
Ferguson writes that the missionaries intended much more than to convert Indians to Christianity. The idea that India’s whole culture needed to be Anglicized was almost as important as the Evangelical project, which sought to pull people in Asian territories out of the ‘darkness’ they had long been sunk in. Missionaries made inroads into India and propagated what they believed was the rationality ’embodied in Christianity’ to challenge the ignorance and superstition of Asian religions. They sought to diffuse among Indians the light of Truth through the imposition of British laws, religion, and values.
Enfield Rifles and the Spark of the 1857 Revolt
India was not just to be ruled, it was also to be redeemed. The annulment of ‘local laws which offended Christian sensibilities’ was central to the redemption project. The reformist zeal stoked anxieties about a threat to Indian religious and social norms. By the 1850s, the fears were mixed with economic and political grievances. The introduction of Enfield rifles in the army sparked the rebellion in 1857.
The cartridges for the rifles were greased with pig and cow fat. They had to be bitten off before use, offending both Muslim and Hindu soldiers. Pigs are abominable to Muslims. Hindus consider cows sacred and their slaughter sacrilegious. The British ignored their objections and fuelled anger by imprisoning soldiers who had refused to use the cartridges. The anger boiled over in May 1857. Indian soldiers turned their guns on their British officers to free their colleagues in Meerut.
The Indian soldiers marched untouched to Delhi, around 60 km away, in May 1857. They hoped to strike the final blow to the British under the guidance of the Muslim Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. All but 7796 of 1,39,000 Indian troops revolted, with civilians joining the soldiers at many places.
Divide et Impera: How Britain Engineered Divisions in India
Hindus and Muslims fighting together and under each other’s command against the colonial power horrified the British, who vowed never again. ‘Divide et impera was an old Roman maxim, and it shall be ours,’ wrote British official Lord Elphinstone. The British would follow a systematic policy of fomenting separate Muslim and Hindu consciousness to frustrate a united nationalist movement that could potentially overthrow British rule.
British colonialists perpetuated myths, including one of the hypersexualized and predatory Muslim men, as part of the divide-and-rule policy in India. Orientalists demonised Muslim men as sexually aggressive, violent, and uncivilized. The British divide-and-rule stereotype has been absorbed and indigenized into India’s contemporary ethnonational and anti-Muslim politics. Once a colonial tool, it is now a weapon against the present-day Muslims.
The British used divide et impera, which the Roman Empire employed as a strategy to fragment power structures and eliminate or absorb them, to govern colonial India. They separated social and cultural groups to prevent them from uniting against the colonizer. Julius Caesar used this tactic in his conquest of Gaul (58–50 BCE) by exploiting tribal divisions. Italian Renaissance political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli recommended the stratagem in The Art of War (1521). He wrote a General ought to endeavour to divide the enemy’s strength, either by making him suspicious of his counselors and confidants, or by obliging him to employ his forces in different places and detachments at the same time, which consequently must very much weaken his main army.
How the British Deepened India’s Divisions
The British crown, which took over India from the East India Company after the 1857 rebellion, undertook a census based on social categorization on the discrete and mutually exclusive classes and religions under the guise of administrative needs. The exercise helped the British understand India’s religious and cultural forces. The British sparked conflict between religious groups. The categories of religion were fluid and varied before the arrival of the British. The British census created new communities and hardened previously porous boundaries
The British deepened divisions by favouring certain groups, for instance, the Sikhs in the military and the upper caste Brahmins in administration. The army was made mono-religious to prevent the kind of collaboration that marked the 1857 Rebellion. India would play a key strategic and military role in the expansion and consolidation of the British Empire. The British tapped into India’s soldiering tradition. They made the Indians the backbone to control the empire. Over two million men from India and what is now Pakistan fought for Britain in the Second World War, eight decades after the largest and bloodiest anticolonial revolt against a European empire in the 19th century threatened to end its rule in the Empire’s crown jewel in 1857.
The British partitioned Bengal, where the rebellion broke out in 1857, in 1905, on the pretext of administrative efficiency. But the idea was to create divisions by separating Hindu-majority West Bengal from the Muslim-majority East Bengal. Bengal was reunited in 1911, but the damage was set in motion.
The British introduced electoral politics in India based on religious identity, encouraging political parties to appeal to voters based on their religion for electoral power. The religious divisions culminated in the partition in 1947 with Pakistan’s creation as a separate Muslim homeland. Dismissed as ‘chimerical and impractical’ in the 1930s, the idea of Pakistan suddenly gathered steam with tacit British support for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, for backing the British war effort. Jinnah revived a moribund Muslim League to rally support for Pakistan’s creation. His opponent, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other major proponents of a united India were jailed until the end of the war (1945).
Britain had no real intention of relinquishing the Empire as late as 1940 or surrendering India to the homespun-clad nationalists. But the Empire was bankrupt. It quit India, but not before having Indians at each other’s throats. Discord had sustained British rule in India. It manifested as genocidal violence when it ended with the haphazard division of India, with disastrous consequences in the form of the India-Pakistan conflict to this day. The violence left a million dead and 17 million displaced.
Cyril Radcliffe and the Hasty Borders
Indian politician Shashi Tharoor wrote that, bled, bombed, and battered for six years, Britain could divide, but it could no longer rule. Cyril Radcliffe, the English lawyer who drew the unnatural border between India and Pakistan, splitting homes, villages, fields, and rivers, had never visited the region before. He left immediately after completing the task in August 1947, barely five weeks after he had arrived in Delhi to draw the border. He knew little about the regions he was supposed to divide, and he did not have the luxury of time to study them.
Radcliffe spent most of the five weeks in a Delhi bungalow, struggling with heat and humidity. He relied on demographics and census tables for the division. Later, he would accept that it would have taken years to settle on a proper boundary, which considered natural features, canal headworks, communications, and culture. He would never return after finishing his task. Radcliffe suspected he would be shot if he did.
The British rule over India left behind more than partitioned borders. It entrenched the politics of division. From creating categories to harden identities to the stereotypes that demonise, colonial tools of control have been repurposed into modern-day conflicts. What began as a means to consolidate imperial rule survives in the form of fault lines. The Empire ended, but its divisions endure.
