1600

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• 1600 Charter granted to British East India
  Company
• 1757 Clive conquers Bengal
• 1857 The Mutiny
• 1757-1857 Company Raj
• 1857-1947 Crown Raj

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Sir Thomas Roe at Agra 1615Seeking Protection
for British Factory
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Robert Clive accepting Bengal in 1757
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King George-V Delhi Durbar 1905
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King George-V Delhi Durbar 1905
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Brief History of Colonialism

• European colonialism (second wave) did NOT begin
  as state-led imperial conquest. It began in India
  and was the result of the maneuvers of a private
  organization, the British East India Company, to
  control trade and commerce in India and the
  Indian Ocean.
• 17th and 18th century encounter of Europeans with
  Indians was not clearly marked by the sense of
  white racial supremacy that later came to define
  European colonialism.
• Colonial-Orientalist scholarship the making of
  histories and the defining of traditions
• Colonial administration enumeration and
  classification of people creation of religion
  as a category and as the primary marker of
  identity.
• The high noon of colonialism in the 19th
  century was marked by the now fully articulated
  justification of a Civilizing Mission
  (expressed in colonial education as well as in
  missionary activity) by the late 19th century
  most of Africa and Asia were under some form of
  European Colonial rule

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Some effects of Colonialism on colonized societies

• Reconfiguration of identities, privileging
  Religion as primary marker of public identity
  colonial codification of religious law
• Categorization and codification of Religious
  traditions creation of textually based normative
  definitions of what is legitimately and
  authentically Islamic and what is not
  exclusion of many important strands within
  religious traditions
• For instance, Sufism and local variation are
  considered low and adulterated Islam, while
  certain Arabic texts, including the Quran and
  some arbitrarily chosen legal books, define what
  is normative Islam
• European Christian missionary activity as well as
  Western criticisms of inferior non-western
  traditions, especially Islam, resulted in a
  variety of reactions from the colonized
  defenses, apologies, counter-attacks
• Movements spring up in response to the material,
  moral and intellectual threat of Western
  domination amongst Muslims in particular the
  desire is to prove to both themselves and the
  West that Islam can be an effective modern force,
  a challenge to European style modernity
• Territorial nationalism Muslims (and everyone
  else in Africa Asia) in pre-colonial times
  lived in empires and kingdoms with shifting and
  porous boundaries territorial nationalism was
  imported from Europe (with intense criticism) and
  did not fit easily with older identity
  configurations such as a universal Muslim Umma

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Significant Changes

• Modern Science Technology
• Centralized Administration
• An English Education
• British Legal Systems
• Racism Theories of Racial Difference
• Monolithic Social Classifications

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• British relationship with Muslim India over
  time
• India is a Muslim Empire (by virtue of having
  been ruled by Turko-Persian dynasties professing
  Islam especially the Mughals) Muslim Emperors
  are lauded for strength and valour
• India as an essentially Hindu country taken over
  by Muslim conquerors (discovery of Ancient
  Indian Civilization as a parallel to
  Greco-Roman Civilization and Islam as the
  nemesis of both Edward Gibbons History of the
  Decline Fall of the Roman Empire very
  important.)
• Indo-Muslim rulers now judged by British
  historians according to their tolerance for
  their Hindu subjects
• The identity of Ancient Hindu/Sanskritic
  Civilization is taken up by the Hindus to
  assert an identity for themselves as defined
  against Indian Muslims
• Muslim elite (Ahsraf) is displaced (slowly)
  after British takeover and is outrun in the race
  for British patronage by newly emerging Hindu
  communities
• The uprising of 1857 is blamed by the British
  squarely on the Indians
• Status and prosperity of middle and upper-class
  Muslims rapidly deteriorates and various segments
  from among them respond in different ways to this
  crisis

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• How did the British colonial presence divide
  India into Hindu-Majority and
  Muslim-Minority?
• They wrote histories and social analyses of
  India, in which they identified a Hindu India
  and a Muslim India.
• They codified religious law for Hindus and
  Muslims and in the process made Hindu and
  Muslim into rigid, textually defined entities.
  
• Enumeration and classification for
  administrative purposes.
• Christian Missionary activity sparked resistance
  among Indians and spurred them on to defending
  and defining their own religious traditions in
  public to counter missionary activity.

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The Colonial Civilizing Mission

• Brigadier General John Jacob in the early 1800s
  asserted
• We hold India, then, by being in reality, as
  in reputation, a superior race to the Asiatic
  and if this natural superiority did not exist, we
  should not, and could not, retain the country for
  one week. IF, then, we are really a morally
  superior race, governed by higher motives and
  possessing higher attributes than the Asiatics,
  the more the natives of India are able to
  understand us, and the more we improve their
  capacity for so understanding, the firmer will
  become our power. Away, then with the assumption
  of equality and let us accept our true position
  of a dominant race. So placed, let us establish
  our rule by setting them a high example, by
  making them feel the value of truth and honesty,
  and by raising their moral and intellectual
  powers.

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Macaulays Minute on Education 1835

• We must at present do our best to form a class
  who may be interpreters between us and the
  millions whom we govern a class of persons
  Indian in blood and colour, but English in
  tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

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• How did Indian Muslims respond to British
  policies and Orientalist scholarship?
• Western-oriented reform Loyalism to British
  Rule (Sayyid Ahmed Khan the Aligarh movement)
• Islamic Universalism anti-colonial activism
  (Jamaluddin al-Afghani)
• Indian nationalism shunning of Western
  education (The Deoband movement)
• Western-oriented reform Indian nationalism
  (Shibli Iqbal)