India's Awakening — The Empire and Gandhi

Last time, we witnessed the great Chinese empire of the Qing crumbling from within and without. Around the same time, on the opposite side of Eurasia, another ancient great power was also beginning to stir from its slumber. India. This land, once known for some of the world’s greatest wealth and drawing distant European ships in search of spices and cotton cloth, had by the mid-19th century come, before anyone realized it, under the control of a single company, and eventually became a colony of the British Empire. Yet the people had not simply been obedient. This is the story of the long road traveled by people who tried to confront a vast empire not with gun or sword, but with an entirely different kind of force.

A Country Ruled by a Company — Colonization and the Great Rebellion of 1857

There was one strange feature in the process by which India became a colony. The first to effectively rule this vast land was not a state, but a single trading company. The British East India Company was originally an organization for commerce, but it gradually came to hold an army, levy taxes, and govern territory. A company of merchants, before anyone realized it, transformed into a power that ruled a nation.

What supported that rule from within were the Indian mercenaries known as sepoys. The company hired Indians as soldiers and ruled India by their strength—and within this arrangement a great crack would eventually run. In 1857, in the northern city of Meerut, the sepoys rose up. The trigger, it is said, was a rumor that the cartridges for the new-style rifles were greased with the fat of cattle and pigs. To Hindus, who held the cow sacred, and to those who shunned the pig alike, it seemed an act that trampled on their faith.

The fire spread at once. To the soldiers’ rebellion were added, one after another, landlords stripped of their lands and peasants suffering under heavy taxes, and it grew into a great surge from northern India into central India. The emperor of the Mughal Empire, by then a name in name only, was even raised up as a symbol of the rebellion. But the rebellion, lacking unified command, was largely suppressed the following year, in 1858.

This event was long called the ‘Sepoy Mutiny,’ but in recent years a view that grasps it as a broader resistance involving a wider range of people, as the ‘Indian Rebellion,’ has spread. Whether to see it as the revolt of mere soldiers, or as the beginning of a national resistance against colonial rule—its assessment is still not uniform even now.

Binding Voices Together — The Budding of National Consciousness

After direct rule began, India was not simply held down. The railways, English education, and the modern legal and administrative systems that Britain brought, ironically, created channels through which people and information could move across a vast land that had been fragmented. A new educated class that had learned in English began to put into words, and to debate, the backwardness of their own society and the injustice of colonial rule. Light and shadow were inseparably intertwined here too.

In that flow, in 1885, the Indian National Congress was formed. At first it was a calm forum for discussion, seeking to cooperate with British rule while gradually winning improvements in the treatment of Indians. But as the years passed, what the people sought deepened from ‘better treatment’ into the wish ‘to decide our own affairs ourselves.’ The words exchanged in that assembly became, in time, the first thread of a river flowing toward the great goal of independence.

In this period, there were also differences of view over the path of resistance. Those who valued dialogue and gradual progress above all, and those who would not refuse more radical means. The aspiration toward one India transcending differences of religion, and the interests of each community. Diversity itself was the richness of India, and at the same time it was the difficulty of binding it together. How to bring this diversity together into a single force—a figure who answered that question with a singular answer came back from across the sea.

Walking, and Grasping Salt — Gandhi’s Nonviolence

That man, Mohandas Gandhi, returned to India bearing the experience of fighting discrimination against Indian immigrants in South Africa. The thought he had honed is called satyagraha. Into this word, meaning ‘to grasp the truth and not let go,’ was poured his conviction: not to answer violence with violence, and not to obey injustice. To use no violence is not weakness, but rather the expression of a strong will—so Gandhi taught. In 1920, the Congress adopted this nonviolence and civil disobedience as the formal policy of its movement.

Where that thought took its most vivid form was the ‘Salt March’ of 1930. At the time, salt was monopolized by the British administration, which taxed it. In India, surrounded by the sea, people were not permitted to make salt freely and had to go out of their way to buy taxed salt. Gandhi set his aim on this seemingly small injustice. With a handful of companions, he set out walking from an inland town toward Dandi on the coast.

The journey was about 360 kilometers. As the walk went on, people joined from the villages along the way, and the column swelled. After more than three weeks, Gandhi reached the shore, bent down, and grasped a handful of salt. It was an innocuous act—simply making salt. Yet the gesture of deliberately breaking the monopoly law was also an act that quietly told the world that imperial rule was by no means a matter of course. People who carried not a single weapon, simply by walking and simply by grasping salt, pressed their will upon a vast empire.

Independence, and the Pain of Partition

The march of resistance was not a smooth one. In 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, Gandhi and the Congress launched a movement calling on Britain to ‘Quit India.’ But the British authorities immediately detained Gandhi and many other leaders. The road to independence advanced even so, again and again piling up imprisonment and setback.

And when the war ended and the exhausted British Empire could no longer hold India, the day of independence at last arrived. In 1947, India brought down the curtain on a long age of colonial rule. Yet that independence was not the very form Gandhi had wished for. It became a ‘partition,’ the nation splitting into two—an India mainly of Hindus, and a Pakistan mainly of Muslims.

When the borders were drawn, an enormous number of people began a great migration, trying to move to the side of their own faith. Along the way, ghastly clashes broke out in many places, and countless lives are said to have been lost. At the very moment the long-cherished wish of independence was realized, the pain of a deep division was carved into it. For Gandhi, who had dreamed of one India, it was an unbearable reality. And in 1948, the year after independence, while he grieved over that division, he fell to an assassin’s bullet. That the end of a life devoted to nonviolence was brought about by violence was a far too sorrowful conclusion.

India’s path tells, at one and the same time, of the depth of the shadow of colonialism and the strength of will of a people who refused to bow to it. From a wealthy great power being swallowed by a single company, to winning its independence, nearly a century was spent. The experience of confronting an empire not with weapons but by walking, by grasping, by not obeying, left an indelible thread of light in the history of Asia, and of the world. Yet India was not the only Asian nation that refused to bow to a vast Western empire. Next time, we move on to the story of another country that stood up to a great Western power head-on, and itself walked the road toward becoming an empire.