Abstract
The book under review is a historic title in the sense that it had been one of the earliest reliably nationalistic accounts of how India started losing her independence to the British between 1756 and 1805. Based on most of the available secondary sources in the 1920s, and examining the occurrences critically, and forecasting it anti-colonially, the study (in Hindi, Bharat Mein Angrezi Raj) attracted the public’s and the authorities’ attention as soon as it was published on 18 March 1929. About 700 copies of it were sold in four days before the book was banned on 22 March 1929 in the United Provinces. Its banning seemed so unjustifiably drastic that Mahatma Gandhi had to describe the government measure as ‘a daylight robbery’ and advised people to buy and read it even by breaking the law. The ban was withdrawn only in 1937 when the Indian National Congress assumed power in the province under Provincial Autonomy, and the book started enlightening its readers on the manner the British Raj was imposed over India. By that time, the author of the book, Pandit Sunderlal (1866–1981), was already well known as a political activist and a journalist in Hindi. An admirer of Lala Lajpat Rai, Sunderlal had a Ghadarite linkage, but turned devotedly to Gandhiji during the Non-cooperation Movement. A Gandhian Congressman, jailed seven times during India’s struggle for freedom and an advocate of composite culture, remained president of the All India Peace Council (1950–1962) and visited China in 1951 as a member of the Indian Cultural Delegation.
Had the present publisher of this outstanding publication and its editors been slightly more mindful, they could have substantially abridged the first 150 pages of this book of 517 pages, which has outlined in a textbook style, the general history from the Aryan invasion to the coming of the English in India. This account does hardly prepare its readers for what was in store, that is, the founding of the British Raj and, more importantly, the Indians losing their independence. Also, this section summering in ten pages how India became independent again, following about 150 years of English tutelage, hardly justifies thematically its presence in the book. Barring some incoherences over these in about 150 pages (1–153) at the beginning, the main body of the book of roughly 342 pages covering a detailed account of how the various parts of a vast country like India, and the multitudes of its populace, lost their independence within a span of roughly fifty years, presents a vivid grim picture of the great sub-continental tragedy. This picturisation by Sunderlal, as authentically worked out as perhaps possible in the 1929 situation historical research, appears to be relevant and valuable even today for understanding how India was brought under the colonial yoke.
Sunderlal’s depiction began by dissecting the circumstances leading to the Battle of Plassey the English managed to manipulate in Bengal (June 1757), pointing to their action against Raja Ramnarayan in Patna (1758), to their overthrowing of Mir Kasim (1763), followed by the running over of Banaras, Gorakhpur and Oudh (1773–1778) in the east, as well as the annexation of Rohilkhand, the fall of Allahabad and the sale of the Oudh Gadi (1798). In the west, the English confronted the Marathas in 1776, succeed in nullifying Nana Fadnavis’s anti-English grand alliance of the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Hyder Ali of Mysore (by Hastings’s being able to win over the Nizam), ending the superiority of the Peshwas (1796) and the Scindias (1802), and defeating soon thereafter the Scindias, Bhonseles and the Gaikwads between 1803 and 1804. Before forcing the Nizam into a subsidiary Alliance (1798), the English defeated Tipu in Seringapattan to conquer Mysore (1791), occupy Tanjore (1796) and later establish their sway over Karnatak (1801) in the south. The English acquisition of Bundelkhand in 1804, subsequent to General Lake’s taking over the administration of Delhi, marked virtually the submission of most Indians to the English East India Company’s authority within a period of about fifty years. Going through numerous bloody wars, extensive killing, plundering, tortures and sufferings of the common man and woman, the period turned out typically to be one of the impositions of colonial rule—the first of its Western variety—in India.
Apparently, such subjugation of an entire nation was believed generally to be the outcome of superior European weaponry and tactics, especially in the 1750s to the 1770s. But within a short time between the 1780s and 1800s, Indian armies had also grown technologically and tactically well under European experts (the French and the Dutch) employed by the native rulers. The reason for India’s escalating subjugation during these decades, therefore, have to be found not so much in military technology as in the evolving socio-economic circumstances. The English East India Company did benefit sometimes by taking advantage of the mutual rivalries among the Moghul-time mobility and bureaucracy. But that it received full support—morally and materially—of the neo-feudals, or the rich and growing class of landlords, such as the Mullicks, Debs and Tagores, especially after the permanent settlement of 1793, was not apparent before, not to the history-writing scholars in the 1920s and 1930s (see British Indian historian William Dalrymple’s interview in The Times of India, 25 October 2019). It was also not known clearly, and revealed after long years of serious research into multiple primary sources, that the Company’s dominance in India was crucially upheld by its being able to woo the Indian financiers through Jagat Seth and other Indian banking companies. ‘Marwaris constituted the large chunk of Indian financiers of the English, and in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Banaras and Calcutta they provided finance and loans for the Company to conquer India’ (see Dalrymples’ book, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire, Bloomsbury, 2019).
But did not India had any chance of saving herself from becoming a British colony, or stand up firmly against English East India Company’s systematic imperial onslaught? She certainly had as Sunderlal found out in the late 1920s in his illustrious book, by giving effect to the influential Maratha Minister Nana Fadnavis’s grand scheme of an anti-English tripartite alliance of the Marathas, their arch enemy, Hyder Ali of Mysore and the Nizam of Hyderabad early in the 1780s. But the Company’s wily chief, Warren Hastings managed to frustrate any formidable joint Indian action by winning over the Nizam to sign an agreement with the English. Followed by Hyder Ali’s death, and the treaty of Salbai with the Marathas thereafter, marked the end of Nana’s endeavours by 1782. What Sunderlal found out in 1929 has been reciprocated now, about ninety years later, again by Dalrymple who found the sabotaging of the Fadnavis scheme as ‘the moment when the fall of India to the company became inevitable’. Here lies the credit of Sunderlal as a historian who had the farsight to anticipate the findings of the much advantaged later-day research scholar. In a way also, Panditji’s book succeeds in reverberating, if not actually anticipating, Sashi Tharoor’s book (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, Aleph, New Delhi, 2016) on the establishment and the impact of colonialism in India. Such prognosistic insight of Sunderlal rendered his study on how India lost her freedom, an interesting and worthwhile work on the country’s eighteenth century tumults.
Our generation must thank Popular Prakashan and SAGE Publications for bringing out this useful new edition.