India's history: an ancient civilisation and a state made in a single week

What was here before any of it

Anatomically modern humans reached the subcontinent between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago, and the earliest known human remains in South Asia are about 30,000 years old.

Settled life emerged on the western margins of the Indus alluvium around nine thousand years ago and developed into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. The Bronze Age on the subcontinent begins around 3300 BCE, and the Indus Valley was one of three early cradles of civilisation in the Old World and the most expansive of them. After its collapse, populations moved from the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra valleys towards the Himalayan foothills and the Ganga-Yamuna basin.

How the first empires rose and broke

Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda Empire and founded the first great empire of ancient India. Its best-known ruler, Ashoka, is remembered for two things that sit awkwardly together: the violence of the Kalinga War, and his subsequent acceptance of Buddhism.

The Maurya Empire collapsed in 185 BCE when the emperor Brihadratha was assassinated by his own general, Pushyamitra Shunga, and the successor Shunga Empire fractured into smaller polities. The Gupta Empire rose later and waned under repeated invasions by the Huna, checked in turn by regional rulers.

That pattern, a large integrating power followed by fragmentation followed by another, repeats across two thousand years and is the reason a single national story is hard to tell honestly. The Vijayanagara Empire was founded in 1336 and declined after defeat at Talikota in 1565. The Bahmani Sultanate, born of a rebellion against the Tughlaqs in 1347, was its chief rival, and its own governors began revolting from 1490.

What the Mughals built and lost

The early modern period opens in the sixteenth century, when the Mughal Empire conquered most of the subcontinent.

The economic scale is the part usually omitted from European accounts. Mughal India produced about a quarter of global GDP in Maddison's estimate, in a phase of proto-industrialisation. What followed was not a simple decline but a fragmentation into successor states that were themselves substantial: Hyderabad, founded by the Qutb Shahi dynasty in 1591, passed to a Mughal official who declared himself Nizam in 1724; the Marathas subdued nearly all of Rajputana in the eighteenth century; the Sikh Empire held the northwest.

The British acquired the subcontinent from those successor states rather than from the Mughals. Maratha dynasties became vassals under subsidiary alliances after the empire fell; the Sikh Empire declined after the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1846 and the Treaty of Amritsar that followed.

Why the rebellion changed who ruled

The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 at Meerut, against the rule of the East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power with its own armed forces on behalf of the British Crown.

The rebels reached Delhi quickly and declared its 81-year-old Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Emperor of Hindustan, then took large parts of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh. In Awadh especially the rising took on the character of a patriotic revolt. What it did not do is propose a replacement: the rebel leaders proclaimed no articles of faith that presaged a new political system, and that absence is the clearest thing about it.

The consequence was constitutional rather than revolutionary. On 28 June 1858 the rule of the East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria, who was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. A rebellion against a company produced government by a state.

The British Raj lasted from 1858 to 1947 and covered almost all of present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, with the exceptions of Portuguese Goa and French Pondicherry. What that rule built, and what it charged for it, is the subject of the next section. The extent is worth holding first: a single administration governed a territory now divided among four states and containing, today, more than a fifth of the world's population.

How a movement became unavoidable

The decades after the rebellion produced political awareness, public opinion and Indian leadership at national and provincial level, and eventually an organisation.

The Indian National Congress was formed in 1885. Its moderate leaders pressed for economic rights and for the right to sit the Indian Civil Service examinations, which is to say for better terms inside the system rather than for its end.

The radicalisation is datable. Protest against the partition of Bengal in 1905 exposed the limits of the moderate programme. In 1907 Congress split into two factions, the radicals under Tilak advocating direct agitation and the boycott of British goods. The Rowlatt Act, which permitted indefinite detention without trial, provoked protest across India and particularly in Punjab, and pushed a minority towards violence.

From the 1920s the movement took the shape it is remembered in: Gandhi's leadership and Congress's adoption of non-violence and civil disobedience, with Nehru among the leading figures who came up through it.

Two features of that arc matter for what followed. The movement was a mass organisation with provincial structures long before it held power, which is why the transfer in 1947 was administratively smooth even where it was humanly catastrophic. And it contained, from 1907 onwards, factions that disagreed fundamentally about method, which is a reasonable description of Indian politics ever since.

What the Raj left behind

The physical inheritance of Crown rule is easy to list and hard to price.

Railways, canals and a famine code were built between 1858 and 1880, and the railway network in particular is still the backbone of Indian transport. A census was established that has run for more than a century, and independent India kept it. An administrative service was created, examined for by competitive examination, which independent India retained.

The other side of the ledger is that all of it was built by an administration that was not accountable to the people it governed, financed from Indian revenues, and designed around what the governing power needed. The famine code exists because there were famines. The railways were laid on gauges and routes chosen for the movement of goods and troops.

A new middle class had arisen by 1880, thinly spread across the country and increasingly conscious of itself, formed by what one account calls the joint stimuli of encouragement and irritation: encouraged by education and by administrative careers, irritated by the ceiling above both. That class is where the independence movement came from, which is the recurring irony of colonial administration everywhere.

What partition actually moved

Independence and partition were the same event, and the numbers are the way to understand it.

The population of undivided India in 1947 was about 390 million. Afterwards there were roughly 330 million in India, 30 million in West Pakistan and 30 million in East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh. Once the boundaries were fixed, about 14.5 million people crossed them. Estimates of total displacement run from 12 to 20 million, and estimates of the dead are disputed.

The mechanics were compressed to a degree that is hard to credit. The Dominion of Pakistan came into being on 14 August 1947 with Jinnah sworn in at Karachi, and India followed at midnight on the 15th. The province of Punjab was split, its mostly Muslim west going to Pakistan and its mostly Hindu and Sikh east becoming India's East Punjab. In East Bengal, districts awarded to Pakistan saw attacks on Hindus, and hundreds of thousands left for India, with the influx into Calcutta permanently altering the city's demography.

The compression is the part that explains the violence. The nationalist leaders agreed to partition in June 1947, Mountbatten announced the date and the division at a press conference on 3 June, and the communal violence that accompanied the publication of the Radcliffe Line, the boundary itself, was worse than what had come before it. Gandhi opposed partition and was overruled by the leaderships of both Congress and the Muslim League.

A full population exchange was seriously proposed and rejected. Ambedkar and Patel supported a complete exchange, which would have meant moving all 42 million Muslims then in India. It did not happen, which is why the Muslim population stayed where it was and why partition remains an argument rather than a settled fact.

Where the Republic's rules came from

India was a dominion for three years after 1947, and during them the colonial legislation continued to apply. Most princely states had acceded, and the machinery of government carried on under statutes written in London by people who had left.

The Constituent Assembly that replaced it was elected by the members of the provincial assemblies. It had 389 members, reduced to 299 after partition, and it took almost three years and eleven sessions to produce a text. The constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and came into effect on 26 January 1950.

Its principal source is the part worth sitting with. The framers drew on several models, and the main one was the Government of India Act 1935, the statute by which Britain had governed India, largely drafted by Samuel Hoare. The independent republic's founding document is in substantial part the colonial administration's own machinery, retained deliberately by people who had spent their careers being governed by it and who judged that the machinery worked even though the authority behind it had not been theirs.

That decision explains a good deal about the Indian state: the strength of the centre, the administrative continuity through 1947, and the fact that a country which changed its sovereign overnight did not change how it was administered.

What the record does not settle

Two things in this history are contested in ways a catalogue should name rather than resolve.

The first is the economic effect of colonial rule. India produced about 25% of the world's industrial output in 1750 and 2% in 1900. The mechanism, the magnitude and the counterfactual are all argued over by economic historians, and the argument is live rather than closed.

The second is partition itself: whether it was avoidable, who bore responsibility, and what the death toll was. The displacement figure is knowable within a range and the mortality figure is not, which is unusual for an event of this scale and this recency, and it is a consequence of the collapse of administration in the districts where the worst of it happened.

The catalogue records the range, names the dispute, and does not adjudicate either.

What makes both arguable rather than resolvable is the state of the record itself. India has a continuous administrative archive going back through the colonial period, held by the National Archives, and it is unusually complete for a country of this size. What it documents thoroughly is what the administration knew and wrote down. The districts where partition violence was worst are precisely the districts where the administration had stopped functioning, so the best-documented century of Indian record-keeping has its largest hole at its most consequential moment.