Indians for employment in the civil service and to
serve as a new native elite to help the British rule
the land.
Company officials took an interest in India’s
antiquities and the Sanskrit language as their
power increased. One of them, William Jones
(d. 1794), founded the Royal Asiatic Society of
Bengal in Calcutta (1784), an early center of
Orientalist scholarship. The research its scholars
conducted enhanced knowledge about Sanskrit
language, literature, and ancient Indian religion,
but it was done in a way that portrayed contem-
porary Indians as inferior to modern Europeans
and highlighted differences between Hindus and
Muslims. Thomas Macaulay (d. 1859), a leading
colonial official, declared in 1835 that after having
consulted with Orientalist scholars, he had con-
cluded, “a single shelf of a good European library
was worth the whole native literature of India
and Arabia” (Metcalf and Metcalf, 80–81). Jones’s
scholarship also furthered the process of transfer-
ring Indian law from the hands of Muslim and
Hindu jurists to those of British-style civil courts,
with the ulama and pandits demoted to simply
being court advisers. The ethnocentric zeal of
reforming-minded British administrators even led
to banning the children of mixed Anglo-Indian
parentage from employment in the civil service.
The division between the British and Indians
increased in the 19th century with the invention
of racist theories of culture and the arrival of evan-
gelical Christian missionaries who eagerly sought
to convert Indian Hindus and Muslims from their
“heathen” ways. Even Indians educated in English
schools were treated with derision and contempt.
The antagonisms caused by the shortcomings of
British officials and their policies finally exploded
in 1857 with a rebellion that spread beyond the
ranks of the company army to the general popula-
tion in the cities of northern India. The violent
suppression of this “mutiny” brought an end to
company rule as well as to the Mughal dynasty.
India was placed under the direct rule of the Brit-
ish Crown, represented by the governor general,
who was reclassified as the viceroy of India. This
phase of Indian history now became known as
that of the British Raj (from the Hindi word for
“kingdom,” “rule”).
The 1857 rebellion was a clear sign that a
nationalist spirit was stirring in India. Native
elites had obtained English-language proficiency
and education in the history and liberal secularist
ideals of modern Europe. They used this knowl-
edge to organize themselves and argue for more
egalitarian treatment from British officials. The
railroad system created by the British after 1850,
the expansion of the postal service, and newspa-
pers made it possible for them to effectively com-
municate with each other across the great expanse
of India. At the same time, supporters of religious
reform arose in both the Hindu and Muslim com-
munities, many taking the route of liberalism,
others having strong separatist sympathies.
The desire for independence coalesced in the
creation of the secularly oriented Indian National
Congress (INC), convened originally in Bom-
bay in 1885 by English-educated Indians who
wanted to lobby for greater participation in the
civil service and local legislative councils. This
organization had majority Hindu membership,
but it reached out to English-educated Muslims in
the name of a united Indian nation. Most Muslim
leaders, including the reformer Sayyid Ahmad
Khan, declined to participate. The INC, however,
did attract mUhammad ali Jinnah (d. 1948), a
Muslim lawyer who had been admitted to the
bar in London and practiced law in Bombay. He
joined the INC in 1895 and remained active until
differences with mohandas k. gandhi caused him
to resign in 1920. Jinnah was also a member of
the all-india mUslim leagUe (AIML), an organi-
zation founded in 1906 to win a greater role for
Muslim elites in the British colonial government.
AIML, under Jinnah’s leadership, joined with the
INC to pursue mutual interests, resulting in the
Lucknow Pact of 1916. This agreement called for
majority representation in government, extending
voting rights to more Indians, and separate elec-India 355 J