THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULENeo-Hinduism had reached the Panjab in the form of the teachings of
Swami Dayanand Saraswati, a Gujarati who also had some following in
western India. The greatest response to his message came from the Panjab’s
small educated elites who eagerly joined his Arya Samaj. The odd
combination ‘Anglo Vedic’ in the name of the college reflected the
educational programme of the Arya Samaj: modern English education was
to be matched with a kind of Vedic fundamentalism. Career prospects and
a new feeling of identity were offered to the elite, which was indeed greatly
in need of both.
Dayanand’s emphasis on Hindu solidarity, his criticism of the caste
system and the strong stand which he took against Islam and Christianity
appealed to the Panjabi mind; at the same time, of course, it alienated the
Muslims. The British, too, watched the Arya Samaj with suspicion. The
very autocratic government of this province tended in all instances to look
askance at anything which seemed to deviate from the straight path of
loyalty to British rule. The British impact on this province was certainly of
a very special kind.
The role of the armyThe British preoccupation with the Panjab has to be seen in the context of
the development of the British Indian army after the Mutiny of 1857. The
soldiers of the Panjab had helped the British to defeat the mutineers and to
‘hold India by the sword’. The Mutiny had also taught the British the
lesson that they had to send more British troops to India, even though this
was rather expensive. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the
British Indian army consisted of 140,000 Indian and 70,000 British
soldiers; despite the disparity in numbers, the expenses for the latter were
much higher than for the former. The Indian troops were under the
command of British officers whose salaries were twice or three times what
they would have been at home. When they returned to Britain on
retirement they received high pensions—an important share of the ‘home
charges’ which India had to pay.
At the height of the age of imperialism the British Indian army was
frequently in action and military expenditure increased correspondingly.
The Afghan war (1878–80), the conquest of Upper Burma (1885), wars
against the tribes on the northwestern frontier (1896 and 1898)—all
demanded an ever greater military budget which increased from 200m to
300m rupees (i.e. from about one-quarter to one-third of the total budget
of British India).
The colonial rulers could afford this only because their income had also
increased as the composition of the various revenues changed. In 1858 the
land revenue made up 50 per cent of all revenue income, 20 per cent was
derived from the opium monopoly and 10 per cent from the salt tax, the