What is India? Four different geographical regions

• North – mountainous Himalayas and Hindu Kush – nomadic

• Central Plains – Ganges and Indus Rivers – agricultural, highly productive farming

• Deccan plateau – mountainous, dry interior

• Ocean-based trading cities on the coasts

Elevation

Climate

Indian Ocean Trade: Western India faces Middle East and Africa;

Eastern India faces Southeast Asia

Arabian Sea Culture; Bay of Bengal Culture

Maurya Empire

(300 BCE)

Delhi Sultanate period, 1236

India, 1525

Indian Languages

Hindu areas

Muslim Areas

Delhi Sultanate period, 1236

Sikh and Jain areas

Pre-Partition Map

British India: Unity and Disunity

• British were experts at setting one group against another– Used Sikhs to crush the Sepoy Rebellion– Institutionalized and regularized caste

divisions to split leaders from masses– Gave separate voting rights to Muslims -

helped create the All-India Muslim League as an alternative to the Indian National Congress

Indian National Congress becomes a mass movement

• Gandhi transforms the INC from a group of elites to a mass movement

• Salt March - a mass movement to show non-violent opposition to British monopoly and taxes on salt

• http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Salt_March.ogg

Gandhi at his spinning wheelAccepts the past to raise self-esteem, show moral superiority, reject British civilization

Rejects the past where it prevents liberation: caste, ethnic division

“A national culture is not a folklore…it takes its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom.” (Fanon)

Nehru or Gandhi: Which way forward?

Nehru and Gandhi: Which way forward?

“Many of the rituals of modern individualism become visible in India in the 19th century. Along with these came modern industry, technology, medicine, a quasi-bourgeois (though colonial) legal system. At the top of these institutions sat the modern state, that is, the European nation-state.

Referring to the Indian nationalists’ demands for more railways, medicine and bourgeois law Gandhi remarked… this was to ‘make India English’ or, as he put it, to have ‘English rule without the Englishmen.’”

-- Dipesh Chakrabarty

Decision of the All-India Muslim League

• Fight for equal rights, continued “special” political status within one India?

• Demand a Muslim “Pakistan”?– “Land of the Pure” = Pakistan– Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir = Pakistan

Note that this idea left out majority Muslim, but not contiguous “East Pakistan”