Colonial Legacy
BRITISH EMPIRE AND INDIAN GOVERNANCE
English East India Company and the Making of Colonial State
(1757-1857)
 Conquest by Sword and Diplomacy ( subsidiary
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Alliance)
Rule of Bureaucracy and Army: A System of
Supervised Empire
Land Revenue Settlements
Orientalists and Utilitarians
Honeymoon with Progress: A Reformist State
Thomas B. Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education"
2ND OF FEBRUARY, 1835
 I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.--But I have done what I could to form a
correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and
Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their
proficiency in the Eastern
tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists
themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good
European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic
superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the
Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.
 We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the
millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in
taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the
vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed
from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying
knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Rebellion and the British Rule
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The 1857 Rebellion and the Transfer of Power
New Raj and Perpetual Crisis of Legitimacy
Landlords and Princes as Natural Allies
Railways, Telegraphs and Modernization of Infra-Structure
Low Agricultural Productivity
India in British Empire: Economic Arrangement
Rule by Convention through Strategic Interventions
Paternalist Despotism
Village Self Republics
Census and Enumerated Communities
Civilizing Mission and a Pedagogic Project
Contradictions of the Raj
Decolonization and Democratization
 1909 Morley-Minto Act
 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Act
 Principles of Separate Electorate
 Limited Representations Based on Property and
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Educational Qualifications
Principles of Dyarchy
Government of India Act 1935
Pressure Compromise and Pressure
Non Violent Revolution and Gradual Politicization of
hitherto Unenfranchised Groups
Imagining India as Nation
 Unnatural Nation : A Colonial perspective
 Nation Naturalized : Perspective of Bharat Mata
 Contesting Visions of Nation: Gandhi, Nehru and
Ambedkar
 Can Nation be naturalized?
Vande Mataram
 Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving Mother of might,
Mother free.
 Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.
 Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands
When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call Mother and Lord!