was well trodden, with at least 25,000 camel loads moving between Lahore and Isfahan, and that is without
counting the Lahore-Qandahar trade.79 The Mughal
state allowed Indians of all faiths to practice their religions peacefully; the particular problem in the Punjab
was not the faith of Sikhism, but the threatening bases
of regional power it created. In the next section, we shall
examine the rise of Mughal successor states such as that
of the Maratha confederacy and the Sikhs, among quite
a few others in more detail. Before doing so, let us briefly
turn our attention to the complicated and cosmopolitan
Indian Ocean trade found on India’s coasts.
India and the World
The World in 1492: Calicut and the
Malabar Coast
When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived
in the port city of Calicut in 1498, it was a crucial link in
the global commodities circuit of the early modern world.
The Malabar Coast was slightly set apart from Deccan
developments in part by the rocky ghats that separated it;
the Zamorin [ruler] of Calicut was a coastal rather than a
territorial king, more akin to what one might find at the
Straits of Malacca than at Vijayanagara. Calicut was a
vibrant, cosmopolitan city; indeed, it was a hinge city in
the global luxury trade. Merchants of every creed traveled through or settled in Calicut. Often they married
local women, thereby introducing new religions to the
region, such as Judaism, Syrian Christianity, and Islam.
The Zamorin had a vested interest in encouraging open
and free trade and exchange in his kingdom: if a ship
wrecked, it was not plundered but protected.80
Calicut lay at the center of the three crucial circuits
of the Indian Ocean trade. These three zones were: 1)
the world of the Arabian Sea, the Mediterranean, and
Europe; 2) the western half of the Indian Ocean world,
stretching from the Persian Gulf to India’s east coast; and
3) the eastern half of the Indian Ocean, stretching from
India’s east coast through Southeast Asia to China.
The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama navigated
around the Cape of Good Hope to East Africa and then
sailed along the Persian and Indian coast to eventually
land in Calicut in 1498. Behind Portuguese strength lay
its successful navy and a certain flinty willingness to use
force and violence to achieve economic ends. The cartaza
system was an unparalleled invention that facilitated
Portuguese success and domination in the sixteenth century. Each trading vessel needed a cartaza issued by the
Portuguese to ply its trade, and certain items could only
be traded with the Portuguese.81 The Portuguese took
Colombo (Sri Lanka) in 1505, Malacca in 1511, and
Hormuz in 1515, quickly claiming all the chokepoints
of the global spice trade.82 In India, the Portuguese established a coastal outpost at Goa in 1510, where they
introduced Catholicism and enforced the oppressions of
the Inquisition. From Goa as well the Portuguese en-
Painting of Vasco da Gama landing
at Calicut.
forced their cartaza system on the western Indian Ocean
trade.83
The Portuguese empire declined in the second half of
the seventeenth century. In its place rose the Dutch East
India Company, which established itself in Coromandel by 1605. Half a century later, the Dutch East India
Company was able to take many Portuguese trading settlements, such as Colombo in 1656 and Cochin in 1663.
Though the Portuguese retained Goa until 1961, they
were unable to defend their other holdings.84 The Dutch
Company thus had a strong position on the Coromandel
Coast and in Southeast Asia. The English were weak in
both but strong in Gujarat.85
Gujarat
Surat, the Mughal port in Gujarat, received a boost
when the Portuguese took over Diu in 1535. In con-
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21
and Orissa in 1817. It was through regular and generous
pay that the loyalties of such soldiers were ensured.
Reluctant to re-employ the former military elites of the
Nawab era, as their loyalties were suspect, the EIC drew
on the Hindu peasant groups of Bihar and Awadh.141
The Company army respected caste and religious preferences by allowing soldiers to follow their own caste’s
dietary norms with separate cooks and kitchens as well
as by patronizing Hindu religious festivals.142 It was not
only Indian loyalties that were suspect; European officers mutinied in 1766 and again in 1795–6.143 Regular
generous payments and guaranteed pensions were required to ensure the loyalty of diverse military men in
late eighteenth-century India. As the Indian army grew
rapidly, the EIC drew on its strength to expand its territorial rule in India.
The Land Revenue System
Though the EIC had little interest in intervention in
Indian social mores, the effort to extract revenue from
Indian land drew the EIC into Indian society.144 The
approach the EIC adopted in Bengal was called “the
Permanent Settlement.” The Permanent Settlement
lasted right up to Indian independence in 1947.145 The
moving force behind the Permanent Settlement was
Lord Cornwallis who came to India fresh on the heels
of his surrender at Yorktown (1781) in the Revolutionary War. The rate of land revenue taxation was set at a
fixed rate in perpetuity. In so doing, the EIC hoped to
encourage enterprising landowners to extract the most
revenue from their lands by introducing improvements
and innovations. Behind this lay the Whig “belief in the
importance of a hereditary landed aristocracy;” Cornwallis sought to create “an Indian version of the English
gentleman-farmer….”146
Since his taxation rate was permanent, the zamindar (landowner) would gain an incentive to maximize
his outputs so that he could keep the remainder of his
increasing profits. If a zamindar failed to meet his revenue burden under the Permanent Settlement, his estate
could be confiscated and auctioned. One major advantage, from the EIC’s point of view, was that this system
would be cheap and manageable. The EIC would treat
only with the large landholders, the zamindars, and “if
the principles of the Settlement were strictly interpreted,
the Company should have no concern with relations between zamindar and ryot [tenant].”147 In fact, a regulation enacted in 1799 allowed a zamindar to seize a tenant’s property directly if the tenant fell in arrears to the
zamindar.148 The colonial government abdicated peasant
welfare to the zamindars, reasoning that the proof would
be in the pudding: a well-managed estate with healthy
cultivators would produce the most profits for the zamindar while ensuring a steady revenue supply to the
EIC state. The revenue rate for Bengal was set at around
£3,000,000, a higher value than had been expected for
the province under the Mughals or the Nawabs.149
Portrait of General Cornwallis, who was the
moving force behind the Permanent Settlement,
which lasted right up to Indian
independence in 1947.
The Permanent Settlement introduced major changes
in eastern Indian social structures, land use patterns, and
legal practices. A new class of landowners was created
by the rapid transformation in the property market occasioned by the forced sales after the Settlement took
effect. Forty-one percent of estates in Bengal changed
hands in the first fifteen years of the new regime.150
Many of the new landholding elite, however, decamped
to Calcutta, leaving their rural estates to the care of others to live off the profits among the splendors of Calcutta.151 Moreover, peasants were further disempowered as
the colonial state strengthened its hold on supply chains
and the conditions of small-scale cultivators’ labor; in a
sense, the peasants were twice wronged, by their Bengali
landlords and by the colonial state. Early experimentations in land revenue systems led to a famine in 1770 in
which one-quarter of the population of Bengal died. In
1783, another famine followed.152 The layered property
rights that existed around land use in the pre-colonial
period—ownership, cultivation, tenancy, commons,
traditional labor exchanges, custom, and more—were
boiled down into a simplistic notion of property rights in
which a landowner had absolute rights over his land to
the exclusion of all others.153
In Madras and Bombay provinces during the 1820s,
a different revenue system took hold, spurred on by the
failures of the Permanent Settlement, the loss of comparable classes of reliable local notables after the expan-
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A map depicting the 1905 partition of Bengal. This vivisection of Bengal, wherein Hindus and Muslims
had historically co-existed peacefully, hit the nerves of the educated Bengali middle-class, who launched a
swadeshi campaign from 1905–08 to oppose the partition.
state. For these reasons, the idea of India was a moving target, a constantly shifting ideological resource that
could be mobilized for diverse purposes. In the context
of the administrative and legal structures created by the
British colonial state in Calcutta and London, the idea of
India was shot through with religious overtones; in the
attempt to balance India’s populations against each other
for its own purposes, the colonial state created political
identities riven with religion. These would prove difficult
to unseat.
Indian Nationalism and the
Rise of Gandhi
The Partition of Bengal, 1905–1911
Such was India’s position when Lord Curzon arrived
52
to take up the Viceroyship in 1899. He attacked his
administration with the same reforming zeal Dalhousie had just before the Mutiny, and he met with similar
Indian mass resistance to his efforts. Curzon wanted to
streamline India’s bureaucracy and roll back some of the
concessions granted to Indians in areas like education
and the local government. For example, he reduced the
number of elected members on the municipal board of
Calcutta in 1899, in part as a sop to European business
interests in the city. Without any consultation of Indians
themselves, a secret all-British conference decided on a
reduction of the number of elected Indian members of
the universities’ governing bodies with the 1904 University Act.
When Curzon decided to divide the entire state in
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