Which colonial power ended in india in 1868

The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the midth century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school. An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us.

Writing in , Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other — that is non-English — European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in , were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Their main — often their only — source of information were the books usually in English circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically. I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world along with, alas, colonialism.

What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east — China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere — for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2, years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement — especially on language, literature and architecture — can be seen plentifully even today.

Jewish immigration into India began right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and continued for many hundreds of years. Baghdadi Jews, such as the highly successful Sassoons, came in large numbers even as late as the 18th century. Christians started coming at least from the fourth century, and possibly much earlier.

There are colourful legends about this, including one that tells us that the first person St Thomas the Apostle met after coming to India in the first century was a Jewish girl playing the flute on the Malabar coast. We loved that evocative — and undoubtedly apocryphal — anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions.

The Parsis started arriving from the early eighth century — as soon as persecution began in their Iranian homeland. Later in that century, the Armenians began to leave their footprints from Kerala to Bengal. Muslim Arab traders had a substantial presence on the west coast of India from around that time — well before the arrival of Muslim conquerors many centuries later, through the arid terrain in the north-west of the subcontinent.

At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were already businessmen, traders and other professionals from a number of different European nations well settled near the mouth of the Ganges. Being subjected to imperial rule is thus not the only way of making connections with, or learning things from, foreign countries. They sent people for training in the US and Europe, and made institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience.

They did not wait to be coercively globalised via imperialism. O ne of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India.

In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role.

However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India as did actually occur to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states. That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia.

The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of midth century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with.

The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing. When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in , the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India.

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The Andrott Island is the largest island with an area of 4. In they officially became part of British Burma. When Burma separated from India in and became a self-governing Crown Colony, the islands remained a Burmese territory. Andaman and Nicobar [1] are a large group of nearly islands in the Bay of Bengal. Though they are a part of India politically, they are closer to Myanmar and Thailand than to the Indian mainland. Complete step by step answer: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are one of the seven union territories of India.

It is a group of islands at the junction of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.