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 nonviolent opposition to British monopoly and taxes on salt http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm ons/b/bc/Salt_March.ogg
Gandhi at his spinning wheel Accepts 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 folkloreit 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 quasibourgeois (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
