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Five thousand years of history through the prism of time
In this story:
The spectrum that is India
The spectrum that is India
They came, they saw, they conquered — and most of them stayed. "They" were the outsiders who rolled into India over the centuries, from the Aryans who gave birth to Hinduism, to the British who established the Raj. In between were a dizzying succession of invaders and strangers, armies and emissaries. Each group arrived with its own special agenda, plan or strategy. And each group was drawn into India's web, absorbed slowly but surely into the landscape of a land that is more than a country — a country that is a compendium of nations.
India's earliest known civilization, however, was entirely indigenous, born almost five thousand years ago in the valley of the river Indus (in present-day Pakistan). Boasting several cities, including Mohenjadaro and Harappa, the Indus Valley civilization flourished for some eight centuries. Its demise was, in all probability, brought about by external forces — the first of India's many invaders, the Aryans.
Springing from the grasslands of Central Asia, the Aryans swept into India around the middle of the second millennium B.C. It was at this time, too, that society began to be structured along what was to become the Hindu caste system with the priestly class, or Brahmins, emerging as the highest rung on the ladder.
Over time, the subjugation of the lower classes gave them the impetus to realize their own worth in other religious frameworks — including Buddhism, founded in northern India around the sixth century B.C. by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
The entry of Islam
In the eighth century A.D. a new force began to manifest itself on the subcontinent, a force that would transform India permanently — a force called Islam. The new religion spread quickly — making converts not only by force, but by appealing to low-caste Hindus in much the same way Buddhism had many centuries before.
As homegrown Muslim rule flourished, two new invasions would change the course of Indian history. The first was that of the Europeans, beginning with the Portuguese who carved out lucrative trade routes, and solidified their position by controlling Goa and several other territories along the western coast.
At the same time, a momentous invasion was underway in the north. Babar, the Muslim king of Kabul, in Afghanistan, breached India, with a mere nine thousand men, but backed by advanced weaponry. Babar became the ruler of northern India, and the founder of the Moghal Empire.
The Moghals partly succeeded, for a while anyway, in reconciling Hindus and Muslims. But, by the mid-seventeenth century, Muslim fanaticism began to replace the carefully-crafted philosophy of tolerance. Hindus spearheaded rebellions, chief among them the Maratha uprising in the west. The Moghal empire began to disintegrate.
How Britain got its "jewel in the crown"
The time was ripe for another breed of Europeans — the British — to graduate from their erstwhile role as traders, and seize the reins of power.
As the story goes, the British never entered India with the thought of ruling the subcontinent. Unlike the Portuguese, the British, along with the Dutch and the French, were content to use India as a base for trade missions further east, in Java and the Moluccas.
But, gradually, the European rivalry increased, with the Anglo-French competition especially fierce. In 1744, war between the two countries in Europe spilled over to conflict between both sides on the Indian subcontinent, and, after two decades, the British emerged triumphant.
Britain's philosophy of "divide and conquer" resulted in several princely states and kingdoms battling each other. Other territories were annexed outright. And several local rulers signed peace treaties that effectively gave Britain control over most of the remainder of India.
An army of Indian soldiers was established under British command and may have lulled India's new rulers into complacency. They were certainly not prepared for the uprising of 1857, an event widely credited with giving birth to India's momentous independence struggle.
It was several months more before the British squashed the rebellion and regained control of Delhi and the other cities. The British crackdown was swift and severe. The East India Company was abolished, the army was reorganized, and London took on formal responsibility for the Indian subcontinent.
A peaceful event in 1885 furthered the independence struggle. The Indian National Congress was founded to boost Indian participation in government. But the eventual result was something very different.
The fight for independence
After World War I, tensions between Indians and their British rulers increased, culminating in the Punjab riots of 1919. British troops dispatched to crush the worst outbreak, in the city of Amritsar, opened fire on unarmed protesters. In a matter of minutes, some 400 civilians had been massacred, and the incident transformed the independence movement into a mass struggle.
The movement also had a new leader. The lawyer Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who had spent years fighting discrimination against Indians in South Africa, had returned home to India, and by 1918 was the chief leader of the Congress movement. Gandhi's legal savvy and his charisma were a powerful combination. He espoused a campaign of civil disobedience aimed at frustrating and thwarting British rule. And above all, he insisted that this campaign be non-violent, an attribute that contributed to his title of "Mahatma" or Great Soul.
The British cracked down on what they perceived as a new, devious threat. Thousands of people were killed in each of the three major campaigns that Gandhi spearheaded between 1918 and independence in 1947. The Muslims disaffected with the Congress movement had found their own leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Like Gandhi, Jinnah too was a lawyer, and he began a campaign for a separate Muslim state. With World War II, the political scenario was transformed.
Seizing the opportunity to step up pressure on Britain, Gandhi and the Congress unleashed their last campaign, with the slogan "Quit India!" At the same time, Jinnah stepped up his efforts to gain support amongst his people for a separate Muslim state. The British jailed Gandhi and the senior Congress leadership, while Jinnah and his party, the Muslim League, saw their strength grow.
Even before the war ended, it had become obvious to Britain that Indian independence was no longer the question. Rather, the problem was how to do it. Given the gap that separated Hindus and Muslims, and the outbreak of horrendous riots between the communities, the entire subcontinent appeared to be on the brink of chaos.
Blood, death and the birth of a nation
In February 1947, the British government announced it would leave India in June 1948. The last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was dispatched to India to oversee the retreat. But once he arrived in Delhi, Mountbatten recognized that the end would have to come sooner, if more bloodshed was to be avoided. Using his sweeping powers, Mountbatten acted swiftly, persuading the Congress party that partition was inevitable. Then, he brought the date of independence forward, to August 1947.
That, however, triggered chaos of a different sort. All sides had barely six weeks in which to determine boundaries and divide government assets (from the military to financial and gold reserves) between India and the new Muslim state-in-waiting, Pakistan.
The horrors of partition and after... 
1.9M/44 sec. QuickTime movie 4M/44 sec. QuickTime movie
There was another crisis, one that triggered perhaps the most tragic event of all in this rush to independence. In the areas of Punjab and Bengal, with Hindu and Muslim populations intermingled across the new boundaries, an exodus on an immense scale got underway. Millions of people tore themselves from their cities and towns, and fled in opposite directions. For many, though, the largest transmigration of peoples in recorded history ended in death. The true figure will never be determined, but it is estimated that between 200-thousand to two million people were killed, most of them in riots between the fleeing communities (Hindus and Sikhs pitted against Muslims), and the rest from the severity of the journey itself.
India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once said, "When the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India." Unfortunately, he was wrong, as events in the weeks and months following independence proved.
The princely states had been warned that they would have to choose between India and Pakistan. While most had done so before independence itself, the Hindu ruler of Kashmir demurred. Then Pakistan invaded the Himalayan kingdom, prompting the king to belatedly choose India. Delhi sent its troops, and the first Indo-Pakistan war ensued. The conflict led to the division of Kashmir, a wound that bleeds to this very day.
Nor was communal hatred confined to Punjab, Bengal or Kashmir. The streets of Delhi were awash once again in the blood of Hindus and Muslims. Mahatma Gandhi, who had watched the partition of the subcontinent with a heavy heart, went on a hunger strike, to force the leaders of both sides to work together for peace. It was the Mahatma's last act in the service of his nation. In January 1948, a Hindu extremist, enraged by Gandhi's efforts to defend Delhi's Muslim minority, shot and killed the frail old man.
Thus was born a nation, with blood, death and tears — and, despite everything, the flame of hope.
NEXT: "Tumultuous Times"
