Icma - U7, india - Resumen Introducción cultural al mundo anglófono PDF

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Unit 7 – Taking English to India NAME: Republic of India / Bhārat Gan ṇarājya CAPITAL: New Delhi (21,75 million) CURRENCY: Indian rupee POPULATION: 1.35 billion. OFFICIAL LANGUAGE(S): English plus 22 Indian languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu. – It is a huge subcontinent. Those languages are official in different parts of the country. Even though English and Hindi are both official, there is no “national language” that all the country identifies with, so each state can choose its own. MAIN CITIES: Mumbai: 18,41 million Kolkata (Calcutta): 13,2 million Delhi: 12,79 million Chennai: 6,42 million

Precolonial India: The Mughal Empire The first Muslims that settled in India were the Delhi Sultanate, a 5-dynasty period from 1206 to 1526, when they were replaced by the Mughals. The Delhi Sultanate was divided in regional kingdoms, and in 1526 one was given to Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire on the Indian subcontinent (descendant of Timur Mughal conqueror in the areas of Turkey; and Ghenghis Khan first founder of the Mughal Empire, who was in the areas of East Asia). He replaced the Delhi Sultanate and established an Empire that would last for approximately 200 year, from the early 16th to the early 18th century, although it did not really end until the Indian Rebellion against the British in the 1857. They were not first Muslims in India (merchants) nor the first Muslims to rule a big share of India (Delhi Sultanate) but they were the ones that consolidated Muslim rule in India, and the reason why many Indians nowadays are still Muslim. They were the elites, a small minority ruling class vastly outnumbered by the Indian population. Because of this, they relied on their military strength to have their power, on a strong autocracy and on taxes to maintain the expensive Empire. To control the territory of the Indian subcontinent they established local rules and elites, without being too disrupting with the local population (a bit like what happened with the British). They had Zamindars, who were aristocrats. The term means landowner in Persian. Typically hereditary, zamindars held enormous tracts of land and control over their peasants, from whom they reserved the right to collect tax on behalf of imperial courts or for military purposes. Usually those taxes were related to trade and agriculture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, with the advent of British imperialism, many wealthy and influential zamindars were bestowed with princely and royal titles such as Maharaja (Great King), Raja (King) and Nawab ("Nawab" usually refers to males and literally means Viceroy; the female equivalent is "Begum" or "Nawab Begum"). Because the elite was Muslim, and they spoke Persian, that was the lingua franca. Precolonial Indian Society: Caste System The system which divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (the Hindi word for religion, but here it means duty) is generally accepted to be more than 3,000 years old. The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation.

Commerce and Empire When the British arrived, colonization was a commercial enterprise. Many companies wanted to do business and needed a royal charter, a permission to colonize a place. The East India Company wanted to control the commerce with the East Indies, and they were given a charter by Elisabeth I in 1600. During this time many other European powers were trying to get control of India for commercial purposes. The British had to do business with the local rulers there to keep their presence in India. They even had an own army with native troops. India was not supposed to be a white colony like Australia were British people went to live, but an exploitation colony to obtain goods from. But when the local rulers started to rebel, they put the people they wanted in power and bribed the population to lead the country in the shadows and keep the rulers favourable to them. This is what happened during the Plassey victory. The British victory at Plassey in Bengal, on 23 June 1757, was a crucial event in the history of India. Though it was more of a skirmish than a battle, the British victory under Robert Clive at Plassey in Bengal was a crucial event in the history of India. The young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ad-daula, had taken Calcutta from the East India Company with a huge army in June 1756, when the notorious Black Hole episode occurred. Clive decided that the best way to secure the Company’s interests in Bengal was to replace Siraj with a new and more pliant nawab. He found a candidate in a discontented elderly general named Mir Jafar. Siraj knew or suspected there was a conspiracy against him, despite Clive’s earnest protestations to the contrary, and moved south to Plassey. On 13 June, Clive moved north with some 2,000 Indian sepoys and 600 British infantries of the Thirty-Ninth of Foot plus close to 200 artillerymen with ten field pieces and two small howitzers. Ambiguous messages were coming in from Mir Jafar and Clive was moving into a dangerous situation against heavy odds. He seems to have had a crisis of confidence and summoned his officers to a council of war on 21 June. The majority, including Clive, voted against action, but in the end, he ordered to move on to Plassey. The confrontation came morning north of the village of Plassey on the bank of the Hughli river. Clive’s army was drawn up in three divisions, as was the Nawab’s army of perhaps 40,000 men with its war-elephants and more than 50 cannons. One division was commanded by Mir Jafar. After an opening cannonade, a crash of thunder at noon heralded a torrential downpour of rain that lasted half an hour. The British artillerymen quickly covered their cannon and ammunition with tarpaulins, but the enemy failed to do the same and their artillery was put out of action, so that when the Nawab’s army moved forward, assuming that Clive’s cannon were also out of action, it was met with a withering storm of fire. The enemy withdrew and Siraj, who distrusted his generals and had already been warned of impending defeat by his astrologer (who had possibly been bribed), lost his nerve when Mir Jafar advised retreat. When Clive’s army

attacked again, Siraj fled on a fast camel. His demoralized army followed suit and when the British entered the enemy camp at about 5pm, they found it abandoned. According to Clive, he lost 18 men, while he estimated the nawab’s dead as around 500. Sirajad-daula was killed by his own people and Mir Jafar replaced him. Clive, who was now effectively master of Bengal, skilfully bolstered Mir Jafar’s apparent authority while keeping him on leading strings. The skirmish at Plassey was critical to the East India Company’s triumph over its French rivals and, in the longer term, to the establishment of British rule in India. Robert Clive managed to obtain the right to the collection of taxes of the local population. They were not only a commercial power, but also a political one (with taxes and an army they held the power of the State). While the BEIC got more and more power, the Mughal Empire was entering a period of decline.

East is East, and West is West? Even though the British went there to do business , British official ended up taking Indian traditions, learning Hindi, dressing like them, marrying Hindi women and, in general, blending with the rest of the population .But this approach toward Indian culture changed in 1835 with Thomas Babington Macauley. The Rhetoric of Empire in England Thomas Babington Macaulay was a nineteenth century English poet, historian and politician. His 1835, Minute on Education in India, where he was a senior civil servant, had a lasting impact on colonial attitudes, encouraging a sense of cultural superiority that had not characterized earlier generations of colonial officials. His minute resulted in the policy of only funding education in English following a European curriculum. Macauley has intended his English educated elite to be loyal to Britain that could act as mediators with the rest of the Indian population; instead, appalled at British hypocrisy, they rebelled against their imperial masters demanding self-determination and freedom. Yet, the assumptions of racial and cultural superiority that Macaulay articulated dominated British policy not only in India but almost everywhere throughout their empire for another hundred years after his death, informing the view that it was Britain's moral responsibility to supervise childlike people elsewhere in the world, until they matured enough to rule themselves. Macaulay believed in European, especially British, superiority over all things Oriental. Serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, Macaulay was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India, by convincing the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic then used in the institutions supported by the British East India Company. The term Macaulay's Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonizers. Macaulay’s own aim had been to create a class of people who, English in all but name, would prove to be both loyal servants of the colonial regime as well as people who would act as a bridge to the general population, spreading English ideals among them. The term "Macaulay’s children" is usually used in a derogatory fashion and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. An example of a Macauley children is Gandhi. The policy resulted in the Government funding only schools and Colleges that used English and a European curriculum, which impacted negatively on institutions that used vernacular languages and traditional Indian curricular. On the other hand, there is little evidence that Indian languages or literature declined, indeed something of a Renaissance developed. Those men who would lead the independence movement, too, were almost all "Macaulay’s children," who drew on the ideals they encountered in English literature, which included

democracy, freedom, and fair-play, to argue that what the British upheld at home, they hypocritically denied Indians in India.

The Decline and Fall of the BEIC By 1857 the British East India Company had complete political control of India. There was general discontent: Dispossessed princes, disgruntled soldiers (they were treated worse than the British), harassed peasantry, religious insensitivity (banning the practice of suicide for widows), Christian missionaries … On 10 May 1857, native soldiers in the BEIC army, the Sepoys, mutinied in Meerut, near Delhi. Rebellion spread. Known as the “Great Rebellion”, the “Sepoy Rebellion”, or “India’s first war of independence”. Indian Mutiny, also called Sepoy Mutiny, widespread but unsuccessful rebellion against British rule in India in 1857–58. Begun in Meerut by Indian troops (sepoys) in the service of the British East India Company, it spread to Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, and Lucknow. In India it is often called the First War of Independence and other similar names. Problems in India at the time: -

The British increasingly used a variety of tactics to usurp control of the Hindu princely states that were under what were called subsidiary alliances with the British. Everywhere the old Indian aristocracy was being replaced by British officials. Doctrine of the lapse → It involved the British prohibiting a Hindu ruler without a natural heir from adopting a successor and, after the ruler died or abdicated, annexing his land.

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Another serious concern was the increasing pace of Westernization, by which Hindu society was being affected by the introduction of Western ideas. Missionaries were challenging the religious beliefs of the Hindus. The humanitarian movement led to reforms that went deeper than the political superstructure. During his tenure as governor-general of India (1848–56), Lord Dalhousie made efforts toward emancipating women and had introduced a bill to remove all legal obstacles to the remarriage of Hindu widows. Converts to Christianity were to share with their Hindu relatives in the property of the family estate. There was a widespread belief that the British aimed at breaking down the caste system. The introduction of Western methods of education was a direct challenge to orthodoxy, both Hindu and Muslim.

The mutiny broke out in the Bengal army because it was only in the military sphere that Indians were organized. The pretext for revolt was the introduction of the new Enfield rifle. To load it, the sepoys had to bite off the ends of lubricated cartridges. A rumour spread among the sepoys that the grease used to lubricate the cartridges was a mixture of pigs’ and cows’ lard; thus, to have oral contact with it was an insult to both Muslims and Hindus. There is no conclusive evidence that either of these materials was actually used on any of the cartridges in question. However, the perception that the cartridges were tainted added to the larger suspicion that the British were trying to undermine Indian traditional society. For their part, the British did not pay enough attention to the growing level of sepoy discontent. The Rebellion In late March 1857 a sepoy named Mangal Pandey attacked British officers at the military garrison in Barrackpore. He was arrested and then executed by the British in early April. Later in April sepoy troopers at Meerut refused the Enfield cartridges, and, as punishment, they were given long prison terms, fettered, and put in jail. This punishment incensed their comrades, who rose on May 10, shot their British officers, and marched to Delhi, where there were no European troops. There the local sepoy garrison joined the Meerut men, and by nightfall the aged pensionary Mughal emperor Bahādur Shah II had

been nominally restored to power by a tumultuous soldiery. The seizure of Delhi provided a focus and set the pattern for the whole mutiny, which then spread throughout northern India. From the time of the mutineers’ seizure of Delhi, the British operations to suppress the mutiny were divided into three parts. First came the desperate struggles at Delhi, Kanpur, and Lucknow during the summer; then the operations around Lucknow in the winter of 1857–58, directed by Sir Colin Campbell; and finally, the “mopping up” campaigns of Sir Hugh Rose in early 1858. Peace was officially declared on July 8, 1858. Aftermath The immediate result of the mutiny was a general housecleaning of the Indian administration. The East India Company was abolished in favour of the direct rule of India by the British government. In concrete terms, this did not mean much, but it introduced a more personal note into the government and removed the unimaginative commercialism that had lingered in the Court of Directors. The financial crisis caused by the mutiny led to a reorganization of the Indian administration’s finances on a modern basis. The Indian army was also extensively reorganized. Another significant result of the mutiny was the beginning of the policy of consultation with Indians. The Legislative Council of 1853 had contained only Europeans and had arrogantly behaved as if it were a full-fledged parliament. It was widely felt that a lack of communication with Indian opinion had helped to precipitate the crisis. Accordingly, the new council of 1861 was given an Indian-nominated element. The educational and public works programs (roads, railways, telegraphs, and irrigation) continued with little interruption; in fact, some were stimulated by the thought of their value for the transport of troops in a crisis. Finally, there was the effect of the mutiny on the people of India themselves. Traditional society had made its protest against the incoming alien influences, and it had failed. The princes and other natural leaders had either held aloof from the mutiny or had proved, for the most part, incompetent. From this time all serious hope of a revival of the past or an exclusion of the West diminished. The traditional structure of Indian society began to break down and was eventually superseded by a Westernized class system, from which emerged a strong middle class with a heightened sense of Indian nationalism. After the rebellion, the Government of India Act (1858) dissolved the East India Company and turned India into a Crown Colony. British rule becomes known as “The Raj”. (from Sanskrit ‘raja’ = king) and that was kept until 1947. Under the Raj, there was increasing emphasis on English education, and the expansion of the government. Larger numbers of Indians joined government service and became another instrument of British cultural dominance and linguistic expansion: a colonial elite. English was needed to become a civil servant and grow through the administration. Universities educated people in English. Political and economic control was strengthened by the rapid expansion of the railway network, which began during the early 1850s

English in India becomes Indian English The elites are educated enough to know they want more and frustrated with their prospects in the colony so they want independence and better treatment in the establishment. In 1885 the Indian National Congress was founded to campaign for a greater share of government for educated Indians, initially from a position of loyalty to the British government. The turning point came in 1919 with the Amritsar Massacre. More than a million Indians fought for Britain in the First World War, 60,000 of whom were killed. In the immediate aftermath of the war, pressure for Indian independence mounted. Early in April 1919 news of the arrest of Indian nationalist leaders in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar sparked riots in which a mob went on the rampage, killing several Europeans, leaving an English female missionary for dead, and looting numerous banks and public buildings. British and Indian troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer were sent to restore

order and Dyer banned all public meetings which, he announced, would be dispersed by force if necessary. Despite this, thousands gathered in protest in a walled enclosure called the Jallianwala Bagh, near the city’s Golden Temple, sacred to Sikhs. Dyer marched a force of 90 Gurkha and Indian soldiers into the enclosure and, without warning, they opened fire for about 10 to 15 minutes on the panicking crowd trapped in the enclosure. According to an official figure, 379 were killed and some 1,200 wounded, though other estimates suggest much higher casualties. From the 1920s to the 1940s Mohandas Gandhi, a London-educated lawyer from the merchant caste, led the INC (Indian National Congress) in campaigns of non-cooperation and civil disobedience against the British. In 1942 he called for the British to “Quit India.” He had seen racial discrimination in South Africa and campaign to civil disobedience. Gandhi wanted economic independence. Spinning wheel. Instead of producing cotton, give to Britain and buy it they should produce their own for them → Economic independence for Britain. He was a Macaulay’s child, educated as expected, but worked as the contrary for what they wanted. The Partition of India British government promised Indian independence after WWI if they participated in the war, but that did not happen. They promised it again after WWII. British rule changed Indian society by encouraging communalism: societies divided according to religious affiliation. In 1905 the British divided Bengal along religious lines, then reversed the decision in 1911. This angered Hindus first, then Muslims, who were in favour of a Muslim Bengal, creating tensions between Hindi and Muslim population. The issue of religion became more important than ethnicity or race. In 1940 the Muslim League called for a separate Muslim country, Pakistan. After the Se...