What is India? Four different geographical regions North – mountainous Himalayas and Hindu Kush...
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Transcript of What is India? Four different geographical regions North – mountainous Himalayas and Hindu Kush...
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
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 non-violent opposition to British monopoly and taxes on salt
• http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Salt_March.ogg
Gandhi at his spinning wheelAccepts 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 folklore…it takes its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom.” (Fanon)
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 quasi-bourgeois (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