Westernization and Modernization

Westernization and Modernization

Western Europeans came to India for their purposes in the late fifteenth century: spices and enormous profits. Admiral Vasco da Gama led a tiny fleet of three cannon-bearing ships across the Indian Ocean and reached at Calicut in 1498.

The route followed in Vasco da Gama's first voyage

For most of the sixteenth century, Portugal enjoyed its lucrative monopoly over the Indian Ocean spice trade. After 1580, Spain s King Phillip absorbed Portugal and its vast profits through a marriage that brought Iberia unity and world power.

Eight years later, however, Queen Elizabeth s English pirates helped to blow Spain s invincible armada to the bottom of the North Sea.

Then, the India Ocean trade was opened suddenly to Dutch and British sea merchants. A Dutch massacre of British merchants took place in 1623

Joseph Francois Dupleix, Governor of the French Company at Pondicherry in the early eighteenth century: The first European to perceive Europe s golden opportunity in India.

Clive s victory in the Mango-Grove, took place in 1757. Lord Clive meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey Warren Hastings, the Company s first Governor-General (1773-1784) of Bengal, ruled India brutally.

Modernity came to India as a consequence of Western rule. The growing use of English in major cities proved a revolutionary agent of change.

Strong winds of Evangelicalism blew from London after 1813, when the ban on missionary travel to and settlement in India was lifted.

The railroad provided the ideal means to facilitate face-to-face meetings. The Industrial Revolution, born in Manchester in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, triggered almost as many changes in Indian society and economic life as it did in Great Britain itself.

Indians employed in all of the institutions by the British Raj became, whether they liked it or not, agents of Westernization or Modernity. The only region that eluded the integration was Afghanistan. By the mid-1850s British power was so great, the engines of British industry moved with such speed and selfconfidence that it seemed as though nothing and no one could slow them down.

British Indian Empire 1909 Imperial Gazetteer of India

Young India s Revolutions and Reforms It seemed to the brightest of young India s intellectuals, most of them Hindus and moneylending middle classes, who hoped to be teachers, barristers, newspaper editors, or entrepreneurs. The best among these, Mahadev G. Ranade (1842-1901), graduated at the top of his class from one of the three new British universities, and went on to become a High Court Judge in Bombay, but was also instrumental in founding the India National Congress.

Young India s Revolutions and Reforms Other young Indian leaders, like Poona Brahman Bal G. Tilak (1856-1920), took a more militantly anti-british, basically Hindu orthodox but revolutionary approach. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), founder of the Anglo-Oriental Mohammedan College at Aligarh, insisted that Congress did not speak for the Muslim quarter of India s population.

The Impact of Mahatma Gandhi Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1906 to attend the Indian national Congress in Calcutta at the end of that year, where Gokhale delivered the speech that Jinnah helped write for Congress s ailing Parsi President Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917).

The Impact of Mahatma Gandhi The futility of the First World War helped Mahatma Gandhi to convince many of his followers that Western Civilization was Satanic. Gandhi launched his first nationwide Satyagraha in August 1920.

The Impact of Mahatma Gandhi In 1930 Gandhi led a loyal band of disciples from his Sabarmati ashram in Gujarat to the seashore near Dandi, defying the British Government s monopoly on the use and sale of salt, all of which had to be purchased in Government shops and was heavily taxed throughout British India.

The Impact of Mahatma Gandhi World War II accelerated the process that brought an end to the British Raj with its transfer of power in the War s aftermath to two nations India and Pakistan.

The Impact of Mahatma Gandhi The 1946 Cabinet Mission s three-tiered federal scheme was India s last hope for independent reincarnation as a single state. On Friday, January 30, 1948, shortly before the sun set over New Delhi, Mahatma Gandhi was shot to death by a crazed Hindu Brahman, who viewed the saintly father of his Nation as India s worst enemy.