From the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, there is a lot of historical information available for studying India. In developing the historical backdrop of present day India, need requirements to be given to chronicles. A collection of historical records and documents is referred to as an “archive,” and primary source documents are typically those that were created as a necessary component of an administrative, legal, social, or commercial activity. They are one-of-a-kind, original documents that were not written or created with the intention of passing on information to a future generation.
Official records, or the documents of various government agencies, make up a significant portion of modern India’s archives. The East India Company’s records provide a comprehensive account of trading conditions from 1600 to 1857. The British crown also kept a lot of official records when it took over the administration. These records assist history specialists with following each significant advancement stage-by-stage and follow the cycles of independent direction and the brain research of the strategy creators.
For constructing the history of the 17th and 18th centuries, the records of the Portuguese, Dutch, and French East India Companies are also useful. They are fundamentally significant from the place of perspective on financial history, however much can be assembled from them about the political set-up also. There are also a lot of works from the present and the past, like travelogues, memoirs, and biographies, that give us interesting and useful insights into the history of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
In the later part of the 18th century, newspapers and journals appeared, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, they provided extremely useful information on almost all aspects of Indian society. Different wellsprings of present day Indian history incorporate oral proof, imaginative writing and artistic creations. The majority of India’s government archives are housed in New Delhi’s National Archives of India. These are authentic and trustworthy sources on a variety of modern Indian history topics.
The records at the National Archives are organized into a number of groups, each representing a different part of the secretariat at different points in its history. This occurred as crafted by the East India Organization was appropriated among different branches — public or general, income, political, military, secret, business, legal, instruction, and so on — and a different arrangement of records was saved for every one of these branches or divisions. In 1767, James Rennell was appointed the first Surveyor General of Bengal.
This was the beginning of the Survey of India’s scientific mapping of the country’s uncharted regions and its bordering lands. The early records of Fort Williams (Bengal Presidency) were lost during the sack of Calcutta in 1756, but the archives of the Bengal presidency after the British victory at Plassey have survived more or less in a complete series, which are partly available in the National Archives of India and partly in the State Archives of West Bengal.
These archives provide valuable information not only on geographical matters but also on contemporary socio-economic conditions and other important historical aspects. The journals and memoirs of the surveyors also provide valuable information The Governor and Council of Fort St. George are included in the Madras Presidency’s records, which date back to AD 1670.
There is a lot of information about the Anglo-French struggle and the English conflicts with other Indian powers in these records that has an impact on the rise of the English East India Company as a political power in the south and the Deccan. When researching the history of Western India—Maharashtra, Gujarat, Sindh, and the Kannada-speaking districts of the former Bombay Presidency that were incorporated into Mysore in 1956—the Bombay Presidency archives, which are located in the Maharashtra Secretariat Record Office in Mumbai, are extremely helpful.
The Parliamentary Papers, which include numerous extracts from the records of the East India Company and the Government of India under the Crown, are the most significant archival publications. The reports of the parliamentary select boards of trustees; different illustrious commissions comprised on unambiguous subjects like schooling, common changes and starvations, and the parliamentary banters on the Indian realm are irreplaceable.
For historical research, the proceedings of the Indian and provincial legislatures, weekly gazettes published by the central and provincial governments, and periodic collections of laws and regulations are all useful sources. The archives of former imperialist powers, who ruled in various parts of the Indian subcontinent and in a few other nations as well, contain a substantial amount of historical material concerning the history of modern India. The India Office Records in London and the British Museum’s records are extremely valuable in England.
The India Office Records has different significant archives: the minutes of the East India Company’s Courts of Directors, General Court, and various committees established from time to time; the correspondence and minutes of the Boards of Control or the Board of Commissioners for India’s Affairs; and the records of the India Council and Secretary of State. The English Gallery has assortments of papers of English emissaries, secretaries of states and other high positioned common and military authorities who were posted in India.
The Church Missionary Society of London’s archives, for example, provide insight into the educational and social development of pre-independence India. For the construction of the history of modern India, the English-language newspapers and journals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries serve as an essential and authentic source of information.
Disgruntled employees of the English East India Company made the first attempts to publish newspapers in India to expose private trade malpractices. For instance, in 1776, William Bolts resigned from the Company and announced his intention to publish a newspaper after the Court of Directors found him guilty of private trading. Bolts’ scheme was met with strong official opposition, and his plan failed to materialize.
James Augustus Hickey published The Bengal Gazette or Calcutta General Advertiser, India’s first newspaper, in 1780. Amrita Marketplace Patrika under Sisir Kumar Ghosh and Motilal Ghosh, Sudharak under Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Indian Reflect under N.N. Sen, Voice of India under Dadabhai Naoroji, Hindustan and Backer under G.P. Varma.
Other notable newspapers of the time included the Tribune and Akhbar-i-Am in Punjab, Indu Prakash, Dnyan Prakash, Kal, and Gujarati in Bombay, and Som Prakash Banganivasi and Sadharani in Bengal. Indian patriots and progressives living abroad distributed papers and diaries — Indian Social scientist (London, Shyamji Krishnavarma), Bande Matram (Paris, Lady Cama), Talwar (Berlin, Virendranath Chattopadhyay), and Ghadar (San Francisco, Lala Hardayal) — to inject a sensation of patriotism among Indians living abroad.
From the 1870s onward, almost every aspect of colonial India’s life is depicted in newspapers. Newspapers followed the major events of the freedom struggle beginning in the 1920s. Be that as it may, news accounts can’t be considered to be fair or totally unbiased. It was inevitable that the report in an Indian nationalist newspaper would differ from the accounts that were published in a London newspaper by pro-British Raj individuals. The art of the colonial era can provide some insight into the political, cultural, and socioeconomic life of the time.
The Company Paintings, also known as “Patna Kalam,” were made possible by funding from the East India Company. They picturise individuals and scenes as they existed at that point. Exchanges, celebrations, moves and the clothing of individuals were noticeable in these works. Organization compositions kept on being well known all through the nineteenth hundred years until the presentation of photography in India during the 1840s. In Calcutta in the nineteenth century, the Kalighat style of painting came to prominence.
It depicted not only mythological figures but also ordinary people going about their daily lives. The social shifts that were taking place at the time in Calcutta were captured in these later photographs. These compositions said something on social wrongs of the time; Some of these paintings mocked particular fashions that people of the time wore. A new art movement emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century, primarily inspired by India’s growing nationalism. Nandalal Bose and Raja Ravi Varma were artists who embodied this new trend.
In the ascent of the Bengal School drove by Abanindranath Tagore (nephew of Rabindranath Tagore), E.B. Havell (who joined the craftsmanship school in Calcutta as head) and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (child of a significant Tamil political pioneer in Sri Lanka) assumed a crucial part. Even though many of the paintings in this new trend were primarily about Indian mythology and cultural heritage, they are important sources for art historians and students of the modern art movement in India.
This school of thought began under Ranajit Guha’s editorship in the early 1980s as a criticism of the existing historiography, which was criticized for ignoring the people’s voice. Subaltern historiography has always held the view that the entire tradition of Indian historiography had an elitist bias. The fundamental conflict in Indian society during the colonial era, according to subaltern historians, was not between colonialism and the Indian people but rather between the elite—both Indian and foreign—and the subaltern groups.
Be that as it may, they try not to buy into the communist hypothesis of the idea of the double-dealing by the patriot development: They point out that class was not the only factor in the society of the time in India because capitalism was still in its infancy. This school believes that caste, gender, religious, and creedal divisions can be exploited by nationalism.
The subalterns assert that nationalism omitted both the marginalized’s representation or voice and society’s internal contradictions. They hold the belief that the Indian people never united in an anti-imperialist struggle and that the Indian national movement never existed. They claim that instead, there were two distinct streams or movements: the genuine anti-imperialist stream of the subalterns and the fictitious elite national movement.
The “official” leadership of the Indian National Congress served as a cover for the elite’s power struggle through the elite streams. This school of thought maintains that the primary conflict during colonial rule was within the Indians themselves rather than between imperialism and the Indian people. Also, Indian nationalism was not the result of the Indian people fighting against colonial exploitation; rather, it was the result of Indians fighting over who got the benefits from the British.
This school says that the search for power and material gain inspired the national movement’s leaders. Numerous academics have criticized this strategy on the grounds that it reduces nationalism to “animal politics” and takes the mind or ideals out of human behavior. With the introduction of a better plough, scientific crop management like crop rotation, and a greater supply of meat (which necessitated the use of spices for both cooking and preservation), many regions of Europe were also experiencing rapid economic development.
The demand for oriental luxury goods also increased as prosperity increased. Venice and Genoa, which had previously prospered through trade in oriental goods, were too small to confront the powerful Ottoman Turks or to conduct significant independent exploration. Even though the Genoese were prepared to provide ships and technical expertise, the north Europeans were prepared to provide financial and human assistance to Portugal and Spain. It should also be noted that Portugal had adopted the same spirit of exploration as the Genoese and assumed leadership of Christendom’s resistance to Islam.
According to historians, Prince Henry of Portugal, who was dubbed the “Navigator,” had become obsessed with the idea of finding an ocean route to India; moreover, he was quick to figure out how to bypass the Muslim control of the eastern Mediterranean and every one of the courses that associated India to Europe. In 1454, Pope Nicholas V presented Prince Henry with a bull, granting him the authority to travel “as far as India” and “sea to the distant shores of the Orient” in an effort to combat Islamic influence and spread Christianity.
However, Prince Henry passed away before his dream could come true. In 1497, under the Settlement of Tordesillas (1494), the leaders of Portugal and Spain partitioned the non-Christian world between them by a fanciful line in the Atlantic, some 1,300 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. The treaty allowed Spain to claim everything to the west and Portugal to claim and occupy everything to the east of the line. As a result, the situation was prepared for the Portuguese incursions into Indian waters.
In 1505, the Portuguese king appointed a governor in India for a three-year term and provided him or her with sufficient force to safeguard Portuguese interests. Francisco De Almeida, the newly appointed governor, was instructed to seize Aden, Ormuz, and Malacca to end Muslim trade and strengthen Portugal’s position in India. Additionally, he was advised to construct fortifications at Anjadiva, Cochin, Cannanore, and Kilwa. Almeida, on the other hand, faced a threat from the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt alongside the opposition of the Zamorin.
The Egyptians built a fleet in the Red Sea to halt the Portuguese advance, encouraged by the Venice merchants whose lucrative trade was now in jeopardy due to Portuguese interference. Almeida’s son was killed when the Portuguese squadron was defeated by the Egyptian and Gujarat navies in a naval battle off Diu in 1507. Almeida completely defeated the two navies the following year to exact revenge for his defeat. Almeida had the idea of making the Portuguese rulers of the Indian Ocean. The Blue Water Policy was the name of his policy.
Albuquerque, who succeeded Almeida as the Portuguese lead representative in India, was the genuine organizer behind the Portuguese power in the East, an errand he finished before his demise. By building bases with views of all sea entrances, he gave Portugal strategic control of the Indian Ocean. At Ormuz, off the Red Sea, there were Portuguese strongholds in East Africa; in the Malabar at Malacca, and Under Albuquerque’s leadership, the Portuguese strengthened their grip on the region by exerting control over the major centers for shipbuilding and establishing a permit system for other ships.
The Portuguese were also able to accomplish their goals because there was no timber available for shipbuilding in the Gulf and Red Sea regions. Albuquerque obtained Goa from the Ruler of Bijapur in 1510 effortlessly; “The first bit of Indian territory to be under the control of the Europeans since the time of Alexander the Great,” according to the Sultan of Bijapur’s principal port.
The fact that sati was outlawed was an interesting aspect of his rule. Albuquerque encouraged the Portuguese sailors who returned to India from their voyages to marry Indian women. They built new roads and irrigation systems, introduced new crops like tobacco and cashew nut, or better plantation varieties of coconut, and planted large groves of coconut to meet the demand for coir rigging and cordage in Goa and the Province of the North.
In the urban communities, for example, Goa and Cochin, they settled as craftsmans and ace skilled workers, other than being brokers. The greater part of such Portuguese came to look upon their new settlements, instead of Portugal, as home. In November 1529, Nino da Cunha took over as the governor of Portuguese interests in India and moved the Portuguese government’s headquarters from Cochin to Goa almost a year later.
During his conflict with the Mughal emperor Humayun, Bahadur Shah of Gujarat obtained assistance from the Portuguese by ceding to them the island of Bassein in 1534, along with its dependencies and revenues. Additionally, he promised them a Diu base. However, when Humayun withdrew from Gujarat in 1536, Bahadur Shah’s relations with the Portuguese became strained.
Bahadur Shah wanted to build a partition wall because the town’s residents had started fighting the Portuguese. In response, the Portuguese began negotiations, during which the Gujarati ruler was summoned to a Portuguese ship and killed in 1537. Da Cunha likewise endeavored to increment Portuguese impact in Bengal by settling numerous Portuguese nationals there with Hooghly as their central command.
Good Circumstances for Portuguese In India, aside from Gujarat, managed by the strong Mahmud Begarha (1458-1511), the northern part was highly separated among many little powers. The Bahmani Kingdom was breaking up into smaller kingdoms in the Deccan. None of the powers had a naval force worth its name, nor did they think of fostering their maritime strength.
The Chinese ships’ navigational range was restricted by an imperial decree in the Far East. The Arab merchants and shipowners who had previously dominated trade in the Indian Ocean lacked the organization and unity of the Portuguese. Additionally, the Portuguese equipped their ships with cannons. Portuguese State There is a widespread tendency to undervalue Portugal’s influence in India. However, the State of Portuguese India, also known as the Estado Português da India, played a larger role in Indian history than is often given credit for.