The authors wish to thank individuals in various agencies of the
Indian and United States governments and private institutions who gave
their time, research materials, and special knowledge to provide
information and perspective. These individuals include Hardeep Puri,
Joint Secretary (America) of the Ministry of External Affairs; Madhukar
Gupta, Joint Secretary (Kashmir) of the Ministry of Home Affairs; Bimla
Bhalla, Director General of Advertising and Visual Publications,
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; Amulya Ratna Nanda, Registrar
General of India; Ashok Jain, director of the National Institute of
Science, Technology and Development Studies; T. Vishwanthan, director of
the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre; G.P. Phondke,
director of the Publications and Information Directorate of the Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research; Air Commander Jasjit Singh,
director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses; G. Madhavan,
deputy executive secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences; Sivaraj
Ramaseshan, distinguished emeritus professor, Raman Research Institute;
H.S. Nagaraja, public relations officer of the Indian Institute of
Science; Virendra Singh, director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research; Bhabani Sen Gupta of the Centre for Policy Research; Pradeep
Mehendiratta, Vice President and Executive Director, Indian Institute of
American Studies; and Richard J. Crites, Chat Blakeman, Peter L.M.
Heydemann, and Marcia S.B. Bernicat of the United States Embassy in New
Delhi. Special thanks go to Lygia M. Ballantyne, director, and Alice
Kniskern, deputy director, and the staff of the Library of Congress New
Delhi Field Office, particularly Atish Chatterjee, for supplying
bounteous amounts of valuable research materials on India and arranging
interviews of Indian government officials.
Appreciation is also extended to Ralph K. Benesch, who formerly
oversaw the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program for the Department of
the Army, and to the desk officers in the Department of State and the
Department of the Army who reviewed the chapters. Thanks also are
offered to William A. Blanpied, Mavis Bowen, Ainslie T. Embree, Jerome
Jacobson, Suzanne Hanchett, Barbara Leitch LePoer, Owen M. Lynch, and
Sunalini Nayudu, who either assisted with substantive information or
read parts of the manuscript or did both.
The authors also wish to thank those who contributed directly to the
preparation of the manuscript. They include Sandra W. Meditz, who
reviewed all textual and graphic materials, served as liaison with the
Department of the Army, and provided numerous substantive and technical
contributions; Sheila Ross, who edited the chapters; Andrea T. Merrill,
who edited the tables and figures; Marilyn Majeska, who supervised
editing and managed production; Alberta Jones King, who assisted with
research, making wordprocessing corrections to various versions of the
manuscript, and proofreading; Barbara Edgerton and Izella Watson, who
performed the final wordprocessing; Marla D. Woodson, who assisted with
proofreading; and Janie L. Gilchrist, David P. Cabitto, Barbara
Edgerton, and Izella Watson, who prepared the camera-ready copy.
Catherine Schwartzstein performed the final prepublication editorial
review, and Joan C. Cook compiled the index.
Graphics support was provided by David P. Cabitto, who oversaw the
production of maps and graphics and, with the assistance of Wayne Horne,
designed the cover and the illustrations on the chapter title pages; and
Harriet Blood and Maryland Mapping and Graphics, who assisted in the
preparation of the maps and charts. Thanks also go to Gary L.
Fitzpatrick and Christine M. Anderson, of the Library of Congress
Geography and Map Division, for assistance in preparing early map
drafts. A very special thank you goes to Janice L. Hyde, who did the
research on and selection of cover and title-page illustrations and
photographs, translated some of the photograph captions and textual
references, and helped the editors on numerous matters of substance and
analysis. Shantha S. Murthy of the Library of Congress Serial Record
Division provided Indian language assistance. Clarence Maloney helped
identify the subjects of some of the photographs.
Finally the authors acknowledge the generosity of individ-uals and
public and private organizations who allowed their photographs to be
used in this study. They have been acknowledged in the illustration
captions.
India - Preface
A series of migrations by Indo-European-speaking seminomads took
place during the second millennium B.C. Known as Aryans, these
preliterate pastoralists spoke an early form of Sanskrit, which has
close philological similarities to other Indo-European languages, such
as Avestan in Iran and ancient Greek and Latin. The term Aryan
meant pure and implied the invaders' conscious attempts at retaining
their tribal identity and roots while maintaining a social distance from
earlier inhabitants.
Although archaeology has not yielded proof of the identity of the
Aryans, the evolution and spread of their culture across the
Indo-Gangetic Plain is generally undisputed (see Principal Regions, ch.
2). Modern knowledge of the early stages of this process rests on a body
of sacred texts: the four Vedas (collections of hymns, prayers, and
liturgy), the Brahmanas and the Upanishads (commentaries on Vedic
rituals and philosophical treatises), and the Puranas (traditional
mythic-historical works). The sanctity accorded to these texts and the
manner of their preservation over several millennia--by an unbroken oral
tradition--make them part of the living Hindu tradition.
These sacred texts offer guidance in piecing together Aryan beliefs
and activities. The Aryans were a pantheistic people, following their
tribal chieftain or raja, engaging in wars with each other or with other
alien ethnic groups, and slowly becoming settled agriculturalists with
consolidated territories and differentiated occupations. Their skills in
using horse-drawn chariots and their knowledge of astronomy and
mathematics gave them a military and technological advantage that led
others to accept their social customs and religious beliefs (see Science
and Technology, ch. 6). By around 1,000 B.C., Aryan culture had spread
over most of India north of the Vindhya Range and in the process
assimilated much from other cultures that preceded it (see The Roots of
Indian Religion, ch. 3).
The Aryans brought with them a new language, a new pantheon of
anthropomorphic gods, a patrilineal and patriarchal family system, and a
new social order, built on the religious and philosophical rationales of
varnashramadharma . Although precise translation into English
is difficult, the concept varnashramadharma , the bedrock of
Indian traditional social organization, is built on three fundamental
notions: varna (originally, "color," but later taken
to mean social class--see Glossary), ashrama (stages of life
such as youth, family life, detachment from the material world, and
renunciation), and dharma (duty, righteousness, or sacred cosmic law).
The underlying belief is that present happiness and future salvation are
contingent upon one's ethical or moral conduct; therefore, both society
and individuals are expected to pursue a diverse but righteous path
deemed appropriate for everyone based on one's birth, age, and station
in life (see Caste and Class, ch. 5). The original three-tiered
society--Brahman (priest; see Glossary), Kshatriya (warrior), and
Vaishya (commoner)--eventually expanded into four in order to absorb the
subjugated people--Shudra (servant)--or even five, when the outcaste
peoples are considered (see Varna , Caste, and Other Divisions,
ch. 5).
The basic unit of Aryan society was the extended and patriarchal
family. A cluster of related families constituted a village, while
several villages formed a tribal unit. Child marriage, as practiced in
later eras, was uncommon, but the partners' involvement in the selection
of a mate and dowry and bride-price were customary. The birth of a son
was welcome because he could later tend the herds, bring honor in
battle, offer sacrifices to the gods, and inherit property and pass on
the family name. Monogamy was widely accepted although polygamy was not
unknown, and even polyandry is mentioned in later writings. Ritual
suicide of widows was expected at a husband's death, and this might have
been the beginning of the practice known as sati in later centuries,
when the widow actually burnt herself on her husband's funeral pyre.
Permanent settlements and agriculture led to trade and other
occupational differentiation. As lands along the Ganga (or Ganges) were
cleared, the river became a trade route, the numerous settlements on its
banks acting as markets. Trade was restricted initially to local areas,
and barter was an essential component of trade, cattle being the unit of
value in large-scale transactions, which further limited the
geographical reach of the trader. Custom was law, and kings and chief
priests were the arbiters, perhaps advised by certain elders of the
community. An Aryan raja, or king, was primarily a military leader, who
took a share from the booty after successful cattle raids or battles.
Although the rajas had managed to assert their authority, they
scrupulously avoided conflicts with priests as a group, whose knowledge
and austere religious life surpassed others in the community, and the
rajas compromised their own interests with those of the priests.
India - Kingdoms and Empires
By the end of the sixth century B.C., India's northwest was
integrated into the Persian Achaemenid Empire and became one of its
satrapies. This integration marked the beginning of administrative
contacts between Central Asia and India.
Although Indian accounts to a large extent ignored Alexander the
Great's Indus campaign in 326 B.C., Greek writers recorded their
impressions of the general conditions prevailing in South Asia during
this period. Thus, the year 326 B.C. provides the first clear and
historically verifiable date in Indian history. A two-way cultural
fusion between several Indo-Greek elements--especially in art,
architecture, and coinage--occurred in the next several hundred years.
North India's political landscape was transformed by the emergence of
Magadha in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain. In 322 B.C., Magadha, under
the rule of Chandragupta Maurya, began to assert its hegemony over
neighboring areas. Chandragupta, who ruled from 324 to 301 B.C., was the
architect of the first Indian imperial power--the Mauryan Empire
(326-184 B.C.)--whose capital was Pataliputra, near modern-day Patna, in
Bihar.
Situated on rich alluvial soil and near mineral deposits, especially
iron, Magadha was at the center of bustling commerce and trade. The
capital was a city of magnificent palaces, temples, a university, a
library, gardens, and parks, as reported by Megasthenes, the
third-century B.C. Greek historian and ambassador to the Mauryan court.
Legend states that Chandragupta's success was due in large measure to
his adviser Kautilya, the Brahman author of the Arthashastra
(Science of Material Gain), a textbook that outlined governmental
administration and political strategy. There was a highly centralized
and hierarchical government with a large staff, which regulated tax
collection, trade and commerce, industrial arts, mining, vital
statistics, welfare of foreigners, maintenance of public places
including markets and temples, and prostitutes. A large standing army
and a well-developed espionage system were maintained. The empire was
divided into provinces, districts, and villages governed by a host of
centrally appointed local officials, who replicated the functions of the
central administration.
Ashoka, grandson of Chandragupta, ruled from 269 to 232 B.C. and was
one of India's most illustrious rulers. Ashoka's inscriptions chiseled
on rocks and stone pillars located at strategic locations throughout his
empire--such as Lampaka (Laghman in modern Afghanistan), Mahastan (in
modern Bangladesh), and Brahmagiri (in Karnataka)--constitute the second
set of datable historical records. According to some of the
inscriptions, in the aftermath of the carnage resulting from his
campaign against the powerful kingdom of Kalinga (modern Orissa), Ashoka
renounced bloodshed and pursued a policy of nonviolence or ahimsa,
espousing a theory of rule by righteousness. His toleration for
different religious beliefs and languages reflected the realities of
India's regional pluralism although he personally seems to have followed
Buddhism (see Buddhism, ch. 3). Early Buddhist stories assert that he
convened a Buddhist council at his capital, regularly undertook tours
within his realm, and sent Buddhist missionary ambassadors to Sri Lanka.
Contacts established with the Hellenistic world during the reign of
Ashoka's predecessors served him well. He sent diplomatic-cum-religious
missions to the rulers of Syria, Macedonia, and Epirus, who learned
about India's religious traditions, especially Buddhism. India's
northwest retained many Persian cultural elements, which might explain
Ashoka's rock inscriptions--such inscriptions were commonly associated
with Persian rulers. Ashoka's Greek and Aramaic inscriptions found in
Kandahar in Afghanistan may also reveal his desire to maintain ties with
people outside of India.
After the disintegration of the Mauryan Empire in the second century
B.C., South Asia became a collage of regional powers with overlapping
boundaries. India's unguarded northwestern border again attracted a
series of invaders between 200 B.C. and A.D. 300. As the Aryans had
done, the invaders became "Indianized" in the process of their
conquest and settlement. Also, this period witnessed remarkable
intellectual and artistic achievements inspired by cultural diffusion
and syncretism. The Indo-Greeks, or the Bactrians, of the northwest
contributed to the development of numismatics; they were followed by
another group, the Shakas (or Scythians), from the steppes of Central
Asia, who settled in western India. Still other nomadic people, the
Yuezhi, who were forced out of the Inner Asian steppes of Mongolia,
drove the Shakas out of northwestern India and established the Kushana
Kingdom (first century B.C.-third century A.D.). The Kushana Kingdom
controlled parts of Afghanistan and Iran, and in India the realm
stretched from Purushapura (modern Peshawar, Pakistan) in the northwest,
to Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) in the east, and to Sanchi (Madhya Pradesh)
in the south. For a short period, the kingdom reached still farther
east, to Pataliputra. The Kushana Kingdom was the crucible of trade
among the Indian, Persian, Chinese, and Roman empires and controlled a
critical part of the legendary Silk Road. Kanishka, who reigned for two
decades starting around A.D. 78, was the most noteworthy Kushana ruler.
He converted to Buddhism and convened a great Buddhist council in
Kashmir. The Kushanas were patrons of Gandharan art, a synthesis between
Greek and Indian styles, and Sanskrit literature. They initiated a new
era called Shaka in A.D. 78, and their calendar, which was formally
recognized by India for civil purposes starting on March 22, 1957, is
still in use.
India - The Deccan and the South
The Classical Age refers to the period when most of North India was
reunited under the Gupta Empire (ca. A.D. 320-550). Because of the
relative peace, law and order, and extensive cultural achievements
during this period, it has been described as a "golden age"
that crystallized the elements of what is generally known as Hindu
culture with all its variety, contradiction, and synthesis. The golden
age was confined to the north, and the classical patterns began to
spread south only after the Gupta Empire had vanished from the
historical scene. The military exploits of the first three
rulers--Chandragupta I (ca. 319-335), Samudragupta (ca. 335-376), and
Chandragupta II (ca. 376-415)--brought all of North India under their
leadership. From Pataliputra, their capital, they sought to retain
political preeminence as much by pragmatism and judicious marriage
alliances as by military strength. Despite their self-conferred titles,
their overlordship was threatened and by 500 ultimately ruined by the
Hunas (a branch of the White Huns emanating from Central Asia), who were
yet another group in the long succession of ethnically and culturally
different outsiders drawn into India and then woven into the hybrid
Indian fabric.
Under Harsha Vardhana (or Harsha, r. 606-47), North India was
reunited briefly, but neither the Guptas nor Harsha controlled a
centralized state, and their administrative styles rested on the
collaboration of regional and local officials for administering their
rule rather than on centrally appointed personnel. The Gupta period
marked a watershed of Indian culture: the Guptas performed Vedic
sacrifices to legitimize their rule, but they also patronized Buddhism,
which continued to provide an alternative to Brahmanical orthodoxy.
The most significant achievements of this period, however, were in
religion, education, mathematics, art, and Sanskrit literature and
drama. The religion that later developed into modern Hinduism witnessed
a crystallization of its components: major sectarian deities, image
worship, devotionalism, and the importance of the temple. Education
included grammar, composition, logic, metaphysics, mathematics,
medicine, and astronomy. These subjects became highly specialized and
reached an advanced level. The Indian numeral system--sometimes
erroneously attributed to the Arabs, who took it from India to Europe
where it replaced the Roman system--and the decimal system are Indian
inventions of this period. Aryabhatta's expositions on astronomy in 499,
moreover, gave calculations of the solar year and the shape and movement
of astral bodies with remarkable accuracy. In medicine, Charaka and
Sushruta wrote about a fully evolved system, resembling those of
Hippocrates and Galen in Greece. Although progress in physiology and
biology was hindered by religious injunctions against contact with dead
bodies, which discouraged dissection and anatomy, Indian physicians
excelled in pharmacopoeia, caesarean section, bone setting, and skin
grafting.
The Southern Rivals
When Gupta disintegration was complete, the classical patterns of
civilization continued to thrive not only in the middle Ganga Valley and
the kingdoms that emerged on the heels of Gupta demise but also in the
Deccan and in South India, which acquired a more prominent place in
history. In fact, from the mid-seventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries,
regionalism was the dominant theme of political or dynastic history of
South Asia. Three features, as political scientist Radha Champakalakshmi
has noted, commonly characterize the sociopolitical realities of this
period. First, the spread of Brahmanical religions was a two-way process
of Sanskritization of local cults and localization of Brahmanical social
order. Second was the ascendancy of the Brahman priestly and landowning
groups that later dominated regional institutions and political
developments. Third, because of the seesawing of numerous dynasties that
had a remarkable ability to survive perennial military attacks, regional
kingdoms faced frequent defeats but seldom total annihilation.
Peninsular India was involved in an eighth-century tripartite power
struggle among the Chalukyas (556-757) of Vatapi, the Pallavas (300-888)
of Kanchipuram, and the Pandyas (seventh through the tenth centuries) of
Madurai. The Chalukya rulers were overthrown by their subordinates, the
Rashtrakutas, who ruled from 753 to 973. Although both the Pallava and
Pandya kingdoms were enemies, the real struggle for political domination
was between the Pallava and Chalukya realms.
Despite interregional conflicts, local autonomy was preserved to a
far greater degree in the south where it had prevailed for centuries.
The absence of a highly centralized government was associated with a
corresponding local autonomy in the administration of villages and
districts. Extensive and well-documented overland and maritime trade
flourished with the Arabs on the west coast and with Southeast Asia.
Trade facilitated cultural diffusion in Southeast Asia, where local
elites selectively but willingly adopted Indian art, architecture,
literature, and social customs.
The interdynastic rivalry and seasonal raids into each other's
territory notwithstanding, the rulers in the Deccan and South India
patronized all three religions--Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. The
religions vied with each other for royal favor, expressed in land grants
but more importantly in the creation of monumental temples, which remain
architectural wonders. The cave temples of Elephanta Island (near
Bombay, or Mumbai in Marathi), Ajanta, and Ellora (in Maharashtra), and
structural temples of Kanchipuram (in Tamil Nadu) are enduring legacies
of otherwise warring regional rulers. By the mid-seventh century,
Buddhism and Jainism began to decline as sectarian Hindu devotional
cults of Shiva and Vishnu vigorously competed for popular support.
Although Sanskrit was the language of learning and theology in South
India, as it was in the north, the growth of the bhakti (devotional)
movements enhanced the crystallization of vernacular literature in all
four major Dravidian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada;
they often borrowed themes and vocabulary from Sanskrit but preserved
much local cultural lore. Examples of Tamil literature include two major
poems, Cilappatikaram (The Jewelled Anklet) and Manimekalai
(The Jewelled Belt); the body of devotional literature of Shaivism and
Vaishnavism--Hindu devotional movements; and the reworking of the Ramayana
by Kamban in the twelfth century. A nationwide cultural synthesis had
taken place with a minimum of common characteristics in the various
regions of South Asia, but the process of cultural infusion and
assimilation would continue to shape and influence India's history
through the centuries.
India - The Coming of Islam
In the early sixteenth century, descendants of the Mongol, Turkish,
Iranian, and Afghan invaders of South Asia--the Mughals--invaded India
under the leadership of Zahir-ud-Din Babur. Babur was the great-grandson
of Timur Lenk (Timur the Lame, from which the Western name Tamerlane is
derived), who had invaded India and plundered Delhi in 1398 and then led
a short-lived empire based in Samarkand (in modern-day Uzbekistan) that
united Persian-based Mongols (Babur's maternal ancestors) and other West
Asian peoples. Babur was driven from Samarkand and initially established
his rule in Kabul in 1504; he later became the first Mughal ruler
(1526-30). His determination was to expand eastward into Punjab, where
he had made a number of forays. Then an invitation from an opportunistic
Afghan chief in Punjab brought him to the very heart of the Delhi
Sultanate, ruled by Ibrahim Lodi (1517-26). Babur, a seasoned military
commander, entered India in 1526 with his well-trained veteran army of
12,000 to meet the sultan's huge but unwieldy and disunited force of
more than 100,000 men. Babur defeated the Lodi sultan decisively at
Panipat (in modern-day Haryana, about ninety kilometers north of Delhi).
Employing gun carts, moveable artillery, and superior cavalry tactics,
Babur achieved a resounding victory. A year later, he decisively
defeated a Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sangha. In 1529 Babur routed
the joint forces of Afghans and the sultan of Bengal but died in 1530
before he could consolidate his military gains. He left behind as
legacies his memoirs (Babur Namah ), several beautiful gardens
in Kabul, Lahore, and Agra, and descendants who would fulfill his dream
of establishing an empire in Hindustan.
When Babur died, his son Humayun (1530-56), also a soldier, inherited
a difficult task. He was pressed from all sides by a reassertion of
Afghan claims to the Delhi throne, by disputes over his own succession,
and by the Afghan-Rajput march into Delhi in 1540. He fled to Persia,
where he spent nearly ten years as an embarrassed guest at the Safavid
court. In 1545 he gained a foothold in Kabul, reasserted his Indian
claim, defeated Sher Khan Sur, the most powerful Afghan ruler, and took
control of Delhi in 1555.
Humayun's untimely death in 1556 left the task of further imperial
conquest and consolidation to his thirteen-year-old son, Jalal-ud-Din
Akbar (r. 1556-1605). Following a decisive military victory at the
Second Battle of Panipat in 1556, the regent Bayram Khan pursued a
vigorous policy of expansion on Akbar's behalf. As soon as Akbar came of
age, he began to free himself from the influences of overbearing
ministers, court factions, and harem intrigues, and demonstrated his own
capacity for judgment and leadership. A "workaholic" who
seldom slept more than three hours a night, he personally oversaw the
implementation of his administrative policies, which were to form the
backbone of the Mughal Empire for more than 200 years. He continued to
conquer, annex, and consolidate a far-flung territory bounded by Kabul
in the northwest, Kashmir in the north, Bengal in the east, and beyond
the Narmada River in the south--an area comparable in size to the
Mauryan territory some 1,800 years earlier (see fig. 3).
Akbar built a walled capital called Fatehpur Sikri (Fatehpur means
Fortress of Victory) near Agra, starting in 1571. Palaces for each of
Akbar's senior queens, a huge artificial lake, and sumptuous
water-filled courtyards were built there. The city, however, proved
short-lived, perhaps because the water supply was insufficient or of
poor quality, or, as some historians believe, Akbar had to attend to the
northwest areas of his empire and simply moved his capital for political
reasons. Whatever the reason, in 1585 the capital was relocated to
Lahore and in 1599 to Agra.
Akbar adopted two distinct but effective approaches in administering
a large territory and incorporating various ethnic groups into the
service of his realm. In 1580 he obtained local revenue statistics for
the previous decade in order to understand details of productivity and
price fluctuation of different crops. Aided by Todar Mal, a Rajput king,
Akbar issued a revenue schedule that the peasantry could tolerate while
providing maximum profit for the state. Revenue demands, fixed according
to local conventions of cultivation and quality of soil, ranged from
one-third to one-half of the crop and were paid in cash. Akbar relied
heavily on land-holding zamindars (see Glossary). They used their
considerable local knowledge and influence to collect revenue and to
transfer it to the treasury, keeping a portion in return for services
rendered. Within his administrative system, the warrior aristocracy (mansabdars
) held ranks (mansabs ) expressed in numbers of troops, and
indicating pay, armed contingents, and obligations. The warrior
aristocracy was generally paid from revenues of nonhereditary and
transferrable jagirs (revenue villages).
An astute ruler who genuinely appreciated the challenges of
administering so vast an empire, Akbar introduced a policy of
reconciliation and assimilation of Hindus (including Maryam al-Zamani,
the Hindu Rajput mother of his son and heir, Jahangir), who represented
the majority of the population. He recruited and rewarded Hindu chiefs
with the highest ranks in government; encouraged intermarriages between
Mughal and Rajput aristocracy; allowed new temples to be built;
personally participated in celebrating Hindu festivals such as Dipavali,
or Diwali, the festival of lights; and abolished the jizya
(poll tax) imposed on non-Muslims. Akbar came up with his own theory of
"rulership as a divine illumination," enshrined in his new
religion Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith), incorporating the principle of
acceptance of all religions and sects. He encouraged widow marriage,
discouraged child marriage, outlawed the practice of sati, and persuaded
Delhi merchants to set up special market days for women, who otherwise
were secluded at home (see Veiling and the Seclusion of Women, ch. 5).
By the end of Akbar's reign, the Mughal Empire extended throughout most
of India north of the Godavari River. The exceptions were Gondwana in
central India, which paid tribute to the Mughals, and Assam, in the
northeast.
Mughal rule under Jahangir (1605-27) and Shah Jahan (1628-58) was
noted for political stability, brisk economic activity, beautiful
paintings, and monumental buildings. Jahangir married the Persian
princess whom he renamed Nur Jahan (Light of the World), who emerged as
the most powerful individual in the court besides the emperor. As a
result, Persian poets, artists, scholars, and officers--including her
own family members--lured by the Mughal court's brilliance and luxury,
found asylum in India. The number of unproductive, time-serving officers
mushroomed, as did corruption, while the excessive Persian
representation upset the delicate balance of impartiality at the court.
Jahangir liked Hindu festivals but promoted mass conversion to Islam; he
persecuted the followers of Jainism and even executed Guru (see
Glossary) Arjun Das, the fifth saint-teacher of the Sikhs (see Sikhism,
ch. 3). Nur Jahan's abortive schemes to secure the throne for the prince
of her choice led Shah Jahan to rebel in 1622. In that same year, the
Persians took over Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, an event that
struck a serious blow to Mughal prestige.
Between 1636 and 1646, Shah Jahan sent Mughal armies to conquer the
Deccan and the northwest beyond the Khyber Pass. Even though they
demonstrated Mughal military strength, these campaigns consumed the
imperial treasury. As the state became a huge military machine, whose
nobles and their contingents multiplied almost fourfold, so did its
demands for more revenue from the peasantry. Political unification and
maintenance of law and order over wide areas encouraged the emergence of
large centers of commerce and crafts--such as Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and
Ahmadabad--linked by roads and waterways to distant places and ports.
The world-famous Taj Mahal was built in Agra during Shah Jahan's reign
as a tomb for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It symbolizes both Mughal
artistic achievement and excessive financial expenditures when resources
were shrinking. The economic position of peasants and artisans did not
improve because the administration failed to produce any lasting change
in the existing social structure. There was no incentive for the revenue
officials, whose concerns primarily were personal or familial gain, to
generate resources independent of dominant Hindu zamindars and village
leaders, whose self-interest and local dominance prevented them from
handing over the full amount of revenue to the imperial treasury. In
their ever-greater dependence on land revenue, the Mughals unwittingly
nurtured forces that eventually led to the break-up of their empire.
The last of the great Mughals was Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), who
seized the throne by killing all his brothers and imprisoning his own
father. During his fifty-year reign, the empire reached its utmost
physical limit but also witnessed the unmistakable symptoms of decline.
The bureaucracy had grown bloated and excessively corrupt, and the huge
and unwieldy army demonstrated outdated weaponry and tactics. Aurangzeb
was not the ruler to restore the dynasty's declining fortunes or glory.
Awe-inspiring but lacking in the charisma needed to attract outstanding
lieutenants, he was driven to extend Mughal rule over most of South Asia
and to reestablish Islamic orthodoxy by adopting a reactionary attitude
toward those Muslims whom he had suspected of compromising their faith.
Aurangzeb was involved in a series of protracted wars--against the
Pathans in Afghanistan, the sultans of Bijapur and Golkonda in the
Deccan, and the Marathas in Maharashtra. Peasant uprisings and revolts
by local leaders became all too common, as did the conniving of the
nobles to preserve their own status at the expense of a steadily
weakening empire. The increasing association of his government with
Islam further drove a wedge between the ruler and his Hindu subjects.
Aurangzeb forbade the building of new temples, destroyed a number of
them, and reimposed the jizya . A puritan and a censor of
morals, he banned music at court, abolished ceremonies, and persecuted
the Sikhs in Punjab. These measures alienated so many that even before
he died challenges for power had already begun to escalate. Contenders
for the Mughal throne fought each other, and the short-lived reigns of
Aurangzeb's successors were strife-filled. The Mughal Empire experienced
dramatic reverses as regional governors broke away and founded
independent kingdoms. The Mughals had to make peace with Maratha rebels,
and Persian and Afghan armies invaded Delhi, carrying away many
treasures, including the Peacock Throne in 1739.
India - The Marathas
The quest for wealth and power brought Europeans to Indian shores in
1498 when Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese voyager, arrived in Calicut
(modern Kozhikode, Kerala) on the west coast. In their search for spices
and Christian converts, the Portuguese challenged Arab supremacy in the
Indian Ocean, and, with their galleons fitted with powerful cannons, set
up a network of strategic trading posts along the Arabian Sea and the
Persian Gulf. In 1510 the Portuguese took over the enclave of Goa, which
became the center of their commercial and political power in India and
which they controlled for nearly four and a half centuries.
Economic competition among the European nations led to the founding
of commercial companies in England (the East India Company, founded in
1600) and in the Netherlands (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie--the
United East India Company, founded in 1602), whose primary aim was to
capture the spice trade by breaking the Portuguese monopoly in Asia.
Although the Dutch, with a large supply of capital and support from
their government, preempted and ultimately excluded the British from the
heartland of spices in the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), both
companies managed to establish trading "factories" (actually
warehouses) along the Indian coast. The Dutch, for example, used various
ports on the Coromandel Coast in South India, especially Pulicat (about
twenty kilometers north of Madras), as major sources for slaves for
their plantations in the East Indies and for cotton cloth as early as
1609. (The English, however, established their first factory at what
today is known as Madras only in 1639.) Indian rulers enthusiastically
accommodated the newcomers in hopes of pitting them against the
Portuguese. In 1619 Jahangir granted them permission to trade in his
territories at Surat (in Gujarat) on the west coast and Hughli (in West
Bengal) in the east. These and other locations on the peninsula became
centers of international trade in spices, cotton, sugar, raw silk,
saltpeter, calico, and indigo.
English company agents became familiar with Indian customs and
languages, including Persian, the unifying official language under the
Mughals. In many ways, the English agents of that period lived like
Indians, intermarried willingly, and a large number of them never
returned to their home country. The knowledge of India thus acquired and
the mutual ties forged with Indian trading groups gave the English a
competitive edge over other Europeans. The French commercial
interest--Compagnie des Indes Orientales (East India Company, founded in
1664)--came late, but the French also established themselves in India,
emulating the precedents set by their competitors as they founded their
enclave at Pondicherry (Puduchcheri) on the Coramandel Coast.
In 1717 the Mughal emperor, Farrukh-siyar (r. 1713-19), gave the
British--who by then had already established themselves in the south and
the west--a grant of thirty-eight villages near Calcutta, acknowledging
their importance to the continuity of international trade in the Bengal
economy. As did the Dutch and the French, the British brought silver
bullion and copper to pay for transactions, helping the smooth
functioning of the Mughal revenue system and increasing the benefits to
local artisans and traders. The fortified warehouses of the British
brought extraterritorial status, which enabled them to administer their
own civil and criminal laws and offered numerous employment
opportunities as well as asylum to foreigners and Indians. The British
factories successfully competed with their rivals as their size and
population grew. The original clusters of fishing villages (Madras and
Calcutta) or series of islands (Bombay) became headquarters of the
British administrative zones, or presidencies as they generally came to
be known. The factories and their immediate environs, known as the
White-town, represented the actual and symbolic preeminence of the
British--in terms of their political power--as well as their cultural
values and social practices; meanwhile, their Indian collaborators lived
in the Black-town, separated from the factories by several kilometers.
The British company employed sepoys--European-trained and
European-led Indian soldiers--to protect its trade, but local rulers
sought their services to settle scores in regional power struggles.
South India witnessed the first open confrontation between the British
and the French, whose forces were led by Robert Clive and François
Dupleix, respectively. Both companies desired to place their own
candidate as the nawab, or ruler, of Arcot, the area around Madras. At
the end of a protracted struggle between 1744 and 1763, when the Peace
of Paris was signed, the British gained an upper hand over the French
and installed their man in power, supporting him further with arms and
lending large sums as well. The French and the British also backed
different factions in the succession struggle for Mughal viceroyalty in
Bengal, but Clive intervened successfully and defeated Nawab
Siraj-ud-daula in the Battle of Plassey (Palashi, about 150 kilometers
north of Calcutta) in 1757. Clive found help from a combination of
vested interests that opposed the existing nawab: disgruntled soldiers,
landholders, and influential merchants whose commercial profits were
closely linked to British fortunes.
Later, Clive defeated the Mughal forces at Buxar (Baksar, west of
Patna in Bihar) in 1765, and the Mughal emperor (Shah Alam, r.
1759-1806) conferred on the company administrative rights over Bengal,
Bihar, and Orissa, a region of roughly 25 million people with an annual
revenue of 40 million rupees (for current value of the rupee--see
Glossary). The imperial grant virtually established the company as a
sovereign power, and Clive became the first British governor of Bengal.
Besides the presence of the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French,
there were two lesser but noteworthy colonial groups. Danish
entrepreneurs established themselves at several ports on the Malabar and
Coromandel coasts, in the vicinity of Calcutta and inland at Patna
between 1695 and 1740. Austrian enterprises were set up in the 1720s on
the vicinity of Surat in modern-day southeastern Gujarat. As with the
other non-British enterprises, the Danish and Austrian enclaves were
taken over by the British between 1765 and 1815.
India - The British Empire in India
Company Rule, 1757-1857
A multiplicity of motives underlay the British penetration into
India: commerce, security, and a purported moral uplift of the people.
The "expansive force" of private and company trade eventually
led to the conquest or annexation of territories in which spices,
cotton, and opium were produced. British investors ventured into the
unfamiliar interior landscape in search of opportunities that promised
substantial profits. British economic penetration was aided by Indian
collaborators, such as the bankers and merchants who controlled
intricate credit networks. British rule in India would have been a
frustrated or half-realized dream had not Indian counterparts provided
connections between rural and urban centers. External threats, both real
and imagined, such as the Napoleonic Wars (1796-1815) and Russian
expansion toward Afghanistan (in the 1830s), as well as the desire for
internal stability, led to the annexation of more territory in India.
Political analysts in Britain wavered initially as they were uncertain
of the costs or the advantages in undertaking wars in India, but by the
1810s, as the territorial aggrandizement eventually paid off, opinion in
London welcomed the absorption of new areas. Occasionally the British
Parliament witnessed heated debates against expansion, but arguments
justifying military operations for security reasons always won over even
the most vehement critics.
The British soon forgot their own rivalry with the Portuguese and the
French and permitted them to stay in their coastal enclaves, which they
kept even after independence in 1947 (see National Integration, this
ch.). The British, however, continued to expand vigorously well into the
1850s. A number of aggressive governors-general undertook relentless
campaigns against several Hindu and Muslim rulers. Among them were
Richard Colley Wellesley (1798-1805), William Pitt Amherst (1823-28),
George Eden (1836-42), Edward Law (1842-44), and James Andrew Brown
Ramsay (1848-56; also known as the Marquess of Dalhousie). Despite
desperate efforts at salvaging their tottering power and keeping the
British at bay, many Hindu and Muslim rulers lost their territories:
Mysore (1799, but later restored), the Maratha Confederacy (1818), and
Punjab (1849). The British success in large measure was the result not
only of their superiority in tactics and weapons but also of their
ingenious relations with Indian rulers through the "subsidiary
alliance" system, introduced in the early nineteenth century. Many
rulers bartered away their real responsibilities by agreeing to uphold
British paramountcy in India, while they retained a fictional
sovereignty under the rubric of Pax Britannica. Later, Dalhousie
espoused the "doctrine of lapse" and annexed outright the
estates of deceased princes of Satara (1848), Udaipur (1852), Jhansi
(1853), Tanjore (1853), Nagpur (1854), and Oudh (1856).
European perceptions of India, and those of the British especially,
shifted from unequivocal appreciation to sweeping condemnation of
India's past achievements and customs. Imbued with an ethnocentric sense
of superiority, British intellectuals, including Christian missionaries,
spearheaded a movement that sought to bring Western intellectual and
technological innovations to Indians. Interpretations of the causes of
India's cultural and spiritual "backwardness" varied, as did
the solutions. Many argued that it was Europe's mission to civilize
India and hold it as a trust until Indians proved themselves competent
for self-rule.
The immediate consequence of this sense of superiority was to open
India to more aggressive missionary activity. The contributions of three
missionaries based in Serampore (a Danish enclave in Bengal)--William
Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward--remained unequaled and have
provided inspiration for future generations of their successors. The
missionaries translated the Bible into the vernaculars, taught company
officials local languages, and, after 1813, gained permission to
proselytize in the company's territories. Although the actual number of
converts remained negligible, except in rare instances when entire
groups embraced Christianity, such as the Nayars in the south or the
Nagas in the northeast, the missionary impact on India through
publishing, schools, orphanages, vocational institutions, dispensaries,
and hospitals was unmistakable.
The British Parliament enacted a series of laws, among which the
Regulating Act of 1773 stood first, to curb the company traders'
unrestrained commercial activities and to bring about some order in
territories under company control. Limiting the company charter to
periods of twenty years, subject to review upon renewal, the 1773 act
gave the British government supervisory rights over the Bengal, Bombay,
and Madras presidencies. Bengal was given preeminence over the rest
because of its enormous commercial vitality and because it was the seat
of British power in India (at Calcutta), whose governor was elevated to
the new position of governor-general. Warren Hastings was the first
incumbent (1773-85). The India Act of 1784, sometimes described as the
"half-loaf system," as it sought to mediate between Parliament
and the company directors, enhanced Parliament's control by establishing
the Board of Control, whose members were selected from the cabinet. The
Charter Act of 1813 recognized British moral responsibility by
introducing just and humane laws in India, foreshadowing future social
legislation, and outlawing a number of traditional practices such as
sati and thagi (or thugee, robbery coupled with ritual murder).
As governor-general from 1786 to 1793, Charles Cornwallis (the
Marquis of Cornwallis), professionalized, bureaucratized, and
Europeanized the company's administration. He also outlawed private
trade by company employees, separated the commercial and administrative
functions, and remunerated company servants with generous graduated
salaries. Because revenue collection became the company's most essential
administrative function, Cornwallis made a compact with Bengali
zamindars, who were perceived as the Indian counterparts to the British
landed gentry. The Permanent Settlement system, also known as the
zamindari system, fixed taxes in perpetuity in return for ownership of
large estates; but the state was excluded from agricultural expansion,
which came under the purview of the zamindars. In Madras and Bombay,
however, the ryotwari (peasant) settlement system was set in
motion, in which peasant cultivators had to pay annual taxes directly to
the government.
Neither the zamindari nor the ryotwari systems proved
effective in the long run because India was integrated into an
international economic and pricing system over which it had no control,
while increasing numbers of people subsisted on agriculture for lack of
other employment. Millions of people involved in the heavily taxed
Indian textile industry also lost their markets, as they were unable to
compete successfully with cheaper textiles produced in Lancashire's
mills from Indian raw materials.
Beginning with the Mayor's Court, established in 1727 for civil
litigation in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, justice in the interior came
under the company's jurisdiction. In 1772 an elaborate judicial system,
known as adalat , established civil and criminal jurisdictions
along with a complex set of codes or rules of procedure and evidence.
Both Hindu pandits (see Glossary) and Muslim qazis (sharia
court judges) were recruited to aid the presiding judges in interpreting
their customary laws, but in other instances, British common and
statutory laws became applicable. In extraordinary situations where none
of these systems was applicable, the judges were enjoined to adjudicate
on the basis of "justice, equity, and good conscience." The
legal profession provided numerous opportunities for educated and
talented Indians who were unable to secure positions in the company,
and, as a result, Indian lawyers later dominated nationalist politics
and reform movements.
Education for the most part was left to the charge of Indians or to
private agents who imparted instruction in the vernaculars. But in 1813,
the British became convinced of their "duty" to awaken the
Indians from intellectual slumber by exposing them to British literary
traditions, earmarking a paltry sum for the cause. Controversy between
two groups of Europeans--the "Orientalists" and
"Anglicists"--over how the money was to be spent prevented
them from formulating any consistent policy until 1835 when William
Cavendish Bentinck, the governor-general from 1828 to 1835, finally
broke the impasse by resolving to introduce the English language as the
medium of instruction. English replaced Persian in public administration
and education.
The company's education policies in the 1830s tended to reinforce
existing lines of socioeconomic division in society rather than bringing
general liberation from ignorance and superstition. Whereas the Hindu
English-educated minority spearheaded many social and religious reforms
either in direct response to government policies or in reaction to them,
Muslims as a group initially failed to do so, a position they endeavored
to reverse. Western-educated Hindu elites sought to rid Hinduism of its
much criticized social evils: idolatry, the caste system, child
marriage, and sati. Religious and social activist Ram Mohan Roy
(1772-1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma) in 1828,
displayed a readiness to synthesize themes taken from Christianity,
Deism, and Indian monism, while other individuals in Bombay and Madras
initiated literary and debating societies that gave them a forum for
open discourse. The exemplary educational attainments and skillful use
of the press by these early reformers enhanced the possibility of
effecting broad reforms without compromising societal values or
religious practices.
The 1850s witnessed the introduction of the three "engines of
social improvement" that heightened the British illusion of
permanence in India. They were the railroads, the telegraph, and the
uniform postal service, inaugurated during the tenure of Dalhousie as
governor-general. The first railroad lines were built in 1850 from
Howrah (Haora, across the Hughli River from Calcutta) inland to the
coalfields at Raniganj, Bihar, a distance of 240 kilometers. In 1851 the
first electric telegraph line was laid in Bengal and soon linked Agra,
Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, Varanasi, and other cities. The three
different presidency or regional postal systems merged in 1854 to
facilitate uniform methods of communication at an all-India level. With
uniform postal rates for letters and newspapers--one-half anna and one
anna, respectively (sixteen annas equalled one rupee)--communication
between the rural and the metropolitan areas became easier and faster.
The increased ease of communication and the opening of highways and
waterways accelerated the movement of troops, the transportation of raw
materials and goods to and from the interior, and the exchange of
commercial information.
The railroads did not break down the social or cultural distances
between various groups but tended to create new categories in travel.
Separate compartments in the trains were reserved exclusively for the
ruling class, separating the educated and wealthy from ordinary people.
Similarly, when the Sepoy Rebellion was quelled in 1858, a British
official exclaimed that "the telegraph saved India." He
envisaged, of course, that British interests in India would continue
indefinitely.
India - The British Raj, 1858-1947
Origins of the Congress and the Muslim League
The decades following the Sepoy Rebellion were a period of growing
political awareness, manifestation of Indian public opinion, and
emergence of Indian leadership at national and provincial levels.
Ominous economic uncertainties created by British colonial rule and the
limited opportunities that awaited the ever-expanding number of
Western-educated graduates began to dominate the rhetoric of leaders who
had begun to think of themselves as a "nation," despite
fissures along the lines of region, religion, language, and caste.
Inspired by the suggestion made by A.O. Hume, a retired British civil
servant, seventy-three Indian delegates met in Bombay in 1885 and
founded the Indian National Congress (Congress--see Glossary). They were
mostly members of the upwardly mobile and successful Western-educated
provincial elites, engaged in professions such as law, teaching, and
journalism. They had acquired political experience from regional
competition in the professions and from their aspirations in securing
nomination to various positions in legislative councils, universities,
and special commissions.
At its inception, the Congress had no well-defined ideology and
commanded few of the resources essential to a political organization. It
functioned more as a debating society that met annually to express its
loyalty to the Raj and passed numerous resolutions on less controversial
issues such as civil rights or opportunities in government, especially
the civil service. These resolutions were submitted to the viceroy's
government and, occasionally, to the British Parliament, but the
Congress's early gains were meager. Despite its claim to represent all
India, the Congress voiced the interests of urban elites; the number of
participants from other economic backgrounds remained negligible.
By 1900, although the Congress had emerged as an all-India political
organization, its achievement was undermined by its singular failure to
attract Muslims, who had by then begun to realize their inadequate
education and underrepresentation in government service. Muslim leaders
saw that their community had fallen behind the Hindus. Attacks by Hindu
reformers against religious conversion, cow killing, and the
preservation of Urdu in Arabic script deepened their fears of minority
status and denial of their rights if the Congress alone were to
represent the people of India. For many Muslims, loyalty to the British
crown seemed preferable to cooperation with Congress leaders. Sir Sayyid
Ahmad Khan (1817-98) launched a movement for Muslim regeneration that
culminated in the founding in 1875 of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental
College at Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh (renamed Aligarh Muslim University in
1921). Its objective was to educate wealthy students by emphasizing the
compatibility of Islam with modern Western knowledge. The diversity
among India's Muslims, however, made it impossible to bring about
uniform cultural and intellectual regeneration.
Sir George Curzon, the governor-general (1899-1905), ordered the
partition of Bengal in 1905. He wanted to improve administrative
efficiency in that huge and populous region, where the Bengali Hindu
intelligentsia exerted considerable influence on local and national
politics. The partition created two provinces: Eastern Bengal and Assam,
with its capital at Dhaka (then spelled Dacca), and West Bengal, with
its capital at Calcutta (which also served as the capital of British
India). An ill-conceived and hastily implemented action, the partition
outraged Bengalis. Not only had the government failed to consult Indian
public opinion but the action appeared to reflect the British resolve to
"divide and rule." Widespread agitation ensued in the streets
and in the press, and the Congress advocated boycotting British products
under the banner of swadeshi (home-made--see Glossary).
The Congress-led boycott of British goods was so successful that it
unleashed anti-British forces to an extent unknown since the Sepoy
Rebellion. A cycle of violence, terrorism, and repression ensued in some
parts of the country. The British tried to mitigate the situation by
announcing a series of constitutional reforms in 1909 and by appointing
a few moderates to the imperial and provincial councils. In 1906 a
Muslim deputation met with the viceroy, Gilbert John Elliot (1905-10),
seeking concessions from the impending constitutional reforms, including
special considerations in government service and electorates. The
All-India Muslim League (Muslim League--see Glossary) was founded the
same year to promote loyalty to the British and to advance Muslim
political rights, which the British recognized by increasing the number
of elective offices reserved for Muslims in the India Councils Act of
1909. The Muslim League insisted on its separateness from the
Hindu-dominated Congress, as the voice of a "nation within a
nation."
In what the British saw as an additional goodwill gesture, in 1911
King-Emperor George V (r. 1910-36) visited India for a durbar (a
traditional court held for subjects to express fealty to their ruler),
during which he announced the reversal of the partition of Bengal and
the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to a newly planned city to be
built immediately south of Delhi, which became New Delhi.
War, Reforms, and Agitation
World War I began with an unprecedented outpouring of loyalty and
goodwill toward the British, contrary to initial British fears of an
Indian revolt. India contributed generously to the British war effort,
by providing men and resources. About 1.3 million Indian soldiers and
laborers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while both the
Indian government and the princes sent large supplies of food, money,
and ammunition. But disillusionment set in early. High casualty rates,
soaring inflation compounded by heavy taxation, a widespread influenza
epidemic, and the disruption of trade during the war escalated human
suffering in India. The prewar nationalist movement revived as moderate
and extremist groups within the Congress submerged their differences in
order to stand as a unified front. The Congress even succeeded in
forging a temporary alliance with the Muslim League--the Lucknow Pact,
or Congress-League Scheme of Reforms--in 1916, over the issues of
devolution of political power and the future of Islam in the Middle
East.
The British themselves adopted a "carrot and stick"
approach in recognition of India's support during the war and in
response to renewed nationalist demands. In August 1917, Edwin Montagu,
the secretary of state for India, made the historic announcement in
Parliament that the British policy for India was "increasing
association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the
gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the
progressive realization of responsible government in India as an
integral part of the British Empire." The means of achieving the
proposed measure were later enshrined in the Government of India Act of
1919, which introduced the principle of a dual mode of administration,
or dyarchy, in which both elected Indian legislators and appointed
British officials shared power. The act also expanded the central and
provincial legislatures and widened the franchise considerably. Dyarchy
set in motion certain real changes at the provincial level: a number of
noncontroversial or "transferred" portfolios--such as
agriculture, local government, health, education, and public works--were
handed over to Indians, while more sensitive matters such as finance,
taxation, and maintaining law and order were retained by the provincial
British administrators.
The positive impact of reform was seriously undermined in 1919 by the
Rowlatt Acts, named after the recommendations made the previous year to
the Imperial Legislative Council by the Rowlatt Commission, which had
been appointed to investigate "seditious conspiracy." The
Rowlatt Acts, also known as the Black Acts, vested the viceroy's
government with extraordinary powers to quell sedition by silencing the
press, detaining political activists without trial, and arresting any
suspected individuals without a warrant. No sooner had the acts come
into force in March 1919--despite opposition by Indian members on the
Imperial Legislative Council--than a nationwide cessation of work (hartal
) was called by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). Others took up
his call, marking the beginning of widespread--although not
nationwide--popular discontent. The agitation unleashed by the acts
culminated on April 13, 1919, in Amritsar, Punjab. The British military
commander, Brigadier Reginald E.H. Dyer, ordered his soldiers to fire at
point-blank range into an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of some 10,000
men, women, and children. They had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, a
walled garden, to celebrate a Hindu festival without prior knowledge of
the imposition of martial law. A total of 1,650 rounds were fired,
killing 379 persons and wounding 1,137 in the episode, which dispelled
wartime hopes and goodwill in a frenzy of postwar reaction.
India - Mahatma Gandhi
That India opted for an entirely original path to solving this crisis
and obtaining swaraj (independence) was due largely to Gandhi,
commonly known as "Mahatma" (or Great Soul) or, as he himself
preferred, "Gandhiji" (an honorific term for Gandhi). A native
of Gujarat who had been educated in Britain, he was an obscure and
unsuccessful provincial lawyer. Gandhi had accepted an invitation in
1893 to represent indentured Indian laborers in South Africa, where he
stayed on for more than twenty years, emerging ultimately as the voice
and conscience of thousands who had been subjected to blatant racial
discrimination. He returned to India in 1915, virtually a stranger to
public life but "fired with a religious vision of a new India,
whose swaraj . . . would [be] a moral reformation of a whole
people which would either convert the British also or render their Raj
impossible by Indian withdrawal of support for it and its modern
values," according to historian Judith M. Brown.
Gandhi's ideas and strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience
(satyagraha--see Glossary), first applied during his South Africa days,
initially appeared impractical to many educated Indians. In Gandhi's own
words, "Civil disobedience is civil breach of unmoral statutory
enactments," but as he viewed it, it had to be carried out
nonviolently by withdrawing cooperation with the corrupt state.
Observers realized Gandhi's political potential when he used the
satyagraha during the anti-Rowlatt Acts protests in Punjab. In 1920,
under Gandhi's leadership, the Congress was reorganized and given a new
constitution, whose goal was swaraj . Membership in the party
was opened to anyone prepared to pay a token fee, and a hierarchy of
committees--from district, to province, to all-India--was established
and made responsible for discipline and control over a hitherto
amorphous and diffuse movement. During his first nationwide satyagraha,
Gandhi urged the people to boycott British education institutions, law
courts, and products (in favor of swadeshi ); to resign from
government employment; to refuse to pay taxes; and to forsake British
titles and honors. The party was transformed from an elite organization
to one of mass national appeal.
Although Gandhi's first nationwide satyagraha was too late to
influence the framing of the new Government of India Act of 1919, the
magnitude of disorder resulting from the movement was unparalleled and
presented a new challenge to foreign rule. Gandhi was forced to call off
the campaign in 1922 because of atrocities committed against police.
However, the abortive campaign marked a milestone in India's political
development. For his efforts, Gandhi was imprisoned until 1924. On his
release from prison, he set up an ashram (a rural commune), established
a newspaper, and inaugurated a series of reforms aimed at the socially
disadvantaged within Hindu society, the rural poor, and the Untouchables
(see Changes in the Caste System, ch. 5). His popularity soared in
Indian politics as he reached the hearts and minds of ordinary people,
winning support for his causes as no one else had ever done before. By
his personal and eclectic piety, his asceticism, his vegetarianism, his
espousal of Hindu-Muslim unity, and his firm belief in ahimsa, Gandhi
appealed to the loftier Hindu ideals. For Gandhi, moral regeneration,
social progress, and national freedom were inseparable.
Emerging leaders within the Congress--Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai
Patel, Rajendra Prasad, C. Rajagopalachari, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad,
Subhas Chandra Bose, and Jaya-prakash (J.P.) Narayan--accepted Gandhi's
leadership in articulating nationalist aspirations but disagreed on
strategies for wresting more concessions from the British. The Indian
political spectrum was further broadened in the mid-1920s by the
emergence of both moderate and militant parties, such as the Swaraj
Party (sometimes referred to as the Swarajist Party), the Mahasabha
Party (literally, great council; an orthodox Hindu communal party), the
Unionist Party, the Communist Party of India, and the Socialist
Independence for India League. Regional political organizations also
continued to represent the interests of non-Brahmans in Madras, Mahars
in Maharashtra, and Sikhs in Punjab.
The Congress, however, kept itself aloof from competing in elections.
As voices inside and outside the Congress became more strident, the
British appointed a commission in 1927, under Sir John Simon, to
recommend further measures in the constitutional devolution of power.
The British failure to appoint an Indian member to the commission
outraged the Congress and others, and, as a result, they boycotted it
throughout India, carrying placards inscribed "Simon, Go
Back." In 1929 the Congress responded by drafting its own
constitution under the guidance of Motilal Nehru (Jawaharlal's father)
demanding full independence (purna swaraj ) by 1930; the
Congress went so far as to observe January 26, 1930, as the first
anniversary of the first year of independence.
Gandhi reemerged from his long seclusion by undertaking his most
inspired campaign, a march of about 400 kilometers from his commune in
Ahmadabad to Dandi, on the coast of Gujarat between March 12 and April
6, 1930. At Dandi, in protest against extortionate British taxes on
salt, he and thousands of followers illegally but symbolically made
their own salt from sea water. Their defiance reflected India's
determination to be free, despite the imprisonment of thousands of
protesters. For the next five years, the Congress and government were
locked in conflict and negotiations until what became the Government of
India Act of 1935 could be hammered out. But by then, the rift between
the Congress and the Muslim League had become unbridgeable as each
pointed the finger at the other acrimoniously. The Muslim League
disputed the claim by the Congress to represent all people of India,
while the Congress disputed the Muslim League's claim to voice the
aspirations of all Muslims.
The 1935 act, the voluminous and final constitutional effort at
governing British India, articulated three major goals: establishing a
loose federal structure, achieving provincial autonomy, and safeguarding
minority interests through separate electorates. The federal provisions,
intended to unite princely states and British India at the center, were
not implemented because of ambiguities in safeguarding the existing
privileges of princes. In February 1937, however, provincial autonomy
became a reality when elections were held; the Congress emerged as the
dominant party with a clear majority in five provinces and held an upper
hand in two, while the Muslim League performed poorly.
India - Political Impasse and Independence
Nehru's long tenure in office gave continuity and cohesion to India's
domestic and foreign policies, but as his health deteriorated, concerns
over who might inherit his mantle or what might befall India after he
left office frequently surfaced in political circles. After his death,
the Congress Caucus, also known as the Syndicate, chose Lal Bahadur
Shastri as prime minister in June 1964. A mild-mannered person, Shastri
adhered to Gandhian principles of simplicity of life and dedication to
the service of the country. His short period of leadership was beset
with three major crises: widespread food shortages, violent anti-Hindi
demonstrations in the state of Madras (as Tamil Nadu was then called)
that were quelled by the army, and the second war with Pakistan over
Kashmir. Shastri's premiership was cut short when he died of a heart
attack on January 11, 1966, the day after having signed the
Soviet-brokered Tashkent Declaration. The agreement required both sides
to withdraw all armed personnel by February 26, 1966, to the positions
they had held prior to August 5, 1965, and to observe the cease-fire
line.
Indira Gandhi held a cabinet portfolio as minister of information and
broadcasting in Shastri's government. She was the only child of Nehru,
who was also her mentor in the nationalist movement. The Syndicate
selected her as prime minister when Shastri died in 1966 even though her
eligibility was challenged by Morarji Desai, a veteran nationalist and
long-time aspirant to that office. The Congress "bosses" were
apparently looking for a leading figure acceptable to the masses, who
could command general support during the next general election but who
would also acquiesce to their guidance. Hardly had Indira Gandhi begun
in office than she encountered a series of problems that defied easy
solutions: Mizo tribal uprisings in the northeast; famine, labor unrest,
and misery among the poor in the wake of rupee devaluation; and
agitation in Punjab for linguistic and religious separatism.
In the fourth general election in February 1967, the Congress
majority was greatly reduced when it secured only 54 percent of the
parliamentary seats, and non-Congress ministries were established in
Bihar, Kerala, Orissa, Madras, Punjab, and West Bengal the next month. A
Congress-led coalition government collapsed in Uttar Pradesh, while in
April Rajasthan was brought under President's Rule--direct central
government rule (see The Executive, ch. 8). Seeking to eradicate
poverty, Mrs. Gandhi pursued a vigorous policy in 1969 of land reform
and placed a ceiling on personal income, private property, and corporate
profits. She also nationalized the major banks, a bold step amidst a
growing rift between herself and the party elders. The Congress expelled
her for "indiscipline" on November 12, 1969, an action that
split the party into two factions: the Congress (O)--for
Organisation--under Desai, and the Congress (R)--for Requisition--under
Gandhi. She continued as prime minister with support from communists,
Sikhs, and regional parties.
Gandhi campaigned fiercely on the platform "eliminate
poverty" (garibi hatao ) during the fifth general election
in March 1971, and the Congress (R) gained a large majority in
Parliament against her former party leaders whose slogan was
"eliminate Indira" (Indira hatao ). India's decisive
victory over Pakistan in the third war over Kashmir in December 1971,
and Gandhi's insistence that the 10 million refugees from Bangladesh be
sent back to their country generated a national surge in her popularity,
later confirmed by her party's gains in state elections in 1972. She had
firmly established herself at the pinnacle of power, overcoming
challenges from the Congress (O), the Supreme Court, and the state chief
ministers in the early 1970s. The more solidified her monopoly of power
became, the more egregious was her intolerance of criticisms, even when
they were deserved. As head of her party and the government, Gandhi
nominated and removed the chief ministers at will and frequently
reshuffled the portfolios of her own cabinet members. Ignoring their
obligations to their constituencies, party members competed with each
other in parading their loyalty to Gandhi, whose personal approval alone
seemed crucial to their survival. In August 1971, Gandhi signed the
twenty-year Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation with the Soviet
Union because ties with the United States, which had improved in Nehru's
later years, had eroded (see Russia, ch. 9).
Neither Gandhi's consolidation of power, nor her imperious style of
administration, nor even her rhetoric of radical reforms was enough to
meet the deepening economic crisis spawned by the enormous cost of the
1971 war. A huge additional outlay was needed to manage the refugees,
the crop failures in 1972 and 1973, the skyrocketing world oil prices in
1973-74, and the overall drop in industrial output despite a surplus of
scientifically and technically trained personnel. No immediate sign of
economic recovery or equity was visible despite a loan obtained from the
International Monetary Fund (IMF--see Glossary) in 1974. Both Gandhi's
office and character came under severe tests, beginning with railroad
employee strikes, national civil disobedience advocated by J.P. Narayan,
defeat of her party in Gujarat by a coalition of parties calling itself
the Janata Morcha (People's Front), an all-party, no-confidence motion
in Parliament, and, finally, a writ issued by the Allahabad High Court
invalidating her 1971 election and making her ineligible to occupy her
seat for six years.
What had once seemed a remote possibility took place on June 25,
1975: the president declared an Emergency and the government suspended
civil rights. Because the nation's president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed
(1974-77), and Gandhi's own party members in Parliament were amenable to
her personal influence, Gandhi had little trouble in pushing through
amendments to the constitution that exonerated her from any culpability,
declaring President's Rule in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu where anti-Indira
parties ruled, and jailing thousands of her opponents. In her need to
trust and confide in someone during this extremely trying period, she
turned to her younger son, Sanjay, who became an enthusiastic advocate
of the Emergency. Under his watchful eyes, forced sterilization as a
means of birth control was imposed on the poor, increased numbers of
urban squatters and slum dwellers in Delhi were evicted in the name of
beautification projects, and disgruntled workers were either disciplined
or their wages frozen. The Reign of Terror, as some called it, continued
until January 18, 1977, when Gandhi suddenly relaxed the Emergency,
announced the next general election in March, and released her opponents
from prison.
With elections only two months away, both J.P. Narayan and Morarji
Desai reactivated the multiparty front, which campaigned as the Janata
Party and rode anti-Emergency sentiment to secure a clear majority in
the Lok Sabha (House of the People), the lower house of Parliament (see
The Legislature, ch. 8). Desai, a conservative Brahman, became India's
fourth prime minister (1977-79), but his government, from its inception,
became notorious for its factionalism and furious internal competition.
As it promised, the Janata government restored freedom and democracy,
but its inability to effect sound reforms or ameliorate poverty left
people disillusioned. Desai lost the support of Janata's left-wing
parties by the early summer of 1979, and several secular and liberal
politicians abandoned him altogether, leaving him without a
parliamentary majority. A no-confidence motion was about to be
introduced in Parliament in July 1979, but he resigned his office;
Desai's government was replaced by a coalition led by Chaudhury Charan
Singh (prime minister in 1979-80). Although Singh's life-long ambition
had been to become prime minister, his age and inefficiency were used
against him, and his attempts at governing India proved futile; new
elections were announced in January 1980.
Gandhi and her party, renamed Congress (I)--I for Indira--campaigned
on the slogan "Elect a Government That Works!" and regained
power. Sanjay Gandhi was elected to the Lok Sabha. Unlike during the
Emergency, when India registered significant economic and industrial
progress, Gandhi's return to power was hindered by a series of woes and
tragedies, beginning with Sanjay's death in June 1980 while attempting
to perform stunts in his private airplane. Secessionist forces in Punjab
and in the northeast and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in
December 1979 consumed her energy. She began to involve the armed forces
in resolving violent domestic conflicts between 1980 and 1984. In May
1984, Sikh extremists occupied the Golden Temple in Amritsar, converting
it into a haven for terrorists. Gandhi responded in early June when she
launched Operation Bluestar, which killed and wounded hundreds of
soldiers, insurgents, and civilians (see Insurgent Movements and
External Subversion, ch. 10). Guarding against further challenges to her
power, she removed the chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir and Andhra
Pradesh just months before her assassination by her Sikh bodyguards on
October 31, 1984. The news of Indira Gandhi's assassination plunged New
Delhi and other parts of India into anti-Sikh riots for three days;
several thousand Sikhs were killed.
India - Rajiv Gandhi
When Rajiv Gandhi, Indira's eldest son, reluctantly consented to run
for his brother's vacant Lok Sabha seat in 1980, and when he later took
over the leadership of the Congress youth wing, becoming prime minister
was the last thing on his mind; equally, his mother had her own
misgivings about whether Rajiv would bravely "take the brutalities
and the ruthlessness of politics." Yet on the day Indira was
assassinated, Rajiv was sworn in as prime minister at the age of forty.
He brought into politics energy, enthusiasm, and vision--qualities badly
needed to lead the divided country. Moreover, his looks, personal charm,
and reputation as "Mr. Clean" were assets that won him many
friends in India and abroad, especially in the United States. Rajiv also
had a clear mandate to rule the country with an overwhelming majority in
Parliament.
Rajiv seemed to have understood the magnitude of the most critical
and urgent problems that faced the nation when he assumed office. As
Paul H. Kreisberg, a former United States foreign service officer, put
it, Rajiv was faced with an unenviable four-pronged challenge: resolving
political and religious violence in Punjab and the northeast; reforming
the demoralized Congress (I), which was often identified with the
interests of the upper and upper-middle classes; reenergizing the
sagging economy in terms of productivity and budget control; and
reducing tensions with neighbors, especially Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As
Rajiv tackled these issues with singular determination, there was
optimism and hope about the future of India. Between 1985 and 1987,
temporary calm was restored by accommodating demands for regional
control in the northeast and by granting more concessions to Punjab.
Although Rajiv acknowledged the gradual attrition of the Congress, he
was unwilling to relinquish control of the leadership, tolerate
"cliques," or conduct new elections for offices at the state
and district levels.
Economic reforms and incentives to private investors were introduced
by easing government tax rates and licensing requirements, but officials
manipulated the rules and frequently accepted bribes. These innovative
measures also came under attack from business leaders, who for many
years had controlled both markets and prices with little regard for
quality. When the Ministry of Finance began its own investigation of tax
and foreign-exchange evasion amounting to millions of dollars, many of
India's leading families, including Rajiv's political allies, were found
culpable. Despite these hindrances, Rajiv's fascination with electronics
and telecommunications resulted in revamping the antiquated telephone
systems to meet public demands. Collaboration with the United States and
several European governments and corporations brought more investment in
research in electronics and computer software.
India's perennial, see-sawing tensions with Pakistan, whose potential
nuclear-weapons capacity escalated concerns in the region, were
ameliorated when the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC--see Glossary) was inaugurated in December 1985. Both nations
signed an agreement in 1986 promising that neither would launch a first
strike at the other's nuclear facilities. However, sporadic conflicts
persist along the cease-fire line in Kashmir (see South Asia, ch. 9).
Relations with Sri Lanka degenerated because of unresolved
Sinhalese-Tamil controversies and continued guerrilla warfare by Tamil
militants, under the leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,
who had bases in Tamil Nadu. Beginning in 1987, India's attempt to
disarm and subdue the Tigers through intervention of the Indian Peace
Keeping Force proved disastrous as thousands of Indian soldiers and
Tamil militants were killed or wounded (see Peacekeeping Operations, ch.
10).
Rajiv Gandhi's performance in the middle of his term in office was
best summed up, as Kreisberg put it, as "good intentions, some
progress, frequently weak implementation, and poor politics." Two
major scandals, the "Spy" and the "Bofors" affairs,
tarnished his reputation. In January 1985, Gandhi confirmed in
Parliament the involvement of top government officials, their
assistants, and businessmen in "a wide-ranging espionage
network." The ring reportedly infiltrated the prime minister's
office as early as 1982 when Indira was in power and sold defense and
economic intelligence to foreign diplomats at the embassies of France,
Poland and other East European countries, and the Soviet Union. Although
more than twenty-four arrests were made and the diplomats involved were
expelled, the Spy scandal remained a lingering embarrassment to Rajiv's
administration.
In 1986 India purchased US$1.3 billion worth of artillery pieces from
the Swedish manufacturer A.B. Bofors, and months later a Swedish radio
report remarked that Bofors had won the "biggest" export order
by bribing Indian politicians and defense personnel. The revelation
caught the nation's attention immediately because of the allegations
that somehow Rajiv Gandhi and his friends were connected with the deal.
When Vishwanath Pratap (V.P.) Singh, as minister of defence,
investigated the alleged kickbacks, he was forced to resign, and he
became Rajiv's Janata political rival. Despite relentless attacks and
criticisms in the media as well as protests and resignations from
cabinet members, Rajiv adamantly denied any role in the affair. But when
he called parliamentary elections in November 1989, two months ahead of
schedule, the opposition alliance, the National Front, vigorously
campaigned on "removing corruption and restoring the dignity of
national institutions," as did another opposition party, Janata
Dal. Rajiv and his party won more seats in the election than any other
party, but, being unable to form a government with a clear majority or a
mandate, he resigned on November 29. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by
Sri Lankan terrorists on May 21, 1991, near Madras. The Gandhi era, as
future events would prove, was over, at least for the near term.
India - Geography and Demographics
Principal Regions
India's total land mass is 2,973,190 square kilometers and is divided
into three main geological regions: the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the
Himalayas, and the Peninsula region (see fig. 5). The Indo-Gangetic
Plain and those portions of the Himalayas within India are collectively
known as North India. South India consists of the peninsular region,
often termed simply the Peninsula. On the basis of its physiography,
India is divided into ten regions: the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the northern
mountains of the Himalayas, the Central Highlands, the Deccan or
Peninsular Plateau, the East Coast (Coromandel Coast in the south), the
West Coast (Konkan, Kankara, and Malabar coasts), the Great Indian
Desert (a geographic feature known as the Thar Desert in Pakistan) and
the Rann of Kutch, the valley of the Brahmaputra in Assam, the
northeastern hill ranges surrounding the Assam Valley, and the islands
of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
Indo-Gangetic Plain
In social and economic terms, the Indo-Gangetic Plain is the most
important region of India. The plain is a great alluvial crescent
stretching from the Indus River system in Pakistan to the Punjab Plain
(in both Pakistan and India) and the Haryana Plain to the delta of the
Ganga (or Ganges) in Bangladesh (where it is called the Padma).
Topographically the plain is homogeneous, with only floodplain bluffs
and other related features of river erosion and changes in river
channels forming important natural features.
Two narrow terrain belts, collectively known as the Terai, constitute
the northern boundary of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Where the foothills of
the Himalayas encounter the plain, small hills known locally as ghar
(meaning house in Hindi) have been formed by coarse sands and pebbles
deposited by mountain streams. Groundwater from these areas flows on the
surface where the plains begin and converts large areas along the rivers
into swamps. The southern boundary of the plain begins along the edge of
the Great Indian Desert in the state of Rajasthan and continues east
along the base of the hills of the Central Highlands to the Bay of
Bengal (see fig. 1). The hills, varying in elevation from 300 to 1,200
meters, lie on a general east-west axis. The Central Highlands are
divided into northern and southern parts. The northern part is centered
on the Aravalli Range of eastern Rajasthan. In the northern part of the
state of Madhya Pradesh, the Malwa Plateau comprises the southern part
of the Central Highlands and merges with the Vindhya Range to the south.
The main rivers that flow through the southern part of the plain--the
Narmada, the Tapti, and the Mahanadi--delineate North India from South
India (see Rivers, this ch.).
Some geographers subdivide the Indo-Gangetic Plain into three parts:
the Indus Valley (mostly in Pakistan), the Punjab (divided between India
and Pakistan) and Haryana plains, and the middle and lower Ganga. These
regional distinctions are based primarily on the availability of water.
By another definition, the Indo-Gangetic Plain is divided into two
drainage basins by the Delhi Ridge; the western part consists of the
Punjab Plain and the Haryana Plain, and the eastern part consists of the
Ganga-Brahmaputra drainage systems. This divide is only 300 meters above
sea level, contributing to the perception that the Indo-Gangetic Plain
appears to be continuous between the two drainage basins. The Punjab
Plain is centered in the land between five rivers: the Jhelum, the
Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej. (The name Punjab
comes from the Sanskrit pancha ab , meaning five waters or
rivers.)
Both the Punjab and Haryana plains are irrigated with water from the
Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej rivers. The irrigation projects emanating from
these rivers have led to a decrease in the flow of water reaching the
lower drainage areas in the state of Punjab in India and the Indus
Valley in Pakistan. The benefits that increased irrigation has brought
to farmers in the state of Haryana are controversial in light of the
effects that irrigation has had on agricultural life in the Punjab areas
of both India and Pakistan.
The middle Ganga extends from the Yamuna River in the west to the
state of West Bengal in the east. The lower Ganga and the Assam Valley
are more lush and verdant than the middle Ganga. The lower Ganga is
centered in West Bengal from which it flows into Bangladesh and, after
joining the Jamuna (as the lower reaches of the Brahmaputra are known in
Bangladesh), forms the delta of the Ganga. The Brahmaputra (meaning son
of Brahma) rises in Tibet (China's Xizang Autonomous Region) as the
Yarlung Zangbo River, flows through Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, and
then crosses into Bangladesh. Average annual rainfall increases moving
west to east from approximately 600 millimeters in the Punjab Plain to
1,500 millimeters around the lower Ganga and Brahmaputra.
The Himalayas
The Himalayas, the highest mountain range in the world, extend along
the northern frontiers of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma.
They were formed geologically as a result of the collision of the Indian
subcontinent with Asia. This process of plate tectonics is ongoing, and
the gradual northward drift of the Indian subcontinent still causes
earthquakes (see Earthquakes, this ch.). Lesser ranges jut southward
from the main body of the Himalayas at both the eastern and western
ends. The Himalayan system, about 2,400 kilometers in length and varying
in width from 240 to 330 kilometers, is made up of three parallel
ranges--the Greater Himalayas, the Lesser Himalayas, and the Outer
Himalayas--sometimes collectively called the Great Himalayan Range. The
Greater Himalayas, or northern range, average approximately 6,000 meters
in height and contain the three highest mountains on earth: Mount
Everest (8,796 meters) on the China-Nepal border; K2 (8,611 meters, also
known as Mount Godwin-Austen, and in China as Qogir Feng) in an area
claimed by India, Pakistan, and China; and Kanchenjunga (8,598 meters)
on the India-Nepal border. Many major mountains are located entirely
within India, such as Nanda Devi (7,817 meters) in the state of Uttar
Pradesh. The snow line averages 4,500 to 6,000 meters on the southern
side of the Greater Himalayas and 5,500 to 6,000 on the northern side.
Because of climatic conditions, the snow line in the eastern Himalayas
averages 4,300 meters, while in the western Himalayas it averages 5,800
meters.
The Lesser Himalayas, located in northwestern India in the states of
Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India in the state
of Sikkim, and in northeastern India in the state of Arunachal Pradesh,
range from 1,500 to 5,000 meters in height. Located in the Lesser
Himalayas are the hill stations of Shimla (Simla) and Darjiling
(Darjeeling). During the colonial period, these and other hill stations
were used by the British as summer retreats to escape the intense heat
of the plains. It is in this transitional vegetation zone that the
contrasts between the bare southern slopes and the forested northern
slopes become most noticeable.
The Outer or Southern Himalayas, averaging 900 to 1,200 meters in
elevation, lie between the Lesser Himalayas and the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
In Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, this southernmost range is often
referred to as the Siwalik Hills. It is possible to identify a fourth,
and northernmost range, known as the Trans-Himalaya. This range is
located entirely on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, north of the great
west-to-east trending valley of the Yarlung Zangbo River. Although the
Trans-Himalaya Range is divided from the Great Himalayan Range for most
of its length, it merges with the Great Himalayan Range in the western
section--the Karakoram Range--where India, Pakistan, and China meet.
The southern slopes of each of the Himalayan ranges are too steep to
accumulate snow or support much tree life; the northern slopes generally
are forested below the snow line. Between the ranges are extensive high
plateaus, deep gorges, and fertile valleys, such as the vales of Kashmir
and Kulu. The Himalayas serve a very important purpose. They provide a
physical screen within which the monsoon system operates and are the
source of the great river systems that water the alluvial plains below
(see Climate, this ch.). As a result of erosion, the rivers coming from
the mountains carry vast quantities of silt that enrich the plains.
The area of northeastern India adjacent to Burma and Bangladesh
consists of numerous hill tracts, averaging between 1,000 and 2,000
meters in elevation, that are not associated with the eastern part of
the Himalayas in Arunachal Pradesh. The Naga Hills, rising to heights of
more than 3,000 meters, form the watershed between India and Burma. The
Mizo Hills are the southern part of the northeastern ranges in India.
The Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia hills are centered in the state of
Meghalaya and, isolated from the northeastern ranges, divide the Assam
Valley from Bangladesh to the south and west.
The Peninsula
The Peninsula proper is an old, geologically stable region with an
average elevation between 300 and 1,800 meters. The Vindhya Range
constitutes the main dividing line between the geological regions of the
Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Peninsula. This range lies north of the
Narmada River, and when viewed from there, it is possible to discern the
prominent escarpments that rise between 800 and 1,400 meters. The
Vindhya Range defines the north-central and northwestern boundary of the
Peninsula, and the Chota Nagpur Plateau of southern Bihar forms the
northeastern boundary. The uplifting of the plateau of the central
Peninsula and its eastward tilt formed the Western Ghats, a line of
hills running from the Tapti River south to the tip of the Peninsula.
The Eastern Ghats mark the eastern end of the plateau; they begin in the
hills of the Mahanadi River basin and converge with the Western Ghats at
the Peninsula's southern tip.
The interior of the Peninsula, south of the Narmada River, often
termed the Deccan Plateau or simply the Deccan (from the Sanskrit daksina
, meaning south), is a series of plateaus topped by rolling hills and
intersected by many rivers. The plateau averages roughly 300 to 750
meters in elevation. Its major rivers--the Godavari, the Krishna, and
the Kaveri--rise in the Western Ghats and flow eastward into the Bay of
Bengal.
The coastal plain borders the plateau. On the northwestern side, it
is characterized by tidal marshes, drowned valleys, and estuaries; and
in the south by lagoons, marshes, and beach ridges. Coastal plains on
the eastern side are wider than those in the west; they are focused on
large river deltas that serve as the centers of human settlement.
Offshore Islands
India's offshore islands, constituting roughly one-quarter of 1
percent of the nation's territory, lie in two groups located off the
east and west coasts. The northernmost point of the union territory of
the Andaman and Nicobar Islands lies 1,100 kilometers southeast of
Calcutta. Situated in the Bay of Bengal in a chain stretching some 800
kilometers, the Andaman Islands comprise 204 islands and islets, and
their topography is characterized by hills and narrow valleys. Although
their location is tropical, the climate of the islands is tempered by
sea breezes; rainfall is irregular. The Nicobar Islands, which are south
of the Andaman Islands, comprise nineteen islands, some with flat,
coral-covered surfaces and others with hills. The islands have a nearly
equatorial climate, heavy rainfall, and high temperatures. The union
territory of Lakshadweep (the name means 100,000 islands) in the Arabian
Sea, comprises--from north to south--the Amindivi, Laccadive, Cannanore,
and Minicoy islands. The islands, only ten of which are inhabited, are
spread throughout an area of approximately 77,000 square kilometers. The
islands are low-lying coral-based formations capable of limited
cultivation.
<>Coasts and Borders
India has 7,000 kilometers of seacoast and shares 14,000 kilometers
of land frontier with six nations: Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan,
Bangladesh, and Burma. India claims a twelve-nautical-mile territorial
sea and an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles. The
territorial seas total 314,400 square kilometers.
In the mid-1990s, India had boundary disagreements with Pakistan,
China, and Bangladesh; border distances are therefore approximations.
The partition of India in 1947 established two India-Pakistan frontiers:
one on the west and one on the east (East Pakistan became Bangladesh in
1971).
Disputes over the state of Jammu and Kashmir led to hostilities
between India and Pakistan in 1947. The January 1, 1949, cease-fire
arranged by the United Nations (UN) divided control of Kashmir. India
controls Jammu, the Vale of Kashmir, and the capital, Srinagar, while
Pakistan controls the mountainous area to the northwest. Neither side
accepts a divided Kashmir as a permanent solution. India regards as
illegal the 1963 China-Pakistan border agreement, which ceded to China a
portion of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The two sides also dispute the
Siachen Glacier near the Karakoram Pass. Further India-Pakistan
hostilities in the 1965 war were settled through the Soviet-brokered
Tashkent Declaration.
In 1968 an international tribunal settled the dispute over the Rann
of Kutch, a region of salt flats that is submerged for six months of the
year in the state of Gujarat. The following year, a new border was
demarcated that recognized Pakistan's claim to about 10 percent of the
area.
In 1992 India completed fencing most of the 547-kilometer-long
section of the boundary between the Indian state of Punjab and the
Pakistani province of Punjab. This measure was undertaken because of the
continuing unrest in the region caused by both ethnic and religious
disputes among the local Indian population and infiltrators from both
sides of the frontier. The more rugged terrain north of Punjab along the
entire cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir
continues to be subject to infiltration and local strife (see Political
Issues, ch. 8; South Asia, ch. 9; Insurgent Movements and External
Subversion, ch. 10).
The 2,000-kilometer-long border with China has eastern, central, and
western sections. In the western section, the border regions of Jammu
and Kashmir have been the scene of conflicting claims since the
nineteenth century. China has not accepted India's definitions of the
boundary and has carried out defense and economic activities in parts of
eastern Kashmir since the 1950s. In the 1960s, China finished
construction of a motor road across Aksai Chin (a region under dispute
between India and China), the main transportation route linking China's
Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region and Tibet.
In the eastern section, the China-India boundary follows the McMahon
Line laid down in 1914 by Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, the British
plenipotentiary to a conference of Indian, British, and Chinese
representatives at Simla (now known as Shimla, Himachal Pradesh). The
Simla Convention, as the agreement is known, set the boundary between
India and Tibet. Although the British and Tibetan representatives signed
the agreement on July 3, 1914, the Chinese delegate declined to sign.
The line agreed to by Britain and Tibet generally follows the crest of
the eastern Himalayas from Bhutan to Burma. It serves as a legal
boundary, although the Chinese have never formally accepted it. China
continued to claim roughly the entire area of Arunachal Pradesh south of
the McMahon Line in the early 1990s. In 1962 China and India fought a
brief border war in this region, and China occupied certain areas south
of the line for several months (see Nehru's Legacy, ch 1; The Experience
of Wars, ch. 10). India and China took a major step toward resolving
their border disputes in 1981 by opening negotiations on the issue.
Agreements and talks held in 1993 and 1995 eased tensions along the
India-China border (see China, ch. 9). Sikkim, which became an Indian
state in 1975, forms the small central section of India's northern
border and lies between Nepal and Bhutan.
India's border with Bangladesh is essentially the same as it was
before East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971. Some minor disputes
continued to occur over the size and number of the numerous enclaves
each country had on either side of the border. These enclaves were
established during the period from 1661 to 1712 during fighting between
the Mughal Empire and the principality of Cooch Behar. This complex
pattern of enclaves was preserved by the British administration and
passed on intact to India and Pakistan.
The 1,300-kilometer frontier with Burma has been delimited but not
completely demarcated. On March 10, 1967, the Indian and Burmese
governments signed a bilateral treaty delimiting the boundary in detail.
India also has a maritime boundary with Burma in the area of the
northern Andaman Islands and Burma's Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
India's borders with Nepal and Bhutan have remained unchanged since the
days of British rule. In 1977 India signed an accord with Indonesia
demarcating the entire maritime boundary between the two countries. One
year earlier, a similar accord was signed with the Maldives.
India - Rivers
The country's rivers are classified as Himalayan, peninsular,
coastal, and inland-drainage basin rivers. Himalayan rivers are snow fed
and maintain a high to medium rate of flow throughout the year. The
heavy annual average rainfall levels in the Himalayan catchment areas
further add to their rates of flow. During the monsoon months of June to
September, the catchment areas are prone to flooding. The volume of the
rain-fed peninsular rivers also increases. Coastal streams, especially
in the west, are short and episodic. Rivers of the inland system,
centered in western Rajasthan state, are few and frequently disappear in
years of scant rainfall. The majority of the South Asia's major rivers
flow through broad, shallow valleys and drain into the Bay of Bengal.
The Ganga River basin, India's largest, includes approximately 25
percent of the nation's area; it is bounded by the Himalayas in the
north and the Vindhya Range to the south. The Ganga has its source in
the glaciers of the Greater Himalayas, which form the frontier between
India and Tibet in northwestern Uttar Pradesh. Many Indians believe that
the legendary source of the Ganga, and several other important Asian
rivers, lies in the sacred Mapam Yumco Lake (known to the Indians as
Manasarowar Lake) of western Tibet located approximately 75 kilometers
northeast of the India-China-Nepal tripoint. In the northern part of the
Ganga River basin, practically all of the tributaries of the Ganga are
perennial streams. However, in the southern part, located in the states
of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, many of the tributaries are not
perennial.
The Brahmaputra has the greatest volume of water of all the rivers in
India because of heavy annual rainfall levels in its catchment basin. At
Dibrugarh the annual rainfall averages 2,800 millimeters, and at
Shillong it averages 2,430 millimeters. Rising in Tibet, the Brahmaputra
flows south into Arunachal Pradesh after breaking through the Great
Himalayan Range and dropping rapidly in elevation. It continues to fall
through gorges impassable by man in Arunachal Pradesh until finally
entering the Assam Valley where it meanders westward on its way to
joining the Ganga in Bangladesh.
The Mahanadi, rising in the state of Madhya Pradesh, is an important
river in the state of Orissa. In the upper drainage basin of the
Mahanadi, which is centered on the Chhattisgarh Plain, periodic droughts
contrast with the situation in the delta region where floods may damage
the crops in what is known as the rice bowl of Orissa. Hirakud Dam,
constructed in the middle reaches of the Mahanadi, has helped in
alleviating these adverse effects by creating a reservoir.
The source of the Godavari is northeast of Bombay (Mumbai in the
local Marathi language) in the state of Maharashtra, and the river
follows a southeasterly course for 1,400 kilometers to its mouth on the
Andhra Pradesh coast. The Godavari River basin area is second in size
only to the Ganga; its delta on the east coast is also one of the
country's main rice-growing areas. It is known as the "Ganga of the
South," but its discharge, despite the large catchment area, is
moderate because of the medium levels of annual rainfall, for example,
about 700 millimeters at Nasik and 1,000 millimeters at Nizamabad.
The Krishna rises in the Western Ghats and flows east into the Bay of
Bengal. It has a poor flow because of low levels of rainfall in its
catchment area--660 millimeters annually at Pune. Despite its low
discharge, the Krishna is the third longest river in India.
The source of the Kaveri is in the state of Karnataka, and the river
flows southeastward. The waters of the river have been a source of
irrigation since antiquity; in the early 1990s, an estimated 95 percent
of the Kaveri was diverted for agricultural use before emptying into the
Bay of Bengal. The delta of the Kaveri is so mature that the main river
has almost lost its link with the sea, as the Kollidam, the distributary
of the Kaveri, bears most of the flow.
The Narmada and the Tapti are the only major rivers that flow into
the Arabian Sea. The Narmada rises in Madhya Pradesh and crosses the
state, passing swiftly through a narrow valley between the Vindhya Range
and spurs of the Satpura Range. It flows into the Gulf of Khambhat (or
Cambay). The shorter Tapti follows a generally parallel course, between
eighty kilometers and 160 kilometers to the south of the Narmada,
flowing through the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat on its way into
the Gulf of Khambhat.
Harnessing the waters of the major rivers that flow from the
Himalayas is an issue of great concern in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh.
Issues of flood control, drought prevention, hydroelectric power
generation, job creation, and environmental quality--but also
traditional lifestyles and cultural continuities--are at stake as these
countries grapple with the political realities, both domestic and
international, of altering the flow of the Ganga and Brahmaputra.
Although India, Nepal, and Bangladesh seek to alleviate problems through
cooperation over Himalayan rivers, irrigation projects altering the flow
of Punjab-area rivers are likely to continue to be an irritant between
India and Pakistan--countries between which cooperation is less likely
to occur--in the second half of the 1990s. Internally, large dam
projects, such as one on the Narmada River, are also controversial (see
Development Programs, ch. 7).
India - Climate
The Himalayas isolate South Asia from the rest of Asia. South of
these mountains, the climate, like the terrain, is highly diverse, but
some geographers give it an overall, one-word characterization--violent.
What geographers have in mind is the abruptness of change and the
intensity of effect when change occurs--the onset of the monsoon rains,
sudden flooding, rapid erosion, extremes of temperature, tropical
storms, and unpredictable fluctuations in rainfall. Broadly speaking,
agriculture in India is constantly challenged by weather uncertainty.
It is possible to identify seasons, although these do not occur
uniformly throughout South Asia. The Indian Meteorological Service
divides the year into four seasons: the relatively dry, cool winter from
December through February; the dry, hot summer from March through May;
the southwest monsoon from June through September when the predominating
southwest maritime winds bring rains to most of the country; and the
northeast, or retreating, monsoon of October and November.
The southwest monsoon blows in from sea to land. The southwest
monsoon usually breaks on the west coast early in June and reaches most
of South Asia by the first week in July (see fig. 6). Because of the
critical importance of monsoon rainfall to agricultural production,
predictions of the monsoon's arrival date are eagerly watched by
government planners and agronomists who need to determine the optimal
dates for plantings.
Theories about why monsoons occur vary. Conventionally, scientists
have attributed monsoons to thermal changes in the Asian landmass.
Contemporary theory cites other factors--the barrier of the Himalayas
and the sun's northward tilt (which shifts the jet stream north). The
hot air that rises over South Asia during April and May creates
low-pressure areas into which the cooler, moisture-bearing winds from
the Indian Ocean flow.These circumstances set off a rush of
moisture-rich air from the southern seas over South Asia.
The southwest monsoon occurs in two branches. After breaking on the
southern part of the Peninsula in early June, the branch known as the
Arabian Sea monsoon reaches Bombay around June 10, and it has settled
over most of South Asia by late June, bringing cooler but more humid
weather. The other branch, known as the Bay of Bengal monsoon, moves
northward in the Bay of Bengal and spreads over most of Assam by the
first week of June. On encountering the barrier of the Great Himalayan
Range, it is deflected westward along the Indo-Gangetic Plain toward New
Delhi. Thereafter the two branches merge as a single current bringing
rains to the remaining parts of North India in July.
The withdrawal of the monsoon is a far more gradual process than its
onset. It usually withdraws from northwest India by the beginning of
October and from the remaining parts of the country by the end of
November. During this period, the northeast winds contribute to the
formation of the northeast monsoon over the southern half of the
Peninsula in October. It is also known as the retreating monsoon because
it follows in the wake of the southwest monsoon. The states of Tamil
Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala receive most of their rainfall from the
northeast monsoon during November and December. However, 80 percent of
the country receives most of its rainfall from the southwest monsoon
from June to September.
South Asia is subject to a wide range of climates--from the
subfreezing Himalayan winters to the tropical climate of the Coromandel
Coast and from the damp, rainy climate in the states of Assam and West
Bengal to the arid Great Indian Desert. Based on precipitation and
temperature, experts define seven climatic regions: the Himalayas, Assam
and West Bengal, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the Western Ghats and coast,
the Deccan (the interior of the Peninsula south of the Narmada River),
and the Eastern Ghats and coast (see fig. 7).
In the Himalayan region, climate varies with altitude. At about 2,000
meters, the average summer temperature is near 18°C; at 4,500 meters,
it is rarely above 0°C. In the valleys, summer temperatures reach
between 32°C and 38°C. The eastern Himalayas receive as much as 1,000
to 2,000 millimeters more precipitation than do the Western Himalayas,
and floods are common.
Assam and West Bengal are extremely wet and humid. The southeastern
part of the state of Meghalaya has the world's highest average annual
rainfall, some 10,900 millimeters.
The Indo-Gangetic Plain has a varied climatic pattern. Rainfall and
temperature ranges vary significantly between the eastern and western
extremes (see table 2, Appendix). In the Peninsula region, the Western
Ghats and the adjoining coast receive heavy rains during the southwest
monsoon. Rainfall in the peninsular interior averages about 650
millimeters a year, although there is considerable variation in
different localities and from year to year. The Eastern Ghats receive
less rainfall than the western coast. Rainfall there ranges between 900
and 1,300 millimeters annually.
The northern Deccan region, bounded by the Western Ghats, the Vindhya
Range and the Narmada River to the north, and the Eastern Ghats,
receives most of its annual rainfall during the summer monsoon season.
The southern Deccan area is in a "rain shadow" and receives
only fifty to 1,000 millimeters of rainfall a year. Temperature ranges
are wide--from some 15°C to 38°C--making this one of India's most
comfortable climatic areas.
Throughout most of non-Himalayan India, the heat can be oppressive
and sometimes, such as was experienced in 1994 and 1995, literally can
be a killer. Hot, relatively dry weather is the norm before the
southwest monsoons, which, along with heavy rains and high humidity,
bring cloud cover that lowers temperatures slightly. Temperatures reach
the upper 30s°C and can reach as high as 48°C during the day in the
premonsoon months.
India - Earthquakes
The 1991 final census count gave India a total population of
846,302,688. However, estimates of India's population vary widely.
According to the Population Division of the United Nations Department of
International Economic and Social Affairs, the population had already
reached 866 million in 1991. The Population Division of the United
Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
projected 896.5 million by mid-1993 with a 1.9 percent annual growth
rate. The United States Bureau of the Census, assuming an annual
population growth rate of 1.8 percent, put India's population in July
1995 at 936,545,814. These higher projections merit attention in light
of the fact that the Planning Commission had estimated a figure of 844
million for 1991 while preparing the Eighth Five-Year Plan (FY 1992-96;
see Population Projections, this ch.).
India accounts for some 2.4 percent of the world's landmass but is
home to about 16 percent of the global population. The magnitude of the
annual increase in population can be seen in the fact that India adds
almost the total population of Australia or Sri Lanka every year. A 1992
study of India's population notes that India has more people than all of
Africa and also more than North America and South America together.
Between 1947 and 1991, India's population more than doubled.
Throughout the twentieth century, India has been in the midst of a
demographic transition. At the beginning of the century, endemic
disease, periodic epidemics, and famines kept the death rate high enough
to balance out the high birth rate. Between 1911 and 1920, the birth and
death rates were virtually equal--about forty-eight births and
forty-eight deaths per 1,000 population. The increasing impact of
curative and preventive medicine (especially mass inoculations) brought
a steady decline in the death rate. By the mid-1990s, the estimated
birth rate had fallen to twenty-eight per 1,000, and the estimated death
rate had fallen to ten per 1,000. Clearly, the future configuration of
India's population (indeed the future of India itself) depends on what
happens to the birth rate (see fig. 8). Even the most optimistic
projections do not suggest that the birth rate could drop below twenty
per 1,000 before the year 2000. India's population is likely to exceed
the 1 billion mark before the 2001 census.
The upward population spiral began in the 1920s and is reflected in
intercensal growth increments. South Asia's population increased roughly
5 percent between 1901 and 1911 and actually declined slightly in the
next decade. Population increased some 10 percent in the period from
1921 to 1931 and 13 to 14 percent in the 1930s and 1940s. Between 1951
and 1961, the population rose 21.5 percent. Between 1961 and 1971, the
country's population increased by 24.8 percent. Thereafter a slight
slowing of the increase was experienced: from 1971 to 1981, the
population increased by 24.7 percent, and from 1981 to 1991, by 23.9
percent (see table 3, Appendix).
Population density has risen concomitantly with the massive increases
in population. In 1901 India counted some seventy-seven persons per
square kilometer; in 1981 there were 216 persons per square kilometer;
by 1991 there were 267 persons per square kilometer--up almost 25
percent from the 1981 population density (see table 4, Appendix).
India's average population density is higher than that of any other
nation of comparable size. The highest densities are not only in heavily
urbanized regions but also in areas that are mostly agricultural.
Population growth in the years between 1950 and 1970 centered on
areas of new irrigation projects, areas subject to refugee resettlement,
and regions of urban expansion. Areas where population did not increase
at a rate approaching the national average were those facing the most
severe economic hardships, overpopulated rural areas, and regions with
low levels of urbanization.
The 1991 census, which was carried out under the direction of the
Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (part of the Ministry
of Home Affairs), in keeping with the previous two censuses, used the
term urban agglomerations . An urban agglomeration forms a
continuous urban spread and consists of a city or town and its urban
outgrowth outside the statutory limits. Or, an urban agglomerate may be
two or more adjoining cities or towns and their outgrowths. A university
campus or military base located on the outskirts of a city or town,
which often increases the actual urban area of that city or town, is an
example of an urban agglomeration. In India urban agglomerations with a
population of 1 million or more--there were twenty-four in 1991--are
referred to as metropolitan areas. Places with a population of 100,000
or more are termed "cities" as compared with
"towns," which have a population of less than 100,000.
Including the metropolitan areas, there were 299 urban agglomerations
with more than 100,000 population in 1991. These large urban
agglomerations are designated as Class I urban units. There were five
other classes of urban agglomerations, towns, and villages based on the
size of their populations: Class II (50,000 to 99,999), Class III
(20,000 to 49,999), Class IV (10,000 to 19,999), Class V (5,000 to
9,999), and Class VI (villages of less than 5,000; see table 5,
Appendix).
The results of the 1991 census revealed that around 221 million, or
26.1 percent, of Indian's population lived in urban areas. Of this
total, about 138 million people, or 16 percent, lived in the 299 urban
agglomerations. In 1991 the twenty-four metropolitan cities accounted
for 51 percent of India's total population living in Class I urban
centers, with Bombay and Calcutta the largest at 12.6 million and 10.9
million, respectively (see table 6, Appendix).
In the early 1990s, growth was the most dramatic in the cities of
central and southern India. About twenty cities in those two regions
experienced a growth rate of more than 100 percent between 1981 and
1991. Areas subject to an influx of refugees also experienced noticeable
demographic changes. Refugees from Bangladesh, Burma, and Sri Lanka
contributed substantially to population growth in the regions in which
they settled. Less dramatic population increases occurred in areas where
Tibetan refugee settlements were founded after the Chinese annexation of
Tibet in the 1950s.
The majority of districts had urban populations ranging on average
from 15 to 40 percent in 1991. According to the 1991 census, urban
clusters predominated in the upper part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain; in
the Punjab and Haryana plains, and in part of western Uttar Pradesh. The
lower part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain in southeastern Bihar, southern
West Bengal, and northern Orissa also experienced increased
urbanization. Similar increases occurred in the western coastal state of
Gujarat and the union territory of Daman and Diu. In the Central
Highlands in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, urbanization was most
noticeable in the river basins and adjacent plateau regions of the
Mahanadi, Narmada, and Tapti rivers. The coastal plains and river deltas
of the east and west coasts also showed increased levels of
urbanization.
The hilly, inaccessible regions of the Peninsular Plateau, the
northeast, and the Himalayas remain sparsely settled. As a general rule,
the lower the population density and the more remote the region, the
more likely it is to count a substantial portion of tribal (see
Glossary) people among its population (see Tribes, ch. 4). Urbanization
in some sparsely settled regions is more developed than would seem
warranted at first glance at their limited natural resources. Areas of
western India that were formerly princely states (in Gujarat and the
desert regions of Rajasthan) have substantial urban centers that
originated as political-administrative centers and since independence
have continued to exercise hegemony over their hinterlands.
The vast majority of Indians, nearly 625 million, or 73.9 percent, in
1991 lived in what are called villages of less than 5,000 people or in
scattered hamlets and other rural settlements (see The Village
Community, ch. 5). The states with proportionately the greatest rural
populations in 1991 were the states of Assam (88.9 percent), Sikkim
(90.9 percent) and Himachal Pradesh (91.3 percent), and the tiny union
territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli (91.5 percent). Those with the
smallest rural populations proportionately were the states of Gujarat
(65.5 percent), Maharashtra (61.3 percent), Goa (58.9 percent), and
Mizoram (53.9 percent). Most of the other states and the union territory
of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were near the national average.
Two other categories of population that are closely scrutinized by
the national census are the Scheduled Castes (see Glossary) and
Scheduled Tribes (see Glossary). The greatest concentrations of
Scheduled Caste members in 1991 lived in the states of Andhra Pradesh
(10.5 million, or nearly 16 percent of the state's population), Tamil
Nadu (10.7 million, or 19 percent), Bihar (12.5 million, or 14 percent),
West Bengal (16 million, or 24 percent), and Uttar Pradesh (29.3
million, or 21 percent). Together, these and other Scheduled Caste
members comprised about 139 million people, or more than 16 percent of
the total population of India. Scheduled Tribe members represented only
8 percent of the total population (about 68 million). They were found in
1991 in the greatest numbers in Orissa (7 million, or 23 percent of the
state's population), Maharashtra (7.3 million, or 9 percent), and Madhya
Pradesh (15.3 million, or 23 percent). In proportion, however, the
populations of states in the northeast had the greatest concentrations
of Scheduled Tribe members. For example, 31 percent of the population of
Tripura, 34 percent of Manipur, 64 percent of Arunachal Pradesh, 86
percent of Meghalaya, 88 percent of Nagaland, and 95 percent of Mizoram
were Scheduled Tribe members. Other heavy concentrations were found in
Dadra and Nagar Haveli, 79 percent of which was composed of Scheduled
Tribe members, and Lakshadweep, with 94 percent of its population being
Scheduled Tribe members.
<>Population
Projections
Population growth has long been a concern of the government, and
India has a lengthy history of explicit population policy. In the 1950s,
the government began, in a modest way, one of the earliest national,
government-sponsored family planning efforts in the developing world.
The annual population growth rate in the previous decade (1941 to 1951)
had been below 1.3 percent, and government planners optimistically
believed that the population would continue to grow at roughly the same
rate.
Implicitly, the government believed that India could repeat the
experience of the developed nations where industrialization and a rise
in the standard of living had been accompanied by a drop in the
population growth rate. In the 1950s, existing hospitals and health care
facilities made birth control information available, but there was no
aggressive effort to encourage the use of contraceptives and limitation
of family size. By the late 1960s, many policy makers believed that the
high rate of population growth was the greatest obstacle to economic
development. The government began a massive program to lower the birth
rate from forty-one per 1,000 to a target of twenty to twenty-five per
1,000 by the mid-1970s. The National Population Policy adopted in 1976
reflected the growing consensus among policy makers that family planning
would enjoy only limited success unless it was part of an integrated
program aimed at improving the general welfare of the population. The
policy makers assumed that excessive family size was part and parcel of
poverty and had to be dealt with as integral to a general development
strategy. Education about the population problem became part of school
curriculum under the Fifth Five-Year Plan (FY 1974-78). Cases of
government-enforced sterilization made many question the propriety of
state-sponsored birth control measures, however.
During the 1980s, an increased number of family planning programs
were implemented through the state governments with financial assistance
from the central government. In rural areas, the programs were further
extended through a network of primary health centers and subcenters. By
1991, India had more than 150,000 public health facilities through which
family planning programs were offered (see Health Care, this ch.). Four
special family planning projects were implemented under the Seventh
Five-Year Plan (FY 1985-89). One was the All-India Hospitals Post-partum
Programme at district- and subdistrict-level hospitals. Another program
involved the reorganization of primary health care facilities in urban
slum areas, while another project reserved a specified number of
hospital beds for tubal ligature operations. The final program called
for the renovation or remodelling of intrauterine device (IUD) rooms in
rural family welfare centers attached to primary health care facilities.
Despite these developments in promoting family planning, the 1991
census results showed that India continued to have one of the most
rapidly growing populations in the world. Between 1981 and 1991, the
annual rate of population growth was estimated at about 2 percent. The
crude birth rate in 1992 was thirty per 1,000, only a small change over
the 1981 level of thirty-four per 1,000. However, some demographers
credit this slight lowering of the 1981-91 population growth rate to
moderate successes of the family planning program. In FY 1986, the
number of reproductive-age couples was 132.6 million, of whom only 37.5
percent were estimated to be protected effectively by some form of
contraception. A goal of the seventh plan was to achieve an effective
couple protection rate of 42 percent, requiring an annual increase of 2
percent in effective use of contraceptives.
The heavy centralization of India's family planning programs often
prevents due consideration from being given to regional differences.
Centralization is encouraged to a large extent by reliance on central
government funding. As a result, many of the goals and assumptions of
national population control programs do not correspond exactly with
local attitudes toward birth control. At the Jamkhed Project in
Maharashtra, which has been in operation since the late 1970s and covers
approximately 175 villages, the local project directors noted that it
required three to four years of education through direct contact with a
couple for the idea of family planning to gain acceptance. Such a
timetable was not compatible with targets. However, much was learned
about policy and practice from the Jamkhed Project. The successful use
of women's clubs as a means of involving women in community-wide family
planning activities impressed the state government to the degree that it
set about organizing such clubs in every village in the state. The
project also serves as a pilot to test ideas that the government wants
to incorporate into its programs. Government medical staff members have
been sent to Jamkhed for training, and the government has proposed that
the project assume the task of selecting and training government health
workers for an area of 2.5 million people.
Another important family planning program is the Project for
Community Action in Family Planning. Located in Karnataka, the project
operates in 154 project villages and 255 control villages. All project
villages are of sufficient size to have a health subcenter, although
this advantage is offset by the fact that those villages are the most
distant from the area's primary health centers. As at Jamkhed, the
project is much assisted by local voluntary groups, such as the women's
clubs. The local voluntary groups either provide or secure sites
suitable as distribution depots for condoms and birth control pills and
also make arrangements for the operation of sterilization camps. Data
provided by the Project for Community Action in Family Planning show
that important achievements have been realized in the field of
population control. By the mid-1980s, for example, 43 percent of couples
were using family planning, a full 14 percent above the state average.
The project has significantly improved the status of women, involving
them and empowering them to bring about change in their communities.
This contribution is important because of the way in which the deeply
entrenched inferior status of women in many communities in India negates
official efforts to decrease the fertility rate.
Studies have found that most couples in fact regard family planning
positively. However, the common fertility pattern in India diverges from
the two-child family that policy makers hold as ideal. Women continue to
marry young; in the mid-1990s, they average just over eighteen years of
age at marriage. When women choose to be sterilized, financial
inducements, although helpful, are not the principal incentives. On
average, those accepting sterilization already have four living
children, of whom two are sons.
The strong preference for sons is a deeply held cultural ideal based
on economic roots. Sons not only assist with farm labor as they are
growing up (as do daughters) but they provide labor in times of illness
and unemployment and serve as their parents' only security in old age.
Surveys done by the New Delhi Operations Research Group in 1991
indicated that as many as 72 percent of rural parents continue to have
children until at least two sons are born; the preference for more than
one son among urban parents was tabulated at 53 percent. Once these
goals have been achieved, birth control may be used or, especially in
agricultural areas, it may not if additional child labor, later adult
labor for the family, is deemed desirable.
A significant result of this eagerness for sons is that the Indian
population has a deficiency of females. Slightly higher female infant
mortality rates (seventy-nine per 1,000 versus seventy-eight per 1,000
for males) can be attributed to poor health care, abortions of female
fetuses, and female infanticide. Human rights activists have estimated
that there are at least 10,000 cases of female infanticide annually
throughout India. The cost of theoretically illegal dowries and the loss
of daughters to their in-laws' families are further disincentives for
some parents to have daughters. Sons, of course continue to carry on the
family line (see Family Ideals, ch. 5). The 1991 census revealed that
the national sex ratio had declined from 934 females to 1,000 males in
1981 to 927 to 1,000 in 1991. In only one state--Kerala, a state with
low fertility and mortality rates and the nation's highest literacy--did
females exceed males. The census found, however, that female life
expectancy at birth had for the first time exceeded that for males.
India's high infant mortality and elevated mortality in early
childhood remain significant stumbling blocks to population control (see
Health Conditions, this ch.). India's fertility rate is decreasing,
however, and, at 3.4 in 1994, it is lower than those of its immediate
neighbors (Bangladesh had a rate of 4.5 and Pakistan had 6.7). The rate
is projected to decrease to 3.0 by 2000, 2.6 by 2010, and 2.3 by 2020.
During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the growth rate had formed a sort
of plateau. Some states, such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and, to a lesser
extent, Punjab, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, had made progress in
lowering their growth rates, but most did not. Under such conditions,
India's population may not stabilize until 2060.
India.
Life Expectancy and Mortality
The average Indian male born in the 1990s can expect to live 58.5
years; women can expect to live only slightly longer (59.6 years),
according to 1995 estimates. Life expectancy has risen dramatically
throughout the century from a scant twenty years in the 1911-20 period.
Although men enjoyed a slightly longer life expectancy throughout the
first part of the twentieth century, by 1990 women had slightly
surpassed men. The death rate declined from 48.6 per 1,000 in the
1910-20 period to fifteen per 1,000 in the 1970s, and improved
thereafter, reaching ten per 1,000 by 1990, a rate that held steady
through the mid-1990s. India's high infant mortality rate was estimated
to exceed 76 per 1,000 live births in 1995 (see table 7, Appendix).
Thirty percent of infants had low birth weights, and the death rate for
children aged one to four years was around ten per 1,000 of the
population.
According to a 1989 National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau report, less
than 15 percent of the population was adequately nourished, although 96
percent received an adequate number of calories per day. In 1986 daily
average intake was 2,238 calories as compared with 2,630 calories in
China. According to UN findings, caloric intake per day in India had
fallen slightly to 2,229 in 1989, lending credence to the concerns of
some experts who claimed that annual nutritional standards statistics
cannot be relied on to show whether poverty is actually being reduced.
Instead, such studies may actually pick up short-term amelioration of
poverty as the result of a period of good crops rather than a long-term
trend.
Official Indian estimates of the poverty level are based on a
person's income and corresponding access to minimum nutritional needs
(see Growth since 1980, ch. 6). There were 332 million people at or
below the poverty level in FY 1991, most of whom lived in rural areas.
Diseases
A number of endemic communicable diseases present a serious public
health hazard in India. Over the years, the government has set up a
variety of national programs aimed at controlling or eradicating these
diseases, including the National Malaria Eradication Programme and the
National Filaria Control Programme. Other initiatives seek to limit the
incidence of respiratory infections, cholera, diarrheal diseases,
trachoma, goiter, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Smallpox, formerly a significant source of mortality, was eradicated
as part of the worldwide effort to eliminate that disease. India was
declared smallpox-free in 1975. Malaria remains a serious health hazard;
although the incidence of the disease declined sharply in the
postindependence period, India remains one of the most heavily malarial
countries in the world. Only the Himalaya region above 1,500 meters is
spared. In 1965 government sources registered only 150,000 cases, a
notable drop from the 75 million cases in the early postindependence
years. This success was short-lived, however, as the malarial parasites
became increasingly resistant to the insecticides and drugs used to
combat the disease. By the mid-1970s, there were nearly 6.5 million
cases on record. The situation again improved because of more
conscientious efforts; by 1982 the number of cases had fallen by roughly
two-thirds. This downward trend continued, and in 1987 slightly fewer
than 1.7 million cases of malaria were reported.
In the early 1990s, about 389 million people were at risk of
infection from filaria parasites; 19 million showed symptoms of
filariasis, and 25 million were deemed to be hosts to the parasites.
Efforts at control, under the National Filaria Control Programme, which
was established in 1955, have focused on eliminating the filaria larvae
in urban locales, and by the early 1990s there were more than 200
filaria control units in operation.
Leprosy, a major public health and social problem, is endemic, with
all the states and union territories reporting cases. However, the
prevalence of the disease varies. About 3 million leprosy cases are
estimated to exist nationally, of which 15 to 20 percent are infectious.
The National Leprosy Control Programme was started in 1955, but it only
received high priority after 1980. In FY 1982, it was redesignated as
the National Leprosy Eradication Programme. Its goal was to achieve
eradication of the disease by 2000. To that end, 758 leprosy control
units, 900 urban leprosy centers, 291 temporary hospitalization wards,
285 district leprosy units, and some 6,000 lower-level centers had been
established by March 1990. By March 1992, nearly 1.7 million patients
were receiving regular multidrug treatment, which is more effective than
the standard single drug therapy (Dapsone monotherapy).
India is subject to outbreaks of various diseases. Among them is
pneumonic plague, an episode of which spread quickly throughout India in
1994 killing hundreds before being brought under control. Tuberculosis,
trachoma, and goiter are endemic. In the early 1980s, there were an
estimated 10 million cases of tuberculosis, of which about 25 percent
were infectious. During 1991 nearly 1.6 million new tuberculosis cases
were detected. The functions of the Trachoma Control Programme, which
started in 1968, have been subsumed by the National Programme for the
Control of Blindness. Approximately 45 million Indians are
vision-impaired; roughly 12 million are blind. The incidence of goiter
is dominant throughout the sub-Himalayan states from Jammu and Kashmir
to the northeast. There are some 170 million people who are exposed to
iodine deficiency disorders. Starting in the late 1980s, the central
government began a salt iodinization program for all edible salt, and by
1991 record production--2.5 million tons--of iodized salt had been
achieved. There are as well anemias related to poor nutrition, a variety
of diseases caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies--beriberi,
scurvy, osteomalacia, and rickets--and a high incidence of parasitic
infection.
Diarrheal diseases, the primary cause of early childhood mortality,
are linked to inadequate sewage disposal and lack of safe drinking
water. Roughly 50 percent of all illness is attributed to poor
sanitation; in rural areas, about 80 percent of all children are
infected by parasitic worms. Estimates in the early 1980s suggested that
although more than 80 percent of the urban population had access to
reasonably safe water, fewer than 5 percent of rural dwellers did.
Waterborne sewage systems were woefully overburdened; only around 30
percent of urban populations had adequate sewage disposal, but scarcely
any populations outside cities did. In 1990, according to United States
sources, only 3 percent of the rural population and 44 percent of the
urban population had access to sanitation services, a level relatively
low by developing nation standards. There were better findings for
access to potable water: 69 percent in the rural areas and 86 percent in
urban areas, relatively high percentages by developing nation standards.
In the mid-1990s, about 1 million people die each year of diseases
associated with diarrhea.
India has an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million cases of cancer, with
500,000 new cases added each year. Annual deaths from cancer total
around 300,000. The most common malignancies are cancer of the oral
cavity (mostly relating to tobacco use and pan chewing--about 35 percent
of all cases), cervix, and breast. Cardiovascular diseases are a major
health problem; men and women suffer from them in almost equal numbers
(14 million versus 13 million in FY 1990).
AIDS
The incidence of AIDS cases in India is steadily rising amidst
concerns that the nation faces the prospect of an AIDS epidemic. By June
1991, out of a total of more than 900,000 screened, some 5,130 people
tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). However, the
total number infected with HIV in 1992 was estimated by a New
Delhi-based official of the World Health Organization (WHO) at 500,000,
and more pessimistic estimates by the World Bank in 1995 suggested a
figure of 2 million, the highest in Asia. Confirmed cases of AIDS
numbered only 102 by 1991 but had jumped to 885 by 1994, the second
highest reported number in Asia after Thailand. Suspected AIDS cases,
according to WHO and the Indian government, may be in the area of 80,000
in 1995.
The main factors cited in the spread of the virus are heterosexual
transmission, primarily by urban prostitutes and migrant workers, such
as long-distance truck drivers; the use of unsterilized needles and
syringes by physicians and intravenous drug users; and transfusions of
blood from infected donors. Based on the HIV infection rate in 1991, and
India's position as the second most populated country in the world, it
was projected that by 1995 India would have more HIV and AIDS cases than
any other country in the world. This prediction appeared true. By
mid-1995 India had been labeled by the media as "ground zero"
in the global AIDS epidemic, and new predictions for 2000 were that
India would have 1 million AIDS cases and 5 million HIV-positive.
In 1987 the newly formed National AIDS Control Programme began
limited screening of the blood supply and monitoring of high-risk
groups. A national education program aimed at AIDS prevention and
control began in 1990. The first AIDS prevention television campaign
began in 1991. By the mid-1990s, AIDS awareness signs on public streets,
condoms for sale near brothels, and media announcements were more in
evidence. There was very negative publicity as well. Posters with the
names and photographs of known HIV-positive persons have been seen in
New Delhi, and there have been reports of HIV patients chained in
medical facilities and deprived of treatment.
Fear and ignorance have continued to compound the difficulty of
controlling the spread of the virus, and discrimination against AIDS
sufferers has surfaced. For example, in 1990 the All-India Institute of
Medical Sciences, New Delhi's leading medical facility, reportedly
turned away two people infected with HIV because its staff were too
scared to treat them.
A new program to control the spread of AIDS was launched in 1991 by
the Indian Council of Medical Research. The council looked to ancient
scriptures and religious books for traditional messages that preach
moderation in sex and describe prostitution as a sin. The council
considered that the great extent to which Indian life-styles are shaped
by religion rather than by science would cause many people to be
confused by foreign-modeled educational campaigns relying on television
and printed booklets.
The severity of the growing AIDS crisis in India is clear, according
to statistics compiled during the mid-1990s. In Bombay, a city of 12.6
million inhabitants in 1991, the HIV infection rate among the estimated
80,000 prostitutes jumped from 1 percent in 1987 to 30 percent in 1991
to 53 percent in 1993. Migrant workers engaging in promiscuous and
unprotected sexual relations in the big city carry the infection to
other sexual partners on the road and then to their homes and families.
India's blood supply, despite official blood screening efforts,
continues to become infected. In 1991 donated blood was screened for HIV
in only four major cities: New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. One
of the leading factors in the contamination of the blood supply is that
30 percent of the blood required comes from private, profit-making banks
whose practices are difficult to regulate. Furthermore, professional
donors are an integral part of the Indian blood supply network,
providing about 30 percent of the annual requirement nationally. These
donors are generally poor and tend to engage in high-risk sex and use
intravenous drugs more than the general population. Professional donors
also tend to donate frequently at different centers and, in many cases,
under different names. Reuse of improperly sterilized needles in health
care and blood-collection facilities also is a factor. India's minister
of health and family welfare reported in 1992 that only 138 out of 608
blood banks were equipped for HIV screening. A 1992 study conducted by
the Indian Health Organisation revealed that 86 percent of commercial
blood donors surveyed were HIV-positive.
India - Health Care
Role of the Government
The Indian constitution charges the states with "the raising of
the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the
improvement of public health" (see The Constitutional Framework,
ch. 8). However, many critics of India's National Health Policy,
endorsed by Parliament in 1983, point out that the policy lacks specific
measures to achieve broad stated goals. Particular problems include the
failure to integrate health services with wider economic and social
development, the lack of nutritional support and sanitation, and the
poor participatory involvement at the local level.
Central government efforts at influencing public health have focused
on the five-year plans, on coordinated planning with the states, and on
sponsoring major health programs. Government expenditures are jointly
shared by the central and state governments. Goals and strategies are
set through central-state government consultations of the Central
Council of Health and Family Welfare. Central government efforts are
administered by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which
provides both administrative and technical services and manages medical
education. States provide public services and health education.
The 1983 National Health Policy is committed to providing health
services to all by 2000 (see table 8, Appendix; The Legislature, ch. 8).
In 1983 health care expenditures varied greatly among the states and
union territories, from Rs13 per capita in Bihar to Rs60 per capita in
Himachal Pradesh (for value of the rupee--see Glossary), and Indian per
capita expenditure was low when compared with other Asian countries
outside of South Asia. Although government health care spending
progressively grew throughout the 1980s, such spending as a percentage
of the gross national product (GNP--see Glossary) remained fairly
constant. In the meantime, health care spending as a share of total
government spending decreased. During the same period, private-sector
spending on health care was about 1.5 times as much as government
spending.
Expenditures
In the mid-1990s, health spending amounts to 6 percent of GDP, one of
the highest levels among developing nations. The established per capita
spending is around Rs320 per year with the major input from private
households (75 percent). State governments contribute 15.2 percent, the
central government 5.2 percent, third-party insurance and employers 3.3
percent, and municipal government and foreign donors about 1.3,
according to a 1995 World Bank study. Of these proportions, 58.7 percent
goes toward primary health care (curative, preventive, and promotive)
and 38.8 percent is spent on secondary and tertiary inpatient care. The
rest goes for nonservice costs.
The fifth and sixth five-year plans (FY 1974-78 and FY 1980-84,
respectively) included programs to assist delivery of preventive
medicine and improve the health status of the rural population.
Supplemental nutrition programs and increasing the supply of safe
drinking water were high priorities. The sixth plan aimed at training
more community health workers and increasing efforts to control
communicable diseases. There were also efforts to improve regional
imbalances in the distribution of health care resources.
The Seventh Five-Year Plan (FY 1985-89) budgeted Rs33.9 billion for
health, an amount roughly double the outlay of the sixth plan. Health
spending as a portion of total plan outlays, however, had declined over
the years since the first plan in 1951, from a high of 3.3 percent of
the total plan spending in FY 1951-55 to 1.9 percent of the total for
the seventh plan. Mid-way through the Eighth Five-Year Plan (FY
1992-96), however, health and family welfare was budgeted at Rs20
billion, or 4.3 percent of the total plan spending for FY 1994, with an
additional Rs3.6 billion in the nonplan budget.
Primary Services
Health care facilities and personnel increased substantially between
the early 1950s and early 1980s, but because of fast population growth,
the number of licensed medical practitioners per 10,000 individuals had
fallen by the late 1980s to three per 10,000 from the 1981 level of four
per 10,000. In 1991 there were approximately ten hospital beds per
10,000 individuals.
Primary health centers are the cornerstone of the rural health care
system. By 1991, India had about 22,400 primary health centers, 11,200
hospitals, and 27,400 dispensaries. These facilities are part of a
tiered health care system that funnels more difficult cases into urban
hospitals while attempting to provide routine medical care to the vast
majority in the countryside. Primary health centers and subcenters rely
on trained paramedics to meet most of their needs. The main problems
affecting the success of primary health centers are the predominance of
clinical and curative concerns over the intended emphasis on preventive
work and the reluctance of staff to work in rural areas. In addition,
the integration of health services with family planning programs often
causes the local population to perceive the primary health centers as
hostile to their traditional preference for large families. Therefore,
primary health centers often play an adversarial role in local efforts
to implement national health policies.
According to data provided in 1989 by the Ministry of Health and
Family Welfare, the total number of civilian hospitals for all states
and union territories combined was 10,157. In 1991 there was a total of
811,000 hospital and health care facilities beds. The geographical
distribution of hospitals varied according to local socioeconomic
conditions. In India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, with a 1991
population of more than 139 million, there were 735 hospitals as of
1990. In Kerala, with a 1991 population of 29 million occupying an area
only one-seventh the size of Uttar Pradesh, there were 2,053 hospitals.
In light of the central government's goal of health care for all by
2000, the uneven distribution of hospitals needs to be reexamined.
Private studies of India's total number of hospitals in the early 1990s
were more conservative than official Indian data, estimating that in
1992 there were 7,300 hospitals. Of this total, nearly 4,000 were owned
and managed by central, state, or local governments. Another 2,000,
owned and managed by charitable trusts, received partial support from
the government, and the remaining 1,300 hospitals, many of which were
relatively small facilities, were owned and managed by the private
sector. The use of state-of-the-art medical equipment, often imported
from Western countries, was primarily limited to urban centers in the
early 1990s. A network of regional cancer diagnostic and treatment
facilities was being established in the early 1990s in major hospitals
that were part of government medical colleges. By 1992 twenty-two such
centers were in operation. Most of the 1,300 private hospitals lacked
sophisticated medical facilities, although in 1992 approximately 12
percent possessed state-of-the-art equipment for diagnosis and treatment
of all major diseases, including cancer. The fast pace of development of
the private medical sector and the burgeoning middle class in the 1990s
have led to the emergence of the new concept in India of establishing
hospitals and health care facilities on a for-profit basis.
By the late 1980s, there were approximately 128 medical
colleges--roughly three times more than in 1950. These medical colleges
in 1987 accepted a combined annual class of 14,166 students. Data for
1987 show that there were 320,000 registered medical practitioners and
219,300 registered nurses. Various studies have shown that in both urban
and rural areas people preferred to pay and seek the more sophisticated
services provided by private physicians rather than use free treatment
at public health centers.
Indigenous or traditional medical practitioners continue to practice
throughout the country. The two main forms of traditional medicine
practiced are the ayurvedic (meaning science of life) system,
which deals with causes, symptoms, diagnoses, and treatment based on all
aspects of well-being (mental, physical, and spiritual), and the unani
(so-called Galenic medicine) herbal medical practice. A vaidya
is a practitioner of the ayurvedic tradition, and a hakim
(Arabic for a Muslim physician) is a practitioner of the unani tradition.
These professions are frequently hereditary. A variety of institutions
offer training in indigenous medical practice. Only in the late 1970s
did official health policy refer to any form of integration between
Western-oriented medical personnel and indigenous medical practitioners.
In the early 1990s, there were ninety-eight ayurvedic colleges
and seventeen unani colleges operating in both the governmental
and nongovernmental sectors.
India - Education
Administration and Funding
Education is divided into preprimary, primary, middle (or
intermediate), secondary (or high school), and higher levels. Primary
school includes children of ages six to eleven, organized into classes
one through five. Middle school pupils aged eleven through fourteen are
organized into classes six through eight, and high school students ages
fourteen through seventeen are enrolled in classes nine through twelve.
Higher education includes technical schools, colleges, and universities.
Article 42 of the constitution, an amendment added in 1976,
transferred education from the state list of responsibilities to the
central government. Prior to this assumption of direct responsibility
for promoting educational facilities for all parts of society, the
central government had responsibility only for the education of
minorities. Article 43 of the constitution set the goal of free and
compulsory education for all children through age fourteen and gave the
states the power to set standards for education within their
jurisdictions. Despite this joint responsibility for education by state
and central governments, the central government has the preponderant
role because it drafts the five-year plans, which include education
policy and some funding for education. Moreover, in 1986 the
implementation of the National Policy on Education initiated a long-term
series of programs aimed at improving India's education system by
ensuring that all children through the primary level have access to
education of comparable quality irrespective of caste, creed, location,
or sex. The 1986 policy set a goal that, by 1990, all children by age
eleven were to have five years of schooling or its equivalent in
nonformal education. By 1995 all children up to age fourteen were to
have been provided free and compulsory education. The 1990 target was
not achieved, but by setting such goals, the central government was seen
as expressing its commitment to the ideal of universal education.
The Department of Education, part of the Ministry of Human Resource
Development, implements the central government's responsibilities in
educational matters. The ministry coordinates planning with the states,
provides funding for experimental programs, and acts through the
University Grants Commission and the National Council of Educational
Research and Training. These organizations seek to improve education
standards, develop and introduce instructional materials, and design
textbooks in the country's numerous languages (see The Social Context of
Language, ch. 4). The National Council of Educational Research and
Training collects data about education and conducts educational
research.
State-level ministries of education coordinate education programs at
local levels. City school boards are under the supervision of both the
state education ministry and the municipal government. In rural areas,
either the district board or the panchayat (village
council--see Glossary) oversees the school board (see Local Government,
ch. 8). The significant role the panchayats play in education
often means the politicization of elementary education because the
appointment and transfer of teachers often become emotional political
issues.
State governments provide most educational funding, although since
independence the central government increasingly has assumed the cost of
educational development as outlined under the five-year plans. India
spends an average 3 percent of its GNP on education. Spending for
education ranged between 4.6 and 7.7 percent of total central government
expenditures from the 1950s through the 1970s. In the early 1980s, about
10 percent of central and state funds went to education, a proportion
well below the average of seventy-nine other developing countries. More
than 90 percent of the expenditure was for teachers' salaries and
administration. Per capita budget expenditures increased from Rs36.5 in
FY 1977 to Rs112.7 in FY 1986, with highest expenditures found in the
union territories. Nevertheless, total expenditure per student per year
by the central and state governments declined in real terms.
Primary and Secondary Education
Several factors work against universal education in India. Although
Indian law prohibits the employment of children in factories, the law
allows them to work in cottage industries, family households,
restaurants, or in agriculture. Primary and middle school education is
compulsory. However, only slightly more than 50 percent of children
between the ages of six and fourteen actually attend school, although a
far higher percentage is enrolled. School attendance patterns for
children vary from region to region and according to gender. But it is
noteworthy that national literacy rates increased from 43.7 percent in
1981 to 52.2 percent in 1991 (male 63.9 percent, female 39.4 percent),
passing the 50 percent mark for the first time. There are wide regional
and gender variations in the literacy rates, however; for example, the
southern state of Kerala, with a 1991 literacy rate of about 89.8
percent, ranked first in India in terms of both male and female
literacy. Bihar, a northern state, ranked lowest with a literacy rate of
only 39 percent (53 percent for males and 23 percent for females).
School enrollment rates also vary greatly according to age (see table 9,
Appendix).
To improve national literacy, the central government launched a
wide-reaching literacy campaign in July 1993. Using a volunteer teaching
force of some 10 million people, the government hoped to have reached
around 100 million Indians by 1997. A special focus was placed on
improving literacy among women.
A report in 1985 by the Ministry of Education, entitled Challenge
of Education: A Policy Perspective , showed that nearly 60 percent
of children dropped out between grades one and five. (The Ministry of
Education was incorporated into the Ministry of Human Resources in 1985
as the Department of Education. In 1988 the Ministry of Human Resources
was renamed the Ministry of Human Resource Development.) Of 100 children
enrolled in grade one, only twenty-three reached grade eight. Although
many children lived within one kilometer of a primary school, nearly 20
percent of all habitations did not have schools nearby. Forty percent of
primary schools were not of masonry construction. Sixty percent had no
drinking water facilities, 70 percent had no library facilities, and 89
percent lacked toilet facilities. Single-teacher primary schools were
commonplace, and it was not unusual for the teacher to be absent or even
to subcontract the teaching work to unqualified substitutes (see table
10, Appendix).
The improvements that India has made in education since independence
are nevertheless substantial. From the first plan until the beginning of
the sixth (1951-80), the percentage of the primary school-age population
attending classes more than doubled. The number of schools and teachers
increased dramatically. Middle schools and high schools registered the
steepest rates of growth. The number of primary schools increased by
more than 230 percent between 1951 and 1980. During the same period,
however, the number of middle schools increased about tenfold. The
numbers of teachers showed similar rates of increase. The proportion of
trained teachers among those working in primary and middle schools,
fewer than 60 percent in 1950, was more than 90 percent in 1987 (see
table 11, Appendix). However, there was considerable variation in the
geographical distribution of trained teachers in the states and union
territories in the 1986-87 school year. Arunachal Pradesh had the
highest percentage (60 percent) of untrained teachers in primary
schools, and Assam had the highest percentage (72 percent) of untrained
teachers in middle schools. Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Chandigarh, and
Pondicherry (Puduchcheri) reportedly had no untrained teachers at either
kind of school.
Various forms of private schooling are common; many schools are
strictly private, whereas others enjoy government grants-in-aid but are
run privately. Schools run by church and missionary societies are common
forms of private schools. Among India's Muslim population, the madrasa
, a school attached to a mosque, plays an important role in education
(see Islamic Traditions in South Asia, ch. 3). Some 10 percent of all
children who enter the first grade are enrolled in private schools. The
dropout rate in these schools is practically nonexistent.
Traditional notions of social rank and hierarchy have greatly
influenced India's primary school system. A dual system existed in the
early 1990s, in which middle-class families sent their children to
private schools while lower-class families sent their children to
underfinanced and underequipped municipal and village schools. Evolving
middle-class values have made even nursery school education in the
private sector a stressful event for children and parents alike. Tough
entrance interviews for admission, long classroom hours, heavy homework
assignments, and high tuition rates in the mid-1990s led to charges of
"lost childhood" for preschool children and acknowledgment of
both the social costs and enhanced social benefits for the families
involved.
The government encourages the study of classical, modern, and tribal
languages with a view toward the gradual switch from English to regional
languages and to teaching Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states. As a
result, there are schools conducted in various languages at all levels.
Classical and foreign language training most commonly occurs at the
postsecondary level, although English is also taught at the lower levels
(see Diversity, Use, and Policy; Hindi and English, ch. 4).
Colleges and Universities
Receiving higher education, once the nearly exclusive domain of the
wealthy and privileged, since independence has become the aspiration of
almost every student completing high school. In the 1950-51 school year,
there were some 360,000 students enrolled in colleges and universities;
by the 1990-91 school year, the number had risen to nearly 4 million, a
more than tenfold increase in four decades. At that time, there were 177
universities and university-level institutions (more than six times the
number at independence), some 500 teacher training colleges, and several
thousand other colleges.
There are three kinds of colleges in India. The first type,
government colleges, are found only in those states where private
enterprise is weak or which were at one time controlled by princes (see
Company Rule, 1757-1857, ch. 1). The second kind are colleges managed by
religious organizations and the private sector. Many of the latter
institutions were founded after 1947 by wealthy business owners and
politicians wishing to gain local fame and importance. Professional
colleges comprise the third kind and consist mostly of medical,
teacher-training, engineering, law, and agricultural colleges. More than
50 percent of them are sponsored and managed by the government. However,
about 5 percent of these colleges are privately run without government
grant support. They charge fees of ten to twelve times the amount of the
government-run colleges. The profusion of new engineering colleges in
India in the late 1980s and early 1990s caused concern in official
education circles that the overall quality and reputation of India's
higher education system would be threatened by these new schools, which
operated mainly on a for-profit basis. As the government tightened its
support to higher education in the early 1990s, colleges and
universities came under considerable financial stress.
The All-India Council of Technical Education is empowered to regulate
the establishment of any new private professional colleges to limit
their proliferation. In 1992 the Karnataka High Court directed the state
government to rescind permission to nine organizations to start new
engineering and medical colleges in the state.
Gaining admission to a nonprofessional college is not unduly
difficult except in the case of some select colleges that are
particularly competitive. Students encounter greater difficulties in
gaining admission to professional colleges in such fields as
architecture, business, medicine, and dentistry.
There are four categories of universities. The largest number are
teaching universities that maintain and run a large number of colleges.
Unitary institutions, such as Allahabad University and Lucknow
University, make up the second kind. The third kind are the twenty-six
agricultural universities, each managed by the state in which it is
located. Technical universities constitute the fourth kind. In the late
1980s, more technical universities, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru
Technological University in the state of Hyderabad, were founded. There
were also proposals to found medical universities in some states. By
1990 Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu already had established such
universities. Out of the 177 universities in the country, only ten are
funded by the central government. The majority of universities are
managed by the states, which establish them and provide funding.
There was a high rate of attrition among students in higher education
in the 1980s. A substantial portion failed their examinations more than
once, and large numbers dropped out; only about one out of four students
successfully completed the full course of studies. Even those students
who were successful could not count on a university degree to assure
them employment. In the early postindependence years, a bachelor's
degree often provided entrance to the elite, but in contemporary India,
it provides a chance to become a white-collar worker at a relatively
modest salary. The government traditionally has been the principal
employer of educated manpower.
State governments play a powerful role in the running of all but the
national universities. Political considerations, if not outright
political patronage, play a significant part in appointments. The state
governor is usually the university chancellor, and the vice chancellor,
who actually runs the institution, is usually a political appointee.
Appointments are subject to political jockeying, and state governments
have control over grants and other forms of recognition. Caste
affiliation and regional background are recognized criteria for
admission and appointments in many colleges. To offset the inequities
implicit in such practices, a certain number of places are reserved for
members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
Education and Society
Historically, Indian education has been elitist. Traditional Hindu
education was tailored to the needs of Brahman (see Glossary) boys who
were taught to read and write by a Brahman teacher (see The Roots of
Indian Religion, ch. 3). During Mughal rule (1526-1858), Muslim
education was similarly elitist, although its orientation reflected
economic factors rather than those of caste background. Under British
company and crown rule (1757-1947), official education policies
reinforced the preexisting elitist tendencies of South Asian education.
By tying entrance and advancement in government service to academic
education, colonial rule contributed to the legacy of an education
system geared to preserving the position and prerogatives of the more
privileged. Education served as a "gatekeeper," permitting an
avenue of upward mobility to those few able to muster sufficient
resources.
Even the efforts of the nationalistic Indian National Congress (the
Congress--see Glossary) faltered in the face of the entrenched interests
defending the existing system of education (see Origins of the Congress
and the Muslim League, ch. 1). Early in the 1900s, the Congress called
for national education, placing an emphasis on technical and vocational
training. In 1920 the Congress initiated a boycott of government-aided
and government-controlled schools; it founded several
"national" schools and colleges, but to little avail. The
rewards of British-style education were so great that the boycott was
largely ignored, and the Congress schools temporarily disappeared.
Postprimary education has traditionally catered to the interests of
the higher and upwardly mobile castes (see Changes in the Caste System,
ch. 5). Despite substantial increases in the spread of middle schools
and high schools' growth in enrollment, secondary schooling is necessary
for those bent on social status and mobility through acquisition of an
office job.
In the nineteenth century, postprimary students were
disproportionately Brahmans; their traditional concern with learning
gave them an advantage under British education policies. By the early
twentieth century, several powerful cultivator castes had realized the
advantages of education as a passport to political power and had
organized to acquire formal learning. "Backward" castes
(usually economically disadvantaged Shudras) who had acquired some
wealth took advantage of their status to secure educational privilege.
In the mid-1980s, the vast majority of students making it through middle
school to high school continued to be from high-level castes and middle-
to upper-class families living in urban areas (see Varna, Caste, and
Other Divisions, ch. 5). A region's three or four most powerful castes
typically dominated the school system. In addition, the widespread role
of private education and the payment of fees even at government-run
schools discriminated against the poor.
The goals of the 1986 National Policy on Education demanded vastly
increased enrollment. In order to have attained universal elementary
education in 1995, the 1981 enrollment level of 72.7 million would have
had to increase to 160 million in 1995. Although the seventh plan
suggested the adoption of new education methods to meet these goals,
such as the promotion of television and correspondence courses (often
referred to as "distance learning") and open school systems,
the actual extended coverage of children was not very great. Many
critics of India's education policy argue that total school enrollment
is not actually a goal of the government considering the extent of
society's vested interest in child labor. In this context, education can
be seen as a tool that one social class uses to prevent the rise of
another. Middle-class Indians frequently distinguish between the
children of the poor as "hands," or children who must be
taught to work, and their own children as "minds," or children
who must be taught to learn. The upgraded curriculum with increased
requirements in English and in the sciences appears to be causing
difficulties for many children. Although all the states have recognized
that curriculum reform is needed, no comprehensive plan to link
curricular changes with new ways of teaching, learning, teacher
training, and examination methods has been implemented.
The government instituted an important program for improving physical
facilities through a phased drive in all primary schools in the country
called Operation Blackboard. Under Operation Blackboard, Rs1 billion was
allocated--but not spent--in 1987 to pay for basic amenities for village
schools, such as toys and games, classroom materials, blackboards, and
maps. This financial allotment averaged Rs2,200 for each government-run
primary school. Additional goals of Operation Blackboard included
construction of classrooms that would be usable in all weather, and an
additional teacher, preferably a woman, in all single-teacher schools.
The nonformal education system implemented in 1979 was the major
government effort to educate dropouts and other unenrolled children.
Special emphasis was given to the nonformal education system in the nine
states regarded by the government as having deficient education systems:
Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa,
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. A large number of children
who resided in these states could not attend formal schools because they
were employed, either with or without wages. Seventy-five percent of the
country's children who were not enrolled in school resided in these
states in the 1980s.
The 1986 National Policy on Education gave new impetus to the
nonformal education system. Revised and expanded programs focused on
involving voluntary organizations and training talented and dedicated
young men and women in local communities as instructors. The results of
a late 1980s integrated pilot project for nonformal and adult education
for women and girls in the Lucknow district of Uttar Pradesh provide
important data for analyzing recent implementation trends and initial
results of both the nonformal education system and adult education in
India. Under this project, 300 centers were opened in rural parts of the
district with the approval of the Department of Education, the central
government, and the state government of Uttar Pradesh with financial and
advisory support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Because of the shortage of women teachers in rural areas of Uttar
Pradesh, in the pilot project nonformal education for girls aged six to
fourteen was integrated with the adult education program for women aged
fifteen to thirty-five, so that the same staff and infrastructure could
be used. Most of the families of the project participants were in
subsistence farming or engaged as farmhands, clerical workers, and petty
merchants. Often the brothers of female participants attended a formal
school situated about one or two kilometers from their homes. Most of
the 300 instructors for the 300 centers were young women between the
ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Each center averaged twenty-five women
and twenty girl participants. The physical facilities of the centers
varied from village to village. Classes might be held on the balcony of
a brick house, within a temple, in a room of a mud-walled house, or
under open thatch-roof structures. Besides focusing on the acquisition
of literacy skills, the project increased participant motivation by also
offering instruction in household work, such as sewing, knitting, and
preserving food. In 1987 a UNESCO mission to evaluate progress in this
project in the areas of functional literacy, vocational skills, and
civic awareness observed that randomly chosen participants in both
nonformal and adult education classes effectively demonstrated their
reading and writing skills at appropriate levels. As a result of many
such local programs, literacy rates improved between 1981 and 1991. Male
literacy increased from 56.5 percent in 1981 to 64.2 percent in 1991
while women's literacy rate increased from 29.9 percent in 1981 to 39.2
percent in 1991.
India - Religion
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW INDIA without understanding its religious
beliefs and practices, which have a large impact on the personal lives
of most Indians and influence public life on a daily basis. Indian
religions have deep historical roots that are recollected by
contemporary Indians. The ancient culture of South Asia, going back at
least 4,500 years, has come down to India primarily in the form of
religious texts. The artistic heritage, as well as intellectual and
philosophical contributions, has always owed much to religious thought
and symbolism. Contacts between India and other cultures have led to the
spread of Indian religions throughout the world, resulting in the
extensive influence of Indian thought and practice on Southeast and East
Asia in ancient times and, more recently, in the diffusion of Indian
religions to Europe and North America. Within India, on a day-to-day
basis, the vast majority of people engage in ritual actions that are
motivated by religious systems that owe much to the past but are
continuously evolving. Religion, then, is one of the most important
facets of Indian history and contemporary life.
A number of world religions originated in India, and others that
started elsewhere found fertile ground for growth there. Devotees of
Hinduism, a varied grouping of philosophical and devotional traditions,
officially numbered 687.6 million people, or 82 percent of the
population in the 1991 census (see table 13, Appendix). Buddhism and
Jainism, ancient monastic traditions, have had a major influence on
Indian art, philosophy, and society and remain important minority
religions in the late twentieth century. Buddhists represented 0.8
percent of the total population while Jains represented 0.4 percent in
1991.
Islam spread from the West throughout South Asia, from the early
eighth century, to become the largest minority religion in India. In
fact, with 101.5 million Muslims (12.1 percent of the population), India
has at least the fourth largest Muslim population in the world (after
Indonesia with 174.3 million, Pakistan with 124 million, and Bangladesh
with 103 million; some analysts put the number of Indian Muslims even
higher--128 million in 1994, which would give India the second largest
Muslim population in the world).
Sikhism, which started in Punjab in the sixteenth century, has spread
throughout India and the world since the mid-nineteenth century. With
nearly 16.3 million adherents, Sikhs represent 1.9 percent of India's
population.
Christianity, represented by almost all denominations, traces its
history in India back to the time of the apostles and counted 19.6
million members in India in 1991. Judaism and Zoroastrianism, arriving
originally with traders and exiles from the West, are represented by
small populations, mostly concentrated on India's west coast. A variety
of independent tribal religious groups also are lively carriers of
unique ethnic traditions.
The listing of the major belief systems only scratches the surface of
the remarkable diversity in Indian religious life. The complex doctrines
and institutions of the great traditions, preserved through written
documents, are divided into numerous schools of thought, sects, and
paths of devotion. In many cases, these divisions stem from the
teachings of great masters, who arise continually to lead bands of
followers with a new revelation or path to salvation. In contemporary
India, the migration of large numbers of people to urban centers and the
impact of modernization have led to the emergence of new religions,
revivals, and reforms within the great traditions that create original
bodies of teaching and kinds of practice. In other cases, diversity
appears through the integration or acculturation of entire social
groups--each with its own vision of the divine--within the world of
village farming communities that base their culture on literary and
ritual traditions preserved in Sanskrit or in regional languages. The
local interaction between great traditions and local forms of worship
and belief, based on village, caste, tribal, and linguistic differences,
creates a range of ritual forms and mythology that varies widely
throughout the country. Within this range of differences, Indian
religions have demonstrated for many centuries a considerable degree of
tolerance for alternate visions of the divine and of salvation.
Religious tolerance in India finds expression in the definition of
the nation as a secular state, within which the government since
independence has officially remained separate from any one religion,
allowing all forms of belief equal status before the law. In practice it
has proven difficult to divide religious affiliation from public life.
In states where the majority of the population embrace one religion, the
boundary between government and religion becomes permeable; in Tamil
Nadu, for example, the state government manages Hindu temples, while in
Punjab an avowedly Sikh political party usually controls the state
assembly. One of the most notable features of Indian politics,
particularly since the 1960s, has been the steady growth of militant
ideologies that see in only one religious tradition the way toward
salvation and demand that public institutions conform to their
interpretations of scripture. The vitality of religious fundamentalism
and its impact on public life in the form of riots and religion-based
political parties have been among the greatest challenges to Indian
political institutions in the 1990s.
<>The Vedas and
Polytheism
The Upanishads, originating as commentaries on the Vedas between
about 800 and 200 B.C., contain speculations on the meaning of existence
that have greatly influenced Indian religious traditions. Most important
is the concept of atman (the human soul), which is an
individual manifestation of brahman (see Glossary). Atman
is of the same nature as brahman , characterized either as an
impersonal force or as God, and has as its goal the recognition of
identity with brahman . This fusion is not possible, however,
as long as the individual remains bound to the world of the flesh and
desires. In fact, the deathless atman that is so bound will not
join with brahman after the death of the body but will
experience continuous rebirth. This fundamental concept of the
transmigration of atman , or reincarnation after death, lies at
the heart of the religions emerging from India.
Indian religious tradition sees karma (see Glossary) as the source of
the problem of transmigration. While associated with physical form, for
example, in a human body, beings experience the universe through their
senses and their minds and attach themselves to the people and things
around them and constantly lose sight of their true existence as atman
, which is of the same nature as brahman . As the time comes
for the dropping of the body, the fruits of good and evil actions in the
past remain with atman , clinging to it, causing a tendency to
continue experience in other existences after death. Good deeds in this
life may lead to a happy rebirth in a better life, and evil deeds may
lead to a lower existence, but eventually the consequences of past deeds
will be worked out, and the individual will seek more experiences in a
physical world. In this manner, the bound or ignorant atman
wanders from life to life, in heavens and hells and in many different
bodies. The universe may expand and be destroyed numerous times, but the
bound atman will not achieve release.
The true goal of atman is liberation, or release (moksha
), from the limited world of experience and realization of oneness with
God or the cosmos. In order to achieve release, the individual must
pursue a kind of discipline (yoga, a "tying," related to the
English word yoke) that is appropriate to one's abilities and station in
life. For most people, this goal means a course of action that keeps
them rather closely tied to the world and its ways, including the
enjoyment of love (kama ), the attainment of wealth and power (artha
), and the following of socially acceptable ethical principles
(dharma--see Glossary). From this perspective, even manuals on sexual
love, such as the Kama Sutra (Book of Love), or collections of
ideas on politics and governance, such as the Arthashastra
(Science of Material Gain), are part of a religious tradition that
values action in the world as long as it is performed with
understanding, a karma-yoga or selfless discipline of action in
which every action is offered as a sacrifice to God. Some people,
however, may be interested in breaking the cycle of rebirth in this life
or soon thereafter. For them, a wide range of techniques has evolved
over the thousands of years that gives Indian religion its great
diversity. The discipline that involves physical positioning of the body
(hatha-yoga), which is most commonly equated with yoga outside of India,
sees the human body as a series of spiritual centers that can be
awakened through meditation and exercise, leading eventually to a
oneness with the universe. Tantrism is the belief in the Tantra (from
the Sanskrit, context or continuum), a collection of texts that stress
the usefulness of rituals, carried out with a strict discipline, as a
means for attaining understanding and spiritual awakening. These rituals
include chanting powerful mantras; meditating on complicated or
auspicious diagrams (mandalas); and, for one school of advanced
practitioners, deliberately violating social norms on food, drink, and
sexual relations.
A central aspect of all religious discipline, regardless of its
emphasis, is the importance of the guru, or teacher. Indian religion may
accept the sacredness of specific texts and rituals but stresses
interpretation by a living practitioner who has personal experience of
liberation and can pass down successful techniques to devoted followers.
In fact, since Vedic times, it has never been possible, and has rarely
been desired, to unite all people in India under one concept of
orthodoxy with a single authority that could be presented to everyone.
Instead, there has been a tendency to accept religious innovation and
diversity as the natural result of personal experience by successive
generations of gurus, who have tailored their messages to particular
times, places, and peoples, and then passed down their knowledge to
lines of disciples and social groups. As a result, Indian religion is a
mass of ancient and modern traditions, some always preserved and some
constantly changing, and the individual is relatively free to stress in
his or her life the beliefs and religious behaviors that seem most
effective on the path to deliverance.
India - Jainism
The oldest continuous monastic tradition in India is Jainism, the
path of the Jinas, or victors. This tradition is traced to Var-dhamana
Mahavira (The Great Hero; ca. 599-527 B.C.), the twenty-fourth and last
of the Tirthankaras (Sanskrit for fordmakers). According to legend,
Mahavira was born to a ruling family in the town of Vaishali, located in
the modern state of Bihar. At the age of thirty, he renounced his
wealthy life and devoted himself to fasting and self-mortification in
order to purify his consciousness and discover the meaning of existence.
He never again dwelt in a house, owned property, or wore clothing of any
sort. Following the example of the teacher Parshvanatha (ninth century
B.C.), he attained enlightenment and spent the rest of his life
meditating and teaching a dedicated group of disciples who formed a
monastic order following rules he laid down. His life's work complete,
he entered a final fast and deliberately died of starvation.
The ancient belief system of the Jains rests on a concrete
understanding of the working of karma, its effects on the living soul (jiva
), and the conditions for extinguishing action and the soul's release.
According to the Jain view, the soul is a living substance that combines
with various kinds of nonliving matter and through action accumulates
particles of matter that adhere to it and determine its fate. Most of
the matter perceptible to human senses, including all animals and
plants, is attached in various degrees to living souls and is in this
sense alive. Any action has consequences that necessarily follow the
embodied soul, but the worst accumulations of matter come from violence
against other living beings. The ultimate Jain discipline, therefore,
rests on complete inactivity and absolute nonviolence (ahimsa) against
any living beings. Some Jain monks and nuns wear face masks to avoid
accidently inhaling small organisms, and all practicing believers try to
remain vegetarians. Extreme renunciation, including the refusal of all
food, lies at the heart of a discipline that purges the mind and body of
all desires and actions and, in the process, burns off the consequences
of actions performed in the past. In this sense, Jain renunciants may
recognize or revere deities, but they do not view the Vedas as sacred
texts and instead concentrate on the atheistic, individual quest for
purification and removal of karma. The final goal is the extinguishing
of self, a "blowing out" (nirvana) of the individual self.
By the first century A.D., the Jain community evolved into two main
divisions based on monastic discipline: the Digambara or
"sky-clad" monks who wear no clothes, own nothing, and collect
donated food in their hands; and the Svetambara or
"white-clad" monks and nuns who wear white robes and carry
bowls for donated food. The Digambara do not accept the possibility of
women achieving liberation, while the Svetambara do. Western and
southern India have been Jain strongholds for many centuries; laypersons
have typically formed minority communities concentrated primarily in
urban areas and in mercantile occupations. In the mid-1990s, there were
about 7 million Jains, the majority of whom live in the states of
Maharashtra (mostly the city of Bombay, or Mumbai in Marathi),
Rajasthan, and Gujarat (see Structure and Dynamics, ch. 2). Karnataka,
traditionally a stronghold of Digambaras, has a sizable Jain community.
The Jain laity engage in a number of ritual activities that resemble
those of the Hindus around them (see The Ceremonies of Hinduism, this
ch.). Special shrines in residences or in public temples include images
of the Tirthankaras, who are not worshiped but remembered and revered;
other shrines house the gods who are more properly invoked to intercede
with worldly problems. Daily rituals may include meditation and bathing;
bathing the images; offering food, flowers, and lighted lamps for the
images; and reciting mantras in Ardhamagadhi, an ancient language of
northeast India related to Sanskrit. Many Jain laity engage in
sacramental ceremonies during life-cycle rituals, such as the first
taking of solid food, marriage, and death, resembling those enacted by
Hindus. Jains may also worship local gods and participate in local Hindu
or Muslim celebrations without compromising their fundamental devotion
to the path of the Jinas. The most important festivals of Jainism
celebrate the five major events in the life of Mahavira: conception,
birth, renunciation, enlightenment, and final release at death.
At a number of pilgrimage sites associated with great teachers of
Jainism, the gifts of wealthy donors made possible the building of
architectural wonders. Shatrunjaya Hills (Siddhagiri) in Gujarat is a
major Svetambara site, an entire city of about 3,500 temples. Mount Abu
in Rajasthan, with one Digambara and five Svetambara temples, is the
site of some of India's greatest architecture, dating from the eleventh
through thirteenth centuries A.D. In Karnataka, on the hill of Sravana
Belgola, stands the monolithic seventeen-meter-high statue of the naked
Bhagwan Bahubali (Gomateshvara), the first person in the world believed
by the faithful to have attained enlightenment, so deep in meditation
that vines are growing around his legs. At this site every twelve years,
a major concourse of Jain ascetics and laity participate in a
purification ceremony in which the statue is anointed from head to toe.
Carved in 981, the statue is considered the holiest Jain shrine. In
addition to its lavish patronage of shrines, the Jain community, with
its long scriptural tradition and wealth gained from trade, has always
been known for its philanthropy and especially for its support of
education and learning. Prestigious Jain schools are located in most
major cities. The largest concentrations of Jains are in Maharashtra
(more than 965,000) and Rajasthan (nearly 563,000), with sizable numbers
also in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
India - Buddhism
Buddhism began with the life of Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-483
B.C.), a prince from the small Shakya Kingdom located in the foothills
of the Himalayas in Nepal. Brought up in luxury, the prince abandoned
his home and wandered forth as a religious beggar, searching for the
meaning of existence. The stories of his search presuppose the Jain
tradition, as Gautama was for a time a practitioner of intense
austerity, at one point almost starving himself to death. He decided,
however, that self-torture weakened his mind while failing to advance
him to enlightenment and therefore turned to a milder style of
renunciation and concentrated on advanced meditation techniques.
Eventually, under a tree in the forests of Gaya (in modern Bihar), he
resolved to stir no farther until he had solved the mystery of
existence. Breaking through the final barriers, he achieved the
knowledge that he later expressed as the Four Noble Truths: all of life
is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; the end of desire leads
to the end of suffering; and the means to end desire is a path of
discipline and meditation. Gautama was now the Buddha, or the awakened
one, and he spent the remainder of his life traveling about northeast
India converting large numbers of disciples. At the age of eighty, the
Buddha achieved his final passing away (parinirvana ) and died,
leaving a thriving monastic order and a dedicated lay community to
continue his work.
By the third century B.C., the still-young religion based on the
Buddha's teachings was being spread throughout South Asia through the
agency of the Mauryan Empire (ca. 326-184 B.C.; see The Mauryan Empire,
ch. 1). By the seventh century A.D., having spread throughout East Asia
and Southeast Asia, Buddhism probably had the largest religious
following in the world.
For centuries Indian royalty and merchants patronized Buddhist
monasteries and raised beautiful, hemispherical stone structures called
stupas over the relics of the Buddha in reverence to his memory. Since
the 1840s, archaeology has revealed the huge impact of Buddhist art,
iconography, and architecture in India. The monastery complex at Nalanda
in Bihar, in ruins in 1993, was a world center for Buddhist philosophy
and religion until the thirteenth century. But by the thirteenth
century, when Turkic invaders destroyed the remaining monasteries on the
plains, Buddhism as an organized religion had practically disappeared
from India. It survived only in Bhutan and Sikkim, both of which were
then independent Himalayan kingdoms; among tribal groups in the
mountains of northeast India; and in Sri Lanka. The reasons for this
disappearance are unclear, and they are many: shifts in royal patronage
from Buddhist to Hindu religious institutions; a constant intellectual
struggle with dynamic Hindu intellectual schools, which eventually
triumphed; and slow adoption of popular religious forms by Buddhists
while Hindu monastic communities grew up with the same style of
discipline as the Buddhists, leading to the slow but steady amalgamation
of ideas and trends in the two religions.
Buddhism began a steady and dramatic comeback in India during the
early twentieth century, spurred on originally by a combination of
European antiquarian and philosophical interest and the dedicated
activities of a few Indian devotees. The foundation of the Mahabodhi
Society (Society of Great Enlightenment) in 1891, originally as a force
to wrest control of the Buddhist shrine at Gaya from the hands of Hindu
managers, gave a large stimulus to the popularization of Buddhist
philosophy and the importance of the religion in India's past.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1956 after some thirty years of
Untouchable, or Dalit (see Glossary), agitation when Bhimrao Ramji
(B.R.) Ambedkar, leader of the Untouchable wing within the Congress (see
Glossary), announced that he was converting to Buddhism as a way to
escape from the impediments of the Hindu caste system (see Varna, Caste,
and Other Divisions, ch. 5). He brought with him masses of
Untouchables--also known as Harijans (see Glossary) or Dalits--and
members of Scheduled Castes (see Glossary), who mostly came from
Maharashtra and border areas of neighboring states and from the Agra
area in Uttar Pradesh. By the early 1990s, there were more than 5
million Buddhists in Maharashtra, or 79 percent of the entire Buddhist
community in India, almost all recent converts from low castes. When
added to longtime Buddhist populations in hill areas of northeast India
(West Bengal, Assam, Sikkim, Mizoram, and Tripura) and high Himalayan
valleys (Ladakh District in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and
northern Uttar Pradesh), and to the influx of Tibetan Buddhist refugees
who fled from Tibet with the Dalai Lama in 1959 and thereafter, the
recent converts raised the number of Buddhists in India to 6.4 million
by 1991. This was a 35.9 percent increase since 1981 and made Buddhism
the fifth largest religious group in the country.
The forms of Buddhism practiced by Himalayan communities and Tibetan
refugees are part of the Vajrayana, or "Way of the Lightning
Bolt," that developed after the seventh century A.D. as part of
Mahayana (Great Path) Buddhism. Although retaining the fundamental
importance of individual spiritual advancement, the Vajrayana stresses
the intercession of bodhisattvas, or enlightened beings, who remain in
this world to aid others on the path. Until the twentieth century, the
Himalayan kingdoms supported a hierarchy in which Buddhist monks, some
identified from birth as bodhisattvas, occupied the highest positions in
society.
Most other Buddhists in India follow Theravada Buddhism, the
"Doctrine of the Elders," which traces its origin through Sri
Lankan and Burmese traditions to scriptures in the Pali language, a
Sanskritic dialect in eastern India. Although replete with miraculous
events and legends, these scriptures stress a more human Buddha and a
democratic path toward enlightenment for everyone. Ambedkar's plan for
the expanding Buddhist congregation in India visualized Buddhist monks
and nuns developing themselves through service to others. Convert
communities, by embracing Buddhism, have embarked on social
transformations, including a decline in alcoholism, a simplification of
marriage ceremonies and abolition of ruinous marriage expenses, a
greater emphasis on education, and a heightened sense of identity and
self-worth.
The Tradition of the Enlightened Master
A number of avowedly Hindu monastic communities have grown up over
time and adopted some of the characteristics associated with early
Buddhism and Jainism, while remaining dedicated to the Hindu
philosophical traditions. One of the oldest and most respected of the
Hindu orders traces its origin to the teacher Shankara (788-820),
believed by many devotees to have lived hundreds of years earlier.
Shankara's philosophy is a primary source of Vedanta, or the "End
of the Veda," the final commentary on revealed truth, which is one
of the most influential trends in modern Hinduism. His interpretation of
the Upanishads portrays brahman as absolutely one and without
qualities. The phenomenal world is illusion (maya ), which the
embodied soul must transcend in order to achieve oneness with brahman
. As a wandering monk, Shankara traveled throughout India, combating
Buddhist atheism and founding five seats of learning at Badrinath (Uttar
Pradesh), Dwaraka (Gujarat), Puri (Orissa), Sringeri (Karnataka), and
Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu). In the 1990s, those seats are still held by
successors to Shankara's philosophy (Shankara Acharyas), who head an
order of orange-clad monks that is highly respected by the Hindu
community throughout India. Activities of the acharyas ,
including their periodic trips away from their home monasteries to visit
and preach to devotees, receive exposure in regional and national media.
Their conservative viewpoints and pronouncements on a variety of topics,
although not binding on most believers, attract considerable public
attention.
The initiation of a renunciant usually depends on the judgment of an acharya
who determines whether a candidate is dedicated and prepared or not; he
then gives to the disciple training and instructions including the
initiate's own secret formula or mantra. After initiation, the disciple
may remain with his teacher or in a monastery for an indefinite period
or may wander forth in a variety of careers. The Ramanandi order in
North India, for example, includes holy men (sadhus) who practice
ascetic disciplines, militant members of fortified temples, and priests
in charge of temple administration and ritual.
There are other orders of renunciants who lead still more austere
existences, including naked ascetics who wander begging for their food
and assemble for spectacular parades at major festivals. A few dedicated
seekers still withdraw to the fastness of the Himalayas or other remote
spots and work on their meditation and yoga in total obscurity. Others
beg in populated areas, sometimes engaging in fierce austerities such as
piercing their bodies with pins and knives. They are a reminder to all
people that the path of renunciation waits for anyone who has the
dedication and the courage to leave the world behind.
Another kind of renunciation appears in the cult of Sai Baba, who
achieved national and international fame in the twentieth century. The
first person known by this name was a holy man--Sai Baba (died
1918)--who appeared in 1872 in Maharashtra and lived a humble life that
blended meditation and devotional techniques from a variety of sources.
This saint has a small but dedicated following throughout India. A later
incarnation was Satya Sai Baba (satya means true), born in 1926
in Andhra Pradesh. At age thirteen, he experienced the first of several
seizures that resulted in a changed personality and intense devotional
activity, leading to his statement that he is the second incarnation of
Sai Baba. By 1950 he had set up a retreat at Puttaparti in what later
became Andhra Pradesh and was accepting disciples. His fame spread along
with numerous apocryphal stories of his ability to perform miracles,
including the manifestation of sacred ash and, according to some
accounts, watches or other objects, from thin air or from his own body.
The cult has expanded to include publishing, social service, and
education institutions and includes an international association of
thousands of believers. Devotion to Satya Sai Baba does not preclude
attachment to other religious observances but concentrates instead on
worship and veneration of the holy man himself, often in the form of a
photograph. Thousands of pilgrims have traveled to his retreat annually
to participate in group activities, obtain mementos, and perhaps a view
of the teacher himself.
India - The Worship of Personal Gods
As one of the most important gods in the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu is
surrounded by a number of extremely popular and well-known stories and
is the focus of a number of sects devoted entirely to his worship.
Vishnu contains a number of personalities, often represented as ten
major descents (avatars) in which the god has taken on physical forms in
order to save earthly creatures from destruction. In one story, the
earth was drowning in a huge flood, so to save it Vishnu took on the
body of a giant turtle and lifted the earth on his back out of the
waters. A tale found in the Vedas describes a demon who could not be
conquered. Responding to the pleas of the gods, Vishnu appeared before
the demon as a dwarf. The demon, in a classic instance of pride,
underestimated this dwarf and granted him as much of the world as he
could tread in three steps. Vishnu then assumed his universal form and
in three strides spanned the entire universe and beyond, crushing the
demon in the process.
The incarnation of Vishnu known to almost everyone in India is his
life as Ram (Rama in Sanskrit), a prince from the ancient north Indian
kingdom of Ayodhya, in the cycle of stories known as the Ramayana
(The Travels of Ram). On one level, this is a classic adventure story,
as Ram is exiled from the kingdom and has to wander in the forests of
southern India with his beautiful wife Sita and his loyal younger
brother Lakshman. After many adventures, during which Ram befriends the
king of the monkey kingdom and joins forces with the great monkey hero
Hanuman, the demon king Ravana kidnaps Sita and takes her to his
fortress on the island of Lanka (modern Sri Lanka). A huge war then
ensues, as Ram with his animal allies attacks the demons, destroys them
all, and returns in triumph to North India to occupy his lawful throne.
Village storytellers, street theater players, the movies, and the
national television network all have their versions of this story. In
many parts of the country, but especially in North India, the annual
festival of Dussehra celebrates Ram's adventures and his final triumph
and includes the public burning of huge effigies of Ravana at the end of
several days of parties. Everyone knows that Ram is really Vishnu, who
came down to rid the earth of the demons and set up an ideal kingdom of
righteousness--Ram Raj--which stands as an ideal in contemporary India.
Sita is in reality his consort, the goddess Lakshmi, the ideal of
feminine beauty and devotion to her husband. Lakshmi, also known as
Shri, eventually became the goddess of fortune, surplus, and happiness.
Hanuman, as the faithful sidekick with great physical and magical
powers, is one of the most beloved images in the Hindu pantheon with
temples of his own throughout the country.
Another widely known incarnation is Krishna. In the Mahabharata (Great
Battle of the Descendants of Bharata), the gigantic, multivolume epic of
ancient North Indian kingdoms, Krishna appears as the ruler of one of
the many states allied either with the heroic Pandava brothers or with
their treacherous cousins, the Kauravas. Bharata was an ancient king
whose achievements are celebrated in the Mahabharata and from
whose name derives one of the names for modern India, that is Bharat.
During the final battle, Krishna serves as charioteer for the hero
Arjuna, and before the fighting starts he bolsters Arjuna's faltering
will to fight against his kin. Krishna reveals himself as Vishnu, the
supreme godhead, who has set up the entire conflict to cleanse the earth
of evildoers according to his inscrutable will. This section of the
epic, the Bhagavad Gita , or Song of the Lord, is one of the
great jewels of world religious literature and of central importance in
modern Hinduism. One of its main themes is karma-yoga , or
selfless discipline in offering all of one's allotted tasks in life as a
devotion to God and without attachment to consequences. The true reality
is the soul that neither slays nor is slain and that can rejoin God
through selfless dedication and through Krishna's saving grace.
A completely different cycle of stories portrays Krishna as a young
cowherd, growing up in the country after he was saved from an evil uncle
who coveted his kingdom. In this incarnation, Krishna often appears as a
happy, roly-poly infant, well known for his pranks and thefts of butter.
Although his enemies send evil agents to destroy him, the baby
miraculously survives their attacks and kills his demonic assailants.
Later, as he grows into an adolescent, he continues to perform miracles
such as saving the cowherds and their flocks from a dangerous storm by
holding up a mountain over their heads until the weather clears. His
most striking exploits, however, are his affairs as a young adult with
the gopis (cowherding maidens), all of whom are in love with
him because of his good looks and talent with the flute.
These explicitly sexual activities, including stealing the clothes of
the maidens while they are bathing, are the basis for a wide range of
poetry and songs to Krishna as a lover; the devotee of the god takes on
a female role and directs toward the beloved lord the heartfelt longing
for union with the divine. Krishna's relationship with Radha, his
favorite among the gopis , has served as a model for male and
female love in a variety of art forms, and since the sixteenth century
appears prominently as a motif in North Indian paintings. Unlike many
other deities, who are depicted as very fair in color, Krishna appears
in all these adventures as a dark lord, either black or blue in color.
In this sense, he is a figure who constantly overturns accepted
conventions of order, hierarchy, and propriety, and introduces a playful
and mischievous aspect of a god who hides from his worshipers but saves
them in the end. The festival of Holi at the spring equinox, in which
people of all backgrounds play in the streets and squirt each other with
colored water, is associated with Krishna.
In iconography Vishnu may appear as any of his ten incarnations but
often stands in sculpture as a princely male with four arms that bear a
club, discus, conch, and lotus flower. He may also appear lying on his
back on the thousand-headed king of the serpents, Shesha-Naga, in the
milk ocean at the center of time, with his feet massaged by Lakshmi, and
with a lotus growing from his navel giving birth to the god Brahma, a
four-headed representation of the creative principle. Vishnu in this
representation is the ultimate source of the universe that he causes to
expand and contract at regular cosmic intervals measuring millions of
years. On a more concrete level, Vishnu may become incarnate at any
moment on earth in order to continue to bring sentient creatures back to
himself, and a number of great religious teachers (including, for
example, Chaitanya in Bengal) are identified by their followers as
incarnations of Vishnu.
India - Shiva
The god Shiva is the other great figure in the modern pantheon. In
contrast to the regal attributes of Vishnu, Shiva is a figure of
renunciation. A favorite image portrays him as an ascetic, performing
meditation alone in the fastness of the Himalayas. There he sits on a
tiger skin, clad only in a loincloth, covered with sacred ash that gives
his skin a gray color. His trident is stuck into the ground next to him.
Around his neck is a snake. From his matted hair, tied in a topknot, the
river Ganga (Ganges) descends to the earth. His neck is blue, a reminder
of the time he drank the poison that emerged while gods and demons
competed to churn the milk ocean. Shiva often appears in this image as
an antisocial being, who once burned up Kama, the god of love, with a
glance. But behind this image is the cosmic lord who, through the very
power of his meditating consciousness, expands the entire universe and
all beings in it. Although he appears to be hard to attain, in reality
Shiva is a loving deity who saves those devotees who are wholeheartedly
dedicated to him.
The bhakti literature of South India, where Shiva has long
been important, describes the numerous instances of pure-hearted
devotion to the beautiful lord and the final revelation of himself as
Shiva after testing his devotees. Shiva often appears on earth in
disguise, perhaps as a wandering Brahman priest, to challenge the
charity or belief of a suffering servant, only to appear eventually in
his true nature. Many of these divine plays are connected directly with
specific people and specific sites, and almost every ancient Shiva
temple can claim a famous poem or a famous miracle in its history. The
hundreds of medieval temples in Tamil Nadu, almost all dedicated to
Shiva, contain sculptured panels depicting the god in a variety of
guises: Bhikshatana, the begging lord; Bhairava, a horrible, destructive
image; or Nataraja, the lord of the dance, beating a drum that keeps
time while he manifests the universe.
Because he withholds his sexual urges and controls them, Shiva is
able to transmute sexual energy into creative power, by generating
intense heat. It is, in fact, the heat generated from discipline and
austerity (tapas ) that is seen as the source for the
generative power of all renunciants, and in this sense Shiva is often
connected with wandering orders of monks in modern India. For the
average worshiper, the sexual power of Shiva is seen in the most common
image that represents him, the lingam. This is typically a cylindrical
stone several feet tall, with a rounded top, standing in a circular
base. On one level, this is the most basic image of divinity, providing
a focus for worship with a minimum of artistic embellishment, attempting
to represent the infinite. The addition of carved anatomical details on
many lingams, however, leaves no doubt for the worshiper that this is an
erect male sexual organ, showing the procreative power of God at the
origin of all things. The concept of reality as the complex interplay of
opposite principles, male and female, thus finds its highest form in the
mythology of Shiva and his consort Parvati (also known as Shakti, Kali,
or Durga), the daughter of the mountains. This most controlled deity,
the meditating Shiva, then has still another form, as the erotic lover
of Parvati, embracing her passionately.
Shiva and Parvati have two sons, who have entire cycles of myths and
legends and bhakti cults in their own right. One son is called
variously Karttikeya (identified with the planet Mars) or Skanda (the
god of war or Subrahmanya). He is extremely handsome, carries a spear,
and rides a peacock. According to some traditions, he emerged motherless
from Shiva when the gods needed a great warrior to conquer an
indestructible demon. In southern India, where he is called Murugan, he
is a lord of mountain places and a great friend of those who dedicate
themselves to him. Some devotees vow to carry on their shoulders
specially carved objects of wood for a determined number of weeks, never
putting them down during that time. Others may go further, and insert
knives or long pins into their bodies for extended periods.
Another son of Shiva and Parvati is Ganesh, or Ganapati, the Lord of
the Ganas (the hosts of Shiva), who has a male human's body with four
arms and the head of an elephant. One myth claims that he originated
directly from Parvati's body and entered into a quarrel with Shiva, who
cut off his human head and replaced it later with the head of the first
animal he found, which happened to be an elephant. For most worshipers,
Ganesh is the first deity invoked during any ceremony because he is the
god of wisdom and remover of obstacles. People worship Ganesh when
beginning anything, for example, at the start of a trip or the first day
of the new school year. He is often pictured next to his mount, the rat,
symbol of the ability to get in anywhere. Ganesh is therefore a clever
figure, a trickster in many stories, who presents a benevolent and
friendly image to those worshipers who placate him. His image is perhaps
the most widespread and public in India, visible in streets and
transportation terminals everywhere. The antics of Ganesh and Karttikeya
and the interactions of Shiva and Parvati have generated a series of
entertaining myths of Shiva as a henpecked husband, who would prefer to
keep meditating but instead is drawn into family problems, providing a
series of morality tales in households throughout India.
India - Brahma and the Hindu Trinity
Philosophical musings as far back as the Rig Veda contemplated the
universe as the result of an interplay between the male principle (purusha
), the prime source of generative power but quiescent, and a female
principle that came to be known as prakriti , an active
principle that manifests reality, or power (shakti ), at work
in the world. On a philosophical level, this female principle ultimately
rests in the oneness of the male, but on a practical level it is the
female that is most significant in the world. The vast array of
iconography and mythology that surround the gods such as Vishnu and
Shiva is a backdrop for the worship of their female consorts, and the
male deities fade into the background. Thus it is that the divine is
often female in India.
Vishnu's consort, Lakshmi, has a number of well-known incarnations
that are the center of cults in their own right. In the Ramayana
, for example, female characters are responsible for most of the
important events, and the dutiful Sita, who resists the advances of
lustful Ravana, is a much beloved figure of devotion. Lakshmi receives
direct worship along with Ram during the big national festival of
Dipavali (Diwali), celebrated with massive fireworks demonstrations,
when people pray for success and wealth during the coming year. The Mahabharata
is equally packed with tales of male and female relationships in which
women hold their own, and the beautiful Draupadi, wife of the five
Pandava heroes, has her own cult in scattered locations throughout
India.
Parvati, in a variety of forms, is the most common focus of devotion
in India. She presents two main facets to her worshipers: a benign and
accepting personality that provides assistance and a powerful and
dangerous personality that must be placated. The benign vision exists in
many temples to Shiva throughout the country, where the goddess has her
own shrine that is in practice the most frequented site of heartfelt
devotion. During annual festivals in which the god and goddess emerge
from their shrines and travel in processions, it is often the goddess
who is most eagerly anticipated. In North India, for example, life-like
statues of the loving goddess Kali, who is ultimately a manifestation of
Parvati, are carried through huge crowds that line village and city
streets. In South India, where gigantic temples are the physical and
social centers of town life, the shrines and their annual festivals are
often known by the names of their goddesses. One of the more famous is
the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Minakshi Temple in Madurai, Tamil
Nadu. The temple is named after the "fish-eyed goddess"
Minakshi, described in myths as a dark queen born with three breasts,
who set out to conquer the universe. After overrunning the world and
vanquishing the gods, Minakshi finally met Shiva and, when her third
breast disappeared, accepted him as her lord. This motif of physical
power and energy appears in many stories where the goddess is a warrior
or conqueror of demons who in the end joins with Shiva.
Alternative visions, however, portray a goddess on the loose, with
the potential for causing havoc in the world unless appeased. The
goddess Durga is a great warrior who carries swords and a shield, rides
a tiger, and destroys demons when the gods prove incapable; in this
incarnation, she never submits, but remains capable of terrible deeds of
war. The goddess Kali often appears as an even more horrific vision of
the divine, with garlands of human skulls around her neck and a severed
head in her hand; her bloody tongue hangs from her mouth, and the
weapons in her arms drip gore. This image attempts to capture the
destructive capacity of the divine, the suffering in the world, and the
ultimate return of all things to the goddess at death.
In many small shrines throughout India, in marked contrast to the
large and ornate temples dominated by Brahmanical principles and the
philosophy of nonviolence, the female divinity receives regular gifts of
blood sacrifices, usually chickens and goats. In addition, the goddess
may manifest herself as the bearer of a number of diseases. The goddess
of smallpox, known as Shitala in North India and Mariamman in South
India, remains a feared and worshiped figure even after the official
elimination of the disease, for she is still capable of afflicting
people with a number of fevers and poxes. Many more localized forms of
goddesses, known by different names in different regions, are the focus
for prayers and vows that lead worshipers to undertake acts of austerity
and pilgrimages in return for favors.
India - Local Deities
A detailed series of life-cycle rituals (samskara , or
refinements) mark major transitions in the life of the individual.
Especially orthodox Hindu families may invite Brahman priests to their
homes to officiate at these rituals, complete with sacred fire and
recitations of mantras. Most of these rituals, however, do not occur in
the presence of such priests, and among many groups who do not revere
the Vedas or respect Brahmans, there may be other officiants or
variations in the rites.
Ceremonies may be performed during pregnancy to ensure the health of
the mother and growing child. The father may part the hair of the mother
three times upward from the front to the back, to assure the ripening of
the embryo. Charms may serve to ward off the evil eye and witches or
demons. At birth, before the umbilical cord is severed, the father may
touch the baby's lips with a gold spoon or ring dipped in honey, curds,
and ghee. The word vak (speech) is whispered three times into
the right ear, and mantras are chanted to ensure a long life. A number
of rituals for the infant include the first visit outside to a temple,
the first feeding with solid food (usually cooked rice), an ear-piercing
ceremony, and the first haircut (shaving the head) that often occurs at
a temple or during a festival when the hair is offered to a deity.
A crucial event in the life of the orthodox, upper-caste Hindu male
is an initiation (upanayana ) ceremony, which takes place for
some young males between the ages of six and twelve to mark the
transition to awareness and adult religious responsibilities. At the
ceremony itself, the family priest invests the boy with a sacred thread
to be worn always over the left shoulder, and the parents instruct him
in pronouncing the Gayatri Mantra. The initiation ceremony is seen as a
new birth; those groups entitled to wear the sacred thread are called
the twice-born (see Glossary). In the ancient categorization of society
associated with the Vedas, only the three highest groups--Brahman,
warrior (Kshatriya), and commoner or merchant (Vaishya)--were allowed to
wear the thread, to make them distinct from the fourth group of servants
(Shudra). Many individuals and groups who are only hazily associated
with the old "twice-born" elites perform the upanayana
ceremony and claim the higher status it bestows. For young Hindu women
in South India, a different ritual and celebration occurs at the first
menses.
The next important transition in life is marriage. For most people in
India, the betrothal of the young couple and the exact date and time of
the wedding are matters decided by the parents in consultation with
astrologers. At Hindu weddings, the bride and bridegroom represent the
god and the goddess, although there is a parallel tradition that sees
the groom as a prince coming to wed his princess. The groom, decked in
all his finery, often travels to the wedding site on a caparisoned white
horse or in an open limousine, accompanied by a procession of relatives,
musicians, and bearers of ornate electrified lamps. The actual
ceremonies in many cases become extremely elaborate, but orthodox Hindu
marriages typically have at their center the recitation of mantras by
priests. In a crucial rite, the new couple take seven steps northward
from a sacred household fire, turn, and make offerings into the flames.
Independent traditions in regional languages and among different caste
groups support wide variations in ritual (see Life Passages, ch. 5).
After the death of a family member, the relatives become involved in
ceremonies for preparation of the body and a procession to the burning
or burial ground. For most Hindus, cremation is the ideal method for
dealing with the dead, although many groups practice burial instead;
infants are buried rather than cremated. At the funeral site, in the
presence of the male mourners, the closest relative of the deceased
(usually the eldest son) takes charge of the final rite and, if it is
cremation, lights the funeral pyre. After a cremation, ashes and
fragments of bone are collected and eventually immersed in a holy river.
After a funeral, everyone undergoes a purifying bath. The immediate
family remains in a state of intense pollution for a set number of days
(sometimes ten, eleven, or thirteen). At the end of that period, close
family members meet for a ceremonial meal and often give gifts to the
poor or to charities. A particular feature of the Hindu ritual is the
preparation of rice balls (pinda ) offered to the spirit of the
dead person during memorial services. In part these ceremonies are seen
as contributing to the merit of the deceased, but they also pacify the
soul so that it will not linger in this world as a ghost but will pass
through the realm of Yama, the god of death.
India - Temples
Islam is India's largest minority religion, with Muslims officially
comprising 12.1 percent of the country's population, or 101.6 million
people as of the 1991 census. The largest concentrations--about 52
percent of all Muslims in India--live in the states of Bihar (12
million), West Bengal (16 million), and Uttar Pradesh (24 million),
according to the 1991 census. Muslims represent a majority of the local
populations only in Jammu and Kashmir (not tabulated in 1991 but 65
percent in 1981) and Lakshadweep (94 percent). As a faith with its roots
outside South Asia, Islam also offers some striking contrasts to those
religions that originated in India.
Origins and Tenets
Islam began with the ministry of the Prophet Muhammad (570-632), who
belonged to a merchant family in the trading town of Mecca in Arabia. In
his middle age, Muhammad received visions in which the Archangel Gabriel
revealed the word of God to him. After 620 he publicly preached the
message of these visions, stressing the oneness of God (Allah),
denouncing the polytheism of his fellow Arabs, and calling for moral
uplift of the population. He attracted a dedicated band of followers,
but there was intense opposition from the leaders of the city, who
profited from pilgrimage trade to the shrine called the Kaaba. In 622
Muhammad and his closest supporters migrated to the town of Yathrib (now
renamed Medina) to the north and set up a new center of preaching and
opposition to the leadership of Mecca. This move, the hijrah or hegira,
marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar and the origin of the new
religion of Islam. After a series of military engagements, Muhammad and
his followers were able to defeat the authorities in Mecca and return to
take control of the city. Before his death in 632, Muhammad was able to
bring most of the tribes of Arabia into the fold of Islam. Soon after
his death, the united Arabs conquered present-day Syria, Iraq, Egypt,
and Iran, making Islam into a world religion by the end of the seventh
century.
Islam means submission to God, and a Muslim is one who has submitted
to the will of God. At the center of the religion is an intense
concentration on the unity of God and the separation between God and his
creatures. No physical representation of God is allowed. There are no
other gods. The duty of humanity is to profess the simple testimony:
"There is no god but God (Allah), and Muhammad is his
Prophet." Obedience to God's will rests on following the example of
the Prophet in one's own life and faithfulness to the revelations
collected into the most sacred text, the Quran. The Five Pillars of
Islam are reciting the profession of faith; praying five times a day;
almsgiving to the poor; fasting (abstaining from dawn to dusk from food,
drink, sexual relations, and smoking) during the month of Ramazan (the
ninth month of the Islamic calendar, known as Ramadan in Arab
countries), the holy month when God's revelations were received by
Muhammad; and making the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca at least once during
one's life if possible. People who obey God's commandments and live a
good life will go to heaven after death; those who disobey will go to
hell. All souls will be resurrected for a last judgment at the end of
the world. Muslims view themselves as followers of the same tradition
preserved in the Judaic and Christian scriptures, accept the prophetic
roles of Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), and Isa (Jesus), and view
Islam as the final statement of revealed truth for the entire world.
Regulation of the Muslim community rests primarily on rules in the
Quran, then on authenticated tales of the conduct (sunna ) of
the Prophet Muhammad, then on reasoning, and finally on the consensus of
opinion. By the end of the eighth century, four main schools of Muslim
jurisprudence had emerged in Sunni (see Glossary) Islam to interpret the
sharia (Islamic law). Prominent among these groups was the Hanafi
school, which dominated most of India, and the Shafii school, which was
more prevalent in South India. Because Islam has no ordained priesthood,
direction of the Muslim community rests on the learning of religious
scholars (ulama) who are expert in understanding the Quran and its
appended body of commentaries.
Early leadership controversies within the Muslim community led to
divisions that still have an impact on the body of believers. When
Muhammad died, leadership fell to his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who
became the first caliph (khalifa , or successor), a position
that combined spiritual and secular power. A separate group advocated
the leadership of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, who had
married his daughter Fatima. Leadership could have fallen to Ali's son
Husayn, but, in the power struggle that followed, in 680 Husayn and
seventy-two followers were murdered at Karbala (now in modern Iraq).
This leadership dispute formed the most crucial dividing point in
Islamic history: the victorious party went on to found the Umayyad
Dynasty (661-750), which had its headquarters at Damascus, leading the
majority of Muslims in the Sunni path. The disaffected Shiat Ali (or
Party of Ali) viewed only his line as legitimate and continued to follow
descendants of Husayn as their leader (imam--see Glossary). Among the
followers of this Shia (see Glossary) path, there is a party of
"Seveners" who trace the lineage of imams down to Ismail (d.
762), the Seventh Imam and eldest son of the Sixth Imam. The Ismailis
are the largest Shia group in India, and are concentrated in Maharashtra
and Gujarat. A second group, the "Twelvers" (the most numerous
Shia group worldwide), traces the lineage of imams through twelve
generations, believing that the last or Twelfth Imam became
"hidden" and will reappear in the world as a savior, or Mahdi,
at some time in the future.
The division between Sunni and Shia dates back to purely political
struggles in the seventh century, but over time between the two major
communities many divisive differences in ritual and legal
interpretations have evolved. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunni,
and in contemporary India 90 percent of Muslims follow this path. Sunnis
have recognized no legitimate caliph after the position was abolished in
Turkey in 1924, placing the direction of the community clearly with the
ulama.
Public worship for the average Muslim consists of going to a mosque (masjid
)--normally on Fridays, although mosques are well attended throughout
the week--for congregational prayers led by a local imam, following the
public call to prayer, which may be intoned from the top of a minaret (minar
) at the mosque. After leaving their footwear at the door, men and women
separate; men usually sit in front, women in back, either inside the
mosque or in an open courtyard. The prayer leader gives a sermon in the
local regional language, perhaps interspersed with Arabic or Farsi
(sometimes called Persian or Parsi) quotations, depending on his
learning and the sophistication of the audience. Announcements of events
of interest that may include political commentary are often included.
Then follow common prayers that involve responses from the worshipers
who stand, bow, and kneel in unison during devotions.
Islamic Traditions in South Asia
Muslims practice a series of life-cycle rituals that differ from
those of Hindus, Jains, or Buddhists. The newborn baby has the call to
prayer whispered into the left ear, the profession of faith whispered
into the right ear, honey or date paste placed in the mouth, and a name
selected. On the sixth day after birth, the first bath occurs. On the
seventh day or a multiple of the seventh, the head is shaved, and alms
are distributed, ideally in silver weighing as much as the hair; a
sacrifice of animals imitates the sheep sacrificed instead of Ishmael
(Ismail) in biblical times. Religious instruction starts at age four
years, four months, and four days, beginning with the standard phrase:
"In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful." Male
circumcision takes place between the ages of seven and twelve. Marriage
requires a payment by the husband to the wife and the solemnization of a
marital contract in a social gathering. Marriage ceremonies include the
donning of a nose ring by the bride, or in South India a wedding
necklace, and the procession of the bridegroom. In a traditional
wedding, males and females attend ceremonies in different rooms, in
keeping with the segregation of sexes in most social settings. After
death the family members wash and enshroud the body, after which it is
buried as prayers from the Quran are recited. On the third day, friends
and relatives come to console the bereaved, read the Quran, and pray for
the soul of the deceased. The family observe a mourning period of up to
forty days.
The annual festivals of Islam are based on a lunar calendar of 354
days, which makes the Islamic holy year independent of the Gregorian
calendar. Muslim festivals make a complete circuit of the solar year
every thirty-three years.
The beginning of the Islamic calendar is the month of Muharram, the
tenth day of which is Ashura, the anniversary of the death of Husayn,
the son of Ali. Ashura, a major holiday, is of supreme importance for
the Shia. Devotees engage in ritualized mourning that may include
processions of colorful replicas of Husayn's tomb at Karbala and
standards with palms on top, which are carried by barefoot mourners and
buried at an imitation Karbala. In many areas of India, these parades
provide a dramatic spectacle that draws large numbers of non-Muslim
onlookers. Demonstrations of grief may include bouts of
self-flagellation that can draw blood and may take place in public
streets, although many families retain personal mourning houses. Sunni
Muslims may also commemorate Husayn's death but in a less demonstrative
manner, concentrating instead on the redemptive aspect of his martyrdom.
The last day of Ramazan is Id al Fitr (Feast of Breaking the Fast),
another national holiday, which ends the month of fasting with
almsgiving, services in mosques, and visits to friends and neighbors.
Bakr Id, or Id al Zuha (Feast of Sacrifice), begins on the tenth day of
the Islamic month of Dhul Hijjah and is a major holiday. Prescribed in
the Quran, Id al Zuha commemorates Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice
Ishmael (rather than Ishaq--Isaac--as in the Judeo-Christian tradition)
according to God's command, but it is also the high point of the
pilgrim's ritual cycle while on the hajj in Mecca. All of these
festivals involve large feasts, gifts given to family and neighbors, and
the distribution of food for charitable purposes.
A significant aspect of Islam in India is the importance of shrines
attached to the memory of great Sufi saints. Sufism is a mystical path (tariqat
) as distinct from the path of the sharia. A Sufi attains a direct
vision of oneness with God, often on the edges of orthodox behavior, and
can thus become a pir (living saint) who may take on disciples
(murids ) and set up a spiritual lineage that can last for
generations. Orders of Sufis became important in India during the
thirteenth century following the ministry of Muinuddin Chishti
(1142-1236), who settled in Ajmer, Rajasthan, and attracted large
numbers of converts to Islam because of his holiness. His Chishtiyya
order went on to become the most influential Sufi lineage in India,
although other orders from Central Asia and Southwest Asia also reached
to India and played a large role in the spread of Islam. Many Sufis were
well known for weaving music, dance, intoxicants, and local folktales
into their songs and lectures. In this way, they created a large
literature in regional languages that embedded Islamic culture deeply
into older South Asian traditions.
In the case of many great teachers, the memory of their holiness has
been so intense that they are still viewed as active intercessors with
God, and their tombs have become the site of rites and prayers by
disciples and lay people alike. Tales of miraculous deeds associated
with the tombs of great saints have attracted large numbers of pilgrims
attempting to gain cures for physical maladies or solutions to personal
problems. The tomb of the pir thus becomes a dargah
(gateway) to God and the focus for a wide range of rituals, such as
daily washing and decoration by professional attendants, touching or
kissing the tomb or contact with the water that has washed it, hanging
petitions on the walls of the shrine surrounding the tomb, lighting
incense, and giving money.
The descendants of the original pir are sometimes seen as
inheritors of his spiritual energy, and, as pirs in their own
right, they might dispense amulets sanctified by contact with them or
with the tomb. The annual celebration of the pir 's death is a
major event at important shrines, attracting hundreds of thousands of
devotees for celebrations that may last for days. Free communal kitchens
and distribution of sweets are also big attractions of these festivals,
at which Muslim fakirs, or wandering ascetics, sometimes appear and
where public demonstrations of self-mortification, such as miraculous
piercing of the body and spiritual possession of devotees, sometimes
occur. Every region of India can boast of at least one major Sufi shrine
that attracts expressive devotion, which remains important, especially
for Muslim women.
The leadership of the Muslim community has pursued various directions
in the evolution of Indian Islam during the twentieth century. The most
conservative wing has typically rested on the education system provided
by the hundreds of religious training institutes (madrasa )
throughout the country, which have tended to stress the study of the
Quran and Islamic texts in Arabic and Persian, and have focused little
on modern managerial and technical skills (see Education and Society,
ch. 2). Several national movements have emerged from this sector of the
Muslim community. The Jamaati Islami (Islamic Party), founded in 1941,
advocates the establishment of an overtly Islamic government through
peaceful, democratic, and nonmissionary activities. It had about 3,000
active members and 40,000 sympathizers in the mid-1980s. The Tablighi
Jamaat (Outreach Society) became active after the 1940s as a movement,
primarily among the ulama, stressing personal renewal, prayer, a
missionary and cooperative spirit, and attention to orthodoxy. It has
been highly critical of the kind of activities that occur in and around
Sufi shrines and remains a minor if respected force in the training of
the ulama. Other ulama have upheld the legitimacy of mass religion,
including exaltation of pirs and the memory of the Prophet. A
powerful secularizing drive led to the founding of Aligarh Muslim
University (founded in 1875 as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental
College)--with its modern curriculum--and other major Muslim
universities. This educational drive has remained the most dominant
force in guiding the Muslim community.
India - Sikhism
Sikhism has about 20 million believers worldwide but has an
importance far beyond those numbers because Sikhs have played a
disproportionately large role in the armed forces and public affairs in
India for the last 400 years. Although most Indian Sikhs (79 percent)
remain concentrated in the state of Punjab, nearly 3.5 million Sikhs
live outside the state, while about 4 million live abroad. This Sikh
diaspora, driven by ambition and economic success, has made Sikhism a
world religion as well as a significant minority force within the
country.
Early History and Tenets
Sikhism began with Guru Nanak (1469-1539), a member of a trading
caste in Punjab who seems to have been employed for some time as a
government servant, was married and had two sons, and at age forty-five
became a religious teacher. At the heart of his message was a philosophy
of universal love, devotion to God, and the equality of all men and
women before God. He set up congregations of believers who ate together
in free communal kitchens in an overt attempt to break down caste
boundaries based on food prohibitions. As a poet, musician, and
enlightened master, Nanak's reputation spread, and by the time he died
he had founded a new religion of "disciples" (shiksha
or sikh) that followed his example.
Nanak's son, Baba Sri Chand, founded the Udasi sect of celibate
ascetics, which continued in the 1990s. However, Nanak chose as his
successor not his son but Angad (1504-52), his chief disciple, to carry
on the work as the second guru. Thus began a lineage of teachers that
lasted until 1708 and amounted to ten gurus in the Sikh tradition, each
of whom is viewed as an enlightened master who propounded directly the
word of God. The third guru, Amar Das (1479-1574), established
missionary centers to spread the message and was so well respected that
the Mughal emperor Akbar visited him (see The Mughals, ch. 1). Amar Das
appointed his son-in-law Ram Das (1534-81) to succeed him, establishing
a hereditary succession for the position of guru. He also built a tank
for water at Amritsar in Punjab, which, after his death, became the
holiest center of Sikhism.
By the late sixteenth century, the influence of the Sikh religion on
Punjabi society was coming to the notice of political authorities. The
fifth guru, Arjun Das (1563-1606), was executed in Lahore by the Mughal
emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) for alleged complicity in a rebellion. In
response, the next guru, Hargobind (d. 1644), militarized and
politicized his position and fought three battles with Mughal forces.
Hargobind established a militant tradition of resistance to persecution
by the central government in Delhi that remains an important motif in
Sikh consciousness. Hargobind also established at Amritsar, in front of
the Golden Temple, the central shrine devoted to Sikhism, the Throne of
the Eternal God (Akal Takht) from which the guru dispensed justice and
administered the secular affairs of the community, clearly establishing
the tradition of a religious state that remains a major issue. The ninth
guru, Tegh Bahadur (1621-75), because he refused Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb's order to convert to Islam, was brought to Delhi and beheaded
on a site that later became an important gurdwara (abode of the
guru, a Sikh temple) on Chandni Chauk, one of the old city's main
thoroughfares.
These events led the tenth guru, Gobind Singh (1666-1708), to
transform the Sikhs into a militant brotherhood dedicated to defense of
their faith at all times. He instituted a baptism ceremony involving the
immersion of a sword in sugared water that initiates Sikhs into the
Khalsa (khalsa , from the Persian term for "the king's
own," often taken to mean army of the pure) of dedicated devotion.
The outward signs of this new order were the "Five Ks" to be
observed at all times: uncut hair (kesh ), a long knife (kirpan
), a comb (kangha ), a steel bangle (kara ), and a
special kind of breeches not reaching below the knee (kachha ).
Male Sikhs took on the surname Singh (meaning lion), and women took the
surname Kaur (princess). All made vows to purify their personal behavior
by avoiding intoxicants, including alcohol and tobacco. In modern India,
male Sikhs who have dedicated themselves to the Khalsa do not cut their
beards and keep their long hair tied up under turbans, preserving a
distinctive personal appearance recognized throughout the world.
Much of Guru Gobind Singh's later life was spent on the move, in
guerrilla campaigns against the Mughal Empire, which was entering the
last days of its effective authority under Aurangzeb (1658-1707). After
Gobind Singh's death, the line of gurus ended, and their message
continued through the Adi Granth (Original Book), which dates
from 1604 and later became known as the Guru Granth Sahib (Holy
Book of the Gurus). The Guru Granth Sahib is revered as a
continuation of the line of gurus and as the living word of God by all
Sikhs and stands at the heart of all ceremonies.
Most of the Sikh gurus were excellent musicians, who composed songs
that conveyed their message to the masses in the saints' own language,
which combined variants of Punjabi with Hindi and Braj and also
contained Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Written in Gurmukhi script,
these songs are one of the main sources of early Punjabi language and
literature. There are 5,894 hymns in all, arranged according to the
musical measure in which they are sung. An interesting feature of this
literature is that 937 songs and poems are by well-known bhakti
saints who were not members of the lineage of Sikh gurus, including the
North Indian saint Kabir and five Muslim devotees. In the Guru
Granth Sahib , God is called by all the Hindu names and by Allah as
well. From its beginnings, then, Sikhism was an inclusive faith that
attempted to encompass and enrich other Indian religious traditions.
The belief system propounded by the gurus has its origins in the
philosophy and devotions of Hinduism and Islam, but the formulation of
Sikhism is unique. God is the creator of the universe and is without
qualities or differentiation in himself. The universe (samsar )
is not sinful in its origin but is covered with impurities; it is not
suffering, but a transitory opportunity for the soul to recognize its
true nature and break the cycle of rebirth. The unregenerate person is
dominated by self-interest and remains immersed in illusion (maya
), leading to bad karma. Meanwhile, God desires that his creatures
escape and achieve enlightenment (nirvana) by recognizing his order in
the universe. He does this by manifesting his grace as a holy word,
attainable through recognition and recitation of God's holy name (nam
). The role of the guru, who is the manifestation of God in the world,
is to teach the means for prayer through the Guru Granth Sahib
and the community of believers. The guru in this system, and by
extension the Guru Granth Sahib , are coexistent with the
divine and play a decisive role in saving the world.
Where the Guru Granth Sahib is present, that place becomes a
gurdwara . Many Sikh homes contain separate rooms or designated
areas where a copy of the book stands as the center of devotional
ceremonies. Throughout Punjab, or anywhere there is a substantial body
of believers, there are special shrines where the Guru Granth Sahib
is displayed permanently or is installed daily in a ceremonial manner.
These public gurdwaras are the centers of Sikh community life
and the scene of periodic assemblies for worship. The typical assembly
involves group singing from the Guru Granth Sahib , led by
distinguished believers or professional singers attached to the shrine,
distribution of holy food, and perhaps a sermon delivered by the
custodian of the shrine.
As for domestic and life-cycle rituals, well into the twentieth
century many Sikhs followed Hindu customs for birth, marriage, and death
ceremonies, including readings from Hindu scriptures and the employment
of Brahmans as officiants. Reform movements within the Sikh community
have purged many of these customs, substituting instead readings from
the Guru Granth Sahib as the focus for rituals and the
employment of Sikh ritual specialists. At major public events--weddings,
funerals, or opening a new business--patrons may fund a reading of the
entire Guru Granth Sahib by special reciters.
Twentieth-Century Developments
The existence of the Khalsa creates a potential division within the
Sikh community between those who have undergone the baptism ceremony and
those who practice the system laid down in the Guru Granth Sahib
but who do not adopt the distinctive life-style of the Khalsa. Among the
latter is a sect of believers founded by Baba Dayal (d. 1853) named the
Nirankaris, who concentrate on the formless quality of God and his
revelation purely through the guru and the Guru Granth Sahib ,
and who accept the existence of a living, enlightened teacher as
essential for spiritual development. The dominant tendency among the
Sikhs since the late nineteenth century has been to stress the
importance of the Khalsa and its outward signs.
Revivalist movements of the late nineteenth century centered on the
activities of the Singh Sabha (Assembly of Lions), who successfully
moved much of the Sikh community toward their own ritual systems and
away from Hindu customs, and culminated in the Akali (eternal) mass
movement in the 1920s to take control of gurdwaras away from
Hindu managers and invest it in an organization representing the Sikhs.
The result was passage of the Sikh Gurdwara Act of 1925, which
established the Central Gurdwara Management Committee to manage all Sikh
shrines in Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh through an assembly of
elected Sikhs. The combined revenues of hundreds of shrines, which
collected regular contributions and income from endowments, gave the
committee a large operating budget and considerable authority over the
religious life of the community. A simultaneous process led to the Akali
Dal (Eternal Party), a political organization that originally
coordinated nonviolent agitations to gain control over gurdwaras
, then participated in the independence struggle, and since 1947 has
competed for control over the Punjab state government. The ideology of
the Akali Dal is simple--single-minded devotion to the guru and
preservation of the Sikh faith through political power--and the party
has served to mobilize a majority of Sikhs in Punjab around issues that
stress Sikh separatism.
There is no official priesthood within Sikhism or any widely accepted
institutional mechanism for policy making for the entire faith. Instead,
decisions are made by communities of believers (sangat ) based
on the Guru Granth Sahib --a tradition dating back to the
eighteenth century when scattered bodies of believers had to fight
against persecution and manage their own affairs. Anyone may study the
scriptures intensively and become a "knower" (giani )
who is recognized by fellow believers, and there is a variety of
training institutes with full-time students and teachers.
Leaders of sects and sectarian training institutions may feel free to
issue their own orders. When these orders are combined with the prestige
and power of the Central Gurdwara Management Committee and the Akali
Dal, which have explicitly narrow administrative goals and are often
faction-ridden, a mixture of images and authority emerges that often
leaves the religion as a whole without clear leadership. Thus it became
possible for Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, head of a training
institution, to stand forth as a leading authority on the direction of
Sikhism; initiate reforms of personal morality; participate in the
persecution of Nirankaris; and take effective control of the holiest
Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, in the early 1980s.
His takeover of the Golden Temple led to a violent siege and culminated
in the devastation of the shrine by the army in 1984 (see The Rise of
Indira Gandhi, ch. 1; Insurgent Movements and External Subversion, ch.
10). Later terrorist activities in Punjab, carried out in the name of
Sikhism, were performed by a wide range of organizations claiming to
represent an authoritative vision of the nature and direction of the
community as a whole.
India - Tribal Religions
Among the 68 million citizens of India who are members of tribal
groups, the religious concepts, terminologies, and practices are as
varied as the hundreds of tribes, but members of these groups have one
thing in common: they are under constant pressure from the major
organized religions. Some of this pressure is intentional, as outside
missionaries work among tribal groups to gain converts. Most of the
pressure, however, comes from the process of integration within a
national political and economic system that brings tribes into
increasing contact with other groups and different, prestigious belief
systems. In general, those tribes that remain geographically isolated in
desert, hill, and forest regions or on islands are able to retain their
traditional cultures and religions longer. Those tribes that make the
transition away from hunting and gathering and toward sedentary
agriculture, usually as low-status laborers, find their ancient
religious forms in decay and their place filled by practices of
Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism.
One of the most studied tribal religions is that of the Santal of
Orissa, Bihar, and West Bengal, one of the largest tribes in India,
having a population estimated at 4.2 million. According to the 1991
census, however, only 23,645 people listed Santal as their religious
belief.
According to the Santal religion, the supreme deity, who ultimately
controls the entire universe, is Thakurji. The weight of belief,
however, falls on a court of spirits (bonga ), who handle
different aspects of the world and who must be placated with prayers and
offerings in order to ward off evil influences. These spirits operate at
the village, household, ancestor, and subclan level, along with evil
spirits that cause disease, and can inhabit village boundaries,
mountains, water, tigers, and the forest. A characteristic feature of
the Santal village is a sacred grove on the edge of the settlement where
many spirits live and where a series of annual festivals take place.
The most important spirit is Maran Buru (Great Mountain), who is
invoked whenever offerings are made and who instructed the first Santals
in sex and brewing of rice beer. Maran Buru's consort is the benevolent
Jaher Era (Lady of the Grove).
A yearly round of rituals connected with the agricultural cycle,
along with life-cycle rituals for birth, marriage and burial at death,
involves petitions to the spirits and offerings that include the
sacrifice of animals, usually birds. Religious leaders are male
specialists in medical cures who practice divination and witchcraft.
Similar beliefs are common among other tribes of northeast and central
India such as the Kharia, Munda, and Oraon.
Smaller and more isolated tribes often demonstrate less articulated
classification systems of the spiritual hierarchy, described as animism
or a generalized worship of spiritual energies connected with locations,
activities, and social groups. Religious concepts are intricately
entwined with ideas about nature and interaction with local ecological
systems. As in Santal religion, religious specialists are drawn from the
village or family and serve a wide range of spiritual functions that
focus on placating potentially dangerous spirits and coordinating
rituals.
Unlike the Santal, who have a large population long accustomed to
agriculture and a distinguished history of resistance to outsiders, many
smaller tribal groups are quite sensitive to ecological degradation
caused by modernization, and their unique religious beliefs are under
constant threat. Even among the Santal, there are 300,000 Christians who
are alienated from traditional festivals, although even among converts
the belief in the spirits remains strong. Among the Munda and Oraon in
Bihar, about 25 percent of the population are Christians. Among the
Kharia of Bihar (population about 130,000), about 60 percent are
Christians, but all are heavily influenced by Hindu concepts of major
deities and the annual Hindu cycle of festivals. Tribal groups in the
Himalayas were similarly affected by both Hinduism and Buddhism in the
late twentieth century. Even the small hunting-and-gathering groups in
the union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands have been under
severe pressure because of immigration to this area and the resulting
reduction of their hunting area.
India - Christianity
The first Christians in India, according to tradition and legend,
were converted by Saint Thomas the Apostle, who arrived on the Malabar
Coast of India in A.D. 52. After evangelizing and performing miracles in
Kerala and Tamil Nadu, he is believed to have been martyred in Madras
and buried on the site of San Thomé Cathedral. Members of the
Syro-Malabar Church, an eastern rite of the Roman Catholic Church,
adopted the Syriac liturgy dating from fourth century Antioch. They
practiced what is also known as the Malabar rite until the arrival of
the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century. Soon thereafter, the
Portuguese attempted to latinize the Malabar rite, an action which, by
the mid-sixteenth century, led to charges of heresy against the
Syro-Malabar Church and a lengthy round of political machinations. By
the middle of the next century, a schism occurred when the adherents of
the Malankar rite (or Syro-Malankara Church) broke away from the
Syro-Malabar Church. Fragmentation continued within the Syro-Malabar
Church up through the early twentieth century when a large contingent
left to join the Nestorian Church, which had had its own roots in India
since the sixth or seventh century. By 1887, however, the leaders of the
Syro-Malabar Church had reconciled with Rome, which formally recognized
the legitimacy of the Malabar rite. The Syro-Malankara Church was
reconciled with Rome in 1930 and, while retaining the Syriac liturgy,
adopted the Malayalam language instead of the ancient Syriac language.
Throughout this period, foreign missionaries made numerous converts
to Christianity. Early Roman Catholic missionaries, particularly the
Portuguese, led by the Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier (1506-52), expanded
from their bases on the west coast making many converts, especially
among lower castes and outcastes. The miraculously undecayed body of
Saint Francis Xavier is still on public view in a glass coffin at the
Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa. Beginning in the eighteenth century,
Protestant missionaries began to work throughout India, leading to the
growth of Christian communities of many varieties.
The total number of Christians in India according to the 1991 census
was 19.6 million, or 2.3 percent of the population. About 13.8 million
of these Christians were Roman Catholics, including 300,000 members of
the Syro-Malankara Church. The remainder of Roman Catholics were under
the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India. In January 1993, after
centuries of self-government, the 3.5-million-strong Latin-rite
Syro-Malabar Church was raised to archepiscopate status as part of the
Roman Catholic Church. In total, there were nineteen archbishops, 103
bishops, and about 15,000 priests in India in 1995.
Most Protestant denominations are represented in India, the result of
missionary activities throughout the country, starting with the onset of
British rule. Most denominations, however, are almost exclusively
staffed by Indians, and the role of foreign missionaries is limited. The
largest Protestant denomination in the country is the Church of South
India, since 1947 a union of Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational,
Methodist, and Anglican congregations with approximately 2.2 million
members. A similar Church of North India has 1 million members. There
are 473,000 Methodists, 425,000 Baptists, and about 1.3 million
Lutherans. Orthodox churches of the Malankara and Malabar rites total 2
million and 700,000 members, respectively.
All Christian churches have found the most fertile ground for
expansion among Dalits, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribe groups
(see Tribes, ch. 4). During the twentieth century, the fastest growing
Christian communities have been located in the northeast, among the
Khasis, Mizos, Nagas, and other hill tribes. Christianity offers a
non-Hindu mode of acculturation during a period when the state and
modern economy have been radically transforming the life-styles of the
hill peoples. Missionaries have led the way in the development of
written languages and literature for many tribal groups. Christian
churches have provided a focus for unity among different ethnic groups
and have brought with them a variety of charitable services.
India - Zoroastrianism
The process of modernization in India, well under way during the
British colonial period (1757-1947), has brought with it major changes
in the organizational forms of all religions. The missionary societies
that came with the British in the early nineteenth century imported,
along with modern concepts of print media and propaganda, an ideology of
intellectual competition and religious conversion. Instead of the
customary interpretation of rituals and texts along received sectarian
lines, Indian religious leaders began devising intellectual syntheses
that could encompass the varied beliefs and practices of their
traditions within a framework that could withstand Christian arguments.
One of the most important reactions was the Arya Samaj (Arya
Society), founded in 1875 by Swami Dayananda (1824-83), which went back
to the Vedas as the ultimate revealed source of truth and attempted to
purge Hinduism of more recent accretions that had no basis in the
scriptures. Originally active in Punjab, this small society still works
to purify Hindu rituals, converts tribal people, and runs centers
throughout India. Other responses include the Ramakrishna order of
renunciants established by Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), which set
forth a unifying philosophy that followed the Vedanta teacher Shankara
and other teachers by accepting all paths as ultimately leading toward
union with the undifferentiated brahman (see The Tradition of
the Enlightened Master, this ch.). One of the primary goals of the
Ramakrishna movement has been to educate Hindus about their own
scriptures; the movement also runs book stores and study centers in all
major cities. Both of these paths are directly modeled on the
institutional and intellectual forms used by European missionaries and
religious leaders.
During the 1930s and 1940s, again responding to institutional models
from Europe, the more activist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS--National Volunteer Organisation) emerged to protect Hinduism. The
RSS had been founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1944), a
native of Maharashtra who was concerned that Hinduism was in danger of
extinction from its external foes and needed a strong, militant force of
devotees to protect it. Members believe that the Indian nation is the
divine mother to whom the citizen devotes mind and body through karma-yoga
, or disciplined service. Training consists of daily early morning
meetings at which the saffron, white, and green Indian flag and the
swallow-tailed, red-ocher RSS banner are raised as rows of members
salute silently. There are then group drills in gymnastic exercises,
sports, discussions of patriotic themes from a primarily Hindu
viewpoint, group singing of nationalist songs, and a final assembly with
saluting. Throughout India in the early 1990s, there were cells (shakha
) of fifty to 100 members from all walks of life (the RSS rejects class
differences) who were devoted to the nation. Although it has attracted
hundreds of thousands of members from all over India, the RSS has never
projected itself as a political party, always remaining a national club
that is ready to send its members to trouble spots for the defense of
the nation and the national culture, embodied in Hinduism. The Jana
Sangh, established in 1951, was the RSS's political arm until it joined
the Janata Party in 1977 and its membership split away in 1980 to form
the BJP.
Another activist organization is the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP--World Hindu Council), founded in 1964. The VHP runs schools,
medical centers, hostels, orphanages, and mass movements to support
Hinduism wherever it is perceived as threatened. This ultraconservative
organization played a role in the extensive agitation for the demolition
of a mosque in Ayodhya, leading to the destruction of the structure
during a huge demonstration in 1992. As a result of the VHP's complicity
in the affair, the Ministry of Home Affairs imposed a two-year ban on
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad under the Unlawful Activities Act. When the
ban expired in December 1994, the government reimposed it for two
additional years.
The spread of Hindu "communal" (that is, religious)
sentiment parallels a similar rise in religious chauvinism and
"fundamentalist" ideologies among religious minorities,
including Muslims and Sikhs. Against this background of agitation, the
periodic outbreak of communal riots in urban areas throughout India
contributes to an atmosphere of religious tension that has been a
hallmark of the national political scene during the twentieth century.
Hindu-Muslim riots, especially in North India, reached a peak during the
partition of India in 1947 and periodically escalated in urban areas in
the early 1990s (see Political Impasse and Independence, ch. 1). This
strife typically involves low-income groups from both communities in
struggles over land, jobs, or local resources that coalesced around a
religious focus after seemingly trivial incidents polarized the two
communities. In practice, although members of other religious
communities are the victims of violence, rioters are rarely motivated by
religious instructors, although fundamentalist agitators are often
implicated. The situation in North India became complicated during the
1980s by Sikh terrorism connected with the crisis in Punjab, the
widespread anti-Sikh riots after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's
assassination in November 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards, and a series of
terrorist or counterterrorist actions lasting into the 1990s. In all of
these cases, many observers believe that religion has appeared as a
cover for political and economic struggles.
The perception that one's religion is in danger receives periodic
reinforcement from the phenomenon of public mass religious conversion
that receives coverage from the news media. Many of these events feature
groups of Scheduled Caste members who attempt to escape social
disabilities through conversion to alternative religions, usually Islam,
Buddhism, or Christianity. These occasions attract the attention of
fundamentalist organizations from all sides and heighten public
consciousness of religious divisions. The most conspicuous movement of
this sort occurred during the 1950s during the mass conversions of
Mahars to Buddhism (see Buddhism, this ch.). In the early 1980s, the
primary example was the conversion of Dalits to Islam in Meenakshipuram,
Tamil Nadu, an event that resulted in considerable discussion in the
media and an escalation of agitation in South India. Meanwhile,
conversions to Christianity among tribal groups continue, with growing
opposition from Hindu revivalist organizations.
Alongside the more publicized violent outbreaks, there have been
major nonviolent changes, as new sectarian movements continue to grow
and as established movements change. For example, the Radhasoami Satsang
movement of North India, which includes adherents in Punjab and Uttar
Pradesh, encompasses yogic ideas on the relationship between humans and
the universe, the bhakti saint tradition including select Sikh
influences, and the veneration of the enlightened guru. The dominant
tendency of these new religions, following the example of the great
teachers of the past that was reiterated by Mahatma Gandhi and most
modern gurus, remains nonviolence to all living beings and acceptance of
the remarkable diversity of Indian religion.
India - Language, Ethnicity, and Regionalism
Diversity, Use, and Policy
The languages of India belong to four major families: Indo-Aryan (a
branch of the Indo-European family), Dravidian, Austroasiatic (Austric),
and Sino-Tibetan, with the overwhelming majority of the population
speaking languages belonging to the first two families. (A fifth family,
Andamanese, is spoken by at most a few hundred among the indigenous
tribal peoples in the Andaman Islands, and has no agreed upon
connections with families outside them.) The four major families are as
different in their form and construction as are, for example, the
Indo-European and Semitic families. A variety of scripts are employed in
writing the different languages. Furthermore, most of the more widely
used Indian languages exist in a number of different forms or dialects
influenced by complex geographic and social patterns.
Sir George Grierson's twelve-volume Linguistic Survey of India
, published between 1903 and 1923, identified 179 languages and 544
dialects. The 1921 census listed 188 languages and forty-nine dialects.
The 1961 census listed 184 "mother tongues," including those
with fewer than 10,000 speakers. This census also gave a list of all the
names of mother tongues provided by the respondents themselves; the list
totals 1,652 names. The 1981 census--the last census to tabulate
languages--reported 112 mother tongues with more than 10,000 speakers
and almost 1 million people speaking other languages. The encyclopedic People
of India series, published by the government's Anthropological
Survey of India in the 1980s and early 1990s, identified seventy-five
"major languages" within a total of 325 languages used in
Indian households. In the early 1990s, there were thirty-two languages
with 1 million or more speakers (see table 15, Appendix).
The Indian constitution recognizes official languages (see The
Constitutional Framework, ch. 8). Articles 343 through 351 address the
use of Hindi, English, and regional languages for official purposes,
with the aim of a nationwide use of Hindi while guaranteeing the use of
minority languages at the state and local levels. Hindi has been
designated India's official language, although many impediments to its
official use exist.
The constitution's Eighth Schedule, as amended by Parliament in 1992,
lists eighteen official or Scheduled Languages (see Glossary). They are
Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani,
Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi,
Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. (Precise numbers of speakers of these languages
are not known. They were not reported in the 1991 census, and estimates
are subject to considerable variation because of the use of multiple
languages by individual speakers.) Of the official languages,
approximately 403 million people, or about 43 percent of the estimated
total 1995 population, speak Hindi as their mother tongue. Telugu,
Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil rank next, each the mother tongue of about 4
to 5 percent (about 37 million to 47 million people); Urdu, Gujarati,
Malayalam, Kannada, and Oriya are claimed by between 2 and 3 percent
(roughly 19 million to 28 million people); Bhojpuri, Punjabi, and
Assamese by 1 to 2 percent (9 million to 19 million people); and all
other languages by less than 1 percent (less than 9 million speakers)
each.
Since independence in 1947, linguistic affinity has served as a basis
for organizing interest groups; the "language question" itself
has become an increasingly sensitive political issue. Efforts to reach a
consensus on a single national language that transcends the myriad
linguistic regions and is acceptable to diverse language communities
have been largely unsuccessful.
Many Indian nationalists originally intended that Hindi would replace
English--the language of British rule (1757-1947)--as a medium of common
communication. Both Hindi and English are extensively used, and each has
its own supporters. Native speakers of Hindi, who are concentrated in
North India, contend that English, as a relic from the colonial past and
spoken by only a small fraction of the population, is hopelessly elitist
and unsuitable as the nation's official language. Proponents of English
argue, in contrast, that the use of Hindi is unfair because it is a
liability for those Indians who do not speak it as their native tongue.
English, they say, at least represents an equal handicap for Indians of
every region.
English continues to serve as the language of prestige. Efforts to
switch to Hindi or other regional tongues encounter stiff opposition
both from those who know English well and whose privileged position
requires proficiency in that tongue and from those who see it as a means
of upward mobility. Partisans of English also maintain it is useful and
indeed necessary as a link to the rest of the world, that India is lucky
that the colonial period left a language that is now the world's
predominant international language in the fields of culture, science,
technology, and commerce. They hold, too, that widespread knowledge of
English is necessary for technological and economic progress and that
reducing its role would leave India a backwater in world affairs.
Linguistic diversity is apparent on a variety of levels. Major
regional languages have stylized literary forms, often with an extensive
body of literature, which may date back from a few centuries to two
millennia ago. These literary languages differ markedly from the spoken
forms and village dialects that coexist with a plethora of caste idioms
and regional lingua francas (see Village Unity and Divisiveness, ch. 5).
Part of the reason for such linguistic diversity lies in the complex
social realities of South Asia. India's languages reflect the intricate
levels of social hierarchy and caste. Individuals have in their speech
repertoire a variety of styles and dialects appropriate to various
social situations. In general, the higher the speaker's status, the more
speech forms there are at his or her disposal. Speech is adapted in
countless ways to reflect the specific social context and the relative
standing of the speakers.
Determining what should be called a language or a dialect is more a
political than a linguistic question. Sometimes the word language
is applied to a standardized and prestigious form, recognized as such
over a large geographic area, whereas the word dialect is used
for the various forms of speech that lack prestige or that are
restricted to certain regions or castes but are still regarded as forms
of the same language. Sometimes mutual intelligibility is the criterion:
if the speakers can understand each other, even though with some
difficulty, they are speaking the same language, although they may speak
different dialects. However, speakers of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi can
often understand each other, yet they are regarded as speakers of
different languages. Whether or not one thinks Konkani--spoken in Goa,
Karnataka, and the Konkan region of Maharashtra--is a distinct language
or a dialect of Marathi has tended to be linked with whether or not one
thinks Goa ought to be merged with Maharashtra. The question has been
settled from the central government's point of view by making Goa a
state and Konkani a Scheduled Language. Moreover, the fact that the
Latin script is predominantly used for Konkani separates it further from
Marathi, which uses the Devanagari (see Glossary) script. However,
Konkani is also sometimes written in Devanagari and Kannada scripts.
Regional languages are an issue in the politically charged atmosphere
surrounding language policy. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, attempts
were made to redraw state boundaries to coincide with linguistic usage.
Such efforts have had mixed results. Linguistic affinity has often
failed to overcome other social and economic differences. In addition,
most states have linguistic minorities, and questions surrounding the
definition and use of the official language in those regions are fraught
with controversy.
States have been accused of failure to fulfill their obligations
under the national constitution to provide for the education of
linguistic minorities in their mother tongues, even when the minority
language is a Scheduled Language. Although the constitution requires
that legal documents and petitions may be submitted in any of the
Scheduled Languages to any government authority, this right is rarely
exercised. Under such circumstances, members of linguistic minorities
may feel they and their language are oppressed by the majority, while
people who are among linguistic majorities may feel threatened by what
some might consider minor concessions. Thus, attempts to make seemingly
minor accommodations for social diversity may have extensive and
volatile ramifications. For example, in 1994 a proposal in Bangalore to
introduce an Urdu-language television news segment (aimed primarily at
Muslim viewers) led to a week of urban riots that left dozens dead and
millions of dollars in property damage.
India - Languages of India
About 80 percent of all Indians--nearly 750 million people based on
1995 population estimates--speak one of the Indo-Aryan group of
languages. Persian and the languages of Afghanistan are close relatives,
belonging, like the Indo-Aryan languages, to the Indo-Iranian branch of
the Indo-European family. Brought into India from the northwest during
the second millennium B.C., the Indo-Aryan tongues spread throughout the
north, gradually displacing the earlier languages of the area.
Modern linguistic knowledge of this process of assimilation comes
through the Sanskrit language employed in the sacred literature known as
the Vedas (see The Vedas and Polytheism, ch. 3). Over a period of
centuries, Indo-Aryan languages came to predominate in the northern and
central portions of South Asia (see Antecedents, ch. 1).
As Indo-Aryan speakers spread across northern and central India,
their languages experienced constant change and development. By about
500 B.C., Prakrits, or "common" forms of speech, were
widespread throughout the north. By about the same time, the
"sacred," "polished," or "pure"
tongue--Sanskrit--used in religious rites had also developed along
independent lines, changing significantly from the form used in the
Vedas. However, its use in ritual settings encouraged the retention of
archaic forms lost in the Prakrits. Concerns for the purity and
correctness of Sanskrit gave rise to an elaborate science of grammar and
phonetics and an alphabetical system seen by some scholars as superior
to the Roman system. By the fourth century B.C., these trends had
culminated in the work of Panini, whose Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi
(Eight Chapters), set the basic form of Sanskrit for subsequent
generations. Panini's work is often compared to Euclid's as an
intellectual feat of systematization.
The Prakrits continued to evolve through everyday use. One of these
dialects was Pali, which was spoken in the western portion of peninsular
India. Pali became the language of Theravada Buddhism; eventually it
came to be identified exclusively with religious contexts. By around
A.D. 500, the Prakrits had changed further into Apabhramshas, or the
"decayed" speech; it is from these dialects that the
contemporary Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia developed. The rudiments
of modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars were in place by about A.D. 1000 to
1300.
It would be misleading, however, to call Sanskrit a dead language
because for many centuries huge numbers of works in all genres and on
all subjects continued to be written in Sanskrit. Original works are
still written in it, although in much smaller numbers than formerly.
Many students still learn Sanskrit as a second or third language,
classical music concerts regularly feature Sanskrit vocal compositions,
and there are even television programs conducted entirely in Sanskrit.
Around 18 percent of the Indian populace (about 169 million people in
1995) speak Dravidian languages. Most Dravidian speakers reside in South
India, where Indo-Aryan influence was less extensive than in the north.
Only a few isolated groups of Dravidian speakers, such as the Gonds in
Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, and the Kurukhs in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar,
remain in the north as representatives of the Dravidian speakers who
presumably once dominated much more of South Asia. (The only other
significant population of Dravidian speakers are the Brahuis in
Pakistan.)
The oldest documented Dravidian language is Tamil, with a substantial
body of literature, particularly the Cankam poetry, going back to the
first century A.D. Kannada and Telugu developed extensive bodies of
literature after the sixth century, while Malayalam split from Tamil as
a literary language by the twelfth century. In spite of the profound
influence of the Sanskrit language and Sanskritic culture on the
Dravidian languages, a strong consciousness of the distinctness of
Dravidian languages from Sanskrit remained. All four major Dravidian
languages had consciously differentiated styles varying in the amount of
Sanskrit they contained. In the twentieth century, as part of an
anti-Brahman movement in Tamil Nadu, a strong movement arose to
"purify" Tamil of its Sanskrit elements, with mixed success.
The other three Dravidian languages were not much affected by this
trend.
There are smaller groups, mostly tribal peoples, who speak
Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic languages. Sino-Tibetan speakers live
along the Himalayan fringe from Jammu and Kashmir to eastern Assam (see
fig. 9). They comprise about 1.3 percent, or 12 million, of India's 1995
population. The Austroasiatic languages, composed of the Munda tongues
and others thought to be related to them, are spoken by groups of tribal
peoples from West Bengal through Bihar and Orissa and into Madhya
Pradesh. These groups make up approximately 0.7 percent (about 6.5
million people) of the population.
Despite the extensive linguistic diversity in India, many scholars
treat South Asia as a single linguistic area because the various
language families share a number of features not found together outside
South Asia. Languages entering South Asia were "Indianized."
Scholars cite the presence of retroflex consonants, characteristic
structures in verb formations, and a significant amount of vocabulary in
Sanskrit with Dravidian or Austroasiatic origin as indications of mutual
borrowing, influences, and counterinfluences. Retroflex consonants, for
example, which are formed with the tongue curled back to the hard
palate, appear to have been incorporated into Sanskrit and other
Indo-Aryan languages through the medium of borrowed Dravidian words.
India - Hindi and English
The development of Hindi and Urdu gives a glimpse of the processes at
work in language evolution in South Asia.
Hindi and Urdu are essentially one language with two scripts,
Devanagari and Persian-Arabic, respectively. In their most formal
literary forms, the two languages have two vocabularies (Hindi taking
words by preference from Sanskrit, Urdu from Persian and Arabic) and
tend to be culturally connected with Hindu and Islamic culture,
respectively. Hindi-Urdu developed from the Khari Boli dialect of Delhi,
the capital city of the Delhi Sultanate, and it was the speech of the
classes and neighborhoods most closely connected with the Mughal court
(1556-1858). In time, the language spread even into South India because
it served as a common medium of communication for trade, administration,
and military purposes. Classical Urdu appropriated a large number of
words from Persian, the official language of the Mughal Empire, and
through Persian from Arabic.
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Urdu had
developed into a highly stylized form written in a Persian-Arabic
script. After the British took over from the Mughals, whose language of
administration was Persian, Urdu began to serve as the language of
administration in lower courts in the north. British administrators and
missionaries, however, felt that the high literary form of Urdu was too
remote from everyday life and was suffused by a Persian vocabulary
unintelligible to the masses. Therefore, they instigated the development
of modern standard Hindi in Devanagari script. Hindi now predominates in
a number of states, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh, and in the National Capital
Territory of Delhi. Urdu is the majority language in no large region but
is more commonly spoken in North India and is the official
administrative language of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In South
India, people in urban Muslim communities in former administrative
capitals, such as Hyderabad or Bangalore, may regularly use Urdu at home
or in their workplace.
Hindi has spread throughout North India as a contemporary lingua
franca. Its speakers range from illiterate workers in large cities to
highly educated civil servants. Many city dwellers learn Hindi as a
second or third language even if they speak another regional language,
such as Marathi, Bengali, or Gujarati. As professionals have become
increasingly mobile, they rely more heavily on Hindi as a means of
communication; those aspiring to career advancement need to learn
standard Hindi. Speakers of other Indo-Aryan languages tend to chose
Hindi for their third language in school because of similarities in
grammar, vocabulary, or script with their own mother tongue and because
it has a wider use than another regional language.
Hindi, especially in the less highly Sanskritized form used in
everyday speech, is barely distinct from everyday Urdu, which before
independence was called Hindustani. However, Hindi has long had
pan-Indian uses extending beyond the regions where it is the majority
language. Hindi is the lingua franca at pilgrimage sites in all regions
and is used to deal with devotees from all parts of the country. It is
also the common means of communication of wandering Hindu holy men in
their discussions with each other and is used frequently in preaching.
Many publishers issue Sanskrit classics on religion, astrology,
medicine, and other subjects with Hindi translations, cribs, or
commentaries to help purchasers who may not be confident of their
Sanskrit ability. Purchasers appear to find those aids useful, even
though Hindi may not be their primary spoken or written language.
Although there are major cinema industries in several other languages,
the Hindi cinema (centered in Bombay, also known as Mumbai in the
Marathi language) dominates the Indian motion picture market, and Hindi
films (the songs tend to be in Urdu) are shown around the country
without subtitles or dubbing (see The Media, ch. 8).
A number of former literary languages with established and major
bodies of literature, such as Braj, Avadhi, and Maithili, have been
essentially subsumed under the rubric of Hindi. Maithili, spoken in
northern Bihar, has a body of literature and its own grammar. Proponents
of its use insist that it is a language in its own right and that it is
related more closely to eastern Indo-Aryan tongues than to Hindi.
Nonetheless, efforts to revive Maithili have had minimal success beyond
its use in elementary education. Other regional tongues that lack
literary forms, such as Marwari (in Rajasthan) and Magadhi (in southern
Bihar), are considered variants of Hindi. Some of them differ from Hindi
considerably more than does Urdu. In general, religious affiliation is
the distinguishing characteristic of Hindi and Urdu speakers; Muslims
speak Urdu, and Hindus speak Hindi, although what they actually say in
informal situations is likely to be about the same. The use of two
radically different scripts is a statement of cultural identity.
However, there are still Hindu religious periodicals published in Urdu,
and Urdu writers who are Hindu by religion.
India - English
There is little information on the extent of knowledge of English in
India. Books and articles abound on the place of English in the Indian
education system, job competition, and culture; and on its
sociolinguistic aspects, pronunciation and grammar, its effect on Indian
languages, and Indian literature in English. Little information is
available, however, on the number of people who "know" English
and the extent of their knowledge, or even how many people study English
in school. In the 1981 census, 202,400 persons (0.3 percent of the
population) gave English as their first language. Fewer than 1 percent
gave English as their second language while 14 percent were reported as
bilingual in two of India's many languages. However, the census did not
allow for recording more than one second language and is suspected of
having significantly underrepresented bilingualism and multilingualism.
The 1981 census reported 13.3 percent of the population as bilingual.
The People of India project of the Anthropological Survey of India,
which assembled statistics on communities rather than on individuals,
found that only 34 percent of communities reported themselves as
monolingual. An Assamese who also knew Bengali, or someone from a
Marathi-speaking family living in Delhi who attended a Hindi-medium
school, might give Bengali or Hindi as his or her second language but
also know English from formal school instruction or picking it up on the
street. It is suspected that many people identify language with literacy
and hence will not describe themselves as knowing a language unless they
can read it and, conversely, may say they know a language if they can
make out its alphabet. Thus people who speak English but are unable to
read or write it may say they do not know the language.
English-language daily newspapers have a circulation of 3.1 million
copies per day, but each copy is probably read by several people. There
are estimates of about 3 percent (some 27 million people) for the number
of literates in English, but even if this percentage is valid, the
number of people with a speaking knowledge is certainly higher than of
those who read it. And, the figure of 3 percent for English literacy may
be low. According to one set of figures, 17.6 million people were
enrolled in English classes in 1977, which would be 3.2 percent of the
population of India according to the 1971 census. Taking the most
conservative evaluation of how much of the instruction would
"stick," this still leaves a larger part of the population
than 3 percent with some English literacy.
Some idea of the possibilities of studying English can be found in
the 1992 Fifth All-India Education Survey. According to the survey, only
1.3 percent of primary schools, 3.4 percent of upper primary schools,
3.9 percent of middle schools, and 13.2 percent of high schools use
English as a medium of instruction. Schools treating English as the
first language (requiring ten years of study) are only 0.6 percent of
rural primary schools, 2.8 percent of rural high schools, and 9.9
percent of urban high schools. English is offered as a second language
(six years of study) in 51 percent of rural primary schools, 55 percent
of urban primary schools, 57 percent of rural high schools, and 51
percent of urban high schools. As a third language (three years of
study), English is offered in 5 percent of rural primary schools, 21
percent of urban primary schools, 44 percent of rural high schools, and
41 percent of urban high schools. These statistics show a considerable
desire to study English among people receiving a mostly vernacular
education, even in the countryside.
In higher education, English continues to be the premier prestige
language. Careers in business and commerce, government positions of high
rank (regardless of stated policy), and science and technology
(attracting many of the brightest) continue to require fluency in
English. It is also necessary for the many students who contemplate
study overseas.
English as a prestige language and the tongue of first choice
continues to serve as the medium of instruction in elite schools at
every level without apology. All large cities and many smaller cities
have private, English-language middle schools and high schools (see
Education, ch. 2). Even government schools run for the benefit of senior
civil service officers are conducted in English because only that
language is an acceptable medium of communication throughout the nation.
Working-class parents, themselves rural-urban migrants and perhaps
bilingual in their village dialect and the regional standard language,
perceive English as the tool their children need in order to advance.
Schools in which English is the medium of instruction are a "growth
industry." Facility in English enhances a young woman's chances in
the marriage market--no small advantage in the often protracted marriage
negotiations between families (see Life Passages, ch. 5). The English
speaker also encounters more courteous responses in some situations than
does a speaker of an indigenous language.
India - Linguistic States
Contemporary languages and dialects, as they figure in the lives of
most Indians, are a far cry from the stylized literary forms of
Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages. North India especially can be viewed
as a continuum of village dialects. As a proverb has it, "Every two
miles the water changes, every four miles the speech." Spoken
dialects of more distant villages will be less and less mutually
understandable and finally become simply mutually unintelligible outside
the immediate region. In some cases, a variety of caste dialects coexist
in the same village or region. In addition, there are numerous regional
dialects that villagers use when doing business in nearby towns or
bazaars.
Since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, regional
languages, such as Bengali, Punjabi, and Marathi, have become relatively
standardized and are now used throughout their respective states for
most levels of administration, business, and social intercourse. Each is
associated with a body of literature. British rule was an impetus for
the official codification of these regional tongues. British colonial
administrators and missionaries learned regional languages and often
studied their literatures, and their translations of English-language
materials and the Bible encouraged the development of written, standard
languages. To provide teaching materials, prose compositions, grammars,
and textbooks were often commissioned and, in some cases, were closer to
everyday speech than was the standard literary language.
Industrialization, modernization, and printing gave a major boost to the
vocabulary and standardization of regional tongues, especially by making
possible the wide dissemination of dictionaries.
Such written forms still often differ widely from spoken vernaculars
and village dialects. Diglossia--the coexistence of a highly elaborate,
formal language alongside a more colloquial form of the same
tongue--occurs in many instances. For example, spoken Bengali is so
divergent from written Bengali as to be nearly another tongue.
Similarly, Telugu scholars waged a bitter battle in the early twentieth
century over proper language style. Reformers favored a simplified prose
format for written Telugu, while traditional classicists wished to
continue using a classical literary poetic form. In the end, the
classicists won, although a more colloquial written form eventually
began to appear in the mass media. Diglossia reinforces social barriers
because only a fraction of the populace is sufficiently educated to
master the more literary form of the language.
The standard regional language may be the household tongue of only a
small group of educated inhabitants of the region's major urban center
that has long exercised politico-economic hegemony in a region. Even
literate villagers may have difficulty understanding it. The more
socially isolated--women and Dalits (see Glossary)--tend to be more
parochial in their speech than people of higher caste, who are often
able to use a colloquial form of the regional dialect, the caste patois,
and the regional standard dialect. An educated person may master several
different speech forms that are often so different as to be considered
separate languages. Western-educated scholars may well use the regional
standard language mixed with English vocabulary with their colleagues at
work. At home, a man may switch to a more colloquial vernacular,
particularly if his wife is uneducated. Even the highly educated
frequently communicate in their village dialects at home.
Only around 3 percent of the population (about 28 million people in
1995) is truly fluent in both English and an Indian language. By
necessity, a substantial minority are able to speak two Indian
languages; even in the so-called linguistic states, there are minorities
who do not speak the official language as their native tongue and must
therefore learn it as a second language. Many tribal people are
bilingual. Rural-urban migrants are frequently bilingual in the regional
standard language as well as in their village dialect. In Bombay, for
example, many migrants speak Hindi or Marathi in addition to their
native tongue. Religious celebrations, popular festivals, and political
meetings are typically carried on in the regional language, which may be
unintelligible to many attendees. Bilingualism in India, however, is
inextricably linked to social context. South Asia's long history of
foreign rule has fostered what Clarence Maloney terms "the
linguistic flight of the elite." Language--either Sanskrit,
Persian, or English--has formed a barrier to advancement that only a few
have been fortunate enough to overcome.
Throughout the twentieth century, radio, television, and the print
media have fostered standardization of regional dialects, if only to
facilitate communication. Linguistic standardization has contributed to
ethnic or regional differentiation insofar as language has served as a
cultural marker. Mass communication forces the adoption of a single
standard regional tongue; typically, the choice is the dialect of the
majority in the region or of the region's preeminent business or
cultural center. The use of less standard forms clearly labels speakers
outside their immediate home base. To fulfill its purposes, the regional
language must be standardized and taught to an increasing percentage of
the population, thereby encroaching both on its own dialects and the
minority languages of the region. The language of instruction and
administration affects the economic and career interests and the
self-respect of an ever-greater proportion of the population.
India - Tribes
Composition and Location
Tribal peoples constitute roughly 8 percent of the nation's total
population, nearly 68 million people according to the 1991 census. One
concentration lives in a belt along the Himalayas stretching through
Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh in the west, to
Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, and
Nagaland in the northeast (see fig. 1). Another concentration lives in
the hilly areas of central India (Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and, to a
lesser extent, Andhra Pradesh); in this belt, which is bounded by the
Narmada River to the north and the Godavari River to the southeast,
tribal peoples occupy the slopes of the region's mountains. Other
tribals, the Santals, live in Bihar and West Bengal. There are smaller
numbers of tribal people in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, in
western India in Gujarat and Rajasthan, and in the union territories of
Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The extent to which a state's population is tribal varies
considerably. In the northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh,
Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland, upward of 90 percent of the population
is tribal. However, in the remaining northeast states of Assam, Manipur,
Sikkim, and Tripura, tribal peoples form between 20 and 30 percent of
the population. The largest tribes are found in central India, although
the tribal population there accounts for only around 10 percent of the
region's total population. Major concentrations of tribal people live in
Maharashtra, Orissa, and West Bengal. In the south, about 1 percent of
the populations of Kerala and Tamil Nadu are tribal, whereas about 6
percent in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are members of tribes.
There are some 573 communities recognized by the government as
Scheduled Tribes and therefore eligible to receive special benefits and
to compete for reserved seats in legislatures and schools. They range in
size from the Gonds (roughly 7.4 million) and the Santals (approximately
4.2 million) to only eighteen Chaimals in the Andaman Islands. Central
Indian states have the country's largest tribes, and, taken as a whole,
roughly 75 percent of the total tribal population live there.
Apart from the use of strictly legal criteria, however, the problem
of determining which groups and individuals are tribal is both subtle
and complex. Because it concerns economic interests and the size and
location of voting blocs, the question of who are members of Scheduled
Tribes rather than Backward Classes (see Glossary) or Scheduled Castes
(see Glossary) is often controversial (see The Fringes of Society, ch.
5). The apparently wide fluctuation in estimates of South Asia's tribal
population through the twentieth century gives a sense of how unclear
the distinction between tribal and nontribal can be. India's 1931 census
enumerated 22 million tribal people, in 1941 only 10 million were
counted, but by 1961 some 30 million and in 1991 nearly 68 million
tribal members were included. The differences among the figures reflect
changing census criteria and the economic incentives individuals have to
maintain or reject classification as a tribal member.
These gyrations of census data serve to underline the complex
relationship between caste and tribe. Although, in theory, these terms
represent different ways of life and ideal types, in reality they stand
for a continuum of social groups. In areas of substantial contact
between tribes and castes, social and cultural pressures have often
tended to move tribes in the direction of becoming castes over a period
of years. Tribal peoples with ambitions for social advancement in Indian
society at large have tried to gain the classification of caste for
their tribes; such efforts conform to the ancient Indian traditions of
caste mobility (see Caste and Class, ch. 5). Where tribal leaders
prospered, they could hire Brahman priests to construct credible
pedigrees and thereby join reasonably high-status castes. On occasion,
an entire tribe or part of a tribe joined a Hindu sect and thus entered
the caste system en masse. If a specific tribe engaged in practices that
Hindus deemed polluting, the tribe's status when it was assimilated into
the caste hierarchy would be affected.
Since independence, however, the special benefits available to
Scheduled Tribes have convinced many groups, even Hindus and Muslims,
that they will enjoy greater advantages if so designated. The schedule
gives tribal people incentives to maintain their identity. By the same
token, the schedule also includes a number of groups whose
"tribal" status, in cultural terms, is dubious at best; in
various districts, the list includes Muslims and a congeries of Hindu
castes whose main claim seems to be their ability to deliver votes to
the party that arranges their listing among the Scheduled Tribes.
A number of traits have customarily been seen as establishing tribal
rather than caste identity. These include language, social organization,
religious affiliation, economic patterns, geographic location, and
self-identification. Recognized tribes typically live in hilly regions
somewhat remote from caste settlements; they generally speak a language
recognized as tribal.
Unlike castes, which are part of a complex and interrelated local
economic exchange system, tribes tend to form self-sufficient economic
units. Often they practice swidden farming--clearing a field by
slash-and-burn methods, planting it for a number of seasons, and then
abandoning it for a lengthy fallow period--rather than the intensive
farming typical of most of rural India (see Land Use, ch. 7). For most
tribal people, land-use rights traditionally derive simply from tribal
membership. Tribal society tends to be egalitarian, its leadership being
based on ties of kinship and personality rather than on hereditary
status. Tribes typically consist of segmentary lineages whose extended
families provide the basis for social organization and control. Unlike
caste religion, which recognizes the hegemony of Brahman priests, tribal
religion recognizes no authority outside the tribe.
Any of these criteria can be called into question in specific
instances. Language is not always an accurate indicator of tribal or
caste status. Especially in regions of mixed population, many tribal
groups have lost their mother tongues and simply speak local or regional
languages. Linguistic assimilation is an ongoing process of considerable
complexity. In the highlands of Orissa, for example, the Bondos--a
Munda-language-speaking tribe--use their own tongue among themselves.
Oriya, however, serves as a lingua franca in dealings with Hindu
neighbors. Oriya as a prestige language (in the Bondo view), however,
has also supplanted the native tongue as the language of ritual. In
parts of Assam, historically divided into warring tribes and villages,
increased contact among villagers began during the colonial period and
has accelerated since independence. A pidgin Assamese developed while
educated tribal members learned Hindi and, in the late twentieth
century, English.
Self-identification and group loyalty are not unfailing markers of
tribal identity either. In the case of stratified tribes, the loyalties
of clan, kin, and family may well predominate over those of tribe. In
addition, tribes cannot always be viewed as people living apart; the
degree of isolation of various tribes has varied tremendously. The
Gonds, Santals, and Bhils traditionally have dominated the regions in
which they have lived. Moreover, tribal society is not always more
egalitarian than the rest of the rural populace; some of the larger
tribes, such as the Gonds, are highly stratified.
Economic and Political Conditions
Most tribes are concentrated in heavily forested areas that combine
inaccessibility with limited political or economic significance.
Historically, the economy of most tribes was subsistence agriculture or
hunting and gathering. Tribal members traded with outsiders for the few
necessities they lacked, such as salt and iron. A few local Hindu
craftsmen might provide such items as cooking utensils. The twentieth
century, however, has seen far-reaching changes in the relationship
between tribals and the larger society and, by extension, traditional
tribal economies. Improved transportation and communications have
brought ever deeper intrusions into tribal lands; merchants and a
variety of government policies have involved tribal peoples more
thoroughly in the cash economy, although by no means on the most
favorable of terms. Large areas fell into the hands of nontribals around
1900, when many regions were opened by the government to homestead-style
settlement. Immigrants received free land in return for cultivating it.
Tribal people, too, could apply for land titles, although even title to
the portion of land they happened to be planting that season could not
guarantee their ability to continue swidden cultivation. More important,
the notion of permanent, individual ownership of land was foreign to
most tribals. Land, if seen in terms of ownership at all, was viewed as
a communal resource, free to whoever needed it. By the time tribals
accepted the necessity of obtaining formal land titles, they had lost
the opportunity to lay claim to lands that might rightfully have been
considered theirs. Generally, tribals were severely disadvantaged in
dealing with government officials who granted land titles. Albeit
belatedly, the colonial regime realized the necessity of protecting
tribals from the predations of outsiders and prohibited the sale of
tribal lands. Although an important loophole in the form of land leases
was left open, tribes made some gains in the mid-twentieth century.
Despite considerable obstruction by local police and land officials, who
were slow to delineate tribal holdings and slower still to offer police
protection, some land was returned to tribal peoples.
In the 1970s, the gains tribal peoples had made in earlier decades
were eroded in many regions, especially in central India. Migration into
tribal lands increased dramatically, and the deadly combination of
constabulary and revenue officers uninterested in tribal welfare and
sophisticated nontribals willing and able to bribe local officials was
sufficient to deprive many tribals of their landholdings. The means of
subverting protective legislation were legion: local officials could be
persuaded to ignore land acquisition by nontribal people, alter land
registry records, lease plots of land for short periods and then simply
refuse to relinquish them, or induce tribal members to become indebted
and attach their lands. Whatever the means, the result was that many
tribal members became landless laborers in the 1960s and 1970s, and
regions that a few years earlier had been the exclusive domain of tribes
had an increasingly heterogeneous population. Unlike previous eras in
which tribal people were shunted into more remote forests, by the 1960s
relatively little unoccupied land was available. Government efforts to
evict nontribal members from illegal occupation have proceeded slowly;
when evictions occur at all, those ejected are usually members of poor,
lower castes. In a 1985 publication, anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
describes this process in Andhra Pradesh: on average only 25 to 33
percent of the tribal families in such villages had managed to keep even
a portion of their holdings. Outsiders had paid about 5 percent of the
market value of the lands they took.
Improved communications, roads with motorized traffic, and more
frequent government intervention figured in the increased contact that
tribal peoples had with outsiders. Tribes fared best where there was
little to induce nontribals to settle; cash crops and commercial
highways frequently signaled the dismemberment of the tribes. Merchants
have long been a link to the outside world, but in the past they were
generally petty traders, and the contact they had with tribal people was
transient. By the 1960s and 1970s, the resident nontribal shopkeeper was
a permanent feature of many villages. Shopkeepers often sold liquor on
credit, enticing tribal members into debt and into mortgaging their
land. In the past, tribes made up shortages before harvest by foraging
from the surrounding forest. More recently shopkeepers have offered
ready credit--with the proviso that loans be repaid in kind with 50 to
100 percent interest after harvest. Repaying one bag of millet with two
bags has set up a cycle of indebtedness from which many have been unable
to break loose.
The possibility of cultivators growing a profitable cash crop, such
as cotton or castor-oil plants, continues to draw merchants into tribal
areas. Nontribal traders frequently establish an extensive network of
relatives and associates as shopkeepers to serve as agents in a number
of villages. Cultivators who grow a cash crop often sell to the same
merchants, who provide consumption credit throughout the year. The
credit carries a high-interest price tag, whereas the tribal peoples'
crops are bought at a fraction of the market rate. Cash crops offer a
further disadvantage in that they decrease the supply of available
foodstuffs and increase tribal dependence on economic forces beyond
their control. This transformation has meant a decline in both the
tribes' security and their standard of living.
In previous generations, families might have purchased silver jewelry
as a form of security; contemporary tribal people are more likely to buy
minor consumer goods. Whereas jewelry could serve as collateral in
critical emergencies, current purchases simply increase indebtedness. In
areas where gathering forest products is remunerative, merchants
exchange their products for tribal labor. Indebtedness is so extensive
that although such transactions are illegal, traders sometimes
"sell" their debtors to other merchants, much like indentured
servants.
In some instances, tribes have managed to hold their own in contacts
with outsiders. Some Chenchus, a hunting and gathering tribe of the
central hill regions of Andhra Pradesh, have continued to specialize in
collecting forest products for sale. Caste Hindus living among them rent
land from the Chenchus and pay a portion of the harvest. The Chenchus
themselves have responded unenthusiastically to government efforts to
induce them to take up farming. Their relationship to nontribal people
has been one of symbiosis, although there were indications in the early
1980s that other groups were beginning to compete with the Chenchus in
gathering forest products. A large paper mill was cutting bamboo in
their territory in a manner that did not allow regeneration, and two
groups had begun to collect for sale the same products the Chenchus
sell. Dalits settled among them with the help of the Chenchus and
learned agriculture from them. The nomadic Banjara herders who graze
their cattle in the forest also have been allotted land there. The
Chenchus have a certain advantage in dealing with caste Hindus; because
of their long association with Hindu hermits and their refusal to eat
beef, they are considered an unpolluted caste. Other tribes,
particularly in South India, have cultural practices that are offensive
to Hindus and, when they are assimilated, are often considered Dalits.
The final blow for some tribes has come when nontribals, through
political jockeying, have managed to gain legal tribal status, that is,
to be listed as a Scheduled Tribe. The Gonds of Andhra Pradesh
effectively lost their only advantage in trying to protect their lands
when the Banjaras, a group that had been settling in Gond territory,
were classified as a Scheduled Tribe in 1977. Their newly acquired
tribal status made the Banjaras eligible to acquire Gond land
"legally" and to compete with Gonds for reserved political
seats, places in education institutions, and other benefits. Because the
Banjaras are not scheduled in neighboring Maharashtra, there has been an
influx of Banjara emigrants from that state into Andhra Pradesh in
search of better opportunities.
Tribes in the Himalayan foothills have not been as hard-pressed by
the intrusions of nontribals. Historically, their political status was
always distinct from the rest of India. Until the British colonial
period, there was little effective control by any of the empires
centered in peninsular India; the region was populated by autonomous
feuding tribes. The British, in efforts to protect the sensitive
northeast frontier, followed a policy dubbed the "Inner Line";
nontribal people were allowed into the areas only with special
permission. Postindependence governments have continued the policy,
protecting the Himalayan tribes as part of the strategy to secure the
border with China (see Principal Regions, ch. 2).
This policy has generally saved the northern tribes from the kind of
exploitation that those elsewhere in South Asia have suffered. In
Arunachal Pradesh (formerly part of the North-East Frontier Agency), for
example, tribal members control commerce and most lower-level
administrative posts. Government construction projects in the region
have provided tribes with a significant source of cash--both for setting
up businesses and for providing paying customers. Some tribes have made
rapid progress through the education system. Instruction was begun in
Assamese but was eventually changed to Hindi; by the early 1980s,
English was taught at most levels. Both education and the increase in
ready cash from government spending have permitted tribal people a
significant measure of social mobility. The role of early missionaries
in providing education was also crucial in Assam.
Government policies on forest reserves have affected tribal peoples
profoundly. Wherever the state has chosen to exploit forests, it has
seriously undermined the tribes' way of life. Government efforts to
reserve forests have precipitated armed (if futile) resistance on the
part of the tribal peoples involved. Intensive exploitation of forests
has often meant allowing outsiders to cut large areas of trees (while
the original tribal inhabitants were restricted from cutting), and
ultimately replacing mixed forests capable of sustaining tribal life
with single-product plantations. Where forests are reserved, nontribals
have proved far more sophisticated than their forest counterparts at
bribing the necessary local officials to secure effective (if
extralegal) use of forestlands. The system of bribing local officials
charged with enforcing the reserves is so well established that the
rates of bribery are reasonably fixed (by the number of plows a farmer
uses or the amount of grain harvested). Tribal people often end up doing
unpaid work for Hindus simply because a caste Hindu, who has paid the
requisite bribe, can at least ensure a tribal member that he or she will
not be evicted from forestlands. The final irony, notes von Fürer-Haimendorf,
is that the swidden cultivation many tribes practiced had maintained
South Asia's forests, whereas the intensive cultivating and commercial
interests that replaced the tribal way of life have destroyed the
forests (see Forestry, ch. 7).
Extending the system of primary education into tribal areas and
reserving places for tribal children in middle and high schools and
higher education institutions are central to government policy, but
efforts to improve a tribe's educational status have had mixed results
(see Education, ch. 2). Recruitment of qualified teachers and
determination of the appropriate language of instruction also remain
troublesome. Commission after commission on the "language
question" has called for instruction, at least at the primary
level, in the students' native tongue. In some regions, tribal children
entering school must begin by learning the official regional language,
often one completely unrelated to their tribal tongue. The experiences
of the Gonds of Andhra Pradesh provide an example. Primary schooling
began there in the 1940s and 1950s. The government selected a group of
Gonds who had managed to become semiliterate in Telugu and taught them
the basics of written script. These individuals became teachers who
taught in Gondi, and their efforts enjoyed a measure of success until
the 1970s, when state policy demanded instruction in Telugu. The switch
in the language of instruction both made the Gond teachers superfluous
because they could not teach in Telugu and also presented the government
with the problem of finding reasonably qualified teachers willing to
teach in outlying tribal schools.
The commitment of tribes to acquiring a formal education for their
children varies considerably. Tribes differ in the extent to which they
view education positively. Gonds and Pardhans, two groups in the central
hill region, are a case in point. The Gonds are cultivators, and they
frequently are reluctant to send their children to school, needing them,
they say, to work in the fields. The Pardhans were traditionally bards
and ritual specialists, and they have taken to education with
enthusiasm. The effectiveness of educational policy likewise varies by
region. In those parts of the northeast where tribes have generally been
spared the wholesale onslaught of outsiders, schooling has helped tribal
people to secure political and economic benefits. The education system
there has provided a corps of highly trained tribal members in the
professions and high-ranking administrative posts.
Many tribal schools are plagued by high dropout rates. Children
attend for the first three to four years of primary school and gain a
smattering of knowledge, only to lapse into illiteracy later. Few who
enter continue up to the tenth grade; of those who do, few manage to
finish high school. Therefore, very few are eligible to attend
institutions of higher education, where the high rate of attrition
continues.
Practices
The influx of newcomers disinclined to follow tribal ways has had a
massive impact on social relations and tribal belief systems. In many
communities, the immigrants have brought on nothing less than the total
disintegration of the communities they entered. Even where outsiders are
not residents in villages, traditional forms of social control and
authority are less effective because tribal people are patently
dependent on politico-economic forces beyond their control. In general,
traditional headmen no longer have official backing for their role in
village affairs, although many continue to exercise considerable
influence. Headmen can no longer control the allocation of land or
decide who has the right to settle in the village, a loss of power that
has had an insidious effect on village solidarity.
Some headmen have taken to leasing village land to outsiders, thus
enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the tribes. Conflict
over land rights has introduced a point of cleavage into village social
relations; increased factional conflict has seriously eroded the ability
of tribes to ward off the intrusion of outsiders. In some villages,
tribal schoolteachers have emerged as a new political force, a
counterbalance to the traditional headman. Changes in landholding
patterns have also altered the role of the joint family. More and more
couples set up separate households as soon as they marry. Because land
is no longer held and farmed in common and has grown more scarce,
inheritance disputes have increased.
Hunters and gatherers are particularly vulnerable to these
far-reaching changes. The lack of strong authority figures in most
hunting and gathering groups handicaps these tribes in organizing to
negotiate with the government. In addition, these tribes are too small
to have much political leverage. Forced settlement schemes also have had
a deleterious impact on the tribes and their environment.
Government-organized villages are typically larger than traditional
hunting and gathering settlements. Forest reserves limit the amount of
territory over which tribes can range freely. Larger villages and
smaller territories have led, in some instances, to an increase in crime
and violence. Traditionally, hunters and gatherers "settled"
their disputes by arranging for the antagonists simply to avoid one
another; new, more circumscribed villages preclude this arrangement.
Tribal beliefs and rituals have altered in the face of increased
contact with Hindus and missionaries of a variety of persuasions (see
Tribal Religions, ch. 3). Among groups in more intense contact with the
Hindu majority, there have been various transformations. The Gonds, for
example, traditionally worshiped clan gods through elaborate rites, with
Pardhans organizing and performing the necessary rituals. The increasing
impoverishment of large sections of the Gond tribe has made it
difficult, if not impossible, to support the Pardhans as a class of
ritual specialists. At the same time, many Gonds have concluded that the
tribal gods were losing their power and efficacy. Gonds have tended to
seek the assistance of other deities, and thus there has been widespread
Hinduization of Gondi belief and practice. Some tribes have adopted the
Hindu practice of having costly elaborate weddings--a custom that
contributes to indebtedness (as it has in many rural Indian families)
and subjects them to the cash economy on the most deleterious of terms.
Some families have adapted a traditional marriage pattern--that of
capturing a bride--to modern conditions, using the custom to avoid the
costly outlays associated with a formal wedding.
Christian missionaries have been active among sundry tribes since the
mid-nineteenth century. Conversion to Christianity offers a number of
advantages, not the least of which is education. It was through the
efforts of various Christian sects to translate the Bible into tribal
languages that those tongues acquired a written script. Christian
proselytizing has served to preserve tribal lore and language in written
form at the same time that it has tended to change drastically the
tribe's cultural heritage and belief systems. In some instances, the
introduction of Christianity has driven a wedge between converts and
their fellow tribal members who continue to adhere to traditional
beliefs and practices.
<>Jews and Parsis
The formation of states along linguistic and ethnic lines has
occurred in India in numerous instances since independence in 1947 (see
Linguistic States, this ch.). There have been demands, however, to form
units within states based not only along linguistic, ethnic, and
religious lines but also, in some cases, on a feeling of the
distinctness of a geographical region and its culture and economic
interests. The most volatile movements are those ongoing in Jammu and
Kashmir and Punjab (see Political Issues, ch. 8; Insurgent Movements and
External Subversion, ch. 9). How the central government responds to
these demands will be an area of scrutiny through the late 1990s and
beyond. It is believed by some officials that conceding regional
autonomy is less arduous and takes less time and fewer resources than
does meeting agitation, violence, and demands for concessions.
Telangana Movement
An early manifestation of regionalism was the Telangana movement in
what became the state of Andhra Pradesh. The princely ruler of
Hyderabad, the nizam, had attempted unsuccessfully to maintain Hyderabad
as an independent state separate from India in 1947. His efforts were
simultaneous with the largest agrarian armed rebellion in modern Indian
history. Starting in July 1946, communist-led guerrilla squads began
overthrowing local feudal village regimes and organizing land reform in
Telugu-speaking areas of Hyderabad, collectively known as Telangana (an
ancient name for the region dating from the Vijayanagar period). In
time, about 3,000 villages and some 41,000 square kilometers of
territory were involved in the revolt. Faced with the refusal of the
nizam of Hyderabad to accede his territory to India and the violence of
the communist-led rebellion, the central government sent in the army in
September 1948. By November 1949, Hyderabad had been forced to accede to
the Indian union, and, by October 1951, the violent phase of the
Telangana movement had been suppressed. The effect of the 1946-51
rebellion and communist electoral victories in 1952 had led to the
destruction of Hyderabad and set the scene for the establishment of a
new state along linguistic lines. In 1953, based on the recommendation
of the States Reorganisation Commission, Telugu-speaking areas were
separated from the former Madras States to form Andhra, India's first
state established along linguistic lines. The commission also
contemplated establishing Telangana as a separate state, but instead
Telangana was merged with Andhra to form the new state of Andhra Pradesh
in 1956.
The concerns about Telangana were manifold. The region had a less
developed economy than Andhra, but a larger revenue base (mostly because
it taxed rather than prohibited alcoholic beverages), which Telanganas
feared might be diverted for use in Andhra. They also feared that
planned dam projects on the Krishna and Godavari rivers would not
benefit Telangana proportionately even though Telanganas controlled the
headwaters of the rivers. Telanganas feared too that the people of
Andhra would have the advantage in jobs, particularly in government and
education.
The central government decided to ignore the recommendation to
establish a separate Telangana state and, instead, merged the two
regions into a unified Andhra Pradesh. However, a "gentlemen's
agreement" provided reassurances to the Telangana people. For at
least five years, revenue was to be spent in the regions proportionately
to the amount they contributed. Education institutions in Telangana were
to be expanded and reserved for local students. Recruitment to the civil
service and other areas of government employment such as education and
medicine was to be proportional. The use of Urdu was to continue in the
administration and the judiciary for five years. The state cabinet was
to have proportional membership from both regions and a deputy chief
minister from Telangana if the chief minister was from Andhra and vice
versa. Finally, the Regional Council for Telangana was to be responsible
for economic development, and its members were to be elected by the
members of the state legislative assembly from the region.
In the following years, however, the Telangana people had a number of
complaints about how the agreements and guarantees were implemented. The
deputy chief minister position was never filled. Education institutions
in the region were greatly expanded, but Telanganas felt that their
enrollment was not proportionate to their numbers. The selection of the
city of Hyderabad as the state capital led to massive migration of
people from Andhra into Telangana. Telanganas felt discriminated against
in education employment but were told by the state government that most
non-Telanganas had been hired on the grounds that qualified local people
were unavailable. In addition, the unification of pay scales between the
two regions appeared to disadvantage Telangana civil servants. In the
atmosphere of discontent, professional associations that earlier had
amalgamated broke apart by region.
Discontent with the 1956 gentlemen's agreement intensified in January
1969 when the guarantees that had been agreed on were supposed to lapse.
Student agitation for the continuation of the agreement began at Osmania
University in Hyderabad and spread to other parts of the region.
Government employees and opposition members of the state legislative
assembly swiftly threatened "direct action" in support of the
students. The Congress-controlled state and central governments offered
assurances that non-Telangana civil servants in the region would be
replaced by Mulkis, disadvantaged local people, and that revenue
surpluses from Telangana would be returned to the region. The
protestors, however, were dissatisfied, and severe violence, including
mob attacks on railroads, road transport, and government facilities,
spread over the region. In addition, seventy-nine police firings
resulted in twenty-three deaths according to official figures, the
education system was shut down, and examinations were cancelled. Calls
for a separate Telangana state came in the midst of counter violence in
Andhra areas bordering Telangana. In the meantime, the Andhra Pradesh
High Court decreed that a central government law mandating replacement
of non-Telangana government employees with Mulkis was beyond
Parliament's constitutional powers.
Although the Congress faced dissension within its ranks, its
leadership stood against additional linguistic states, which were
regarded as "antinational." As a result, defectors from the
Congress, led by M. Chenna Reddy, founded the Telangana People's
Association (Telangana Praja Samithi). Despite electoral successes,
however, some of the new party leaders gave up their agitation in
September 1971 and, much to the disgust of many separatists, rejoined
the safer political haven of the Congress ranks.
In 1972 the Supreme Court reversed the Andhra Pradesh High Court's
ruling that the Mulki rules were unconstitutional. This decision
triggered agitation in the Andhra region that produced six months of
violence.
Throughout the 1970s, Andhra Pradesh settled into a pattern of
continuous domination by Congress (R) and later Congress (I), with much
instability and dissidence within the state party and constant
interference from Indira Gandhi and the national party. Chenna Reddy,
the erstwhile opposition leader, was for a time the Congress (I) state
chief minister. Congress domination was only ended by the founding of
the Telugu National Party by N.T. Rama Rao in 1982 and its overwhelming
victory in the state elections in 1983.
Polls taken after the end of the Telangana movement showed a certain
lack of enthusiasm for it, and for the idea of a separate state.
Although urban groups (students and civil servants) had been most active
in the movement, its support was stronger in rural areas. Its supporters
were mixed: low and middle castes, the young and the not so young,
women, illiterates and the poorly educated, and rural gentry. Speakers
of several other languages than Telugu were heavily involved. The
movement had no element of religious communalism, but some observers
thought Muslims were particularly involved in the movement. Other
researchers found the Muslims were unenthusiastic about the movement and
noted a feeling that migration from Andhra to Telangana was creating
opportunities that were helping non-Telanganas. On the other hand, of
the two locally prominent Muslim political groups, only one supported a
separate state; the other opposed the idea while demanding full
implementation of the regional safeguards. Although Urdu speakers were
appealed to in the agitation (e.g., speeches were given in Urdu as well
as Telugu), in the aftermath Urdu disappeared from the schools and the
administration.
The Telangana movement grew out of a sense of regional identity as
such, rather than out of a sense of ethnic identity, language, religion,
or caste. The movement demanded redress for economic grievances, the
writing of a separate history, and establishment of a sense of cultural
distinctness. The emotions and forces generated by the movement were not
strong enough, however, for a continuing drive for a separate state. In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the People's War Group, an element of
the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), renewed violence in
Andhra Pradesh but was dealt with by state police forces. The Telangana
movement was never directed against the territorial integrity of India,
unlike the insurrections in Jammu and Kashmir and some of the unrest in
northeastern India.
<>Jharkhand Movement
The word Jharkhand , meaning "forest region,"
applies to a forested mountainous plateau region in eastern India, south
of the Indo-Gangetic Plain and west of the Ganga's delta in Bangladesh.
The term dates at least to the sixteenth century. In the more extensive
claims of the movement, Jharkhand comprises seven districts in Bihar,
three in West Bengal, four in Orissa, and two in Madhya Pradesh. Ninety
percent of the Scheduled Tribes in Jharkhand live in the Bihar
districts. The tribal peoples, who are from two groups, the Chotanagpurs
and the Santals, have been the main agitators for the movement.
Jharkhand is mountainous and heavily forested and, therefore, easy to
defend. As a result, it was traditionally autonomous from the central
government until the seventeenth century when its riches attracted the
Mughal rulers. Mughal administration eventually led to more outside
interference and a change from the traditional collective system of land
ownership to one of private landholders.
These trends intensified under British colonial rule, leading to more
land being transferred to the local tribes' creditors and the
development of a system of "bonded labor," which meant
permanent and often hereditary debt slavery to one employer. Unable to
make effective use of the British court system, tribal peoples resorted
to rebellion starting in the late eighteenth century. In response, the
British government passed a number of laws in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to restrict alienation of tribal lands and to
protect the interests of tribal cultivators.
The advent of Christian missions in the region in 1845 led to major
cultural changes, which were later to be important in the Jharkhand
movement. A significant proportion of the tribes converted to
Christianity, and schools were founded for both sexes, including higher
institutions to train tribal people as teachers.
Jharkhand's mineral wealth also has been a problem for the tribes.
The region is India's primary source of coal and iron. Bauxite, copper,
limestone, asbestos, and graphite also are found there. Coal mining
began in 1856, and the Tata Iron and Steel Factory was established in
Jamshedpur in 1907.
The modern Jharkhand movement dates to the early part of the
twentieth century; activity was initially among Christian tribal
students but later also among non-Christians and even some nontribals.
Rivalries developed among the various Protestant churches and with the
Roman Catholic Church, but most of the groups coalesced in the electoral
arena and achieved some successes on the local level in the 1930s. The
movement at this period was directed more at Indian dikus
(outsiders) than at the British. Jharkhand spokesmen made
representations to British constitutional commissions requesting a
separate state and redress of grievances, but without much success.
Independence in 1947 brought emphasis on planned industrialization
centering on heavy industries, including a large expansion of mining. A
measure of the economic importance of the Jharkhand mines is that the
region produces more than 75 percent of the revenue of Bihar, a large
state. The socialist pattern of development pursued by the central
government led to forced sales of tribal lands to the government, with
the usual problem of perceived inadequate compensation. On the other
hand, government authorities felt that because the soils of the region
are poor, industrialization was particularly necessary for the local
people, not just for the national good. However, industrial development
brought about further influx of outsiders, and local people considered
that they were not being hired in sufficient numbers. The
nationalization of the mines in 1971 allegedly was followed by the
firing of almost 50,000 miners from Jharkhand and their replacement by
outsiders.
Land was also acquired by the government for building dams and their
reservoirs. However, some observers thought that very little of the
electricity and water produced by the dams was going to the region. In
addition, government forestry favored the replacement of species of
trees that had multiple uses to the forest dwellers with others useful
only for commercial sales. Traditional shifting cultivation and forest
grazing were restricted, and the local people felt that the prices paid
by the government for forest products they gathered for sale were too
low. In the decades since independence, these problems have persisted
and intensified.
On the political front, in 1949 the Jharkhand Party, under the
leadership of Jaipal Singh, swept the tribal districts in the first
general elections. When the States Reorganisation Commission was formed,
a memorandum was submitted to it asking for an extensive region to be
established as Jharkhand, which would have exceeded West Bengal in area
and Orissa in population. The commission rejected the idea of a
Jharkhand state, however, on the grounds that it lacked a common
language. In the 1950s, the Jharkhand Party continued as the largest
opposition party in the Bihar legislative assembly, but it gradually
declined in strength. The worst blow came in 1963 when Jaipal Singh
merged the party into the Congress without consulting the membership. In
the wake of this move, several splinter Jharkhand parties were formed,
with varying degrees of electoral success. These parties were largely
divided along tribal lines, which the movement previously had not seen.
There also has been dissention between Christian and non-Christian
tribal people because of differences in level of education and economic
development. Non-Christian tribals formed separate organizations to
promote their interests in the 1940s and again in the 1960s. In 1968 a
parliamentary study team visited Ranchi investigating the removal of
groups from the official list of Scheduled Tribes (thereby depriving
these groups of various compensatory privileges). Mass meetings were
held and petitions submitted to the study team maintaining that
Christians had ceased to be tribals by conversion from tribal religions,
and that they benefitted unfairly both from mission schooling and from
government protection as members of Scheduled Tribes. In the following
years, there were accusations that the missionaries were foreign outside
agitators.
In August 1995, the state government of Bihar established the
180-member Provisional Jharkhand Area Autonomous Council. The council
has 162 elected members (two each from eighty-one assembly
constituencies in the Jharkhand area) and eighteen appointed members.
India - Uttarakhand
The term Uttarakhand , meaning "northern tract" or
"higher tract," refers to the Himalayan districts of Uttar
Pradesh, between the state of Himachal Pradesh to the west and Nepal to
the east. It contains the eight districts of the Kumaon and Garhwal
divisions. The main local languages are Kumaoni, Garhwali, and Pahari
("mountain"), a language of the Indo-Aryan family. The
language of the elite, business, and administration is Hindi.
The Uttarakhand movement is motivated by regional factors along with
economic factors stemming from its particular geography. There is no
protest against the dominance of Hindi in education and administration
in the state. As regards religion, the population of the hills is almost
entirely Hindu, like the large majority of Uttar Pradesh. The influx of
outsiders has not become an issue; indeed, the problem has rather been
the need for natives of the region to leave it.
The residents of hill districts have felt themselves lost in the
large state of Uttar Pradesh and their needs ignored by the politicians
more concerned with wider regional issues. There has been almost no
development of industry or higher education, although the 1962 border
war with China resulted in some infrastructure development, particularly
roads, which also were extended to make the more remote pilgrimage sites
more accessible.
Men of the region are forced to leave their families in the hills and
seek employment in the plains, where they mostly find menial positions
as domestic servants, which they consider undignified and inappropriate
to their caste. Students must also go to the plains for higher
education. All find the heat of the lowlands very oppressive.
The major potential in Uttarakhand for hydroelectric power from the
Ganga and Yamuna rivers and for tourism has not been developed, locals
feel. Springs, which are essential for drinking and irrigation water,
have been allowed to dry up. The particular needs of hill agriculture
have been ignored. The plains produce grain primarily, whereas fruit
growing is more promising in the hills. On the other hand, adjacent
Himachal Pradesh, which consists of Himalayan districts formerly in
Punjab or in associated princely states, became a state in 1948.
Himachal Pradesh is geographically and culturally quite similar to
Uttarakhand and has enjoyed satisfying progress in power generation,
tourism, and cultivation. Some administrators observe that small states
such as Himachal Pradesh can make more rapid progress just by virtue of
being smaller, so that the problems are less overwhelming and local
needs are not lost.
The first demand for a separate Uttarakhand state was voiced by P.C.
Joshi, a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), in 1952. However,
a movement did not develop in earnest until 1979 when the Uttarakhand
Kranti Dal (Uttarakhand Revolutionary Front) was formed to fight for
separation. In 1991 the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly passed a
resolution supporting the idea, but nothing came of it. In 1994 student
agitation against the state's implementation of the Mandal Commission
(see Glossary) report increasing the number of reserved government
positions and university places for lower caste people (the largest
caste of Kumaon and Garhwal is the high-ranking Rajput Kshatriya group)
expanded into a struggle for statehood. Violence spread on both sides,
with attacks on police, police firing on demonstrators, and rapes of
female Uttarakhand activists. In 1995 the agitation was renewed, mostly
peacefully, under the leadership of the Uttarakhand Samyukta Sangharsh
Samiti (Uttarakhand United Struggle Association), a coalition headed by
the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), seeing the
appeal of statehood to its high-caste constituencies, also supported the
movement, but wanted to act on its own. To distinguish its activities,
the BJP wanted the new state to be called Uttaranchal, meaning
"northern border or region," essentially a synonym for
Uttarakhand. In 1995 various marches and demonstrations of the
Uttarakhand movement were tense with the possibility of conflict not
just with the authorities, but also between the two main political
groups. Actual violence, however, was rare. A march to New Delhi in
support of statehood was being planned later in the year. An interesting
development was that women were playing an active leadership role in the
agitation.
India - Gorkhaland
