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History > UK, British empire, England > Early 21st century, 20th century
20th, 19th century > British empire > India, Pakistan > Timeline in pictures
Image of map of the British Indian Empire from Imperial Gazetteer of India, Oxford University Press, 1909.
Scanned and reduced from personal copy by Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:10, 5 August 2007 (UTC) Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IGI_british_indian_empire1909reduced.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj
India
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12641776
16 September 1965
India and Pakistan > Kashmir > U.N.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1965/sep/16/
Jawaharial Nehru dies 27 May 1964
Nehru Date taken: November 1948
Photographer: Jack Birns
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=4488ea392b14a2c8 - broken link
Time Covers - The 40S Time cover: 08-24-1942 of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Date taken: August 24, 1942
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=e27c47373240ee3d - broken link
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/nehru-jawaharlal
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1964/may/28/india.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/
26 January 1950
India becomes a republic
From King George VI to President Dr. Rajendra Prasad
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1950/jan/26/india.
January 1948
Assassination of Gandhi
On 30 January 1948, Godse stepped out in front of Gandhi and shot him three times at point-blank range.
A fervent believer in Hindu nationalism, Godse thought Gandhi had betrayed India’s Hindus by agreeing to partition, leading to the creation of Pakistan, and by championing the rights of Muslims.
In 1949, Godse was hanged for Gandhi’s murder.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/17/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/17/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1948/jan/31/india.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1948/jan/31/india.
Mahatma Gandi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 1869-1948
India Leader of India, Mohandas Gandhi.
Location: India Date taken: November 1942
Photographer: Wallace Kirkland
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=b87c00c36903593e - broken link
https://www.theguardian.com/world/mahatma-gandhi https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/gandhi-mohandas-k
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/17/
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/
http://iht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/09/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/picture/2013/jan/30/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2012/jan/30/gandhi-interview-india-1948 http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/sep/22/archive-1932-gandhi-untouchables-fast http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/apr/07/archive-1930-gandhi-civil-disobedience
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/27/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/02/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/27/
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/oct/14/gandhi-reel-history
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/aug/05/worldcinema.drama
https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,127619,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/century/1930-1939/Story/0,,126824,00.html
1947
Indian Partition
Violent split of India and Pakistan
Up to 15 million people moved across the two borders in less than a year, one of the fastest mass migrations in history.
Millions of Muslims fled India, most heading west.
About the same number of Hindus and Sikhs went mostly east into the new India.
About one million people were killed.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/
Mass Migration, India Date taken: 1947
Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White [ migration fr. India to Pakistan ? ]
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=84a0390866182f8f&q - broken link
Muslim refugees fleeing India.
Partition marked a massive upheaval across the subcontinent.
Photograph: AP
Indian prince's descendants can claim fortune from NatWest after 70 years UK ruling dismisses Pakistan’s claim to £35m in legal battle dating back to 1948 G Wed 2 Oct 2019 16.49 BST Last modified on Wed 2 Oct 2019 20.25 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/02/
A train carrying Muslims passes through the north Indian town of Kuinkshaha on its way from Delhi to Lahore, 1947.
Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum
Partition, 70 years on: Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie and other writers reflect G Saturday 5 August 2017 08.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/05/
Refugee camp in Delhi in 1947.
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Partition, 70 years on: Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie and other writers reflect G Saturday 5 August 2017 08.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/05/
On 3 June 1947, only six weeks before British India was carved up, a group of eight men sat around a table in New Delhi and agreed to partition the south Asian subcontinent.
Photographs taken at that moment reveal the haunted and nervous faces of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian National Congress leader soon to become independent India’s first prime minister, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, head of the Muslim League and Pakistan’s first governor-general and Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy.
Yet the public also greeted this agreement with some cautious hope.
Nobody who agreed to the plan realised that partition was unleashing one of the worst calamities of the 20th century.
Only weeks later, the full scale of the tragedy was apparent.
The north-eastern and north-western flanks of the country, made up of Muslim majorities, became Pakistan on 14 August 1947.
The rest of the country, predominantly Hindu, but also with large religious minorities peppered throughout, became India.
Sandwiched between these areas stood the provinces of Bengal (in the east) and Punjab (in the north-west), densely populated agricultural regions where Muslims, Hindus and Punjabi Sikhs had cultivated the land side by side for generations.
The thought of segregating these two regions was so preposterous that few had ever contemplated it, so no preparations had been made for a population exchange.
(...)
However, people took fright and, in the face of mounting violence, took matters into their own hands.
Many did not want “minorities” in their new countries.
Others did not want to become “minorities” with all the attendant horrors this now implied.
Refugees started to cross over from one side to the other in anticipation of partition.
The borderlines, announced on 17 August – two days after independence – cut right through these two provinces and caused unforeseen turmoil.
Perhaps a million people died, from ethnic violence and also from diseases rife in makeshift refugee camps.
The epicentre was Punjab, yet many other places were affected, especially Bengal (often overlooked in the commemorations), Sindh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Kashmir and beyond.
Lahore – heir to the architecture of Mughal, Sikh and British rule, and famed for its poets, universities and bookshops – was reduced in large quarters to rubble.
In Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple, and also known for its carpet and silk weavers, it took more than five years to clear the wreckage.
There were more than 600 refugee camps all over the subcontinent, 70,000 women had suffered sexual violence and the issue of the princely states, especially Kashmir, remained unresolved.
Many hopes had been cruelly dashed.
The act of partition set off a spiral of events unforeseen and unintended by anyone, and the dramatic upheavals changed the terms of the whole settlement.
The stories make us flinch.
Bloated and distorted bodies surfacing in canals months after a riot, young pregnant women left dismembered by roadsides.
One newspaper report tells of an unnamed man from a village “whose family had been wiped out”, who on meeting Jinnah as he toured the Pakistani camps in 1947, “sobbed uncontrollably”.
Up to 15 million people left their homes to begin a new life in India or Pakistan, and by September 1947 the formal exchange of population across the Punjab borderlines had become government policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/05/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1751044.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/south_asia/1751044.stm
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/04/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/20/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/15/
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/14/india-and-pakistan-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/14/west-pakistani-
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/13/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/05/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/05/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/04/multimedia/india-pakistan-
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/27/
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/08/13/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1947/aug/15/
https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/
1947
India / Pakistan > Independence http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=84a0390866182f8f
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/27/pakistan
https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/
https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/
The end of empire after the second world war
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/
India Muslim League
Direct Action Day 16 August 1946
(1876-1948) called for Direct Action on 16 August 1946 to protest against Congress and the British.
In Calcutta this led to three days of Hindu-Muslim violence - the bloodiest in nearly a century - and thousands of deaths. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/south_asia/1751044.stm
Vultures feeding on corpses lying abandoned in alleyway after bloody rioting between Hindus and Muslims.
Location: Calcutta, India Date taken: 1946
Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=a13af2dc17971718
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Action_Day http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/south_asia/1751044.stm http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/jinnah_mohammad_ali.shtml
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/
Riots between Muslims and Hindus India Calcutta 1946
Riots that took place in the streets of Calcutta in 1946 between Muslims and Hindus claimed thousands of lives.
Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images
India’s Muslims and the Price of Partition NYT AUG. 17, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/india-muslims-hindus-partition.html
In 1946, just months before independence, carnage unimaginable in ferocity and unprecedented in scale broke out against Hindus in Muslim-dominated East Bengal and against Muslims in Hindu-majority Bihar.
The great campaigner for freedom from Britain’s imperial yoke, Mohandas Gandhi, spent weeks in both theaters of what he described as “almost a civil war.”
He was determined to quell sectarian violence with his own life if need be.
Gandhi never accepted the “Two Nations” theory, which saw a sanctuary for the subcontinent’s Muslims in a future Pakistan and a natural home for its Hindus in a Hindu rashtra, a Hindu nation.
On Aug. 15, 1947, as India won its freedom and the new nation celebrated its new dawn, Gandhi did not join the celebrations in New Delhi.
He was in Calcutta, where sectarian riots had disfigured life, even as bloody carnage had left hundreds of Hindus dead in East Bengal and Muslims, likewise, in Bihar.
Freedom had come with the partition of the country on the basis of religion.
Gandhi described the day as meant for celebration but also for sorrow.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/
India
The Muslim League
The Muslim League, a party established by Muslim landlords and the educated middle class, claimed that it alone had the right to represent Muslims and their interests.
This brought it into conflict with the Indian National Congress of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who argued that they represented all Indians.
In 1936-7, the British decided to conduct elections to 11 provincial legislatures.
A large measure of administrative powers was to be transferred to the governments thus elected.
The Congress, the League and a slew of provincial parties participated in the polls.
Despite its claim of representing Muslims’ aspirations, the Muslim League polled less than 5 percent of their votes, which inspired fantasies and fears.
The League began to argue that the Hindu majority of undivided India would swamp Muslims and suppress their religion and culture.
As evidence, the League pointed to Hindu-Muslim riots in the northern states of Bihar and the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), both ruled by the Congress, as an ominous portent.
They argued that the movement to ban the slaughter of cows, led by an assortment of religious leaders, Hindu nationalist groups and some members of the Congress, was aimed at subverting Muslim culture.
Unlike Muslims, Christians, Jews and animists, a segment of Hindus worship the cow and don’t eat its meat.
In 1937, Congress adopted as the national song of India some verses from “Vande Mataram,” or “I praise you, Mother,” a poem written in the 1870s by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, a Bengali poet and novelist, as an ode to the Hindu goddess Durga.
The League objected to its singing as it depicted India as Mother Goddess, which the League construed to promote idolatry, anathema to Muslims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/
1945
British policy on India
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1945/sep/20/
Bengal famine 1943
An emaciated family who arrived in Kolkata in search of food in November 1943.
Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – study Study is first time weather data has been used to argue wartime policies exacerbated famine G Fri 29 Mar 2019 11.15 GMT Last modified on Fri 29 Mar 2019 16.41 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/
The 1943 famine in Bengal (...) killed up to 3 million people
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/
1942
Bombay riots
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/10/
The English in India
A hundred years of rule by Rabindranath Tagore - 1936
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1936/oct/02/
https://www.theguardian.com/century/1930-1939/
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in London for a conference on Indian constitutional reform in 1931.
Photograph: Associated Press
Why India and the World Need Gandhi The great leader envisioned a world where every citizen has dignity and prosperity. NYT Oct. 2, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/
13 April 1919
Jallianwallah Bagh massacre / The Amritsar shooting
Reginald Dyer was found responsible for the killing of unarmed Indian Sikhs during the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre and forced into retirement.
Photograph: Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
The Massacre That Led to the End of the British Empire The events at Jallianwala Bagh, in the Indian city of Amritsar, marked the beginning of the resistance against colonial governance. NYT April 13, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/
On 13 April 1919, the day of the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi, British soldiers fired indiscriminately on unarmed men, women and children attending a peaceful public meeting in a walled park called Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar, Punjab.
An estimated 1,000 people were killed and many more injured as they were shot in cold blood, even as they tried to escape.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/12/
On April 13, 1919, led a group of British soldiers to Jallianwala Bagh, a walled public garden in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar.
Several thousand unarmed civilians, including women and children, had gathered to celebrate the Sikh New Year.
Viewing the gathering as a violation of the prohibitory orders on public assembly, General Dyer ordered his troops to fire without warning.
According to official figures, the 10 minutes of firing resulted in 379 dead and more than a thousand injured.
As news of the massacre became public, many British officials and public figures hailed General Dyer’s actions as necessary to keep an unruly subject population in order.
For Indians, Jallianwala Bagh became a byword for colonial injustice and violence.
The massacre triggered the beginning of the end of the colonial rule in India.
General Dyer’s very British determination to teach the colonized population a lesson was rooted in the memories of the Great Rebellion of 1857, when Indian rebels — sepoys of the British Indian Army, peasants, artisans and dispossessed landholders and rulers — revolted against the East India Company, killed several Europeans and brought the company to its knees in much of northern India.
The British responded ferociously, decisively defeated the rebels, and carried out wanton retribution to teach the natives a lesson in imperial governance.
Reginald Dyer was found responsible for the killing of unarmed Indian Sikhs during the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre and forced into retirement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/
at least 379 innocent Indians were killed
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/feb/20/
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-amritsar-massacre http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03q5b6g
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/12/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/10/
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2017/jun/26/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/23/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/feb/20/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/feb/20/
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/15/
famine in Bihar 1873-74
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/
South Asians making Britain
Timeline > 1858-1950
The impact of South Asians on British life from the Raj to the early years of Indian independence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/sep/10/
10 December 1855
The Guardian visits the East India Company's military seminary
http://www.theguardian.com/news/1855/dec/10/
British Raj / British India
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/India.html
1857
British India and the 'Great Rebellion' / The Indian Mutiny
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/indian_rebellion_01.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/sceptred_isle/page/150.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/empire/episodes/episode_49.shtml http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/5312092.stm
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/11/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/24/
1853
Karl Marx in the New-York Herald Tribune
British Rule in India
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
British Presence in India in the 18th Century
East India Company
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/east_india_01.shtml
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