BRITISH CROWN RAJ

BRITISH CROWN RAJ During the period from 1858 to 1947, called the British Crown Raj, all of the territory that is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh was directly ruled from Great Britain by Parliament in the name of the British Crown. This article is mainly concerned with the organization of political power and its direct relations with Indian society; other articles will examine the British and Western impact in more cultural terms.

The Organization of Power

In 1858 Parliamentary control replaced the East India Company, which had gradually gained control of this territory, and had ruled it as the proxy of the British government. While the company's rule had long been regarded as an inefficient anachronism, the uprising in 1857–1858 against the company by Indian soldiers in its armies and by many groups in North India was the immediate cause of the takeover. There is no way of assessing Indian public opinion at that time, but the general impression given by Indian commentators is that the transfer of power was welcomed by Indian elites, especially in the great urban port areas of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. They seemed to have taken seriously the proclamation issued in 1858 by Queen Victoria stating that Indians would be placed on equality with all the subjects of the British Crown, with everyone freely admitted, on the basis of merit, to all offices in India. The realities during the next ninety years of British rule were very different, marked by the exclusion of Indians from most positions of political power, although many achieved high economic and cultural status. The ideals of the proclamation, however, later were adopted into the manifestos of Indian nationalists as the legitimate rights and demands of the Indian people.

The "Home" government

In Great Britain, control of Indian affairs was vested by Parliament in the secretary of state for India, whose position as a cabinet member made clear that the final control and direction of the affairs of India rested with the Home government, and not with its appointees in India. This legal position was strengthened by the ease of communications made possible by the telegraph, the opening of the Suez Canal, and by steamships, all of which brought the government of India in Calcutta and Simla under close scrutiny.

The government of India

The actual administrative structure in India, however, was not basically changed from what it had been under the East India Company, with the governor-general remaining the head of the government of India, but with the additional title of viceroy, indicating he was the personal representative of Great Britain's monarch. He was assisted by an Executive Council of five members, each of whom had specific portfolios. A Legislative Council, established in 1853, was made up of officials and nonofficials nominated by the governor-general. This was expanded to include Indian appointees in 1862, and their numbers were increased in 1892, when a small measure of representation, based on a very narrow franchise, was introduced. A momentous change took place in 1909 with the passage of the Indian Councils Act, which gave a wider, but still very limited, franchise for elections to the councils. The great innovation, however, was the decision to reserve seats for Muslims in the legislatures. The argument for reservations and separate electorates was that otherwise the Muslim minority would have no chance of election in the face of the Hindu majority, but Indian nationalists, then and now, saw this as a move to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, thus weakening the nationalist movement.

Below the central government of India were the various provincial governments, each of which had versions of executive councils and legislative councils modeled on that of the central government. The provinces were in turn divided into districts, which were grouped under a commissioner. The district officer, often referred to as the "collector," reminiscent of his former function as the chief revenue officer, was also in some periods the chief magistrate and in charge of police. This structure echoed in many ways the administrative system that dated from the Mughal empire.

These formal administrative structures of British power were dependent for their control of the vast Indian population on three institutions: the army; the civil bureaucracy; and the legal system.

The army

The continuance of British power ultimately depended upon the Indian army, and there was general agreement among the British authorities that the mutinies in the army in 1857 reflected basic weaknesses, making reform essential. Under the East India Company, each of the three presidencies—Bengal, Madras, and Bombay—had separate armies under the general control of a commander-in-chief, and this cumbersome system was revised by unifying all the armies under the civilian governor-general, but with a commander-in-chief of the army as the second most important person in the government. This recognition of civilian, not military control of the government was a basic element of British power in India and remained a fundamental characteristic of the government of independent India. The most significant clash between the rights of the civilian and military chiefs took place during the administration of Lord Curzon (1899–1905).

Another issue of special concern, after the uprisings of 1857–1858, was the proportion of Indians to British soldiers in the Indian army. In 1856 there had been a total of about 238,000 Indians in the three armies and about 45,000 British. By 1863 this ratio had been changed to 205,000 Indians and 65,000 British. This remained fairly constant until the beginning of World War II, when it shifted to 177,000 Indian soldiers to 43,000 British. Another important issue was the regional and caste composition of the Indian soldiers. Since it was high caste soldiers from the Bengal army who had taken part in the mutinies, enlistment from Bengal was drastically curtailed. In this context, British officers insisted that certain Indian regional and religious groups belonged to "martial races," identified as Rajputs, Muslims (especially from the Northwest), Sikhs, and Gurkhas from Nepal, and that Indian soldiers should therefore come only from these groups. While there is no historic evidence for the theory of martial races, it was widely accepted by Englishmen and is still influential in India. All the officers of the Indian army were British, but by the end of the nineteenth century, the British officers and the Indian soldiers seemed to have developed mutual respect for each other.

After 1858 the army was mainly used to guard the frontiers, both on the northwest and northeast, against militant groups, and only occasionally did it have to be used within India proper. It was also used, however, to support British foreign policy in China, East Africa, and the Middle East, where there was little direct Indian concern. During World War I, over a million Indian soldiers served overseas, mainly in France and the Middle East. In World War II, the Indian army was used in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. Both wars saw an increase in the number of Indian officers in the army, but its traumatic moment came with the defeat of the British at Singapore in 1942, when the Japanese persuaded a number of Indian officers and men to join the Indian National Army to fight with them against the British under the leadership of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, who had been a leading figure in India's nationalist movement.

The army was an important element in the transfer of power from the British to Indians in 1947, despite mass outbreaks of violence among the civilian population. It continues to be a vital element in the preservation of the new nation against insurrections and movements for self-determination in its borderlands, notably in Kashmir, Nagaland, and in Punjab, as well as in wars with Pakistan and China.

The Indian Civil Service

While the Indian army was the ultimate guarantor of British power in India, its maintenance as an authoritarian regime based upon laws depended upon another institution, the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Originally known as the "covenanted service" of the East India Company, most of the young men who signed contracts to serve in its commercial and political branches were relatives or dependents of East India Company directors or sharesholders. In 1853 the great innovation was made of appointment to the service through competitive examinations. Indians could have competed, but the examinations, based entirely on English subjects, were held in England, and it was not until 1864 that an Indian succeeded in passing. After 1923 the examinations were held in India as well as England, making it easier for Indians to compete; by 1947 the majority of ICS members were Indians, and it was this group that moved into the successor service of independent India, the Indian Administrative Service. Never numbering more than four thousand, the members of the Indian Civil Service held all the important executive posts in the bureaucracy and were the real rulers of India's vast population, which by 1900 numbered about 285 million people. Its members were generalists, expected to fulfill any position assigned to them, whether in agricultural, financial, or legal administration. They were revenue officials, magistrates, police superintendents, and district commissioners. They have been much lauded for their fairness and efficiency, but some have judged them wanting in imagination and sympathy for the people they governed.

The legal system

When the East India Company took control of Bengal in the 1770s, its officials intended to make use of the existing legal systems of the Mughal empire, following what was often described as the "ancient institutions and usages," but when they discovered that there were no codes of law or courts of the kind they expected, they began to improvise. The result was ad hoc construction of a complex mixture of courts and laws, often different in the various provinces. The new system included laws and regulations made by the central and provincial governments and by municipal authorities, laws devised in England that applied only to India, and English common law. European residents, never a large body, were subject to some courts but not to others. Gradually, a body of criminal law was created that applied to all residents, and commercial codes were also constructed that had applicability throughout the country. What was most difficult to codify was personal law, that is, matters relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption. All of these were perceived to be sanctioned by religious beliefs, and British officials were wary of any actions that seemed to come in conflict with matters of religion. The fateful decision was therefore made that personal law would be decided on the basis of the religion of the persons concerned. This added new complications, for there were no universally applicable Hindu or Muslim laws, and the British in effect codified laws for court usage that were more rigid than the usages that had been in existence. This system, subject to much acrimonious criticism, was the material with which officials of the Crown had to deal, much of which forms the basis for contemporary India's legal system.

At the same time, British India's courts were increasingly modeled on British patterns, and lawyers came to occupy a very important place in Indian life, making India an extremely litigious society. This new class of lawyers played a very important role as India's national movements developed. Though at first all the judges were British, by the end of the century many Indian judges had been appointed. The judiciary was remarkably independent of governmental control, and the new legal system, along with the modernized army and the ICS and its ancillary bureaucracies, proved of fundamental importance to the development of modern India.

Major Government Policies

The major policy concerns of the British Indian government after 1858 can be summarized under four main headings: foreign policy, taxation and economic policy, education and social welfare, and internal security.

Foreign policy

The immense archives of the government of India indicate that foreign policy excited more interest than any of the other policy concerns, since India's security was central to Great Britain's role as a world power in the nineteenth century. The foreign relations of the government of India were focused, therefore, on its contiguous neighbors. Two general principles guided these relations: first, the government of India was unwilling to permit any genuinely independent country to exist on its borders; second, the imperial designs of Russia in Central Asia were considered a major threat to British power in India. The corollary of acting on these principles was that throughout the nineteenth century, British India was, in a very real sense, an expansionist state. The rulers of unstable Afghanistan, with its ethnic links to the whole northwest area of Punjab, were a constant threat to the British attempt to control the mountainous region. Then there was a fear, undoubtedly overblown, that Russia in its conquest of Central Asia would move into Afghanistan, either through conquest or alliance with its chieftains, thus posing a threat to India. As a result of these fears, the British government of India invaded Afghanistan in 1838–1842 and again in 1878–1880, but both times its troops were forced to withdraw in the face of popular resistance. To the east, the government of India fought wars with Burma in 1824 and 1852, finally annexing the whole country in 1885. In the Himalayan region, a border known as the McMahon Line was defined in 1913–1914 between India and China, claiming vast areas for India, though it was never acknowledged by China. Indian claims for this as the legitimate border in 1962 became the occasion of war between India and China, another instance of the legacy of the imperial era in foreign policy, as in other areas of contemporary Indian life.

Taxation and economic policy

The right to collect the revenues of Bengal, taken by the East India Company from the decrepit Mughal empire in 1765, marked the beginning of British imperial power in India, and the collection of taxes remained at the heart of the policies of the British Government of India. A third of the government's revenue, which came mainly from land taxes, was used to pay for the army, in contrast to three percent of the revenues in the other colonies. Indian revenues paid for military expenses even when the army was used for British wars elsewhere, including in China and Africa. The very high salaries paid to members of the ICS were mainly remitted to Great Britain, as were the profits of British companies in India. All expenses incurred in London that were connected in any way with India were charged to the Indian account.

After 1858, as Indians became more publicly vocal in criticizing British rule in India, the burden of taxation was a constant theme. The most famous of the critics was R. C. Dutt, one of the first Indians to be accepted into the ICS, who wrote the first economic history of India. His major argument was that the poverty of the Indian people was due to the economic policies of the British. The British, he argued, suppressed the Indian textile industry in order to facilitate their own, and used Indian raw materials to produce manufactured goods in Great Britain, which were then sent to India. His conclusion was that although Britain gave India internal peace and political unity, at the same time its economic policies destroyed the Indian economy. Although modern economic historians are more nuanced in their analysis of British economic policies, his arguments were widely accepted by generations of Indians and by many critics of British imperialism in the West. While not denying that foreign rule almost inevitably meant the implementation of policies that favored Great Britain, not India, current economic analysis tends to emphasize the disadvantages of having Britain's free trade policies imposed on India, which gave no protection to India's own industries. Furthermore, capitalists, both Indian and British, could get better returns from trade than from investing in new industries.

While the Indian government did not actively promote economic development, preferring to leave it to private enterprise, it took the lead in the development of railways, partly to stimulate trade, partly to facilitate troop movements. The result was that by 1910 India had the fourth-largest railway system in the world. The government built some lines itself, but it encouraged private investors by assuring them subsidies if the railways did not yield a minimum rate of 5 percent return on investment. This new system of transportation served to unify the country both economically and socially.

Education and social welfare

One policy of deliberate social intervention by the British in India that had enduring results was the decision made by the East India Company in 1835 to grant support only to those institutions of higher education that used English as the medium of instruction. The motivation for this decision was not, as was often said, to supply the British with clerks for their government offices, but was the result of joint pressure from British and Indian groups. For Indian leaders like Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), the English language was key to the useful knowledge of the West that could transform Indian society. From the British side, the famous Minute by T. B. Macaulay, who was in Calcutta working on the legal system, summarized another case for the English language. It would, he wrote, create among the Indian higher classes, "persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect," who would be the interpreters between the British and the millions whom they governed (Sources, p. 601). This attitude tied in with the decision in 1854 to set up provincial universities in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, based on the model of the new University of London. These new universities were not teaching bodies, but they were responsible for curricula, examinations, and awarding of degrees. Teaching colleges were affiliated to the universities. This set the pattern for the other provincial universities established after 1858 in Allahabad, Lahore, Pune, Patna, and Agra, each with many affiliated colleges with the same standards. The system had many faults, but out of it came India's educated classes for all the new professions, such as law, journalism, and medicine; it also provided the leaders of the nationalist movement that eventually ended British rule in 1947. The students came mainly from the old elite classes, so the dominance of India's traditional ruling classes was perpetuated.

Because of the belief that a primary cause of the uprisings of 1857–1858 had been interference in Indian religious customs, the British government of India became very hesitant to legislate social change of any kind. Coupled with this was the widespread belief in British official circles that Indian society, although possessing a great culture, was by its very nature resistant to the progress so highly valued in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. The obvious path for a foreign government, uncertain of its support among the people, therefore, was not to innovate but to move with extreme caution, an approach that served the British Raj very well. Its police, army, bureaucracy, and law courts could preserve society without disturbing it.

Internal security

While the army was the ultimate guarantor of British power, it was only called upon for internal security in times of major disturbances, which, after 1858, were remarkably few. In Amritsar, in 1919, Brigadier Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd that had gathered in an enclosed garden ( Jallianwala Bagh) to listen to nationalist speeches; 400 people were killed, 1,200 wounded. The army was also used in 1942, during the "Quit India" movement, opening fire in Bihar and along the North-West Frontier, where British control of large areas appeared to be threatened. Otherwise, internal security was left in the hands of the police, who were under the control of provincial authorities. At the dawn of the Crown Raj in 1858, however, the police had a reputation for oppression and corruption, which led to a series of attempted reforms. Police were organized in each district under a British superintendent, with Indian constables. By 1902 a police commission reported, however, that the police were still feared almost as much as criminals.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, internal security took on a new urgency as the government became more concerned about the increasing spread of nationalism sentiment, which the British usually referred to as "sedition" or even "terrorism." As a result, in 1904 Criminal Intelligence Departments were set up to maintain stricter watch over the nationalists. Censorship of the press also increased after 1857, the government monitoring all Indian-language papers as well as those printed in English. The Indian press, nevertheless, was usually left free to criticize the government, though publishers might be treated with suspicion as "seditious agents" and might face the loss of their deposits or their presses.

Challenging British Rule: The Rise of Nationalism

The Indian National Congress

The founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 must be understood in the context of this century of change. Many local associations had been formed in different parts of the country seeking government action for social change, but the Bombay meeting of representatives from all parts of India in 1885 was the first of its kind. The Congress delegates in the early years thereafter met annually; they were almost all drawn from the new English-speaking professional classes. Their speeches and resolutions were hardly hostile to British rule, primarily expressing that they wanted to share in India's administration and direction in collaboration with the British. They asked for a modest portion of representative government, entrance into the Indian Civil Service through examinations to be held in India as well as in England, and the right for Indians to serve as officers in the army. They argued that the poverty of the masses was due to exorbitant taxes and Britain's free-trade policy, which deprived Indian industries of protection from foreign competition.

Opposition to the moderate and conciliatory proposals of the Indian National Congress leadership soon developed from at least three directions. The British viewed them as a threat to their power; British officials insisted at the time (and many of them continued to do so right up to 1947) that democracy was an impossible dream for India, because of its deeply rooted divisions of caste, language, and religion. Democratic institutions, they argued, could not be transferred to India, which had known only autocracy throughout its history. From Muslim leaders, like Sayyid Ahmed Khan, came somewhat similar conclusions, fortified by their convictions that representative institutions, based on the Western model of "one person, one vote," would keep Muslims permanently subjected to India's Hindu majority. In subsequent years, a growing estrangement between Muslims and Hindus became a characteristic of Indian political life, especially as Hindu leaders identified Hindu culture as Indian culture.

A third source of tension surfaced within the Congress itself when the moderate stance of its early leaders was questioned. This was done most effectively at the end of the nineteenth century by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), a Poona (Pune) journalist, who denounced the Congress policy of moderation as humbly "begging" the British for favors. In a slogan that soon became famous, he declared that "Swaraj (freedom) is my birthright and I will have it." More fateful for the subsequent history of India, however, was his linking of nationalism with a revival of Hindu military glories, harking back to Shivaji's struggle against the Mughal Muslims centuries earlier. Charged with "sedition" and inciting violence, Tilak was sentenced to jail and deported to Mandalay.

The All-India Muslim League

While the Indian National Congress always insisted that it stood for the freedom of all Indians, Muslim leaders saw Hindu leaders like Tilak as spokesmen for a Hindu nationalism that threatened the Muslim minority. In 1906 this sense of unease led a group of prominent Muslims to form the All-India Muslim League to protect Muslim social and political interests. The League had little influence before the late 1930s, however, when Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) began his campaign for a separate homeland for Muslims.

The rise of nationalism

In the aftermath of World War I, Indian political life gained a new momentum, following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar and Mahatma Gandhi's return from South Africa to lead the first nationwide satyagraha ("hold fast to the truth") movement. British Liberal Secretary of State Edwin Montagu also inaugurated new reforms with the passage of his 1919 Government of India Act, admitting more Indians to councils and offering much wider franchises for elections to all legislatures, central as well as provincial, the latter including Indian ministers. That act fell far short, however, of what the Congress nationalist leaders wanted, and the retention of separate Muslim electorates expanded the growing divide between the Muslim League and the National Congress.

In 1920 Mahatma Gandhi persuaded the Indian National Congress to adopt his method of nonviolent noncooperation (satyagraha) to win freedom from British rule. This was a rejection of both the constitutional gradualism of the moderates and the violent militancy that was being increasingly advocated by young revolutionaries demanding an immediate end to British rule. Gandhi's devout belief was that confrontational politics based only on nonviolence could win true freedom for India.

Gandhi was an idealist and visionary, but he was also a superb political organizer, and under his leadership the Indian National Congress became a carefully articulated body, with grassroots committees in most of India's towns and villages, as well as provincial committees, and, at the top, an All-India Congress Committee, with its supreme Working Committee "cabinet." Mahatma Gandhi urged people to refuse to obey unjust laws and to be willing to go to jail for having done so. He called for multiple boycotts of British goods and institutions, asked students not to attend government schools, lawyers not to practice in courts, and Congress not to participate in government elections. He stopped short, however, of asking Indians not to serve in the army, recognizing that the soldiers were not free agents.

Gandhi's success in revising the agenda of the India National Congress depended upon many factors, including his unique personality, his profound spirituality, his teachings, and his organizational abilities. A basic one, relating to all these, was the loyalty he evoked in the numerous very able men and women, both Indians and foreigners, who made his work possible. He was especially proud of having mobilized Indian women to take an active part in the dangerous work of confrontational politics.

The most famous of Gandhi's followers was wealthy Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), who was the son of a wealthy family, educated in England, strongly influenced by Marxist thought, and sharing little of Gandhi's religiosity. Frequently elected president of the Congress, Nehru remained Gandhi's chief supporter through the long and tortuous developments of the 1930s, which led to the next great constitutional landmark, the Government of India Act of 1935. This act gave a larger measure of autonomy to Indian political leaders at the provincial level, and when elections were held in 1937, Congress won enough legislative seats to form the government in seven provinces, leaving the Muslim League out in the cold. This opportunity to serve as ministers and elected officials before independence was an important asset to the success of the Indian democratic system after 1947.

In 1939, when Great Britain declared war, India's viceroy also proclaimed that India was at war, without consulting any Indian leaders. Congress's Working Committee ordered all its provincial ministries to resign. The gulf between Muslims and Hindus was dramatized in 1940, when the League made its momentous announcement in Lahore that its goal was the formation of a separate nation, to be called Pakistan, as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims. In 1942 Gandhi launched his last great campaign against British rule, known as the "Quit India" movement. The government acted decisively, arresting all Congress leaders, including Gandhi. As World War II ended, the Congressmen were all released, but now Nehru, not Gandhi, was at the center of the complex negotiations on behalf of the Congress that led to independence and to the partition of the British Raj into the two states of India and Pakistan. Jinnah alone spoke for the Muslim League.

Independence and partition

By 1946 the issue was no longer whether Britain would give India her freedom, but when. Though Great Britain had won the war, her resources were depleted, and there was no will to fight to hold India by force. Nehru and Jinnah had very different visions of South Asia's future. Nehru's vision, shared by Gandhi and all the leaders of Congress, was that the British should transfer their power to a single Indian nation-state with a strong central government and relatively weak provincial governments, with all decisions to be made by democratic process. Jinnah's vision appeared initially to be that he might accept an undivided India, but with a weak central government and strong state governments, a number of which—including the key states of Punjab, Bengal, North-West Frontier, and Sind—would all have Muslim majorities. This solution was completely unacceptable to Nehru. In the end, the last British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, opted for India's partition along religious lines, to which Nehru agreed, despite Gandhi's adamant rejection of any "vivisection" of Mother India. As for Jinnah, he initially opposed the partition of Punjab and Bengal, knowing how disastrous that would be, hoping as well for a corridor across the thousand miles of North India that were to separate West from East Pakistan. But Lord Mountbatten made the decision that the partition should take place on 15 August 1947, and he directed his staff to accelerate the final plans to place full responsibility for dividing India conspicuously on the Indians themselves. As the news spread of the imminent partition, violence on an unprecedented scale broke out; Muslims were murdered as they fled from India, Hindus and Sikhs murdered as they tried to escape from Pakistan. No one is sure of the numbers, but it is estimated that half a million to 1 million people died, as 13 million fled, the rest becoming refugees. India's struggle for freedom is often represented, because of Gandhi, as a nonviolent struggle, but in truth few nations have been born with greater loss of human life. The horror reached a dramatic climax when Gandhi himself was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948 as he led a prayer meeting for the end of the violence. The assassin was a militant Hindu who wrongly blamed Gandhi for the partition and for favoring Muslims.

Ainslie T. Embree

See alsoBritish East India Company Raj ; British Impact ; Curzon, Lord George ; Gandhi, Mahatma M. K. ; Nehru, Jawaharlal ; Tilak, Bal Gangadhar

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The bibliography for the period of direct British rule in India is immense, and only a representative sampling can be given. The most comprehensive bibliographical work is Maureen Patterson, editor, South Asian Civilization: A Bibliographic Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), chapter six. C. H. Philips, editor, The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858–1947 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) is a very useful selection of political documents. Stephen Hay, editor, vol. 2, Sources of Indian Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), provides writings from many leading Indian leaders. There are three multivolume series on India history that have volumes devoted to the period: Volume six of The Cambridge History of India (Delhi: S. Chand, 1958); The History and Culture of the Indian People (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1963, 1965, 1969), with volumes nine, ten, eleven, dealing with the period 1858–1947; The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) has a few volumes dealing with some aspects of the period. Judith M. Brown. Modern India The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) is an authoritative guide, as are Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal in Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 1998). Some of the most interesting work on the period has appeared under the editorship of Ranajit Guha, in collections of essays under the general title Subaltern Studies, published by Oxford University Press beginning in 1982. Its general theme is the contribution to the struggle against British domination by the people on their own, independent of the elites in the Indian National Congress.

B. B. Misra, The Bureaucracy in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997) is a sober analysis of the functioning of the administration, while Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India, vol. 2, The Guardians (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), is a readable tribute to British officials with much useful information. Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj from the Great Indian Mutiny to Independence 1858–1947 (New York: Norton, 1989), is a valuable summary. An outline of the legal system is found in the Cambridge History of India, vol. 5, pp. 379–394. B. R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), is a volume of The New Cambridge History of India. The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, edited by Dharma Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), has excellent articles on many aspects of the economic life of the period. Percival Spear, India, Pakistan, and the West (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), has excellent brief analyses of educational and legal changes. Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, and Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, provide important insights into the process of decolonization and the partition of South Asia into India and Pakistan in 1947.