Evolution of Indian Culture - An IDC Project

06/25/2025

"Evolution of India's Culture- Prehistory to 1947AD" is now compiled as an epub book and is distributed through Amazon.
You can get the link at https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org
Please leave your comments at the Amazon site.
We are proceeding to research on the second part of the book to track culture from 1947AD to the present.

We are proud to participate in Mass Cultural Council’s Card to Culture program, in collaboration with the Department of Transitional Assistance, the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) Nutrition Program, and the Massachusetts Health Connector, by broadening accessibility to cultural programming. Excep...

09/23/2024

India British Period (1800AD-1947AD) – Economy and Politics
Hardik Dixit

India accounted for around 24% of world GDP in 1750CE. By the end of British period in 1947, India’s fraction of world GDP was a paltry 4%.
The Britishers came as traders. The trade centres expanded and then they encroached into administration and taxation. Agriculture was commercialized through middlemen. The installation of the railways helped in transporting goods to the ports. India’s grains and raw materials were “drained” in London. A quarter of government of India’s revenue was spent on these procurements and shipping. Remainder of the revenue was used for administrative extravagance, exorbitant salaries for the Officers and in military adventures.
The Moghul type tax collection system was reengineered to a hierarchical system called Ryotwari, where a farmer directly paid revenue to a government agent. The fraction was negotiated with a view to the weather and crop-yield called “settlement”. In large chunks of land, a new class of local strongmen called Zamindars developed. The zamindar paid a fixed quota to the government and had the option of transferring the land ownership to whoever he chose. These zamindars exploited the cultivators. Land revenue reforms resulted in widespread famines, thus caused massive loss of lives. Millions, in some areas one third of the population, perished in famines between 1850CE and 1900CE.

British Industrial revolution resulted in weakening of Industrial strength in India. India's share of global industrial output declined from 25% in 1750 down to 2% in 1900. At the same time, the United Kingdom's share of the world economy rose from 2.9% in 1700 up to 9% in 1870. Britain replaced India as the world's largest textile manufacturer in the 19th century. In 1826, British took over the Assam region from Ahom kings. British East India company established first tea garden in 1837.

The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 is considered the first rebellion by the Indians against the British rule. The Mutiny resulted in the administration being transferred from East India Company to the British Parliament. Eventually Queen Victoria was coronated as the empress of India in 1877. though she did not personally visit (Figure 4). India was ruled as two divisions, (i) British India, where the British rules were applied, (ii) Princely states, which were autonomous under the overall supervision of the Crown. The leaders of the Princely states mostly sided with the British for their own protection.
Indian National Congress as a political party was formed in 1885 to vent the grievances of Indian people against the British rulers. Eventually an extremist group called swadeshi emerged who wanted to boycott British goods and to promote native goods in all levels. Bengal was divided into East and west in 1905 on religious lines, leading to the founding of All India Muslim League in 1906.
Mohandas Gandhi, an English-trained Barrister, returned to India from South Africa in 1915. He had tried out a method of passive resistance called Satyagraha through his work in South Africa. His principle was to cause civil disobedience against the “unjust” laws. He had strong principles not to resort to violence. Gandhi could mobilize the country in Satyagraha through his famous Dandi March in an agitation to repeal the Salt Tax levied by the British (Figure 5)
The first general elections in India were held in 1937 with about ten percent participation. The National Congress won plurality in eight States and the Muslim League in three. The British went to war with Germany in 1941 and enlisted Indian Army along with it. Gandhi called for the British ouster through the massive Quit India movement of 1942.
The Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah demanded a separate country on religious grounds claiming cultural inhomogeneity. A country Pakistan was carved out from India in two parts, in the west and in the east. Both countries were declared free together on August 14/15 of !947. Large trains ferried people across the boundaries for months (Figure 6). There was massive loss of life and property. The six hundred princely states merged with the Indian union in 1948, some voluntarily, some by force.
References:
1 – India A History - John Keay, Grover Pres, 2011.
2 - The cultural heritage of India, Volume II
- Ramakrishna Mission - Institute of Culture, Calcutta
3 – India Discovery Center presentation by Bhavani Vankineni, Nov 2019
https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org/economy-and-politics-british-period/
4 - Angus Madison (2003). "The World Economy: Historical Statistics".
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/the-world-economy_9789264104143-en
5 – How the East India Company Became the World's Most Powerful Monopoly
https://www.history.com/news/east-india-company-england-trade #:~:text=In%201784%2C%20the%20British%20Parliament,Company's%20land%20holdings%20in%20India.
6 – How the princely states, used by Britain to consolidate its empire, faded into obscurity
https://scroll.in/article/1036979/how-the-princely-states-used-by-britain-to-consolidate-its-empire-faded-into-obscurity
7 - IMPACT OF BRITISH RULE ON INDIA: ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL (1757-1857)
https://www.nios.ac.in/media/documents/SecSocSciCour/English/Lesson-05.pdf
8 - Government of the Raj 1858-1914
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/parliament-and-empire/parliament-and-the-american-colonies-before-1765/government-of-the-raj-1858-1914/

Image references –
Figure 1 – https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history-one-chart/
Figure 2 – Various Land Revenue Systems during British from India Discovery Center presentation by Vani
Figure 3 - Tea exports - https://clairepetras.com/eic/

Figure 4 - Salt March – Gandhi - By Yann (talk) - Scanned by Yann (talk)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138627

Figure 5 - Indian National Congress - By Unknown author - http://www.movinghere.org.uk/galleries/histories/asian/origins/origins.htm Moving Here - Heritage. Originally uploaded on English Wikipedia by Fowler&fowler (talk)A. O. Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress, is shown in the middle (third row from the front). To his right is Dadabhoy Nairoji; to his left, in sequence, are: W. C. Bonnerjee, Pherozeshah Mehta, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5624844

09/23/2024

India British Period (1800 CE-1947 CE) – Science and Technology
Bijoy Misra

Science in India had moved to alchemy during the Moghul Period. Fundamental mathematical and astronomical calculations continued in several pockets until the traders showed up. East India Company and then the British Empire brought their own young men from England to survey India’s hills, rivers, minerals and vegetation in search of raw materials for British industry. The native India recovered through the efforts of a few individuals.
William Lambton (~1751-1823), a British soldier turned surveyor, led the land survey of India measuring each hillock including the Mount Everest. Radhanath Sikdar, a mathematician, acted as an Assistant to the project. The massive “Plantae Asiaticae Rariores” (Figure 1) was compiled in three volumes with a catalog of 20,000 specimen plants from Indian subcontinent. They were published by Nathaniel Wolf Wallich (1786-1854), a Danish surgeon and a botanist. A survey of the mammals and birds was prepared by the geologist W. T. Blanford (1832-1905) under the title “The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma”. The geological map was produced by Henry Wesley Voysey (1791-1824), a surgeon. These catalogs still serve as reference books in India.
Henry Blanford created the first scientific report on the Monsoons in India (1875). He established the India Meteorological Department. John Eliot (1839-1908), the next Director, studied tropical disturbances and cyclones. Some of the reports are still studied today. The Geological Survey of India was organized in 1851 under the leadership of Thomas Oldham (1816-1878). Coal, iron, mica, bauxite and manganese were mined and exported to England. Export of minerals continues to be used as a revenue producer in free India.
The British scuttled Indian textile industry by cutting away the fingers of the muslin weavers in Dacca (currently in Bangladesh). The consumer textile was imported from England. The massive railway network in India is a relic of the British engineering in India. Though designed for transporting goods to the ports for onward transmission to England, the railway network continues as the foundation of India’s transport system. Milling technology was imported and was
applied to grains and oil seeds. Infrastructure civil engineering works included ports, bridges, irrigation projects and memorial monuments (Figure 2). The health system in the country faltered. Infant mortality increased and longevity declined.
Indian Association of Cultivation of Science was established in Calcutta in 1876 through the personal funds of Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar, a physician. Another entrepreneur Jamsetji Tata (Figure 3) established the first steel mill in India in Jamsedpur in 1907 and followed up establishing the first science education institution Indian Institute of Science in 1908. Bose Institute, a multidisciplinary research institution was established by Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1907), who showed the plants much closer to the animals than previously believed.
Physicist Sir C V Raman (Figure 4) did his research work at these premises and won Nobel Prize in 1929.
An astronomical treatise was produced by Samanta Chandraskhara (1835-1904) (Figure 5) in Puri. He helped correct the Almanac errors that had continued because of the locational coordinate errors. Prafulla Chandra Roy (1861-1944) helped establish the Indian indigenous chemical industry to compete with the British imports. Meghnad Saha (1893-1956) worked on the thermionic emissions and star identification through temperature. Saha Equation is used as a standard tool in modern Astrophysics to calculate the degree of ionization of the gases in the star to be in thermal equilibrium. Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974) (Figure 6) studied general relativity and eventually developed statistics to define the quantum states of identical particles like photons. The work is popularly known as Bose-Einstein statistics in Physics.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) (Figure 7) has been called the “boy wonder” in mathematics. He wrote elaborate mathematical formulas through intuition, claiming as “vision.” Denied of higher education, he was noticed by the mathematician Thomas Hardy to visit Cambridge University and publish papers. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893-1972) (Figure 8) helped establish the modern quantitative tools in statistics. The method of creating a non-dimensional metric to quantify the scatter in data is a standard tool in Statistics.

References:
1. The Cultural Heritage of India, Volume VI, Science and Technology, The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Calcutta, 1937, reprinted 1986.
2. A Concise History of Science in India – Edited by D.M.Bose, S.N.Sen, B.V. Subbarayappa, Orient Black Swan, 2009.
3. IDC Presentation Fall 2019 https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org/british-period-science-and-technology/
-------------------------------------------
Dr. Bijoy Misra serves as the President of India Discovery Center and leads the Science and Technology track in the project on "Evolution of Indian Culture: Pre-history to 1947AD"
More information and updates on the project are available at https://www.facebook.com/Evolution-of-Indian-Culture-An-IDC-Project-107749391111922
More information on India Discovery Center is available at https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org

(c) Copyright 2023 India Discovery Center, Inc. All rights reserved.

04/01/2023

India British Period (1800 CE-1947 CE) – Philosophy and Religion

Multiple accounts of Western travelers to India suggest a remarkable tolerance between the various religious sects as they lived their daily life. (Ref 1). The British period saw the deterioration of the Indian society through social and religious divisions. A slow reconstruction by new thought leaders began in the nineteenth century culminating in the liberation of India.

The fissure in the 18th century society occurred through urbanization. Industrialization forced the creation of a service class to do the menial jobs of cleaning toilets and disposing the dead. The British period taxation caused massive landlessness and migration to the urban centers in search of livelihood. The new menial class was looked down upon. it was socially outcast.

Voluminous literature was created in Germany by invoking a mythical race in India through the evidence of warriors in the epic Mahabharata(Ref 2). Adolf Holtzmann (1810 CE – 1870 CE) and others tried to interpret Mahābhārata and Bhagvadgītā to promote this hypothesis constructing the A***n race model in north India. An artificial divide was constructed. The north-south divide continues as a major fissure in the Indian society.

The British used these divisions for their army recruitment policies by selecting people from so called “martial races” and creating units coined after the names of these races. The army recruitment was a vehicle through which the British aimed to inculcate Western customs and beliefs in the colonial India. This had an adverse effect leading to the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Figure 1). It was the beginning of the Indian awakening.

Hindus adopted orthodox beliefs to escape oppression. Uncertainty in life, starvation and scare caused superstitions. The ritual of sati, untouchability, child marriage, idolatry and subjugation of women proliferated in the name of purification. The spread of English education did bring Indian intellectuals in touch with the western liberalism. (Ref 3, Ref 4.)

A religious movement was initiated by a local leader in Bengal, Raja Ram Mohan Roy (Figure 2). Titled Brahmo Samaj, the aim was to reform the socio-religious landscape of Hinduism by rejecting idolatry and the rituals. A unitarian approach of belief in one supreme brahman was the key. (Ref 5)

Swami Dayananda Saraswati (Figure 3), a Hindu monk, developed Arya Samaj in Punjab. Rejecting idolatry and the multitude of rituals, he stressed the authority of the Vedas and the Vedic prescriptions. His monthly journal Satyartha Prakash became popular. (Ref 6)

Ramakrishna Paramahansa (1836CE-1886CE), a Hindu priest in Bengal claimed the God-realization through the loving practice of the individual belief system. He preached religious harmony respecting all beliefs. His disciple Narendranath Datta (1863CE-1903CE), traveled the world as a monk with a new name Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda became an icon to the Indian revival. (Ref 7)

Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872 CE- 1950 CE, Figure 5), was trained in England and qualified as a British administrative officer. He turned himself into a revolutionary and evaded British capture. In a French occupied area in South India, he contemplated on the rebirth of a more powerful India. His teachings on Integral Yoga have world-wide following.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 CE – 1948 CE, Figure 6) developed his socio-religious ideas and political philosophy during his struggle in South Africa. Satya (Truth) and ahminsā (non-violence) were two main aspects of Gandhian thought. Truth is God with morals and code of conduct as its basis. Since all life has one divine origin, violence towards others is violence on one’s own self. All conflicts can be resolved without resorting to violence. He practiced these principles during the freedom struggle. He made spinning wheel Charkhā as a symbol of passive resistance, economic freedom and moral virtues. (Ref 8, Ref 9)

Post-mutiny India was a divided community on religious lines as Hindus embraced Western education system dominating the intellectual and economic landscape. The fear of Hindu domination was exploited by the British to encourage Muslims to adopt a separate religious identity with the formation of All India Muslim League. AIML was eventually instrumental in the formation of Pakistan.
Likewise, to serve the interests of orthodox Hindus in Congress and around the country, Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1915 thus further widening the religious divide that eventually led to sectarian riots of 1947.

References
1.V.P.S. Raguvanshi, Religious life in India at the Advent of British Rule, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 23, Part - II (1960), pp. 100-107
2.Vishwa Alduri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp-490.
3.Cameron Freeman, Christianity in British Colonial India and the Crystallization of Modern Hindu Religious Identities (https://camronfreeman.com/socio-cultural-anthropology/)
4.Kumar, Sunil. Contribution of Western Culture in Nationalism of India, International Journal of History and Cultural Studies, Volume 3, Issue 4, PP 22-25, 2017.
5.Sivanath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj, Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, pp 663, 1974 (second edition)
6.Lajpat Rai, Arya Samaj, Longmans, Green and CO., pp352, 1915.
7.Swami Nikhilanada, Swami Vivekananda A Biography, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, pp 232, 1953
8.Ranade, R.D, Spiritual Awakening in Gandhi and other Indian Saints, Sarva Seva Sangha-Prakashan, Rajghat, Varanasi, India, 2003, pp 207
9.Rolland, Romain, Mahatma Gandhi the man who became one with the universal being, , Publication Division, IB Ministry, India, pp 126, 1924
10. Pictures/images – courtesy Wikipedia.

Dr. Satyendra Sharma leads the Philosophy and Religion track in India Discovery Center's project on "Evolution of Indian Culture: Pre-history to 1947AD". More information and updates on the project are available at https://www.facebook.com/Evolution-of-Indian-Culture-An-IDC-Project-107749391111922 Information on India Discovery Center is at https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org

Authored by: Satyendra Sharma for IDC

(c) Copyright 2023 India Discovery Center, Inc. All rights reserved.

04/01/2023

India British Period (1800 CE-1947 CE) – Philosophy and Religion
Satyendra Sharma

Multiple accounts of Western travelers to India suggest a remarkable tolerance between the various religious sects as they lived their daily life. (Ref 1). The British period saw the deterioration of the Indian society through social and religious divisions. A slow reconstruction by new thought leaders began in the nineteenth century culminating in the liberation of India.
The fissure in the 18th century society occurred through urbanization. Industrialization forced the creation of a service class to do the menial jobs of cleaning toilets and disposing the dead. The British period taxation caused massive landlessness and migration to the urban centers in search of livelihood. The new menial class was looked down upon. it was socially outcast.
Voluminous literature was created in Germany by invoking a mythical race in India through the evidence of warriors in the epic Mahabharata(Ref 2). Adolf Holtzmann (1810 CE – 1870 CE) and others tried to interpret Mahābhārata and Bhagvadgītā to promote this hypothesis constructing the A***n race model in north India. An artificial divide was constructed. The north-south divide continues as a major fissure in the Indian society.
The British used these divisions for their army recruitment policies by selecting people from so called “martial races” and creating units coined after the names of these races. The army recruitment was a vehicle through which the British aimed to inculcate Western customs and beliefs in the colonial India. This had an adverse effect leading to the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Figure 1). It was the beginning of the Indian awakening.
Hindus adopted orthodox beliefs to escape oppression. Uncertainty in life, starvation and scare caused superstitions. The ritual of sati, untouchability, child marriage, idolatry and subjugation of women proliferated in the name of purification. The spread of English education did bring Indian intellectuals in touch with the western liberalism. (Ref 3, Ref 4.)
Figure 1: Artist’s rendering of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 CE
A religious movement was initiated by a local leader in Bengal, Raja Ram Mohan Roy (Figure 2). Titled Brahmo Samaj, the aim was to reform the socio-religious landscape of Hinduism by rejecting idolatry and the rituals. A unitarian approach of belief in one supreme brahman was the key. (Ref 5)
Figure 2. Raja Ram Mohan Roy

Swami Dayananda Saraswati (Figure 3), a Hindu monk, developed Arya Samaj in Punjab. Rejecting idolatry and the multitude of rituals, he stressed the authority of the Vedas and the Vedic prescriptions. His monthly journal Satyartha Prakash became popular. (Ref 6)

Figure 3. Swami Dayanand Saraswati

Ramakrishna Paramahansa (1836CE-1886CE), a Hindu priest in Bengal claimed the God-realization through the loving practice of the individual belief system. He preached religious harmony respecting all beliefs. His disciple Narendranath Datta (1863CE-1903CE), traveled the world as a monk with a new name Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda became an icon to the Indian revival. (Ref 7)

Figure 4. Swami Vivekananda
Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872 CE- 1950 CE, Figure 5), was trained in England and qualified as a British administrative officer. He turned himself into a revolutionary and evaded British capture. In a French occupied area in South India, he contemplated on the rebirth of a more powerful India. His teachings on Integral Yoga have world-wide following.

Figure 5. Sri Aurobindo Ghose

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 CE – 1948 CE, Figure 6) developed his socio-religious ideas and political philosophy during his struggle in South Africa. Satya (Truth) and ahminsā (non-violence) were two main aspects of Gandhian thought. Truth is God with morals and code of conduct as its basis. Since all life has one divine origin, violence towards others is violence on one’s own self. All conflicts can be resolved without resorting to violence. He practiced these principles during the freedom struggle. He made spinning wheel Charkhā as a symbol of passive resistance, economic freedom and moral virtues. (Ref 8, Ref 9)
Figure 6. Mahatma Gandhi
Post-mutiny India was a divided community on religious lines as Hindus embraced Western education system dominating the intellectual and economic landscape. The fear of Hindu domination was exploited by the British to encourage Muslims to adopt a separate religious identity with the formation of All India Muslim League. AIML was eventually instrumental in the formation of Pakistan.
Likewise, to serve the interests of orthodox Hindus in Congress and around the country, Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1915 thus further widening the religious divide that eventually led to sectarian riots of 1947.
References
1. V.P.S. Raguvanshi, Religious life in India at the Advent of British Rule, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 23, Part - II (1960), pp. 100-107
2. Vishwa Alduri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp-490.
3. Cameron Freeman, Christianity in British Colonial India and the Crystallization of Modern Hindu Religious Identities (https://camronfreeman.com/socio-cultural-anthropology/)
4. Kumar, Sunil. Contribution of Western Culture in Nationalism of India, International Journal of History and Cultural Studies, Volume 3, Issue 4, PP 22-25, 2017.
5. Sivanath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj, Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, pp 663, 1974 (second edition)
6. Lajpat Rai, Arya Samaj, Longmans, Green and CO., pp352, 1915.
7. Swami Nikhilanada, Swami Vivekananda A Biography, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, pp 232, 1953
8. Ranade, R.D, Spiritual Awakening in Gandhi and other Indian Saints, Sarva Seva Sangha-Prakashan, Rajghat, Varanasi, India, 2003, pp 207
9. Rolland, Romain, Mahatma Gandhi the man who became one with the universal being, , Publication Division, IB Ministry, India, pp 126, 1924
10. Pictures/images – courtesy Wikipedia.

Dr. Satyendra Sharma leads the Philosophy and Religion track in India Discovery Center's project on "Evolution of Indian Culture: Pre-history to 1947AD". More information and updates on the project are available at https://www.facebook.com/Evolution-of-Indian-Culture-An-IDC-Project-107749391111922 Information on India Discovery Center is at https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org
(c) Copyright 2023 India Discovery Center, Inc. All rights reserved.

02/24/2023

India British Period (1800-1947) - Language and Literature

Around 1800, Jesuit priests like Gilchrist, Carey, Bronson, Forbes and Campbell made industrious efforts to create standardized grammars of most Indian languages. Figure 1 gives the view of An English-Hindustani Dictionary and A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language, compiled by John Gilchrist (1759-1841.

The Bengal Gazette, the first English newspaper from Kolkata was published in 1780. The Baptist missionaries published a weekly Bengali newspaper, Samachar Darpan, in 1818. Pandit Jugal Kishore Shukla published a weekly Hindi newspaper, Udant Martand (Figure-2) in 1826 from the same city. These newspapers did voice against the social taboos like widow burning, caste system and untouchability. Urdu, a Persian-Hindoostanee hybrid language evolved as a transition language in the north. It became a medium of protest. An Urdu newspaper Urdu-Akbar was vocal in criticizing the East India Company on civic matters.

Native scholars pitched in to translate texts from English literature to the local languages. Many helped in translating the Indian literary texts into English. Germans took interest and associated their national identity with the old Vedic civilization of India.

The indigenous education in India was severely perturbed through the English Education Act 1835. The Act was the brainchild of historian Lord Macaulay who was too biased against India. “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The engineering became an organized restructuring of India’s working public. Government employment became a prize for the English-educated, who acted as a subsidiary to the Crown. The indigenous languages and literature suffered. English education did help bring a new sense of self-determination incensed by the western liberalism. The indigenous literature did survive under heavy odds.

1850 CE to 1900 CE is considered the renaissance in Indian literature. Introduction of the printing press allowed new work to reach the masses. Kalimohan Banerjee compiled a Bengali encyclopedia Vidya Kalpadruma in thirteen volumes. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Hunnarkhanni Chadai, Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar and Sundaram Pillai enriched Asamese, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi and Tamil literature.
Bharatendu-Harishchandra (1850-1885) (Figure-3) engineered the fusion of the Hindi dialects to a common platform with Devanagari script. Though short in life, he was among the first to use literary skills in shaping political opinion.

The Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s (Figure-4) novel Anandamath (1882) directly challenged British rule. The depiction of India as a mother and the popular patriotic song Vande Mataram originated through the novel. At the other coast, Marathi nationalism was expressed through the institution of the newspaper Kesari by Balagangadhara Tilak (Figure-5) as a voice against British rule.
In southern India, Subramanya Bharati (1882-1921) (Figure-6) contributed in both traditional and nationalist literatures in Tamil. Similarly, Kundukri Veeresalingam (1848-1919) in Telugu, Narmad (1833-1886) in Gujarati profusely contributed to the national cause.

In 1857, the British established four major universities in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Lahore as centers for higher studies. There was translation and compilation work, but no research. Aligarh Muslim University and Indian Association of Cultivation of Science were established through private funding of Indian businessmen in 1975.

Swami Vivekananda (1863 – 1902) and Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) created voluminous spiritual literature regarding uplifting India. The poem Geetanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (Figure-7) was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1913). Massive freedom literature in the 1930’s helped India to procure freedom.

There were many English-speaking poets and novelists who were influenced by the material from India or wrote about Indian society. Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson instituted the United Universalist Church in the US. Edwin Arnold created a lyrical translation of Bhagavadgita. English Novelist Rudyard Kipling was born in India and won the Nobel prize in literature in 1907. Many writers of Indian descent have made a mark for their writings in the English language.

References:
1.हिंदी भाषा का इतिहास by Dr. Dhirendra Verma (1897–1973), first scientific history of Indian languages in 1933 and a principal editor of first 'हिन्दी विश्वकोश' (Hindi Encyclopedia).
2.A comparative grammar of the modern A***n languages of India: to wit, Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Oṛiya, and Bangali, by Beames, John, 1837-1902
3.A GRAMMAR OF THE HINDI LANGUAGE by: REV. S. H KELLOGG,1893
4. 1857–1947- The British Impact on India, 1700–1900, BY: By Fritz BlackKWell
5.https://www.indianetzone.com/41/indian_english_literature_during_british_india.htm
6.https://www.historydiscussion.net/history-of-india/literature/literature-in-india-during-british-rule/5948

Authored by: Prem Nagar for India Discovery Center (IDC)
(c) Copyright 2023 India Discovery Center, Inc. All rights reserved.