It was only after the Second World War that the British position on India changed. Winston Churchill predicted that an independent India would quickly descend into endless civil war and ethnic violence. They believed that India could be a viable, independent state.īy the 1930s, with the local Indian independence movement accelerating, British opinions remained the same.
Their goal was to move people across India, regardless of language, race or religion, toward a single Indian sense of nationality. This view was best-reflected in remarks made by British Indian civil servant John Strachey in 1888, who noted that Spain is more similar to Scotland than Bengal, in the east of India, is to the Punjab in the west.īut, the Indian National Congress, or INC, a political movement formed in 1885, disagreed. How could a country with more ethnicities, languages and religions than all of Europe survive as a united, self-ruled republic? The prevailing opinion among the British elite was that India as a whole would never be fit for self-rule. The British ruled over nearly 300 million Indians who spoke hundreds of languages and practiced many different religions. By 1857, India was formally placed under the rule of the British government, under a system known as the British Raj. From the seventeenth century onwards, the British had been slowly increasing their presence in the region. Any history of modern India must begin with British rule.
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