The political impact of the colonial regime

In the scholarship of the 1960s, 1970s and much of the 1980s, the emergence of an Indian nationalist movement appears as the result of western, English-language education and the formation of new professions in urban areas--the emergence of an Indian, urban middle class. In the late 1980s and in the 1990s, recent scholarship finds the process of the development of a nationalist consciousness to be more complex, to be the result of a new relationship between state and society. It is in the transition from Hindic-Islamicate polities to the colonial regime that we find reasons for the emergence of new types of political organizations and new types of political consciousness in India.

The decline of the old regime

The political universe for former chiefs and little kings which survived British pacification was severely altered as imperial consolidation took place. The former chiefs and little kings no longer were the center of systems of political and religious ideas where they shared ruling status and ruling authority with the gods and goddesses which ruled the universe. In precolonial India there had been no "civil society" no large social sphere of human interaction which was separate from the state. All institutions of rule from the village level up were loosely linked in ritual networks which focused on the sharing of authority between ruling men and divinities. Political and religious rituals in villages and ideas of authority were modelled, more or less, on the rituals of royal courts and the great temples.

With the consolidation of the colonial regime, there was a political revolution when one considers the fate of the ideological structures of the old regime. What was left of networks of ritual and patronnage became warped. The colonial state took the monopoly of force and assumed responsibility for the management of major conflicts. The former ruling elites lost their status as the protectors of communities. Former ruling families tried to maintain what they could of their former status and honor, building palacial mansions and spending lavishly. They continued to engage in conflict over succession to ruling titles and honor, but these conflicts were managed in colonial courts of law, not the battlefield. In the course of the 19th century Indian ideologies of rule--monarchical cosmologies--became fragmented. No integrated system of Indian political ideology survived the political disruption of colonial rule. Nationalist leaders at the end of the 19th century would not look to Indian kingly traditions, but to Western models of liberal democracy as they thought about the future of an Indian nation.