South Asia 70 Years After Independence: The British Legacy

In 2017, South Asia will mark the 70th anniversary of the departure of the British from most of the region. The British-controlled “Indian Empire,” more commonly referred to as the British Raj, came to an end in 1947 with the partition and independence of India and Pakistan, which also contained the territory that would become Bangladesh in 1971. Independent India inherited the special privileges retained by the British in Nepal and Bhutan. The British left Sri Lanka and Burma in 1948, and remained in the Maldives until 1965; however, in 1947, most of South Asia was effectively free of British rule or influence, as the new states of India and Pakistan charted their own paths.

Yet even 70 years after the British departed, their legacy lives on in modern South Asia in quite a number of ways. Seven decades provides enough distance for us to take stock of what aspects of Britain's legacy were functions of its power at the time, and what aspects have now become permanent parts of the contemporary South Asian political landscape.

British rule in South Asia was longer and more comprehensive than the systems set up by other Western powers in other colonies. British rule in South Asia lasted almost 200 years, starting with the conquest of Bengal by the British East India Company in 1757, and mostly complete after the conquest of the Sikh Empire in 1849; the British Crown officially took control of India in 1858. From the start, the British could not rule South Asia purely as a colonial and military power, as a place used primarily for the forcible extraction of raw resources. It was too complex a society, with established political and economic patterns, enormous ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity, and a quarter of the world’s population. In addition to direct British rule over its Indian provinces, there were over 500 subject indigenous monarchies, the “princely states.”

The British took over and modified many institutions established by the Mughal Empire and its successor states, within a framework influenced by Anglo-Saxon ideas. The capital was moved back to Delhi in 1911 (from the British-built town of Calcutta), a symbol of empire in India since the 13th century. By the time Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1876, the British Raj was a complex enterprise spanning much of the Indian Ocean littoral with its own bureaucracy, civil service, transportation infrastructure, and military, mostly staffed by native South Asians, who formed a secondary ruling class throughout the British Empire as a whole.

An increasing number of South Asians were educated in British-run schools, learning English, and adopting many Western customs; they formed an elite among the natives of the region, most of whom remained engaged in agriculture, living traditional lifestyles. Eventually, as a result of the Government of India Act, 1919, and later a similarly named act in 1935, South Asians began to participate in and not only administer and soldier for the Indian government. Independent South Asian institutions, customs, and laws all developed from these precedents, many of which were somewhat indigenized after 1947, with few radical departures.

Culture: Cricket and Tea

While the most profound aspects of the British legacy in South Asia deal with politics and governance, cricket and tea also ought to be mentioned. The first has permeated all levels of South Asian society to emerge as overwhelmingly the most popular sport in India. Today, the global cricket scene is dominated by Indian teams, which have commercialized the sport in a manner resembling the big sports leagues in the United States. The sport is also a major pastime in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

What would South Asian culture be without chai, as tea is known in Hindi-Urdu? It is ubiquitous in an infinite number of varieties throughout the region, served at both state functions and in roadside stalls; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made much of the fact that he was once a chaiwalla, a roadside tea-seller. However, tea and commercial tea production was introduced into India by the British in the 1830s. Except for the Assam variety of tea, other varieties of tea were introduced into India by the British, who acquired seeds from China. An excess of tea production and a decline in consumption in Britain itself led the British government to promote the consumption of tea in India. For example, in 1903, according to Scroll.in, “ the British government established a propaganda unit, at first called the Tea Cess Committee, that was meant to propagate tea consumption.”

Thus was the chai craze born.

English Language

The English language is one of the most visible legacies of the British Raj, one that is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. Although the modern states of South Asia have various other official languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Sinhala, Nepali, and Dhivehi, it is almost a given throughout the region that the elites and well-to-do members of the middle classes will educate their children in English-language schools.

Although English has not replaced local languages, many of which are in fact thriving, English use at the elite level has come to dominate the written administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of governments in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Additionally, the top newspapers, the higher judiciary, the officer corps, universities, and the laws of these countries all predominantly use English. If anything, English has spread in South Asia after the British left as wealth spreads and more families aspire to middle class respectability. A sort of stable equilibrium seems to have developed in which English is used as a working language and native languages are used for everyday communication and entertainment.

Military

The military institutions of South Asian states, especially India and Pakistan, are heavily influenced by British martial traditions. Even before British rule began in India, the British East India Company was raising regiments of native soldiers. Eventually, these units were consolidated by the Crown into the Indian Army and Indian Navy, and later an Indian Air Force. These institutions were inherited and divided by India and Pakistan in 1947.

Much of the current regimental structure of the Indian and Pakistani armies are derived from British times. Numerous customs remain common practice; for example what the British called the “martial races” – inhabitants of certain regions, such as the Punjab, or castes, such as the Rajputs – continue to contribute disproportionately to the militaries of South Asia.

Also an inheritance of the British is the existence of parading in regiments and an elitism among officers, many of whom drink in exclusive Officers’ Messes. Different aspects of the martial tradition have come to the fore in India and Pakistan, both of whose militaries pride themselves on their professionalism. In India, this professionalism and sense of duty has led to a military considered to be completely coup-proof. On the other hand, in Pakistan, the sense of duty and elitism has given rise to a military that often sees its very patriotic duty as saving the country from incompetent civilian leadership.

Law and Institutions

Parliamentary democracy is the dominant form of government throughout South Asia, the only region outside of Europe where this type of political system is so dominant. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal are all parliamentary democracies. The framer of the Indian constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar, argued that parliamentary democracy was suitable for the region because such as system allowed a “daily assessment of responsibility, which is not available under the American [Presidential] system…[it] preferred more more responsibility to more stability.” Parliamentary government in South Asia has allowed many groups to share power, as in Nepal after the end of its monarchy in 2006, and has often prevented the entrenchment of dictatorial government, as in Pakistan, which has successfully rolled back a previous attempt by Pervez Musharraf to change the country’s government into a presidential system.

British ideas are manifest in the existence of professional administrative civil services in many South Asian countries. Even more importantly, the laws and courts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh primarily operate on the basis of British common law (with some influence of Islamic law in the latter two), and many laws enacted during the Raj remain on the books today. A common law system grants precedent a major role in the development of the legal system, giving such a system both more predictability and independence from legislation. In South Asian countries, as in the United States, such a system has allowed for the gradual expansion of rights that are difficult to alter.

This has led to an interesting tradition of liberalism – in the sense of expanding the individual, economic, and personal rights of individuals – throughout South Asia, often as the result of court decisions. For example, in 2010 the Supreme Court of Bangladesh ruled that a provision of its constitution declaring Islam to be the state religion was illegal and that the principle of secularism must be restored. In 2009, the Pakistani Supreme Court gave legal recognition to transgender people (hijras) as an official third gender. And after the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977, the Indian Supreme Court articulated the “Basic Structure” doctrine, which declared parts of the Indian constitution relating to fundamental rights to be unalterable. Not bad for a tradition that began continents away with the Magna Carta.

This tradition combines well with another tradition reinforced by the British, that of incrementalism, the slowness of change and a preference for the evolution of society and respect for customs rather than sudden, revolutionary change. In the 19th century in particular, the British pursued this strategy in order to avoid rocking the boat and alienating the population of the Raj, especially after the failed Indian Revolt of 1857. Despite economic and social problems in India and coups in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the basic institutions and structures of these countries have evidenced a remarkable level of continuity since the British Raj. And while social change may seem slow, it proceeds in a steady fashion under a strong legal framework, in sharp contrast to revolutions in Russia and China, and the turmoil to be found in other third-world countries.

The South Asian Political Framework

The very boundaries of South Asia that endure to this day were created by the British. A patchwork of states in South Asia were gradually conquered by the British to give shape to the modern borders of India, Pakistan, Nepal (which essentially retained whatever the British did not carve off), and Bangladesh. Without the British, there is no guarantee that South Asia would have the same states with the same boundaries it does today. A more likely scenario would be a slightly greater number of states centered around the more powerful of South Asia’s regions, such as Bengal, Punjab, the Ganges valley, and Maharashtra. Instead, a sense of pan-Indian nationalism and identity within the borders of the British Raj developed among the educated classes of India by the early 20th century.

The frontier disputes between Pakistan and Afghanistan and India and China are the result of British treaties, negotiated from a position of strength, with those countries. These treaties were designed to push the boundary of the Raj to its “natural” frontiers, namely the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. But the most important territorial legacy of the British is the partition of India, which led to the creation of two large states on the basis of religious demography, an anomaly in South Asian history, but one likely to endure.

Contrary to the belief of some scholars and a certain popular perception, the British did not create tensions between different religious and caste groups in South Asia; they took advantage of existing differences at times, but also promoted a united India without the need for a partition. Local politics, and not the British, drove partition. Nonetheless, British acquiescence was necessary for the partition of 1947, and British “Border Commissions” drew the final boundary between India and Pakistan, the eastern portion of which was inherited by Bangladesh in 1971. With the exception of Kashmir and some minor changes, the boundaries of South Asia seem unlikely to change anytime soon.

Geopolitics

Many common geopolitical understandings throughout the region, especially those grounding Indian and Pakistani strategies, also derive from the British legacy. While the great empires of the subcontinent were primarily land powers, the British Empire’s naval legacy has influenced the increasingly popular notion in India that it must become a net security provider throughout the Indian Ocean, especially in territories in the Middle East and South Asia that the British used to rule from India. The idea that a power in South Asia ought to influence events beyond, in Afghanistan and Central Asia, is also one held dearly by both Indians and Pakistanis, a legacy of the “Great Game” played by the British and the Russians in the 19th century.

Historically, powers in South Asia rarely exerted influence outside of the region. But the potential for more was understood by Lord George Curzon, the erstwhile British viceroy of India in 1909, when he wrote:

It is obvious…that India, must, under modern conditions, be the greatest power in the Asiatic Continent, and therefore, it may be added, in the world. The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbors, its reserve of military strength, supplying an army always in a high state of efficiency and capable of being hurled at a moment’s notice upon any given point either of Asia and Africa — all these are assets of precious values.

Modern geopolitics is now making use of the insights of the geopolitical value of the region first propounded by the British.

The Legacy

While a century has not yet passed since the British left South Asia, it is still possible to see what some of the most enduring legacies of the Raj have been. These include political and military institutions in those countries, parliamentarism, the English language, and the very borders of the countries of South Asia. All of these aspects of the British legacy are likely to remain essential parts of the South Asian story as it moves forward into the 21st century.