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The India Subcontinent after the British Revolution of 1926

As the ride tide washed over Great Britain and the Union of Socialist Commonwealths came to power, the sun had finally set on the British Empire. With her naval forces in shambles and her people in disarray, the once mighty Britannia now found herself broken and scattered. The British Raj, often said to be the jewel of Her Majestyʼs empire, was faced with a very unique situation, one which could either unite or divide the nation. Mohandas Gandhi, a widely popular and revolutionary political figure, had been amassing power and influence over the masses of South Asia, quickly becoming the de facto leader of the Indian National Congress. Though at this point, it held no real power, the INC was still the dominant political force in India, being the only large organization that actually represented the native population.

When news of civil war in Britain broke out in May of 1926, Indians were split once again. The scars of betrayal from the Great War were still fresh in the minds of many. None could forget the bloodshed and hardship India had endured in loyal service to Great Britain, only to have the promises of freedom stripped away. Yet the social, political and economic issues that had kept India so divided had not been solved, and this caused many to be reluctant to demand full independence so soon. Some even took up arms for Britain once more, in the hope that this time the promises of freedom would be kept. Even Gandhi was not sure what the correct course of action was, as he did not believe India was ready for Purna Swaraj just yet.

However, as the war progressed and the socialist revolution gained momentum, it seemed that India was headed for independence whether they wanted it or not. In early June, London fell into Socialist hands and the British Raj stopped receiving aid from the Home Isles. In order to finance the Indian Army and hold onto power, the Viceroy and Governor-General, The Lord Irwin, began raising taxes and suppressing what little freedoms Indians possessed. These crackdowns were met with mass protests and non-violent non-compliance, instigated by Gandhi and his supporters. Throughout India, men, women and children from all walks of life poured into the streets and demanded immediate independence. Recognizing the immense of Indianʼs freedom, Gandhi began making the necessary preparations to establish a functional and stable state once the dust had settled.

On August 1st, he entered into negotiations with Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose from the leftist wing of the INC, as well as Muhammed Ali Jinnah from the All-India Muslim League in the capital of Delhi. After weeks of heated debate and arguments, a compromise was reached in mid-September. The Republic of India would be a secular, federal republic in which each state would elect representatives to a national Parliament. In order to properly organize the state, the federal government would take a dominant role in the economy and administration of the republic. Protective tariffs would be employed until Indiaʼs economy was strong enough to compete globally, but the country would not follow in the socialist footsteps of its former master. To prevent social unrest, people from all castes, religious groups, and social spheres would be given suffrage, and all votes would be collected within one pool. Full equality was to be a guarantee.

Essentially a European model of governance, this compromise did not fully satisfy any of the involved parties, but it seemed to be the best they could due given the harsh divides and limited time and resources available to them. For Bose, however, this compromise was unacceptable. Before a final settlement was reached, he and several other hardline socialists walked out of the negotiations. They moved their operations to Calcutta, where they began consolidating support and drilling militias. On August 17th, Gandhi announced this proposal alongside Jinnah and Nehru, and the masses were ecstatic. India would finally be free and unified.

In response to this, The Lord Irwin sent a detachment to arrest the leaders of this new republic. A group of peaceful protesters blocked the path of the soldiers and refused to move even when threatened with violence. After a couple of hours, the conflict grew in scale and tension, eventually culminating in a protester throwing a rock at an Indian soldier, and him opening fire on the crowd out of panic. This would be the tipping point of the revolution. Within several days, a wave of peaceful protests, hectic riots and outright guerrilla warfare swept over the Indian subcontinent. The last bits of strength the British Raj still had began to crumble, and everywhere Indian soldiers laid down their arms and joined in the protesting. By the end of August, the Imperial Legislative Council along with the Provincial Legislative Councils from all the provinces except for Bengal and Madras had voted in favor of the Ghandi Proposal. The Lord Irwin fled to the Crown Colony of Ceylon, bringing with him most of the Europeans living in India, including businessmen, soldiers, bureaucrats and tourists. Additionally, several hundred Indian loyalists accompanied him, standing by the Crown even in its last days.

With the British out of the way, Gandhi and the INC were finally able to take control over India and establish their republic. However, it became clear to them that they did not have control over the entire subcontinent. Gandhiʼs broad coalition had the bulk of its support from Hindustan and the Indus River valley, or more generally, Northern India. In the south, however, things were different. At the dawn of British colonialism in India, there were several prominent kingdoms and empires that were on the rise after the collapse of Mughal rule in the 18th century. These states had their expansion halted and kept at bay by British treaties and military intervention, but they continued to exist as princely states. Now that British authority had collapsed, many of these princely states saw an opportunity to reclaim their stolen destiny and rise to power once more.

Such was the case with Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad at the time. Using his vast fortune, he recruited many of the Indian soldiers that were deserting from the British forces stationed in the Madras presidency. With his own personal army, the Nizam invaded the Madras province in September and took control of most of the northern territories, gaining a vast coastline. Having been landlocked for decades, the Nizam was satisfied with his new holdings, and halted the invasion just outside the city of Madras, where the British had fortified their position. Following the lead of Hyderabad, the Kingdom of Mysore also invaded the Madras province, annexing their former territories from before Britain had began to whittle away at their land. Similarly, they too were satisfied with their new coastline and began integrating their new holdings at once. The small Kingdom of Travancore declared its independence from the Raj, but did not invade due to its lack of military.

In Madras, the British were able to successfully suppress the mass protests and rioting that had affected the rest of the subcontinent. This was largely due to support from Ceylon, which had a firm hold on its colonial population and was able to spare reinforcements. Once the city was secured, the British began moving south to establish control over most of the Tamil-speaking region on the mainland. When The Lord Irwin arrived in Colombo, he met with the governor of the colony, Hugh Clifford, to discuss the situation. Without any support or communication from the Crown, it was decided that Ceylon and what little territory the British still held in southern India would be combined into a new state, no longer under British rule but very much still under European administration. The Lord Irwin was made the First President of the new South Indian Republic. Though a republic in name, this country was essentially a colonial settler-state, in which the European minority controlled all the wealth and power and society was divided heavily by race.

The case of the Bombay Presidency was very similar to Madras. Once it became clear in late-August that British rule had come to an end, the Sindh and Gujarat regions broke off from Bombayʼs authority to form new provinces that joined the Indian National Congress. Although the city of Bombay itself was very pro-union, the remaining territories were reluctant to join the new union. At this point, the Bombay province was largely Marathi-speaking, and many local leaders were uneasy about the prospect of joining a predominantly Hindu republic. Marathis were scattered across various political divides, both within and outside of the Indian republic, and nationalist were only willing to join as a united Marathi state. These nationalists had become very outspoken and passionate, taking center stage in public discourse throughout the Bombay province. They often harkened back to the might of the Maratha empire before the British invaded, and emphasized that, like Mysore and Hyderabad, they could too reclaim their past glory. In the middle of September, several nationalist leaders had pressured Rajaram III, the Maharaja of Kolhapur, to ascend to the throne of a new Marathi kingdom with its capital in Pune. As the contemporary head of the Bhonsle dynasty, Rajaram was the most legitimate claimant to the title of Chhatrapati, the king of the Marathis. Across most of the Bombay province, the establishment of the Marathi kingdom was met with joyous praise, but many liberals, socialists and pan-Indians, especially in urban centers such as Bombay, were furious. A massive revolt in Bombay, headed by factory workers and university students, led to the creation of the short-lived Mumbai Commune. Once Rajaram and the nationalist had secured power on the mainland, they besieged the city and attacked it with artillery seized from the British. Eventually the Commune was starved and shelled into submission, and was absorbed into the kingdom, but not before the exodus of hundreds of intellectuals and leftists who fled to Bengal and Gujarat. This created a brain drain in the Marathi kingdom, and soon far-right traditionalists and nationalists took control over the state, putting Rajaram III into the position of a figurehead. These nationalists were highly militaristic, and began training soldiers and stockpiling weapons to launch an attack on Hyderabad and India in order to rebuild the Maratha empire.

The south was not the only region outside of the INCʼs control, so too was the case for Bengal. After Gandhi had announced his proposal for a new Indian federal republic, Chandra Bose and the socialist wing collectively resigned from the INC and declared the beginning of the Peopleʼs Republic of India. Bose called upon all the peopleʼs of India to rise up and seize the means of production, and to resist both the British imperialists and Gandhiʼs false promises of freedom. The only way the people of India could be free, he argued, was if they overthrew the capitalists and the bourgeois that had collaborated with the British and enabled their oppression. His calls were met with fervor from the urban youth and other socialist factions, but indifference from almost everybody else. Several large scale riots and insurgencies sprung up in Bombay, Madras, Agra and several other cities across India, as well as many rural regions in the United Provinces and Bihar. Most of these, however, were quickly put down or absorbed by more broadly inclusive movements. The only real success was in Calcutta and Bengal, where Bose had been building support and where socialist sympathies were already widespread.

Within a few days, Bose and his militias had taken control of Calcutta and had the remaining British officials either jailed or executed. Caught up in the intensity of rebellion, Bose had begun to loose sight of his intentions. By mid-September, his revolution had spread across the regions of Bengal and Assam, and had even begun to pour into neighboring Bihar. As the fire of revolution burned out throughout the rest of India, Bose started to switch his rhetoric from pan- Indianism towards an appeal to Bengali nationalism. Although Bose definitely had ambitions to take over the entirety of South Asia, he recognized that he needed to temporarily narrow his scope to just Bengal and the surrounding regions. His message was also popular in the diverse region of Assam, where many minority groups were concerned about their status in the Hindu-dominated INC republic. Bose promised these groups full equality under his government, and by the end of the month the entire region was under his control. The princely states, including the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, were dismantled and the entire nation was reorganized around ethnolinguistic lines. A one party socialist state was declared, known as the Socialist Union of Bengal, and Chandra Bose became its Supreme Leader.

Back in the north, Gandhi and the INC had been building the foundations for their new nation. Delegates from all of the provinces and princely states under their control met at Delhi to create a constitution for their new republic and to discuss the borders of the new states. Gandhiʼs proposal was used as the foundation and he was elected by the delegation as the first President of India. On October 10th, the Republic of India was declared. As part of the constitution, all of the princely states in India were abolished and were either integrated into or replaced by democratic states. The borders of these new states were decided based largely on historical boundaries and pragmatic resource allocation. Many of the dynasties and rulers of these princely states stood opposed to this new constitution, namely the Rana dynasty in Nepal. However, a large scale revolt broke out in Kathmandu against the tyranny of the king, and a mob of civilians overpowered the guards of the royal palace, and looted the building while the royal family was staying in Delhi. The territory was annexed by India and merged with Sikkim, becoming a new state in the republic. The various colonies of other European powers, namely France and Portugal, were easily invaded and annexed into the burgeoning states that surrounded them.

Description

The India Subcontinent after the British Revolution of 1926

As the ride tide washed over Great Britain and the Union of Socialist Commonwealths came to power, the sun had finally set on the British Empire. With her naval forces in shambles and her people in disarray, the once mighty Britannia now found herself broken and scattered. The British Raj, often said to be the jewel of Her Majestyʼs empire, was faced with a very unique situation, one which could either unite or divide the nation. Mohandas Gandhi, a widely popular and revolutionary political figure, had been amassing power and influence over the masses of South Asia, quickly becoming the de facto leader of the Indian National Congress. Though at this point, it held no real power, the INC was still the dominant political force in India, being the only large organization that actually represented the native population.

When news of civil war in Britain broke out in May of 1926, Indians were split once again. The scars of betrayal from the Great War were still fresh in the minds of many. None could forget the bloodshed and hardship India had endured in loyal service to Great Britain, only to have the promises of freedom stripped away. Yet the social, political and economic issues that had kept India so divided had not been solved, and this caused many to be reluctant to demand full independence so soon. Some even took up arms for Britain once more, in the hope that this time the promises of freedom would be kept. Even Gandhi was not sure what the correct course of action was, as he did not believe India was ready for Purna Swaraj just yet.

However, as the war progressed and the socialist revolution gained momentum, it seemed that India was headed for independence whether they wanted it or not. In early June, London fell into Socialist hands and the British Raj stopped receiving aid from the Home Isles. In order to finance the Indian Army and hold onto power, the Viceroy and Governor-General, The Lord Irwin, began raising taxes and suppressing what little freedoms Indians possessed. These crackdowns were met with mass protests and non-violent non-compliance, instigated by Gandhi and his supporters. Throughout India, men, women and children from all walks of life poured into the streets and demanded immediate independence. Recognizing the immense of Indianʼs freedom, Gandhi began making the necessary preparations to establish a functional and stable state once the dust had settled.

On August 1st, he entered into negotiations with Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose from the leftist wing of the INC, as well as Muhammed Ali Jinnah from the All-India Muslim League in the capital of Delhi. After weeks of heated debate and arguments, a compromise was reached in mid-September. The Republic of India would be a secular, federal republic in which each state would elect representatives to a national Parliament. In order to properly organize the state, the federal government would take a dominant role in the economy and administration of the republic. Protective tariffs would be employed until Indiaʼs economy was strong enough to compete globally, but the country would not follow in the socialist footsteps of its former master. To prevent social unrest, people from all castes, religious groups, and social spheres would be given suffrage, and all votes would be collected within one pool. Full equality was to be a guarantee.

Essentially a European model of governance, this compromise did not fully satisfy any of the involved parties, but it seemed to be the best they could due given the harsh divides and limited time and resources available to them. For Bose, however, this compromise was unacceptable. Before a final settlement was reached, he and several other hardline socialists walked out of the negotiations. They moved their operations to Calcutta, where they began consolidating support and drilling militias. On August 17th, Gandhi announced this proposal alongside Jinnah and Nehru, and the masses were ecstatic. India would finally be free and unified.

In response to this, The Lord Irwin sent a detachment to arrest the leaders of this new republic. A group of peaceful protesters blocked the path of the soldiers and refused to move even when threatened with violence. After a couple of hours, the conflict grew in scale and tension, eventually culminating in a protester throwing a rock at an Indian soldier, and him opening fire on the crowd out of panic. This would be the tipping point of the revolution. Within several days, a wave of peaceful protests, hectic riots and outright guerrilla warfare swept over the Indian subcontinent. The last bits of strength the British Raj still had began to crumble, and everywhere Indian soldiers laid down their arms and joined in the protesting. By the end of August, the Imperial Legislative Council along with the Provincial Legislative Councils from all the provinces except for Bengal and Madras had voted in favor of the Ghandi Proposal. The Lord Irwin fled to the Crown Colony of Ceylon, bringing with him most of the Europeans living in India, including businessmen, soldiers, bureaucrats and tourists. Additionally, several hundred Indian loyalists accompanied him, standing by the Crown even in its last days.

With the British out of the way, Gandhi and the INC were finally able to take control over India and establish their republic. However, it became clear to them that they did not have control over the entire subcontinent. Gandhiʼs broad coalition had the bulk of its support from Hindustan and the Indus River valley, or more generally, Northern India. In the south, however, things were different. At the dawn of British colonialism in India, there were several prominent kingdoms and empires that were on the rise after the collapse of Mughal rule in the 18th century. These states had their expansion halted and kept at bay by British treaties and military intervention, but they continued to exist as princely states. Now that British authority had collapsed, many of these princely states saw an opportunity to reclaim their stolen destiny and rise to power once more.

Such was the case with Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad at the time. Using his vast fortune, he recruited many of the Indian soldiers that were deserting from the British forces stationed in the Madras presidency. With his own personal army, the Nizam invaded the Madras province in September and took control of most of the northern territories, gaining a vast coastline. Having been landlocked for decades, the Nizam was satisfied with his new holdings, and halted the invasion just outside the city of Madras, where the British had fortified their position. Following the lead of Hyderabad, the Kingdom of Mysore also invaded the Madras province, annexing their former territories from before Britain had began to whittle away at their land. Similarly, they too were satisfied with their new coastline and began integrating their new holdings at once. The small Kingdom of Travancore declared its independence from the Raj, but did not invade due to its lack of military.

In Madras, the British were able to successfully suppress the mass protests and rioting that had affected the rest of the subcontinent. This was largely due to support from Ceylon, which had a firm hold on its colonial population and was able to spare reinforcements. Once the city was secured, the British began moving south to establish control over most of the Tamil-speaking region on the mainland. When The Lord Irwin arrived in Colombo, he met with the governor of the colony, Hugh Clifford, to discuss the situation. Without any support or communication from the Crown, it was decided that Ceylon and what little territory the British still held in southern India would be combined into a new state, no longer under British rule but very much still under European administration. The Lord Irwin was made the First President of the new South Indian Republic. Though a republic in name, this country was essentially a colonial settler-state, in which the European minority controlled all the wealth and power and society was divided heavily by race.

The case of the Bombay Presidency was very similar to Madras. Once it became clear in late-August that British rule had come to an end, the Sindh and Gujarat regions broke off from Bombayʼs authority to form new provinces that joined the Indian National Congress. Although the city of Bombay itself was very pro-union, the remaining territories were reluctant to join the new union. At this point, the Bombay province was largely Marathi-speaking, and many local leaders were uneasy about the prospect of joining a predominantly Hindu republic. Marathis were scattered across various political divides, both within and outside of the Indian republic, and nationalist were only willing to join as a united Marathi state. These nationalists had become very outspoken and passionate, taking center stage in public discourse throughout the Bombay province. They often harkened back to the might of the Maratha empire before the British invaded, and emphasized that, like Mysore and Hyderabad, they could too reclaim their past glory. In the middle of September, several nationalist leaders had pressured Rajaram III, the Maharaja of Kolhapur, to ascend to the throne of a new Marathi kingdom with its capital in Pune. As the contemporary head of the Bhonsle dynasty, Rajaram was the most legitimate claimant to the title of Chhatrapati, the king of the Marathis. Across most of the Bombay province, the establishment of the Marathi kingdom was met with joyous praise, but many liberals, socialists and pan-Indians, especially in urban centers such as Bombay, were furious. A massive revolt in Bombay, headed by factory workers and university students, led to the creation of the short-lived Mumbai Commune. Once Rajaram and the nationalist had secured power on the mainland, they besieged the city and attacked it with artillery seized from the British. Eventually the Commune was starved and shelled into submission, and was absorbed into the kingdom, but not before the exodus of hundreds of intellectuals and leftists who fled to Bengal and Gujarat. This created a brain drain in the Marathi kingdom, and soon far-right traditionalists and nationalists took control over the state, putting Rajaram III into the position of a figurehead. These nationalists were highly militaristic, and began training soldiers and stockpiling weapons to launch an attack on Hyderabad and India in order to rebuild the Maratha empire.

The south was not the only region outside of the INCʼs control, so too was the case for Bengal. After Gandhi had announced his proposal for a new Indian federal republic, Chandra Bose and the socialist wing collectively resigned from the INC and declared the beginning of the Peopleʼs Republic of India. Bose called upon all the peopleʼs of India to rise up and seize the means of production, and to resist both the British imperialists and Gandhiʼs false promises of freedom. The only way the people of India could be free, he argued, was if they overthrew the capitalists and the bourgeois that had collaborated with the British and enabled their oppression. His calls were met with fervor from the urban youth and other socialist factions, but indifference from almost everybody else. Several large scale riots and insurgencies sprung up in Bombay, Madras, Agra and several other cities across India, as well as many rural regions in the United Provinces and Bihar. Most of these, however, were quickly put down or absorbed by more broadly inclusive movements. The only real success was in Calcutta and Bengal, where Bose had been building support and where socialist sympathies were already widespread.

Within a few days, Bose and his militias had taken control of Calcutta and had the remaining British officials either jailed or executed. Caught up in the intensity of rebellion, Bose had begun to loose sight of his intentions. By mid-September, his revolution had spread across the regions of Bengal and Assam, and had even begun to pour into neighboring Bihar. As the fire of revolution burned out throughout the rest of India, Bose started to switch his rhetoric from pan- Indianism towards an appeal to Bengali nationalism. Although Bose definitely had ambitions to take over the entirety of South Asia, he recognized that he needed to temporarily narrow his scope to just Bengal and the surrounding regions. His message was also popular in the diverse region of Assam, where many minority groups were concerned about their status in the Hindu-dominated INC republic. Bose promised these groups full equality under his government, and by the end of the month the entire region was under his control. The princely states, including the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, were dismantled and the entire nation was reorganized around ethnolinguistic lines. A one party socialist state was declared, known as the Socialist Union of Bengal, and Chandra Bose became its Supreme Leader.

Back in the north, Gandhi and the INC had been building the foundations for their new nation. Delegates from all of the provinces and princely states under their control met at Delhi to create a constitution for their new republic and to discuss the borders of the new states. Gandhiʼs proposal was used as the foundation and he was elected by the delegation as the first President of India. On October 10th, the Republic of India was declared. As part of the constitution, all of the princely states in India were abolished and were either integrated into or replaced by democratic states. The borders of these new states were decided based largely on historical boundaries and pragmatic resource allocation. Many of the dynasties and rulers of these princely states stood opposed to this new constitution, namely the Rana dynasty in Nepal. However, a large scale revolt broke out in Kathmandu against the tyranny of the king, and a mob of civilians overpowered the guards of the royal palace, and looted the building while the royal family was staying in Delhi. The territory was annexed by India and merged with Sikkim, becoming a new state in the republic. The various colonies of other European powers, namely France and Portugal, were easily invaded and annexed into the burgeoning states that surrounded them.