British Raj
Following the 1857 rebellion, the British Crown assumed direct rule of India from the East India Company. For 89 years, a vast colonial bureaucracy governed hundreds of millions of people, building railways and telegraph systems while systematically extracting India's wealth and suppressing self-governance.
Preceding Causes
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 exposed the East India Company's inability to govern India stably, prompting the Government of India Act 1858 to transfer sovereignty to the Crown under Queen Victoria (declared Empress of India in 1876).
Historical Consequences
By some estimates (notably Angus Maddison's), India's share of world GDP fell from roughly 25% to under 4% during the colonial period due to deindustrialization and economic extraction. Railways, telegraph, and English education unintentionally connected India, enabling a pan-Indian nationalist movement. Partition of India in 1947 was its violent conclusion.
Bengal Partition of 1905
Viceroy Curzon partitioned Bengal along religious lines — creating a Muslim-majority East Bengal and Hindu-majority West Bengal — claiming administrative necessity. The massive backlash and Swadeshi movement forced its reversal in 1911, but the idea of religious partition had been seeded.
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
On April 13, 1919 (Baisakhi Day), British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered troops to fire without warning into a crowd of thousands of unarmed civilians gathered in an enclosed garden in Amritsar, Punjab. The official Hunter Commission recorded 379 dead and over 1,200 wounded; Indian estimates place the death toll considerably higher.
Formation of Indian National Congress
Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant, founded the Indian National Congress in Bombay in 1885 with 72 delegates, initially as a moderate platform for educated Indians to petition the British government. It evolved into the primary vehicle for India's independence movement.