All of the key concepts we will look at this chapter – Dao, qi, and Taiji, as well as the system of the Yi – remained at the core of Chinese metaphysics. They were used in a variety of ways to construct metaphysical systems of varying complexity, particularly through and in response to encounters with Buddhist philosophy.

The Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic) offers the most comprehensive definition of yinyang:

In this passage, yinyang is taken as a pattern embedded in the nature of all beings, thus providing the foundation for a coherent view of the world. This worldview weaves together human beings, heaven, and the Dao 道 (the way) in a way that creates a reality of dynamic wholeness pervaded by and mediated through the interaction of yin and yang. That is why yinyang is called the “net” (gangji) of the ten thousand things. The term gangji comes from the image of silk fabric. Gang 綱 is the main strand to which all other threads are attached, whereas ji 紀 represents the mesh of the other threads. Together, they show that the ten thousand things are tied to an interrelated net or web through yinyang. This chapter will explore this gangji through four of the most significant concepts in Chinese cosmology: Dao (the way), qi 氣 (vital energy), yi 易 (change/ease/constancy), and taiji 太極 (great ultimate).

In 1772, determined at last to put an end to the chaos and fiscal disorder its intervention had precipitated in Bengal, the Company's directors appointed Warren Hastings, a man with a distinguished record of diplomatic and commercial service in India, as the first governor-general of the company's Indian territories. Subordinating the other presidencies to a new capital established in Calcutta, Hastings set about the task of creating an ordered system of government for British India. Hastings's thirteen years at the helm of government were far from untroubled. Indeed, throughout his years in office he had to contend with a divided council in Calcutta whose majority opposed his every move, while after his return to England his actions were made the subject of an embittered impeachment trial in the House of Commons. As a spectacle, for Hastings was ultimately acquitted, the trial dominated British public life for years. Nevertheless, Hastings laid an enduring foundation for the British Raj in India. This chapter will begin by examining the structures of governance established by Hastings, and his successor Lord Cornwallis (1785–93), in British-ruled Bengal. It will then ask how and why the British went on to conquer the entire Indian subcontinent in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it will conclude by assessing the relationships that grew up between what was known as the ‘Company Bahadur’, as though it were a Mughal grandee, and its Indian subjects in the years up to 1850.

Foundation of Colonial Rule

When Hastings took office, the East India Company's agents knew nothing about India apart from the requirements of trade, and they almost never ventured outside their coastal enclaves. With rare exceptions, among them Hastings himself, they knew no Indian languages. Within the existing British Empire, furthermore, rule over a vast indigenous population such as that of India was unprecedented. With the partial exception of Ireland, Britain's previous imperial expansion, in the West Indies and North America, had involved the dispossession of the native peoples in favour of settlers from Europe and Africa. Hence, as they confronted their new responsibilities in India, the British found themselves sailing in wholly uncharted waters. Their difficulties were further enhanced by the reluctance of the Company's agents in India to abandon their profitable trading activities for the uncertain advantages of government.

Imagine a time traveller standing in Mughal Delhi, amidst the splendor of the emperor Shah Jahan's (r. 1627–58) elegant, riverside city, in the year 1707 (plate 1.1). News had come of the death of Shah Jahan's long-ruling son, Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) in the distant Deccan, where he had been engaged in arduously extending his vast empire. The traveller, understandably wondering what the death of a mighty monarch would mean, might first have looked back in time a century, say to the death of Shah, Jahan's grandfather, Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Had he done so, he would have seen the key institutions in place that had made the Mughals, in the intervening century, the most powerful empire the subcontinent had ever known. It was far greater in population, wealth, and power than the contemporaneous Turko-Mongol empires with which the Mughals shared so much: the Persian Safavids and the Ottoman Turks. The Mughal population in 1700 may have been 100 million, five times that of the Ottomans, almost twenty that of the Safavids. Given the trajectory of continuity and growth that had taken place in the seventeenth century, our time traveller at the turn of the eighteenth century might legitimately have imagined a Mughal future to match the glorious past.

But if, Janus-faced, the traveller then looked ahead a century, say to 1803, he would have found not continuity but extraordinary change. He would have seen an empire existing only in name amidst a landscape of competing regional powers. Among these regional states was one which, in 1707 only a minor European trading body operating from coastal enclaves, was now transformed into a governing body based in the rich, eastern province of Bengal. The Mughal emperor, though still a symbolic overlord, was now confined to the area around Delhi, himself prey to Afghans, the western Deccan-based Marathas, and, in 1803, placed under the control of that very English Company which, as this new century turned, had lately come to a vision of creating an empire itself.

The first edition of A Concise History of India appeared in 2001, and covered events up to the end of the twentieth century in 2000. A second edition, titled A Concise History of Modern India, to more accurately reflect its coverage, appeared in 2006. That edition took the story of India up to 2005 and included the displacement of the BJP government by the Congress under Manmohan Singh the previous year. We are immensely grateful for the enthusiastic response this book has received over the last ten years from teachers, colleagues, and students. Although not meant as a textbook, to our pleasant surprise, A Concise History of Modern India has been widely adopted in college and university courses on South Asia.

The current third edition has left intact the material in Chapters 1 through 8, up to 1989. We revised these chapters extensively for the second edition, incorporating new perspectives and new research into our narrative. Even though a number of important studies have appeared over the last several years covering the colonial and early national periods, not to mention the eighteenth century, we did not consider revision necessary at this point. Chapter 9, however, and the Epilogue, had become seriously outdated and, to be useful, required a comprehensive revision amounting to a complete reorganization. The current Chapter 9 covers the twenty-year period from 1990 to 2010 as one continuous narrative. An attempt has been made, furthermore, to reorganize the chapter in a thematic rather than wholly chronological fashion. Its two major sections assess successively the changing nature of India's politics, with special attention given to the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the growth and consequences of economic liberalization over the twenty years since the coming into office in 1991 of the Narasimha Rao government. We reflect in particular on a troubling economic polarization, with growing affluence in the cities but profound disadvantage for others. Among the most depressed are the largely tribal populations of interior central and eastern India, where there has been endemic violence in recent years. The chapter concludes with a look at the fascinating question of the rivalry between India and China, the two Asian ‘giants’, as the locus of global economic power shifts eastward. In this section we have relied substantially on the writing of such experts as the distinguished economist Amartya Sen.

The hopeful words of any nation's founding fathers are likely to be read with some degree of irony decades later. If the words of the founding fathers at times rang hollow, they also, in fact, predicted many successes, not least India's proud claim to be the world's largest democracy (Plate 9.1). By the turn of the millennium, more than a dozen general elections and hundreds of state elections had produced a high degree of politicization extending to those long outside the political system. In 1997, at the conclusion of free India's first half-century, K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005), Dalit by birth, was sworn in as the country's president, a powerful symbol of the progress and aspirations of ‘untouchables’. The role of president, importantly, had already earlier on three occasions been assumed by a Muslim and, most poignantly, at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination, by a Sikh. The Supreme Court's activism – for example, indicting top government and political leaders for bribery and corruption as well as favouring public-interest litigation – strengthened the effective exercise of civil liberties. India's press continued to be renowned for its independence and vitality. Economic liberalization had stimulated the growth of a prospering urban middle class and brought about for India a major role in the global software industry. ‘Bollywood’ films and a culture increasingly open to the larger world, together with India's traditional role as a site of tourism and a producer of the arts, wisdom, and handicrafts, delighted ever-increasing numbers of consumers worldwide.

Yet the country continued to be weighed down by seemingly intractable poverty, in the countryside and in urban slums alike. The millennial years were also marked by substantial violence directed against Muslims as well as others, among them Christians, tribals, and Dalits. In 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu militants was followed by an anti-Muslim pogrom that left at least a thousand people dead; an orchestrated campaign of even greater violence followed a decade later in Gujarat.