On August 15, 1947, like the phoenix, ancient India was reborn from its ashes

Ahead of India's 75th Independence Day celebration ceremony, school children in Amritsar, Punjab commemorate the event holding the flag of India in their hands.

AFP/Narinder Nanu

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

10 mins

75 years ago, British India emancipated itself from centuries of colonial domination and was reborn in the world.

The price of freedom had been the partition of the country into two sets: a multi-confessional India with a Hindu majority and a Muslim state called Pakistan.

India was certainly divided, but mistress of its destiny.

Back in five questions on the centuries of colonial servitude, the rise of nationalism in India and the circumstances of its accession to independence.

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1 – Can we date the beginning of the British colonization of India

It formally began in 1757 with the victory of the troops of the

(the East India Company) over those of the

(king) of Bengal, at Plassey.

Plassey was a small town, halfway between Calcutta, where the British soldiers were based, and Murshidabad, which was then the capital of the kingdom of Bengal.

On June 23, 1757, the battle opposed, in the mango groves of the peaceful Bengali countryside, the soldiers of the

Siraj-ud-Doulah to the British mercenaries.

Before sunset, the deal was over, with the generals of the

's army preparing to betray their master to make a pact with the enemy.

However, it was not until the English victory at Buxar (1764) that the entire strategic region of the Gangetic plain, made up of the rich provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, passed into the hands of the English East India Company.

Landed in India at the dawn of the 17th century to trade in spices and silk, the

was instrumental in the colonization of India.

Its policy of muscular expansion, based on a succession of princely alliances, battles and annexation of territories, ended up transforming the purely commercial enterprise of the company into a true imperialist adventure, with almost the whole of the sub -continent finding itself directly or indirectly under its tutelage from the middle of the 19th century.

The Red Fort is pictured during preparations for India's Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi on August 12, 2021. © AFP - SAJJAD HUSSAIN

However, as one can imagine, this brutal expansion did not only make people happy.

In 1857, a great revolt broke out, triggered by the convergence of various factors.

The discontent first affected the Indian soldiers of the English army in Bengal, before spreading to other garrisons and other layers of society.

The rebels wanted to restore the marginalized Mughal emperor to his red fort in Delhi.

Passed down in history as the " 

 ", this revolt led to London disbanding the

.

The English crown will now directly assume the administration and government of this colony.

Queen Victoria became Empress of India, succeeding the Mughal Emperor who had just been deposed by

and exiled to Rangoon.

2 – What are the main stages in the rise of Indian nationalism

Long perceived as a simple mutiny, the revolt of 1857 is considered by contemporary historiographers as the first war of Indian independence.

The historian Arundhati Virmani recalls in her

(Autrement, 2012), that it was Karl Marx himself who had underlined, in an article published in the

on July 15, 1857, that c It was " 

 ".

However, what Marx does not say is that the reprisals of power were terrible, causing thousands of deaths among the rebels, victims of various atrocities.

Put down in blood, the revolt of 1857 dissuaded for a long time the Indians from rising openly against the occupying power.

But at the beginning of the 20th century, the fragile peace was shattered.

Deadly attacks hit British government officials in protest at the 1905 partition of Bengal, India's largest province, by Viceroy Lord Curzon.

The government will eventually reconsider its decision.

Mahatma Gandhi in Madras, around 1915. © Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

The period is especially marked by the rise of the Congress party, founded in 1885 by notables and intellectuals.

It was the entry on the scene of

, in 1919, as leader of the Congress, which was to upset the Indian political situation.

Gandhi renewed the way of doing politics by mobilizing for the first time the popular masses in the anti-colonial struggle.

At the same time, he implemented an original " 

 " program, based on the one hand on ethical principles of non-violence and fraternity transcending classes, castes and communities, and, on the other hand, on symbols drawn from the Indian daily and religious imagination, such as the spinning wheel and Hindu devotional songs.

Its mode of action, illustrated in particular by the " 

 », which he undertook in 1930 to harvest salt in defiance of the law, or his fasting exercises, used as a political weapon, destabilized his English interlocutors.

The various actions of civil disobedience carried out throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s by the leaders of the Congress, under the aegis of Gandhi, gave international visibility to the struggle for Indian independence.

Faced with the rising force of Indian nationalism, England, weakened by the Second World War, clearly no longer had the means to pursue its domination over the jewel of its empire.

► Also discover the RFI webdoc: In the footsteps of Gandhi

3 – Could the tragedy of Partition have been avoided

The partition of August 1947, with 14 million refugees and one million deaths, was indeed

, which deeply marked the Indo-Pakistani collective memory.

It has been compared to the Holocaust.

Who was responsible for this tragedy?

The British ?

In the name of the eternal principle " 

 ", the latter are accused of having sown discord between Hindus and Muslims to prevent them from uniting.

The problem with this hypothesis is that the two peoples in question did not wait for the English to land on the subcontinent to go to war.

The last Viceroy of India Louis Mountbatten with Jinnah in 1947 © Public Domain

Gandhi, for his part, did not want the score, which he described as " 

 ".

He had even called on the leaders of Congress to offer the primacy of post-British India to Jinnah rather than accepting a cut-up country, which was, for him, an absolute historical nonsense.

But Gandhi was no longer listened to, even by those close to him in Congress who, hurriedly brought together in the summer of 1947 by Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, gave the green light to the plan to partition the British Empire, fear of seeing India plunge into the most atrocious civil war that Asia has ever known.

The border between Pakistan and India was drawn in seven weeks by the team of English lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India before.

The new borders will be announced on August 17, two days after the proclamation of the double independence.

South Asian historiography has attributed the partition disaster to

who, as the founder of Pakistan, embodied the tireless struggle for the realization of this goal.

Recent works on the history of the partition of India have made it possible to qualify his position, recalling that Jinnah was essentially a modernist reformer.

After serving on the Congress leadership team, he joined the Muslim League.

He was not particularly religious since he was married to an Ismaili, ate pork and drank whisky.

But he shared the concerns of the Muslim elite over the future status of religious minorities in an independent, Hindu-majority India.

For the Muslim League of Jinnah, the Pakistan it wanted to bring about was not necessarily an independent country,

as evidenced by the green light given by the party's Executive Council in 1946 to the project proposing a federal solution within a united India.

This project was rejected by the leaders of Congress, making partition inevitable.

4 – How was the date of August 15 decided

The brief of the last viceroy, Admiral Lord Mountbatten, appointed in March 1947, was to lead the British Indian Empire to independence by June 30, 1948. Before leaving London, the admiral had obtained Prime Minister Clément Attlee with full powers to carry out his task.

Upon disembarking in Delhi, he realizes that the country was on the edge of the abyss and that he was going to have to speed up the process of handing over power.

Independence was perhaps the boost that India needed to avoid plunging into a night of massacres and violence that feared the growing tensions between Hindus and Muslims.

It was during a press conference that he proposed the date of August 15, which also happens to be the anniversary of the surrender of Japan.

On July 18, the British Parliament adopted in turn the bill called " 

 ", ratifying the date of independence.

Independent India was born on the night of August 14-15, 1947, at midnight, with Nehru's famous speech to the parliamentarians of the Constituent Assembly: " 

 ”    

5 – Why is Gandhi absent from the official photos of the independence celebration

Gandhi is absent from the celebrations because he did not want to be part of them.

The old man, marginalized in his party, felt that there was nothing to celebrate and that the partition was a “ 

 ” for his country.

He had left New Delhi on August 9 to go to Calcutta, which had been regularly shaken since 1946 by anti-Muslim riots.

He spent August 15 in a dilapidated house in the heart of a Muslim slum.

He sent no official message and contented himself with fasting, as he did every 15th of the month.

Calcutta was peaceful, but the situation in the slum deteriorated at the end of August.

Hindu rioters attacked Gandhi's house and demanded that the Muslims who had taken refuge there be handed over to them.

" 

 ", writes Catherine Clément in the beautiful book that she devoted to

(Découvertes/Gallimard, 1989 ).

six months later

independence,

by a Hindu nationalist who reproached him for his too conciliatory attitude towards Muslims.

► To read also: 75 years after independence, what future for Indian democracy?

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