Who is this man? Where is this statue situated? Where is this man from? What do you think he did that was important?

Rammohan Roy was a deeply religious Indian.

In 1811, he attended the funeral of his brother in West Bengal, in the south of India. According to Hindu custom, his body was to be burned. The body was carried forward – and then the dead man’s widow appeared. She was very frightened, but she knew her duty. She allowed herself to be tied to her dead husband’s corpse.

Roy begged his sister-in-law not to go through with this ancient Indian custom, but the other relatives forced him back. They believed her suicide would show her love for her husband, and help to pay for her husband’s sins.

Roy watched as she choked and screamed as the smoke and flames enveloped her. She burned alive, whilst her relatives danced around the fire singing ‘Maha sati!’ (meaning a great wife).

From that day, Roy made up his mind to end this Hindu custom of widow burning (called ‘sati’). He knew very few of his fellow Indians would help him.

In the end, it was the British who helped him, and he helped them. In 1829, he travelled to Britain to try to persuade British people to support a ban on sati. Some Hindus warned him that travelling overseas would harm his soul forever, but Roy dismissed this idea and set sail.

By the end of the year, the British Governor General of India had banned sati throughout British lands in India.

Roy died in Bristol in 1833 and is now celebrated in India as a great reformer – but at the time, he appeared to have betrayed his country by supporting Britain’s interference…

Date(s): 1757-c.1800Person: Who was this man, and what was so special about him?

Q: How would you describe relations between Indians and British at this time? Give evidence

Date(s):

Person: Who was this man,and what was so specialabout him?

Q: How did he begin to change relations between Indians and British people?

Date(s):

Person: Who was the author of this book?

Q1: What does his research reveal about how the British had a positive impact in India at this time?

Q2: Any negative impact?

Date(s):

Person: Who was this woman, and who killed her, along with over 250 others?

Give reasons to explain why relations had become so bad that this fighting broke out.

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Person: Who was this man, and what was his ambition for Indians in the British Empire?

Q: How would you describe relations between Indians and British at this time? Give evidence

Moving On:Think about how the relationship between the British and Indian people was changing in 1801-1901.

For each time period shown in these five boxes, what was the:• Speed of change?• Extent of change? • Direction of change? (positive?

negative?)• How might your ideas about these

changes be shown in a ‘road map’?

Challenge: what was the nature of these changes? (For example, were they political or economic changes? Change in ideas or national boundaries or status?)

After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company (EIC) was able to take control of the rich province of Bengal. Many British traders, soldiers and officials then settled in India. Despite great differences between them, the British and Indians generally mixed together well. Some had Indian wives – one British general was famous for parading around Calcutta with his thirteen Indian wives, each on a different elephant! Generally, until around 1800, most British people said it was best to ignore the different Indian customs, in a spirit of ‘Live and Let Live’.

In around 1800, attitudes began to change. The number of evangelicals in Britain was growing. These people were a powerful group of Christians, who took their faith very seriously. They thought that they needed to convert people of other faiths to Christianity.

One famous evangelical was William Carey. He was sure that God wanted him to go to India to convert people to Christianity. He arrived in Calcutta in 1793. At first, British leaders in India were worried that people like Carey would upset Indian traders by interfering with their Hindu beliefs.

Yet Carey eventually won the respect of many Indians, by treating them with love and respect. On the other hand, he also challenged some of their customs, and worked to have them changed or even banned, such as sati (which was banned in 1829).

In 1995 a museum worker, Roy Moxham, read a curious footnote in an old book about the British Empire. It said that the British had once planted a hedge in India that was almost 2,500km long and 5 metres thick! Moxham spent three years researching this hedge, and the story he uncovered tells us a lot about how British rule in India was changing by the 1840s.

By 1845, the East India Company controlled huge areas of India. Wherever they went, they built roads, bridges and even railways. After banning sati, they introduced more laws based on Christian standards, and to enforce these laws, they had to run the law courts. All of this cost money.

The EIC made sure most of the profits of their trade went back to Britain. They organised taxes, which made it easy for British merchants to sell their goods in India, because Indian businesses could not compete. Britain grew in wealth, while huge areas of India remained poor.

The British wanted to raise more money to pay for the government of their land in India. So they introduced a salt tax, like many rulers before them had done. Salt is really important in hot climates, giving essential minerals to the body. The British raised the salt tax higher than ever known before.

Britain didn’t control all of India at this time – there were still some independent areas who did not follow British rule. Here, salt was cheaper. So, to ensure everyone paid the tax, the British planted a hedge to stop people smuggling cheap salt in from independent ‘princely’ states into British-controlled India. Some poor people died because they couldn’t afford the salt.

In the early 1800s, more and more British women sailed to India to join their husbands. The Indians called their rulers ‘sahibs’ and British wives and daughters ‘memsahibs’. Miss Williams was a ‘memsahib’ living with her parents and older sister at Cawnpore in northern India. Her father was a colonel in the EIC. Senior officers in the army were always British, but most of the soldiers were Indian. They were known as sepoys. There had been a long tradition of loyalty among sepoys, who were proud to serve the British.

By 1857 that was beginning to change. British officers were spending less time with their troops now that their wives were in India. Sepoy pay was also being cut, and many sepoys believed that the British were going to force them to drop their Muslim or Hindu beliefs and become Christian. This was because of the many new laws that were being introduced, to change Indian customs and to take land from Indians.

In 1857, some sepoys near Delhi murdered their officers and sparked off a revolt that spread rapidly across the whole of northern India. The violence lasted almost a year, and both Indians and British were involved in atrocities (meaning, unnecessary violence) .In Cawnpore, Indian rebels besieged the British army garrison. Hundreds of soldiers were trapped inside with their wives and children. Miss Williams watched as people died of their wounds, or hunger and thirst. Her mother was shot in the face. When it looked like she would be able to leave the city in a boat, fighting broke out again, and over 250 people were killed in the river.

The British called this revolt ‘The Indian Mutiny’, which also came to involve local princes, who had lost land to the British. Many Indian historians call the revolt a war of independence. The British shot hundreds of rebels in revenge. Law and order was re-established. But relations were never the same again.

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 led to the abolition of the East India Company. India was now to be ruled directly by the British Parliament. All rebels who had not murdered Europeans were to be pardoned, and Indian religions and customs would be respected. This was the start of the period known as the ‘British Raj’. It lasted from 1858 to 1947. The Indian word ‘raj’ means ‘rule’. Under the British Raj, Queen Victoria was the ruler of all British-held lands in India (she took the title ‘Empress of India’ in 1877). She was represented in India by a viceroy who governed over 300 million Indians, with the help of c.5,000 British officials. Many of rich princes were happy that the British Raj allowed them to keep their wealth, and others grew to respect the Raj and its achievements.

Yet many viceroys thought that Indians were an inferior (lower) race. Dadabhai Naoroji was insulted by this. He was educated in India by the British, and in 1855 sailed to London, where he quickly realised how little the British people knew about their empire. He decided to try and educate them by organising meetings and making speeches about the British Raj.

Back in India, in 1885, he helped set up the Indian National Congress – an organisation of well-educated Indians, loyal to Queen Victoria, who wanted responsible Indians to be given important posts in the government of their own country. The British ignored their demands, although Naoroji managed to become an MP in Britain in 1892, winning by just six votes. He became the first ever Indian Member of Parliament.