The reason I was inclined towards the balkanization theory put forward by
@Atanz , was India's reality both now and then.
Let us look at the arguments in greater detail.
British came to India when there was no mass communication, no telegraph or radio wireless communication and no railway. Yet just a few hundred British Military Officers managed to rule India for couple of centuries. This would not have been the case if India was united and a solidified single entity. Without the establishment of democracy, rule of law, modern military structures and a robust bureaucratic system based on merit and loyalty to state, India would not have survived as an entity it is today. All these were British gifts to India. Otherwise without these structures, India was a collection of small kingdoms.
This takes into account only what we remember from reading about modern Indian history, so-called, sometimes defined as the history of India from 1707 to 1947, or to current times. If we take earlier periods into account, we find a similar, rather strikingly similar picture. For instance, the number of functionaries during the Maurya imperial rule who played the equivalent role of the British civil service and British military officers who turned their hand to both military matters and to civilian administration, the dharma mahamatyas, was roughly the same as the ICS. Incidentally, quite parallel to the British achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Mauryas established a uniform administration (democracy was not established by the British; the mangled versions of self-rule contained in the 1919 Morley-Minto reforms which led to dyarchy and even the 1935 Government of India Act were so heavily restricted by property qualifications that they amounted to nothing much more than the creation of a cooperative oligarchy that worked with the hegemons). There is little to choose between the Maurya administration and the British, if we look at it from a distance, other than the fact that the handing over of power by the imperial administration to the successor administration was violent in the earlier case, and was repressed violence in the later case.
India was ruled perfectly well without the British gifts, not only by the Mauryas, but by the Guptas, the Chalukyas, the Rastrakutas, the Cholas, and later still, the Khiljis, the Tughlaqs and the Mughals.
[/quote]India is not a monolithic country. There are too many languages (several hundreds), ethnicity (several hundreds), religions (dozen major ones), and castes. To bring all these together under a single state, a very sophisticated, centrally powerful and inclusive political structure was needed. I do not believe Marathas, a warrior caste of Hindus could form a stable India using only Hindu ideology and military power. This would not have survived into modern times. As IT DID NOT. Would have Sikh community accepted them? What about Muslims? What about Buddhists? What about other Hindu castes? What about Parsis and Iranis?[/quote]
This is more than a little puzzling.
First, the Marathas as used here refers to the Maratha confederacy, which included far more than the Marathas themselves. The leading families and the aristocracy were Maratha; so were the leading families and the aristocracy Turanian and Iranian under the Mughals, before the Marathas, and English, after the Marathas, with help from the Scots and the Irish and even the Welsh.
Second, how the idea crops up of the Marathas being exclusively Hindus in outlook is not clear. They were anything but the kinds of bigots that today's Hindutva-vadis are. Just to remind you, the artillery was served by Ibrahim Gardi and his band of gunners, hardly poster boys for Hindu domination. The founder of Maratha power, Shivaji Bhonsle, was exemplary about employing people who were not Hindus, and his lead was followed.
Getting down to other communities, the Hindus supported them, generally; there were always opportunists who took the other side. The Muslims under their rule did not fail to cooperate, but Muslims elsewhere fought them, as is only to be expected in a system of warfare where the prevalent principle was
vae victis. For that matter, the Rajputs and the Jats, and many other Hindu kingdoms fought them before succumbing. You will recall that rather a similar state of affairs prevailed while the West Saxons were consolidating their power in Britain against Mercia, Cumbria and Wales.
The Sikhs were not a significant power at the time, and their militarisation happened largely because of persecution by the administration in the Punjab. Earlier, they were very largely Khatri, traders and men of commerce, as were all the Gurus. The Buddhists existed in Nepal and in the Himalayan foothills, while the Parsis were a minuscule number then, as they (unfortunately) are now. The Iranis? If you are referring to the second wave of Zoroastrians, the wave was not yet due, and if you are referring to ethnic Iranians, they responded much the same way as the other Muslims: submissive when conquered, offering resistance before that. There is no known example of a Turkish, Iranian or Indian revolting against the Marathas.
To build a unified and stable state out of a non-monolithic nation, you need a political structure that goes well above and beyond a single caste and is based on rule of law and respect for individual rights of every person. Ironically British provided the tools for creation of such a state in India. Whether it was their intention to do so or it happened just as a side effect of their colonialism, is a question better be left for historians to answer. But the reality of this, is not in dispute.
Political structure well above and beyond a single caste is more than satisfied by the Maratha Empire, from all the evidence abounding. It was not their fault that a later lunatic fringe painted them in saffron colours, the colour of their battle flag, and appropriated all their achievements to Hinduism.
I am not able to understand why a rule of law was not considered to be prevalent during Maratha rule, or for that matter, during earlier Mughal rule or Tughlaq or Khilji or Gupta or Chalukya. If the reference to the rule of law was to the British court system, first, the legal system under the Mughals was also governed by qazis and their rulings, and second, the British system itself relied heavily on the services of local religious authorities.
Therefore my inclination towards balkanization. You can not seriously expect a single Hindu caste to rule over 1.5 billion people successfully and in a stable fashion.
Quite right too. Nobody actually did. Incidentally, just to pour a little cold water all around, patriotic songs of the period of agitation against British rule spoke of 330 million citizens. 1.5 billion took a lot of hard work to achieve, and said hard work continues as we read this. Besides, as pointed out, it was by no means a single Hindu caste that was involved. Please shoot your Indian history tutors and guides.
Mmmm. What possibilities?
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Khoda hamraat dadash
