name	Rajasthan
native name	राजस्थान
type	State
image seal	Seal of Rajasthan.jpg
map caption	Location of Rajasthan in India
image map1	Rajasthan locator map.svg
map caption1	Map of Rajasthan
coor pinpoint	Jaipur
coordinates type	region:IN-RJ_type:adm1st
coordinates display	inline,title
coordinates region	IN-RJ
subdivision type	Country
subdivision name
established title	Established
established date	1 November 1956
parts type	Districts
parts style	para
p1	33 total
seat type	Capital
seat	Jaipur
seat1 type	Largest city
seat1	Jaipur
leader title	Governor
leader name	Dr. Shivraj Patil
leader title1	Chief Minister
leader name1	Ashok Gehlot
leader title2	Legislature
leader name2	Unicameral (200 seats)
leader title3	Parliamentary constituency
leader name3	25
leader title4	High Court
leader name4	Rajasthan High Court
unit pref	Metric
area total km2	342269
area rank	1st
population total	68621012
population as of	2011
population rank	8th
population density km2	auto
timezone1	IST
utc offset1	+05:30
iso code	IN-RJ
blank name sec1	HDI
blank info sec1	0.537 (medium)
blank1 name sec1	HDI rank
blank1 info sec1	21st (2005)
blank name sec2	Literacy
blank info sec2	68% (20th)
blank1 name sec2	Official languages
blank1 info sec2	Marwaris, Rajasthani, Hindi
website	rajasthan.gov.in
footnotes	}}

Rājasthān (, ) the land of Rajasthanis, ("''the land of kings''" or "''the land of colours''"), is the largest state of the Republic of India by area. It encompasses most of the area of the large, inhospitable Great Indian Desert (Thar Desert), which has an edge paralleling the Sutlej-Indus river valley along its border with Pakistan. The state is bordered by Pakistan to the west, Gujarat to the southwest, Madhya Pradesh to the southeast, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to the northeast and Punjab to the north. Rajasthan covers an area of 132,150 sq mi or 342,239 km². The proportion of the state's total area to the total area of the country is 10.41 per cent.

Jaipur is the capital and the largest city of the state. Geographical features include the Thar Desert along north-western Rajasthan and the termination of the Ghaggar River near the archaeological ruins at Kalibanga of the Indus Valley Civilization, which are the oldest in the Indian subcontinent discovered so far.

One of the world's oldest mountain ranges, the Aravalli Range, cradles the only hill station of Rajasthan, Mount Abu, famous for Dilwara Temples, a sacred pilgrimage for Jains. Eastern Rajasthan has the world famous Keoladeo National Park near Bharatpur, famous for its bird life and is a World Heritage Site and two famous national tiger reserves, Ranthambore and Sariska Tiger Reserve. Rajasthan was formed on 30 March 1949, when all erstwhile princely states ruled by Rajputs, known as Rajputana, merged into the Dominion of India.

Etymology

The first mention of word ''Rajasthan'' comes from the work of James Tod (''Annals'') in 1829 A.D. Rajasthan literally means a ''Land of Kingdoms''. George Thomas (''Military Memories'') was the first in 1800 A.D., to term this region as ''Rajputana''.John Keay in his book, ''India: A History'' stated that the Rajputana name was coined by the British, but that the word even achieved a retrospective authenticity: in an 1829 translation of Ferishta's history of early Islamic India, John Briggs discarded the phrase Indian princes, as rendered in Dow's earlier version, and substituted Rajpoot princes. Rajasthan was essentially the country of the Gurjars. R. C. Majumdar explained that the region was long known as ''Gurjaratra'' that is Country protected or ruled by the Gurjars, early form of Gujarat, before it came to be called Rajputana.

The only difference between erstwhile Rajputana and Rajasthan is that certain portions of what had been British India, in the former province of Ajmer-Merwara, were included. Portions lying geographically outside of Rajputana such as the Sumel-Tappa area were included in Madhya Pradesh.

History

The Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world's first and oldest civilizations, was located in parts of what is now Rajasthan. Kalibangan in Hanumangarh district, Rajasthan was a major provincial capital of the Indus Valley Civilization. It is believed that Western Kshatrapas (35–405 BC) were Saka rulers of the western part of India (Saurashtra and Malwa: modern Gujarat, Southern Sindh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan). They were successors to the Indo-Scythians, and were contemporaneous with the Kushans who ruled the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. The Indo-Scythians invaded the area of Ujjain and establish the Saka era (with Saka calendar), marking the beginning of the long-lived Saka Western Satraps state.

Traditionally the Meenas, Rajputs, Yadavs, Jats, Bhils, Gurjars, Bishnois and other tribes made a great contribution in building the state of Rajasthan. All these tribes suffered great difficulties in protecting their culture and the land. Millions of them were martyred trying to protect their land. Gurjars had been exterminated in Bhinmal and Ajmer areas fighting with the invaders. Bhils once ruled Kota. Meenas were rulers of Bundi and Dhundhar region.

Gurjars ruled many dynasties in this part of the country. In fact this region was long known as ''Gurjaratra''. Up to the tenth century almost the whole of North India, excepting Bengal, owned supremacy of Gurjars with their seat of power at Kannauj. Gurjar Pratihar Empire acted as barrier for Arab invaders from 6th to 11th century. The chief credit of Gurjara Pratihara empire lies in its successfully resistance to the foreign invasions from the west, from the days of Junaid. Historian Majumdar, say that this was frankly recognized by the Arab writers themselves. He further clears that historians of India have wondered at the slow progress of Muslim invaders in India, as compared with their rapid advance in other parts of the world. Now, there can be little doubt that it was the power of the Gurjara Pratihara army that effectively barred the progress of the Muslims beyond the confines of Sindh, their first conquest for nearly three hundred years.

The earlier contributions of warriors and protectors of the land Vishnois, Ahirs, Gurjars, Jats, Bhils and Meenas were neglected and lost in history due to stories of valour shown by certain specific clans in later years graining more prominence over older acts of bravery.

Rajasthan means the ''Land of the Kings.'' Modern Rajasthan includes most of Rajputana, which comprises mainly the erstwhile Rajput kingdoms as well as two Jat kingdoms and a Muslim kingdom. Marwar (Jodhpur), Bikaner, Mewar (Udaipur), Alwar and Dhundhar (Jaipur) were some of the main Rajput states. The Jats were rulers in Bharatpur and Dholpur. Tonk was ruled by a Muslim Nawab. Rajput families rose to prominence in the 6th century CE. The Rajputs put a very valiant resistance to the Islamic invasions and protected this land with their warfare and chivalry for more than 500 years. They also resisted Mughal incursions into India, but contributed to the slower than anticipated access to the Indian Subcontinent. Later the Mughals, with a technique based on a combination of treachery and skilled warfare were able to set firm a grip on northern India, including Rajasthan. The fighter spirit and valour of Rajputs impressed the Mughals to such an extent that even after defeating the Rajputs, the Mughals held their valour and value in the highest esteem. Mewar led other kingdoms in its resistance to outside rule. Most notably Rana Sanga fought the Battle of Khanua against Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire.

Samrat Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, the Hindu Emperor, also known as Hemu in the history of India was born in the village of Machheri in Alwar District in the year 1501. He had won 22 battles against Afghans, from Punjab to Bengal and had defeated Akbar's forces twice at Agra and Delhi in 1556, before acceeding to the throne of Delhi and establishing 'Hindu Raj' in North India, albeit for a short duration, from Purana Quila in Delhi. He was killed in the Second Battle of Panipat.

Maharana Pratap of Mewar resisted Akbar in the famous Battle of Haldighati {1576) and later operated from hilly areas of his kingdom. Bhils were Maharana's main allies during these wars. Most of these attacks were evenly met as the Mughal forces outnumbered Mewar Rajputs in all the wars fought between them. The Haldighati war was fought between 10,000 Mewaris and a 100,000 strong Mughal force (including many Rajputs like Kachwahas from Dhundhar).

Over the years the Mughals began to have internal disputes which took their concentration away at times. The Mughal Empire eventually weakened to which several groups across their kingdom saw opportunities to establish their power whilst the army was fighting somewhere else. The Rajputs saw this as an opportunity to reassert their independence. With the decline of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, Rajputana came under attack by the Marathas and Pindaris, and the Maratha general Scindia captured Ajmer.

The Rajput kings following a rapid defeat, concluded treaties with the British in the early 19th century, accepting British sovereignty in return for local autonomy. Following the Mughal tradition as well as its strategic location Ajmer became a province of British India, while the autonomous Rajput states, the Muslim state Tonk, and the Jat states (Bharatpur and Dholpur) were organized into the Rajputana Agency.

Rajasthan's formerly independent kingdom created a rich architectural and cultural heritage, seen even today in their numerous forts and palaces (Mahals and Havelis) which are enriched by features of Muslim and Jain architecture.

The development of the frescos in Rajasthan is linked with the history of the Marwaris, who have also played a crucial role in the economic development of the region. Many wealthy families throughout Indian history have links to Marwar. These families include the legendary Birla, Bhandari, Bajaj, Mittal and Mirza families.

Geography

The main geographic features of Rajasthan are the Thar Desert and the Aravalli Range, which runs through the state from southwest to northeast, almost from one end to the other, for more than 850 km. Mount Abu is at the southwestern end of the range, separated from the main ranges by the West Banas River, although a series of broken ridges continues into Haryana in the direction of Delhi where it can be seen as outcrops in the form of the Raisina Hill and the ridges farther north. About three-fifths of Rajasthan lies northwest of the Aravallis, leaving two-fifths on the east and south.

The northwestern portion of Rajasthan is generally sandy and dry. Most of the region is covered by the Thar Desert, which extends into adjoining portions of Pakistan. The Aravalli Range does not intercept the moisture-giving southwest monsoon winds off the Arabian Sea, as it lies in a direction parallel to that of the coming monsoon winds, leaving the northwestern region in a rain shadow. The Thar Desert is thinly populated; the town of Bikaner is the largest city in the desert. The Northwestern thorn scrub forests lie in a band around the Thar Desert, between the desert and the Aravallis. This region receives less than 400 mm of rain in an average year. Temperatures can exceed 45 °C in the summer months and drop below freezing in the winter. The Godwar, Marwar, and Shekhawati regions lie in the thorn scrub forest zone, along with the city of Jodhpur. The Luni River and its tributaries are the major river system of Godwar and Marwar regions, draining the western slopes of the Aravallis and emptying southwest into the great Rann of Kutch wetland in neighboring Gujarat. This river is saline in the lower reaches and remains potable only up to Balotara in Barmer district. The Ghaggar River, which originates in Haryana, is an intermittent stream that disappears into the sands of the Thar Desert in the northern corner of the state and is seen as a remnant of the primitive Saraswati river.

The Aravalli Range and the lands to the east and southeast of the range are generally more fertile and better watered. This region is home to the Kathiarbar-Gir dry deciduous forests ecoregion, with tropical dry broadleaf forests that include teak, ''Acacia'', and other trees. The hilly Vagad region lies in southernmost Rajasthan, on the border with Gujarat. With the exception of Mount Abu, Vagad is the wettest region in Rajasthan, and the most heavily forested. North of Vagad lies the Mewar region, home to the cities of Udaipur and Chittaurgarh. The Hadoti region lies to the southeast, on the border with Madhya Pradesh. North of Hadoti and Mewar is the Dhundhar region, home to the state capital of Jaipur. Mewat, the easternmost region of Rajasthan, borders Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Eastern and southeastern Rajasthan is drained by the Banas and Chambal rivers, tributaries of the Ganges.

The Aravali Range runs across the state from the southwest peak Guru Shikhar (Mount Abu), which is 1,722 m in height, to Khetri in the northeast. This divides the state into 60% in the northwest of the range and 40% in the southeast. The northwest tract is sandy and unproductive with little water but improves gradually from desert land in the far west and northwest to comparatively fertile and habitable land towards the east. The area includes the Thar Desert. The south-eastern area, higher in elevation (100 to 350 m above sea level) and more fertile, has a very diversified topography. in the south lies the hilly tract of Mewar. In the southeast, a large area within the districts of Kota and Bundi forms a tableland. To the northeast of these districts is a rugged region (badlands) following the line of the Chambal River. Farther north the country levels out; the flat plains of the northeastern Bharatpur district are part of an alluvial basin.

Language

Although not claasified as one of the scheduled constitutional languages Rajasthani language is still a dialect of the Indo-Aryan languages family. It is spoken by 130 million people in Rajasthan and other states of India.

Economy

Rajasthan's economy is primarily agricultural and pastoral. Wheat and barley are cultivated over large areas, as are pulses, sugarcane, and oilseeds. Cotton and tobacco are the state's cash crops. Rajasthan is among the largest producers of edible oils in India and the second largest producer of oilseeds. Rajasthan is also the biggest wool-producing state in India and the main opium producer and consumer. There are mainly two crop seasons. The water for irrigation comes from wells and tanks. The Indira Gandhi Canal irrigates northwestern Rajasthan.

The main industries are mineral based, agriculture based, and textiles. Rajasthan is the second largest producer of polyester fibre in India. The Bhilwara District produces more cloth than Bhiwandi, Maharashtra and the bhilwara is the largest city in suitings production and export. Several prominent chemical and engineering companies are located in the city of Kota, in southern Rajasthan. Rajasthan is pre-eminent in quarrying and mining in India. The Taj Mahal was built from the white marble which was mined from a town called Makrana. The state is the second largest source of cement in India. It has rich salt deposits at Sambhar, copper mines at Khetri, Jhunjhunu and zinc mines at Dariba, Zawar mines at Zawarmala for zinc, Rampura Aghucha (opencast) near Bhilwara. Dimensional stone mining is also undertaken in Rajasthan. Jodhpur sandstone is mostly used in monuments, important buildings and residential buildings. This stone is termed as "chittar patthar".

Rajasthan is now the preferred destination for IT companies and North India's largest integrated IT park is located in Jaipur and is named as Mahindra World City Jaipur covering nearly of land. Some of the companies operating in Rajasthan include Infosys, Genpact, Wipro, Truworth, Deutsche Bank, NEI, MICO, Honda Siel Cars, Coca Cola and Procter & Gamble.

Tourism

Rajasthan attracted 14% of total foreign visitors during 2009-2010 which is fourth highest in all states of India. It positioned fourth place also in Domestic tourist visitors. Endowed with natural beauty and a great history, tourism is a flourishing industry in Rajasthan. The palaces of Jaipur, lakes of Udaipur, and desert forts of Jodhpur, targarh fort (star fort) in bundi, Bikaner & Jaisalmer rank among the most preferred destinations in India for many tourists both Indian and foreign. Tourism accounts for eight percent of the state's domestic product. Many old and neglected palaces and forts have been converted into heritage hotels. Tourism has increased employment in the hospitality sector.

Rajasthan is famous for the majestic forts, intricately carved temples and decorated havelis, which were built by Rajput kings in previous ages, they were the soul of pre-Muslim era Rajasthan. Jantar Mantar, Dilwara Temples, Chittorgarh Fort, Lake Palace, bundi palace ,City Palaces, Jaisalmer [ancient miniature in bundi ] Havelis are part of the true architectural heritage of India. Jaipur, the Pink City, is noted for the ancient houses made of a type of sand stone dominated by a pink hue ,in budi maximum houses are painted blue. At Ajmer, the white marble Bara-dari on the Anasagar lake is exquisite. Jain Temples dot Rajasthan from north to south and east to west. Dilwara Temples of Mount Abu, Ranakpur Temple dedicated to Lord Adinath near Udaipur, Jain temples in the fort complexes of Chittor, Jaisalmer and Kumbhalgarh, Lodurva Jain temples, Bhandasar Temple of Bikaner are some of the best examples.

Rajasthan is often called a shopper's paradise. Rajasthan is famous for textiles, semi-precious stones and handicrafts. The attractive designs of jewellery and clothes are eye-catching and invite shoppers. Rajasthani furniture has intricate carvings and bright colours. Rajasthani handicrafts are in demand due to the intricate work on them. Above all, Rajasthan's shopping appeals to both tourists and people from other parts of India due to its cheap prices for quality goods.

Bikaner is famous for its namkeens, Jaipur for its jewellery, Jodhpur for sweets and Jaisalmer for yellow stone, wall paintings of bundi.

Culture

[[File:Rajasthani Dolls.JPG|thumb|Rajasthani Up-Down Dolls found in the road-side shops of Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.

Rajasthan is culturally rich and has artistic and cultural traditions which reflect the ancient Indian way of life. There is rich and varied folk culture from villages which is often depicted and is symbolic of the state. Highly cultivated classical music and dance with its own distinct style is part of the cultural tradition of Rajasthan. The music is uncomplicated and songs depict day-to-day relationships and chores, more often focused around fetching water from wells or ponds.

The Ghoomar dance from Udaipur and Kalbeliya dance of Jaisalmer have gained international recognition. Folk music is a vital part of Rajasthani culture. Kathputli, Bhopa, Chang, Teratali, Ghindr, Kachchhighori, Tejaji etc. are the examples of the traditional Rajasthani culture. Folk songs are commonly ballads which relate heroic deeds and love stories; and religious or devotional songs known as bhajans and banis (often accompanied by musical instruments like dholak, sitar, sarangi etc.) are also sung.

Rajasthan is known for its traditional, colorful art.wall painting in bundi . The block prints, tie and dye prints, Bagaru prints, Sanganer prints, and Zari embroidery are major export products from Rajasthan. Handicraft items like wooden furniture and handicrafts, carpets, and blue pottery are some of the things commonly found here. Rajasthan is a shoppers' paradise, with beautiful goods found at low prices. Reflecting the colorful Rajasthani culture, Rajasthani clothes have a lot of mirror-work and embroidery. A Rajasthani traditional dress for females comprises an ankle length skirt and a short top, also known as a ''lehenga'' or a ''chaniya choli''. A piece of cloth is used to cover the head, both for protection from heat and maintenance of modesty. Rajasthani dresses are usually designed in bright colours like blue, yellow and orange.

The main religious festivals are Deepawali, Holi, Gangaur, Teej, Gogaji, Shri Devnarayan Jayanti, Makar Sankranti and Janmashtami, as the main religion is Hinduism. Rajasthan's desert festival is celebrated with great zest and zeal. This festival is held once a year during winter. Dressed in brilliantly hued costumes, the people of the desert dance and sing haunting ballads of valor, romance and tragedy. There are fairs with snake charmers, puppeteers, acrobats and folk performers. Camels, of course, play a stellar role in this festival.

Administration

Government

The current government in Rajasthan is that of Indian National Congress. The current Chief Minister is Ashok Gehlot.

Politics

The Political life of Rajasthan is dominated by two major parties Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Indian National Congress.

Districts

Rajasthan is divided into 33 districts and seven divisions:

Ajmer Division: Ajmer, Bhilwara, Nagaur, Tonk.

Bharatpur Division: Bharatpur, Dholpur, Karauli, Sawai Madhopur.

Bikaner Division: Bikaner, Churu, Ganganagar, Hanumangarh.

Jaipur Division: Jaipur, Alwar, Jhunjhunu, Sikar, Dausa.

Jodhpur Division: Barmer, Jaisalmer, Jalore, Jodhpur, Pali, Sirohi.

Kota Division: Baran, Bundi, Jhalawar, Kota.

Udaipur Division: Banswara, Chittorgarh, Pratapgarh, Dungarpur, Udaipur, Rajsamand

Demographics

{{IndiaCensusPop | title= Population Growth | 1951= 15971000 | 1961= 20156000 | 1971= 25766000 | 1981= 34262000 | 1991= 44006000 | 2001= 56507000 | 2011= 68621000 | estimate= | estyear= | estref= | footnote=Source:Census of India }} Rajasthan has a mainly Rajasthani population. Hindus account for 88.8% of the population. Muslims make up 8.5%, Sikhs 1.4% and Jains 1.2% of the population. The state of Rajasthan is also populated by Sindhis, who came to Rajasthan from Sindh province (now in Pakistan) during the India-Pakistan separation in 1947.

The mother tongue of the majority of people in Rajasthan is Rajasthani. Rajasthani and Hindi are the most widely used languages in Rajasthan. Rajasthani is used as a medium of instruction, along with Hindi and English, in some schools. Some other languages used in Rajasthan are Gujarati, Sindhi and Punjabi.

Education

During recent years, Rajasthan has made significant progress in the area of education. The state government has been making sustained efforts to improve the educational standard. In recent decades, the literacy rate of Rajasthan has increased significantly. In 1991, the state's literacy rate was only 38.55% (54.99% male and 20.44% female). In 2001, the literacy rate increased to 60.41% (75.70% male and 43.85% female). This was the highest leap in the percentage of literacy recorded in India (the rise in female literacy being 23%). At the Census 2011, Rajasthan had a literacy rate of 67.06% (80.51% male and 52.66% female). Although Rajasthan's literacy rate is below the national average of 74.04% and although its female literacy rate is the lowest in the country (closely followed by Bihar at 53.33%), the state has been praised for its efforts and achievements in raising both male and female literacy rates.

Rajasthan has nine universities and more than two hundred and fifty colleges, fifty five thousand primary and seven thousand four hundred secondary schools. There are forty-one engineering colleges with an annual enrollment of about 11,500 students. The state has twenty-three polytechnics and one-hundred and fifty-two Industrial Training Institute (ITIs) that impart vocational training to the students.

Flora and fauna

Though a large percentage of the total area is desert, and even though there is little forest cover, Rajasthan has a rich and varied flora and fauna. The natural vegetation is classed as Northern Desert Thorn Forest (Champion 1936). These occur in small clumps scattered in a more or less open forms. Density and size of patches increase from west to east following the increase in rainfall.

Some wildlife species, which are fast vanishing in other parts of India, are found in the desert in large numbers such as the Great Indian Bustard ''(Ardeotis nigriceps)'', the Blackbuck ''(Antilope cervicapra)'', the Indian Gazelle ''(Gazella bennettii)'' and the Indian Wild Ass.

The Desert National Park, Jaisalmer, spread over an area of 3162 km², is an excellent example of the ecosystem of the Thar Desert, and its diverse fauna. Great Indian Bustard, Blackbuck, chinkara, desert fox, Bengal fox, wolf, desert cat etc. can be easily seen here. Seashells and massive fossilized tree trunks in this park record the geological history of the desert. The region is a haven for migratory and resident birds of the desert. One can see many eagles, harriers, falcons, buzzards, kestrel and vultures. Short-toed Eagles ''(Circaetus gallicus)'', Tawny Eagles ''(Aquila rapax)'', Spotted Eagles ''(Aquila clanga)'', Laggar Falcons ''(Falco jugger)'' and kestrels are the commonest of these.

The Ranthambore National Park located in Sawai Madhopur, is one of the finest Tiger Reserves in the Country which became a part of Project Tiger in 1973.

The Sariska Tiger Reserve located in Alwar district, 200 km from Delhi and 107 km from Jaipur covers an area of approximately 800 km².The area was declared a National Park in 1979.

Tal Chhapar Sanctuary is a very small sanctuary in Sujangarh, Churu District, 210 km from Jaipur, in the Shekhawati region. This sanctuary is home to a large population of graceful Blackbuck. Desert Fox and desert cat can also be spotted along with typical avifauna such as partridge and sand grouse.

Wildlife

Rajasthan is also noted for National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries. There are four national park and wildlife sanctuaries named the Keoladeo National Park of Bharatpur, Sariska Tiger Reserve of Alwar, Ranthambore National Park of Sawai Madhopur, and Desert National Park of Jaisalmer.

Ranthambore National Park and Sariska Wildlife Sanctuary are both known worldwide for their tiger population and considered by both wilderness lovers and photographers as the best places in India to spot tigers. At one point, due to poaching and negligence, tigers became extinct here, but recently 5 tigers have been shifted here . Prominent among the wildlife sanctuaries are Mount Abu Sanctuary, Bhensrod Garh Sanctuary, Darrah Sanctuary, Jaisamand Sanctuary, Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary, Jawahar Sagar sanctuary and Sita Mata Wildlife Sanctuary.

There are a variety of wildlife species in Rajasthan, notably including the apex predator Caracal, Caracal caracal.

Transport

Rajasthan is connected by many national highways. Most renowned being NH 8, which is India's first 4–8 lane highway. Rajasthan also has an inter-city surface transport system both in terms of railways and bus network. All chief cities are connected by air, rail and road.

By Air: There are four main airports at Rajasthan- Jaipur airport, Udaipur airport, Jodhpur airport and Kota airport. These airports connect Rajasthan with the major cities of India such as Delhi and Mumbai.

By Rail: Rajasthan is connected with the main cities of India by rail. Jaipur, Kota, Bikaner, Ajmer, Udaipur and Jodhpur are the principal railway stations in Rajasthan. Kota City is the only Electrified Section served by three Rajdhani Expresses and trains to all cities of India.

By Road: Rajasthan is well connected to the main cities of the country including Delhi, Ahmedabad and Indore by State and National Highways and served by Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation (RSRTC) and Private operators.

Statistics

Population:68.6 million (2011 Census, estimated at more than 68 million now)

Cities and Towns: 222

Major cities: Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, Udaipur, Ajmer, Bikaner Bharatpur, Alwar, Bhilwara, Sri Ganganagar, Sikar and Hanumangarh.

Roads: 1,51,914 km. (8,798 km National Highway)

National highways crossing Rajasthan: Delhi-Ahmedabad, Agra-Bikaner, Jaipur-Bhopal, Bhatinda-Kandla, Shivpuri-Kota, Kota-Udaipur and Pali-Ambala.

Climate: Generally dry with monsoon during July–August

Districts: 33

Languages: English and Hindi commonly used, as well as indigenous Rajasthani languages, Braj Bhasha etc.

Literacy: 61.03%

See also

Districts of Rajasthan

Kathputli (Puppet)

Keoladeo National Park

List of people from Rajasthan

Marwaris

Rajasthani people

Rajasthani languages

Ranthambore National Park

Sariska Tiger Reserve

References

Gahlot, Sukhvirsingh. 1992. ''RAJASTHAN: Historical & Cultural''. J. S. Gahlot Research Institute, Jodhpur.

Somani, Ram Vallabh. 1993. ''History of Rajasthan''. Jain Pustak Mandir, Jaipur.

Tod, James & Crooke, William. 1829. ''Annals & Antiquities of Rajasthan or the Central and Western Rajput States of India''. 3 Vols. Reprint: Low Price Publications, Delhi. 1990. ISBN 81-85395-68-3 (set of 3 vols.)

Mathur, P.C., 1995. ''Social and Economic Dynamics of Rajasthan Politics'' (Jaipur, Aaalekh)

Video of Rajasthan, India . http://www.youtube.com/DjBobbyLosAngeles#p/u/6/jxjZlzQl-Zw

External links

RajasthanTalkies.com

Category:States and territories of India Category:States and territories established in 1956

ace:Rajasthan ar:راجاستان bn:রাজস্থান zh-min-nan:Rajasthan be:Раджастхан be-x-old:Раджастхан bh:राजस्थान br:Rajasthan bg:Раджастан ca:Rajasthan cs:Rádžasthán cy:Rajasthan da:Rajasthan de:Rajasthan dv:ރާޖަސްތާން et:Rājasthān el:Ράτζασταν es:Rajastán eo:Raĝastano eu:Rajasthan fa:راجستان hif:Rajasthan fr:Rajasthan gu:રાજસ્થાન ko:라자스탄 주 hi:राजस्थान hsb:Radźastan hr:Radžastan io:Rajasthan bpy:রাজস্থান id:Rajasthan it:Rajasthan he:ראג'סטאן kn:ರಾಜಸ್ಥಾನ pam:Rajasthan ka:რაჯასტანი sw:Rajasthan la:Rajasthan lv:Rādžastāna lt:Radžastanas hu:Rádzsasztán mk:Раџастан ml:രാജസ്ഥാന്‍ mr:राजस्थान ms:Rajasthan nl:Rajasthan ne:राजस्थान new:राजस्थान ja:ラージャスターン州 no:Rajasthan nn:Rajasthan or:ରାଜସ୍ଥାନ pa:ਰਾਜਸਥਾਨ pnb:راجستھان pl:Radżastan pt:Rajastão ro:Rajasthan ru:Раджастхан sa:राजस्थान simple:Rajasthan sk:Radžastan sl:Radžastan sr:Раџастан sh:Rajasthan fi:Rajasthan sv:Rajasthan ta:இராச்சசுத்தான் te:రాజస్థాన్ th:รัฐราชสถาน tg:Роҷистон tr:Racasthan uk:Раджастхан ur:راجستھان vi:Rajasthan war:Rajasthan yo:Rajasthan zh:拉贾斯坦邦

Conventional long name	Crown Rule or Direct Rule ''British Raj''
Common name	India
Continent	Asia
Region	Indian Subcontinent
Country	India
Empire	British Empire
Government type	Constitutional Monarchy
Event pre	Indian Rebellion
Date pre	10 May 1857
Event start	Government of India Act
Date start	2 August
Year start	1858
Event end	Indian Independence Act
Date end	15 August
Year end	1947
Event post	Partition of India
Date post	15 August 1947
P1	Company rule in India
Flag p1	Flag of the British East India Company (1801).svg
P3	Mughal Empire
Flag p3	Flag of the Mughal Empire.svg
S1	Union of India
S2	Dominion of Pakistan
S3	British Burma
Flag s1	Flag of India.svg
Flag s2	Flag of Pakistan.svg
Flag s3	British Burma 1937 flag.svg
Flag s4	Sikkimflag.svg
Flag	Star of India (flag)
Flag type
Image coat	Star-of-India-gold-centre.svg
Symbol	Order of the Star of India
Symbol type	Star of India
Image map caption	The British Indian Empire, 1909
Capital	Calcutta (1858–1912)New Delhi (1912–1947)Shimla (Summer)
National motto	''Dieu et mon Droit''"God and my right"
National anthem	''None''Royal anthem''God Save the King''
Common languages	Hindustani, Urdu, English
Currency	British Indian rupee
Leader1	Victoria 1
Leader2	Edward VII
Leader3	George V
Leader4	Edward VIII
Leader5	George VI
Year leader1	1858–1901
Year leader2	1901–1910
Year leader3	1910–1936
Year leader4	1936
Year leader5	1936–1947
Title leader	Emperor (1876–1947)
Representative1	Charles Canning
Year representative1	1858–1862
Representative2	Louis Mountbatten
Year representative2	1947
Title representative	Viceroy 2
Legislature	Imperial Legislative Council
Stat year1
Stat area1
Stat pop1
Footnotes	1: Reigned as Empress of India from 1 May 1876, before that as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.2: Viceroy and Governor-General of India.
Today	}}

British Raj (''rāj'' (राज راج), lit. "reign" in Hindustani) was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; it can also refer to the period of dominion, and even the region under the rule. The region, commonly called India in contemporary usage, included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. After 1876, the resulting political union was officially called the Indian Empire and issued passports under that name. As ''India'', it was a founding member of the League of Nations, the United Nations, and a member nation of the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and 1936.

The system of governance was instituted in 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (and who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India), and lasted until 1947, when the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states, the ''Union of India'' (later the Republic of India) and the ''Dominion of Pakistan'' (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern half of which, still later, became the People's Republic of Bangladesh). The eastern part of the Indian Empire became the separate colony of Burma in 1937, and this gained independence in 1948.

Geographical extent

The British Raj extended over all regions of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In addition, at various times, it included Aden Colony (from 1858 to 1937), Lower Burma (from 1858 to 1937), Upper Burma (from 1886 to 1937), British Somaliland (briefly from 1884 to 1898), and Singapore (briefly from 1858 to 1867). Burma was directly administered by the British Crown from 1937 until its independence in 1948. The Trucial States of the Persian Gulf were theoretically princely states of British India until 1946 and used the rupee as their unit of currency.

Among other countries in the region, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was ceded to Britain in 1802 under the Treaty of Amiens. Ceylon was a British crown colony but not part of British India. The kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan, having fought wars with the British, subsequently signed treaties with them and were recognised by the British as independent states. The Kingdom of Sikkim was established as a princely state after the Anglo-Sikkimese Treaty of 1861; however, the issue of sovereignty was left undefined. The Maldive Islands were a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965 but not part of British India.

British India and the Native States

India under British rule was made up of two types of territory: ''British India'' and the ''Native States'' (or ''Princely States''). In its Interpretation Act 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions:

(4.) The expression "British India" shall mean all territories and places within Her Majesty's dominions which are for the time being governed by Her Majesty through the Governor-General of India or through any governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India. (5.) The expression "India" shall mean British India together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty exercised through the Governor-General of India, or through any governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India.

In general the term "British India" had been used (and is still used) to also refer to the regions under the rule of the British East India Company in India from 1600 to 1858. The term has also been used to refer to the "British in India".

Suzerainty over 175 princely states, some of the largest and most important, was exercised (in the name of the British Crown) by the central government of British India under the Viceroy; the remaining approximately 500 states were dependents of the provincial governments of British India under a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, or Chief Commissioner (as the case might have been). A clear distinction between "dominion" and "suzerainty" was supplied by the jurisdiction of the courts of law: the law of British India rested upon the laws passed by the British Parliament and the legislative powers those laws vested in the various governments of British India, both central and local; in contrast, the courts of the Princely States existed under the authority of the respective rulers of those states.

Major provinces

At the turn of the 20th century, British India consisted of eight provinces that were administered either by a Governor or a Lieutenant-Governor. The following table lists their areas and populations (but does not include those of the dependent Native States) circa 1907:

style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;"

Province of British India !! Area (in thousands of square units) !! Population (in millions of inhabitants) !! Chief Administrative Officer
style="text-align:center;"	Burma		>style="text-align:center;"| Lieutenant-Governor
style="text-align:center;"	Bengal (including present-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa)	||	75	Lieutenant-Governor
style="text-align:center;"	Madras	||	38	Governor-in-Council
style="text-align:center;"	Bombay	||	19	Governor-in-Council
style="text-align:center;"	United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand)	||	48	Lieutenant-Governor
style="text-align:center;"	Central Provinces (including Berar)	||	13	Chief Commissioner
style="text-align:center;"	Punjab	||	20	Lieutenant-Governor
style="text-align:center;"	Assam	||	6	Chief Commissioner

During the partition of Bengal (1905–1911), a new province, ''Assam and East Bengal'' was created as a Lieutenant-Governorship. In 1911, ''East Bengal'' was reunited with Bengal, and the new provinces in the east became: Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

Minor provinces

In addition, there were a few minor provinces that were administered by a Chief Commissioner: style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;" style="text-align:center;"

Minor Province !! Area (in thousands of square miles)!! Population (in thousands of inhabitants) !! Chief Administrative Officer
style="text-align:center;"	North West Frontier Province	16	>style="text-align:center;"| Chief Commissioner
style="text-align:center;"	British Baluchistan (British and Administered territory)	46 ||	308	British Political Agent in Baluchistan served as ''ex-officio'' Chief Commissioner
	Coorg	1.6 ||	181	British Resident in Mysore served as ''ex-officio'' Chief Commissioner
	Ajmer-Merwara	2.7 ||	477	British Political Agent in Rajputana served as ''ex-officio'' Chief Commissioner
	Andaman and Nicobar Islands	3 ||	25	Chief Commissioner

Princely states

A Princely State, also called a Native State or an Indian State, was a nominally sovereign entity with an indigenous Indian ruler that was under indirect British control through the exercise of suzerainty or paramountcy. There were 565 princely states when the Indian subcontinent became independent from Britain in August 1947. The princely states did not form a part of British India (i.e. the presidencies and provinces), as they were not directly under British rule.

Within the princely states the military, foreign affairs, and communications were under British control. The British also exercised a general influence over the states' internal politics, in part through the granting or withholding of recognition of individual rulers.

Organization

File:1stViscountHalifax.jpg|Sir Charles Wood, who was President of the Board of Control of the East India Company from 1852 to 1855 and whose Education Dispatch of 1854 shaped British education policy in India, was also Secretary of State for India in the early years of Crown rule. File:Robert cecil.jpg|Lord Salisbury was Secretary of State for India on two occasions before serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a total of thirteen years. File:Lord Viscount Canning.jpg|Lord Canning, the last Governor-General of India under Company rule and the first Viceroy of India under Crown rule. File:Proby cautley.jpg|Sir Proby Cautley, director of the Ganges Canal (1848–54) was appointed to the Council of India after his retirement and subsequent return to England. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 made changes in the governance of India at three levels: in the imperial government in London, in the central government in Calcutta, and in the provincial governments in the presidencies (and later in the provinces).

In London, it provided for a cabinet-level Secretary of State for India and a fifteen-member Council of India, whose members were required, as one prerequisite of membership, to have spent at least ten years in India and to have done so no more than ten years before. Although the Secretary of State formulated the policy instructions to be communicated to India, he was required in most instances to consult the Council, but especially so in matters relating to spending of Indian revenues. The Act envisaged a system of "double government" in which the Council ideally served both as a check on excesses in imperial policy-making and as a body of up-to-date expertise on India. However, the Secretary of State also had special emergency powers that allowed him to make unilateral decisions, and, in reality, the Council's expertise was sometimes outdated. From 1858 until 1947, twenty seven individuals served as Secretary of State for India and directed the India Office; these included: Sir Charles Wood (1859–1866), Marquess of Salisbury (1874–1878) (later Prime Minister of Britain), John Morley (1905–1910) (initiator of the Minto-Morley Reforms), E. S. Montagu (1917–1922) (an architect of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms), and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence (1945–1947) (head of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India). The size of the advisory Council was reduced over the next half-century, but its powers remained unchanged. In 1907, for the first time, two Indians were appointed to the Council.

In Calcutta, the Governor-General remained head of the Government of India and now was more commonly called the Viceroy on account of his secondary role as the Crown's representative to the nominally sovereign princely states; he was, however, now responsible to the Secretary of State in London and through him to Parliament. A system of "double government" had already been in place during the Company's rule in India from the time of Pitt's India Act of 1784. The Governor-General in the capital, Calcutta, and the Governor in a subordinate presidency (Madras or Bombay) was each required to consult his advisory council; executive orders in Calcutta, for example, were issued in the name of "Governor-General-in-Council" (''i.e.'' the Governor-General with the advice of the Council). The Company's system of "double government" had its critics, since, from the time of the system's inception, there had been intermittent feuding between the Governor-General and his Council; still, the Act of 1858 made no major changes in governance. However, in the years immediately thereafter, which were also the years of post-rebellion reconstruction, the Viceroy Lord Canning found the collective decision-making of the Council to be too time-consuming for the pressing tasks ahead. He therefore requested the "portfolio system" of an Executive Council in which the business of each government department (the "portfolio") was assigned to and became the responsibility of a single Council member. Routine departmental decisions were made exclusively by the member; however, important decisions required the consent of the Governor-General and, in the absence of such consent, required discussion by the entire Executive Council. This innovation in Indian governance was promulgated in the Indian Councils Act 1861.

If the Government of India needed to enact new laws, the Councils Act allowed for a Legislative Council—an expansion of the Executive Council by up to twelve additional members, each appointed to a two-year term—with half the members consisting of British officials of the government (termed ''official'') and allowed to vote, and the other half, comprising Indians and domiciled Britons in India (termed ''non-official'') and serving only in an advisory capacity. All laws enacted by Legislative Councils in India, whether by the Imperial Legislative Council in Calcutta or by the provincial ones in Madras and Bombay, required the final assent of the Secretary of State in London; this prompted Sir Charles Wood, the second Secretary of State, to describe the Government of India as "a despotism controlled from home". Moreover, although the appointment of Indians to the Legislative Council was a response to calls after the 1857 rebellion, most notably by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for more consultation with Indians, the Indians so appointed were from the landed aristocracy, often chosen for their loyalty, and far from representative. Even so, the ..."...tiny advances in the practise of representative government were intended to provide safety valves for the expression of public opinion which had been so badly misjudged before the rebellion". Indian affairs now also came to be more closely examined in the British Parliament and more widely discussed in the British press.

The Governors-General and Viceroys

12 Apr 18768 Jun 1880 6 Jan 189918 Nov 1905 23 Nov 19104 Apr 1916 4 Apr 19162 Apr 1921 3 Apr 192618 Apr 1931 18 Apr 19361 Oct 1943 1 Oct 194321 Feb 1947

Viceroy !! Period of Tenure!! Events/Accomplishments
Charles Canning, 1st Earl Canning	Charles Canning	1 Nov 185821 Mar 1862	1858 reorganisation of British Indian Army (contemporaneously and hereafter British Indian Army
[[James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin	Lord Elgin	21 Mar 1862
John Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence	John Lawrence	12 Jan 1869 >
Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo	Lord Mayo	8 Feb 1872 >
Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook	Lord Northbrook	3 May 187212 Apr 1876
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton	Lord Lytton	| Baluchistan established as a Chief Commissionership Queen Victoria (in absentia) proclaimed Empress of India at Delhi Durbar of 1877. Great Famine of 1876–78: 5.25 million dead; reduced relief offered at expense of Rs. 8 crore. Creation of Famine Commission of 1878–80 under Sir Richard Strachey. Indian Forest Act of 1878 Second Anglo-Afghan War.
George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon	Lord Ripon	8 Jun 188013 Dec 1884
Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava	Lord Dufferin	13 Dec 188410 Dec 1888
Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne	Lord Lansdowne	10 Dec 188811 Oct 1894
Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin	Lord Elgin	6 Jan 1899>
George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston	Lord Curzon	| Creation of the North West Frontier Province (now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) under a Chief Commissioner (1901). Indian famine of 1899–1900. Return of the bubonic plague, 1 million deaths Financial Reform Act of 1899; Gold Reserve Fund created for India. Punjab Land Alienation Act Inauguration of Department (now Ministry) of Commerce and Industry. Death of Queen Victoria (1901); dedication of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta as a national gallery of Indian antiquities, art, and history. Coronation Durbar in Delhi (1903); Edward VII (in absentia) proclaimed Emperor of India. Francis Younghusband's British expedition to Tibet (1903–04) North-Western Provinces (previously Ceded and Conquered Provinces) and Oudh renamed United Provinces in 1904 Reorganization of Indian Universities Act (1904). Systemization of preservation and restoration of ancient monuments by Archaeological Survey of India with Indian Ancient Monument Preservation Act. Inauguration of agricultural banking with Cooperative Credit Societies Act of 1904 Partition of Bengal (1905); new province of East Bengal and Assam under a Lieutenant-Governor.
Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto	Lord Minto	23 Nov 1910 >
Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst	Lord Hardinge	| Visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911: commemoration as Emperor and Empress of India at last Delhi Durbar King George V announces creation of new city of New Delhi to replace Calcutta as capital of India. Indian High Courts Act of 1911 Indian Factories Act of 1911 Construction of New Delhi, 1912-1929 World War I, Indian Army in: Western Front, Belgium, 1914; German East Africa (Battle of Tanga, 1914); Mesopotamian Campaign (Battle of Ctesiphon, 1915; Siege of Kut, 1915-16); Battle of Galliopoli, 1915-16 Passage of Defence of India Act 1915
Frederic Thesiger, 1st Viscount Chelmsford	Lord Chelmsford	| Indian Army in: Mesopotamian Campaign (Fall of Baghdad, 1917); Sinai and Palestine Campaign (Battle of Megiddo, 1918) Passage of Rowlatt Act, 1919 Government of India Act 1919 (also Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 1919 Third Anglo-Afghan War, 1919 University of Rangoon established in 1920.
Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading	Lord Reading	2 Apr 19213 Apr 1926
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax	Lord Irwin	| Indian Trade Unions Act of 1926, Indian Forest Act, 1927 Appointment of Royal Commission of Indian Labour, 1929 Indian Constitutional Round Table Conferences, London, 1930-32, Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 1931.
Freeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of Willingdon	Lord Willingdon	18 Apr 193118 Apr 1936
Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow	Lord Linlithgow	| Indian Payment of Wages Act of 1936 Burma administered independently after 1937 with creation of new cabinet position Secretary of State for India and Burma, and with the Burma Office separated off from the India Office Indian Provincial Elections of 1937 Cripps' mission to India, 1942. Indian Army in Middle East Theatre of World War II (East African campaign, 1940, Anglo-Iraqi War, 1941, Syria-Lebanon campaign, 1941, Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, 1941	British Indian Army
[[Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell	Lord Wavell	| Indian Army becomes, at 2.5 million men, the largest all-volunteer force in history. World War II: Burma Campaign, 1943-45 (Battle of Kohima, Battle of Imphal) Bengal famine of 1943 Indian Army in Italian campaign (Battle of Monte Cassino) British Labour Party wins UK General Election of 1945 with Clement Attlee as prime minister. 1946 Cabinet Mission to India Indian Elections of 1946.
Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma	Lord Mountbatten	21 Feb 194715 Aug 1947

History

Aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857: Indian Critiques, British Response

File:Rani of jhansi.jpg|Lakshmibai, The Rani of Jhansi, one of the principal leaders of the Great Uprising of 1857, who earlier had lost her kingdom as a result of Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse. Image:Image victoria proclamation1858c.JPG‎|The proclamation to the "Princes, Chiefs, and People of India," issued by Queen Victoria on November 1, 1858. "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." (p. 2) Image:SAKhan.jpg|Sir Syed Ahmed Khan founder of the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College, later the Aligarh Muslim University, wrote one of the early critiques, ''The Causes of the Indian Mutiny''. Image:Victoria empress india1.jpg|A 1887 souvenir portrait of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, a full 30 years after the Great Uprising.

Although the Great Uprising of 1857 had shaken the British enterprise in India, it had not derailed it. After the rebellion, the British became more circumspect. Much thought was devoted to the causes of the rebellion, and from it three main lessons were drawn. At a more practical level, it was felt that there needed to be more communication and camaraderie between the British and Indians—not just between British army officers and their Indian staff but in civilian life as well. The Indian army was completely reorganised: units composed of the Muslims and Brahmins of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, who had formed the core of the rebellion, were disbanded. New regiments, like the Sikhs and Baluchis, composed of Indians who, in British estimation, had demonstrated steadfastness, were formed. From then on, the Indian army was to remain unchanged in its organisation until 1947. The 1861 Census had revealed that the English population in India was 125,945. Of these only about 41,862 were civilians as compared with about 84,083 European officers and men of the Army. In 1880, the standing Indian Army consisted of 66,000 British soldiers, 130,000 Natives, and 350,000 soldiers in the princely armies.

It was also felt that both the princes and the large land-holders, by not joining the rebellion, had proved to be, in Lord Canning's words, "breakwaters in a storm". They too were rewarded in the new British Raj by being officially recognised in the treaties each state now signed with the Crown. At the same time, it was felt that the peasants, for whose benefit the large land-reforms of the United Provinces had been undertaken, had shown disloyalty, by, in many cases, fighting for their former landlords against the British. Consequently, no more land reforms were implemented for the next 90 years: Bengal and Bihar were to remain the realms of large land holdings (unlike the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh).

Lastly, the British felt disenchanted with Indian reaction to social change. Until the rebellion, they had enthusiastically pushed through social reform, like the ban on ''suttee'' by Lord William Bentinck. It was now felt that traditions and customs in India were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily; consequently, no more British social interventions were made, especially in matters dealing with religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows).

Technological and economic changes: 1858-1905

Image:India railways1909a.jpg|The 1909 Map of Indian Railways, when India had the fourth largest railway network in the world. Railway construction in India began in 1853. Image:Victoriaterminus1903.JPG|"The most magnificent railway station in the world." Stereographic image of Victoria Terminus, Bombay, which was completed in 1888. Image:Agra canal headworks1871a.jpg|The Agra canal (c. 1873), a year away from completion. The canal was closed to navigation in 1904 in order to increase irrigation and aid in famine-prevention. Image:George Robinson 1st Marquess of Ripon.jpg|Lord Ripon, the Liberal Viceroy of India, who instituted the Famine Code In the second half of the 19th century, both the direct administration of India by the British crown and the technological change ushered in by the industrial revolution had the effect of closely intertwining the economies of India and Great Britain. In fact many of the major changes in transport and communications (that are typically associated with Crown Rule of India) had already begun before the Mutiny. Since Dalhousie had embraced the technological change then rampant in Great Britain, India too saw rapid development of all those technologies. Railways, roads, canals, and bridges were rapidly built in India and telegraph links equally rapidly established in order that raw materials, such as cotton, from India's hinterland could be transported more efficiently to ports, such as Bombay, for subsequent export to England. Likewise, finished goods from England, were transported back, just as efficiently, for sale in the burgeoning Indian markets. However, unlike Britain itself, where the market risks for the infrastructure development were borne by private investors, in India, it was the taxpayers—primarily farmers and farm-labourers—who endured the risks, which, in the end, amounted to £50 million. In spite of these costs, very little skilled employment was created for Indians. By 1920, with the fourth largest railway network in the world and a history of 60 years of its construction, only ten per cent of the "superior posts" in the Indian Railways were held by Indians.

The rush of technology was also changing the agricultural economy in India: by the last decade of the 19th century, a large fraction of some raw materials—not only cotton, but also some food-grains—were being exported to faraway markets. Consequently, many small farmers, dependent on the whims of those markets, lost land, animals, and equipment to money-lenders. More tellingly, the latter half of the 19th century also saw an increase in the number of large-scale famines in India. Although famines were not new to the subcontinent, these were particularly severe, with tens of millions dying, and with many critics, both British and Indian, laying the blame at the doorsteps of the lumbering colonial administrations.

Taxes in India decreased during the colonial period for most of India's population; with the land tax revenue claiming 15% of India's national income during Mogul times compared with 1% at the end of the colonial period. The percentage of national income for the village economy increased from 44% during Mogul times to 54% by the end of colonial period. India's per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it had increased to $618 by 1947

New Middle Class, Indian National Congress, Economic Critiques: 1860s-1890s

Image:A_O_Hume.jpg|Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), the man who conceived the idea of the Indian National Congress in a letter to graduates of Calcutta University. Image:1st INC1885.jpg|The first meeting of the Indian National Congress, Bombay, December 28, 1885. Seated, in the third row (middle) are (l. to r.) Dadabhai Naoroji, Allan Octavian Hume, Womesh Chandra Bonerjee, and Pherozeshah Mehta. Image:Poverty and Un British Rule in India1.jpg|Title page of the 1901 edition of ''Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India'', by Dadabhai Naoroji, the "Grand Old Man of India," Member of the British Parliament (1892-95), and three-time Congress president (1886, 1893, and 1906). Image:Pherozeshah mehta.jpg|Sir Pherozeshal Mehta, lawyer, businessman, "father of municipal government in Bombay," and president of the 6th session of the Indian National Congress in 1890.

There were other developments too: by the early 1880s, a new middle-class had arisen in India and spread thinly across the country. Moreover, there was a growing solidarity among its members, created by the "joint stimuli of encouragement and irritation." The ''encouragement'' felt by this class came from its success in education and its ability to avail itself of the benefits of that education such as employment in the Indian Civil Service. It came too from Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 in which she had declared, "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." Indians were especially encouraged when Canada was granted dominion status in 1867 and established an autonomous democratic constitution. Lastly, the encouragement came from the work of contemporaneous Oriental scholars like Monier Monier-Williams and Max Müller, who in their works had been presenting ancient India as a great civilization. The ''irritation'', on the other hand, came not just from incidents of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from governmental actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns (''e.g.'' in the Second Anglo-Afghan War) and the attempts to control the vernacular press (''e.g.'' in the ''Vernacular Press Act of 1878'').

It was, however, Viceroy Lord Ripon's partial reversal of the Ilbert Bill (1883), a legislative measure that had proposed putting Indian judges in the Bengal Presidency on equal footing with British ones, that transformed the discontent into political action. On December 28, 1885, professionals and intellectuals from this middle-class—many educated at the new British-founded universities in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, and familiar with the ideas of British political philosophers, especially the utilitarians—founded the Indian National Congress in Bombay. At its first meeting, attended by seventy individuals, including Womesh Chandra Bonerjee, who was elected the first president, and Alan Octavian Hume, who two years before had conceived its idea, the Congress called for both increased Indian participation in provincial legislative councils and improved Indian access to civil service jobs.

During its first twenty years, the Congress primarily debated British policy toward India; however, its debates created a new Indian ''Weltanschauung'', whose, main precept, voiced by Dadabhai Naoroji, held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, it was further held, by unfair trade, by the restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and by the use of Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India. For example, when the British government linked tariffs on sale of Indian-manufactured cotton to those on the cotton manufactured in the mills of Lancashire, the Indian businessmen in Bombay protested that it was unfair trade. Other Indians publicly worried about the cost of the large-scale railway construction in India, and who would pay for it. Still, Indian nationalism was "confined to the Westernized middle-class, with the masses as yet mere lookers-on."

Social Reformers, Moderates vs. the Extremists: 1870s-1907

File:Dayanand saraswati.gif|Swami Dayanand Saraswati in 1874, the year before he founded the ''Arya Samaj'' on April 13, 1875 (in Bombay). |Pandita Ramabai, poet, Sanskrit scholar, and a champion of the emancipation of Indian women. Ramabai, who took up the cause of widow remarriage, especially of Brahamin widows, later converted to Christianity. File:Gopal krishan gokhale.jpg|Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a constitutional social reformer and moderate nationalist, was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1905. File:Sri aurobindo tilak surat1907.jpg|Congress "extremist" Bal Gangadhar Tilak speaking at the 1907 Surat Session of the Indian National Congress during which the party split into the Moderates and the Extremists. Seated at the table is Aurobindo Ghosh and to his right (in the chair) is Lala Lajpat Rai, both allies of Tilak. By the turn of the twentieth century, reform movements had taken root within the Indian National Congress. Congress member Gopal Krishna Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society, which lobbied for legislative reform (for example, for a law to permit the remarriage of Hindu child widows,) and whose members took vows of poverty, and worked among the untouchable community. Soon, however, a rift began to appear in the Congress between the moderates, led by Gokhale, who eschewed public agitation, and the new "extremists" who not only advocated agitation, but also regarded the pursuit of social reform as a distraction from nationalism. Prominent among the extremists was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who attempted to mobilize Indians by appealing to an explicitly Hindu political identity, displayed, for example, in the annual public Ganapati festivals that he inaugurated in western India.

Tilak's extremist ally was the Punjab's Lala Lajpat Rai, who was also active in the Hindu reform movement ''Arya Samaj'' as well as in ''Cow Protection Societies''. Both movements had been founded earlier by reformer Dayanand Saraswati, and the latter movement, around this time, sponsored agitation against the killing of cows that led to anti-Muslim riots in the United Provinces. Lajpat Rai's public run for the Congress presidency in 1907 was to later split the Congress for almost a decade.

Partition of Bengal, Indian Response: 1905-1910

Image:George Curzon2.jpg|George Nathaniel Curzon, the Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, who partitioned the Bengal Presidency in 1905. Image:B 0110A.jpg|Sir Surendranath Banerjee, a Congress moderate, who led the political opposition to the partiton of Bengal with the ''Swadeshi'' movement.

Image:1909magazine vijaya.jpg|Cover of a 1909 issue of the Tamil magazine, ''Vijaya'' showing "Mother India" with her diverse progeny and the slogan "Bande Mataram," in its Sanskritized form (with initial "V").

In 1905, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, who was considered by many to be both brilliant and indefatigable, and who in his first term had built an impressive record of archaeological preservation and administrative efficiency, now, in his second term, divided the largest administrative subdivision in British India, the Bengal Presidency, into the Muslim-majority province of ''East Bengal and Assam'' and the Hindu-majority ''province'' of ''Bengal'' (present-day Indian states of West Bengal, Bihār, and Orissa). Curzon's act, the Partition of Bengal—which some considered administratively felicitous, and, which had been contemplated by various colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck, but never acted upon—was to transform nationalist politics as nothing else before it. The Hindu elite of Bengal, among them many who owned land in East Bengal that was leased out to Muslim peasants, protested fervidly. The large Bengali Hindu middle-class (the ''Bhadralok''), upset at the prospect of Bengalis being outnumbered in the new Bengal province by Biharis and Oriyas, felt that Curzon's act was punishment for their political assertiveness. The pervasive protests against Curzon's decision took the form predominantly of the ''Swadeshi'' (“buy Indian”) campaign led by two-time Congress president, Surendranath Banerjee, and involved boycott of British goods; however, sporadically—but flagrantly—the protesters also took to political violence that involved attacks on civilians. The violence, however, was not effective, most planned attacks were either preempted by the British or failed.

The rallying cry for both types of protest was the slogan ''Bande Mataram'' (Bengali, lit: "Hail to the Mother"), the title of a song by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which invoked a mother goddess, who stood variously for Bengal, India, and the Hindu goddess Kali. The unrest spread from Calcutta to the surrounding regions of Bengal when Calcutta's English-educated students returned home to their villages and towns. The religious stirrings of the slogan and the political outrage over the partition were combined as young men, in groups such as Jugantar, took to bombing public buildings, staging armed robberies, and assassinating British officials. Since Calcutta was the imperial capital, both the outrage and the slogan soon became nationally known. For example, the Tamil poet Subramanya Bharathi, upon meeting the young Bengali revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose, was to not only translate ''Bande Mataram'' into Tamil, but also re-compose it in Carnatic Music, and sing it, to great acclaim, in rallies on the beaches of Madras.

The ''Swadeshi'' boycott movement was very successful: by 1908, imports of British cotton were down by 25%. The ''swadeshi'' cloth, although more expensive and somewhat less comfortable than its Lancashire competitor, was worn as a mark of national pride by people all over India. The movement also became a spur for indigenous industrial progress in India. The Tata Iron and Steel Company was founded in Jamshedpur, Bengal Province, in 1907, during the height of the ''swadeshi'' movement, and in the next four decades was to become the single largest steel complex in the British Empire. The Tatas became early financial backers of the Indian National Congress.

Maps 1907-1909

Image:1907-bengal-sikkim3.jpg|Map of the ''Province of Bengal'' (incorporating present-day West Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa during the Partition of Bengal (1905-1911). Image:1907-east-bengal-assam3.jpg|Map of the ''Province of East Bengal and Assam'' during the Partition of Bengal (1905-1911). Image:Brit IndianEmpireReligions3.jpg|1909 Prevailing Religions, Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing the prevailing majority religions for different districts, based on the Census of 1901. Image:British_Indian_Empire_1909_Imperial_Gazetteer_of_India.jpg|1909 Map of the British Indian Empire.

Muslim Social Movements, Muslim League: 1870s-1906

Image:LordMelgund1885.jpg|Lord Minto, the Conservative viceroy who replaced Curzon and who met with the Muslim delegation in Simla in June 1906. The Minto-Morley Reforms of 1909 were to allow separate Muslim electorates. File:Ahsan-Manzil.jpg|The Ahsan Manzil Palace in Dacca which was to serve as the venue to hold Muslim League's Foundation Convention on 30th December, 1906. Image:1921ajmalkhan.jpg|Hakim Ajmal Khan, another founder of the Muslim League, was to also become the president of the Indian National Congress in 1921. The overwhelming, but predominantly Hindu, protest against the partition of Bengal and the fear, in its wake, of reforms favouring the Hindu majority, now led the Muslim elite in India, in 1906, to meet with the new viceroy, Lord Minto, and to ask for separate electorates for Muslims. In conjunction, they demanded proportional legislative representation reflecting both their status as former rulers and their record of cooperating with the British. This led, in December 1906, to the founding of the Muslim League in Dacca. Although Curzon, by now, had resigned his position over a dispute with his military chief Lord Kitchener and returned to England, the League was in favour of his partition plan. The Muslim elite's position, which was reflected in the League's position, had crystallized gradually over the previous three decades, beginning with the 1871 Census of British India, which had first estimated the populations in regions of Muslim majority. (For his part, Curzon's desire to court the Muslims of East Bengal had arisen from British anxieties ever since the 1871 census—and in light of the history of Muslims fighting them in the 1857 Mutiny and the Second Anglo-Afghan War—about Indian Muslims rebelling against the Crown.) In the three decades since, Muslim leaders across northern India, had intermittently experienced public animosity from some of the new Hindu political and social groups. The Arya Samaj, for example, had not only supported Cow Protection Societies in their agitation, but also—distraught at the 1871 Census's Muslim numbers—organized "reconversion" events for the purpose of welcoming Muslims back to the Hindu fold. In 1905, when Tilak and Lajpat Rai attempted to rise to leadership positions in the Congress, and the Congress itself rallied around symbolism of Kali, Muslim fears increased. It was not lost on many Muslims, for example, that the rallying cry, "Bande Mataram," had first appeared in the novel ''Anand Math'' in which Hindus had battled their Muslim oppressors. Lastly, the Muslim elite, and among it Dacca Nawab, Khwaja Salimullah, who hosted the League's first meeting in his mansion in Shahbag, was aware that a new province with a Muslim majority would directly benefit Muslims aspiring to political power.

Minto-Morley Reforms, Delhi Durbar: 1909-1915

Image:Mandalay burma generalview1903.jpg|Mandalay, Burma, where Bal Gangadhar Tilak was imprisoned from 1907 to 1913. The jail was located on the banks of the Irrawaddy River shown in the picture in the far background on the right. The picture was taken in 1903 by the Archaeological Survey of India, which in turn was created by Lord Curzon Image:John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn - Project Gutenberg eText 17976.jpg|John Morley, the Secretary of State for India from 1905 to 1910, and Gladstonian Liberal. The Indian Councils Act 1909, also known as the ''Minto-Morley Reforms'' allowed Indians to be elected to the Legislative Council. Image:Delhidurbar pc1911.jpg|Picture post card of the Gordon Highlanders marching past King George V and Queen Mary at the Delhi Durbar on December 12, 1911, when the King was crowned Emperor of India Image:Komogata Maru LAC a034014 1914.jpg|Sikhs on board the Komagata Maru in Vancouver's English Bay, 1914. Their eventual return to India spurred terrorist activity by the Ghadar Party.

The first steps were taken toward self-government in British India in the late 19th century with the appointment of Indian counsellors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the Indian Councils Act of 1892. Municipal Corporations and District Boards were created for local administration; they included elected Indian members.

The Indian Councils Act 1909 — also known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Gilbert Elliot, fourth earl of Minto, was viceroy) — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures, known as legislative councils. Indians had previously been appointed to legislative councils, but after the reforms some were elected to them. At the centre, the majority of council members continued to be government-appointed officials, and the viceroy was in no way responsible to the legislature. At the provincial level, the elected members, together with unofficial appointees, outnumbered the appointed officials, but responsibility of the governor to the legislature was not contemplated. Morley made it clear in introducing the legislation to the British Parliament that parliamentary self-government was not the goal of the British government.

The Morley-Minto Reforms were a milestone. Step by step, the elective principle was introduced for membership in Indian legislative councils. The "electorate" was limited, however, to a small group of upper-class Indians. These elected members increasingly became an "opposition" to the "official government". The Communal electorates were later extended to other communities and made a political factor of the Indian tendency toward group identification through religion.

The partition of Bengal was rescinded in 1911 and announced at the Delhi Durbar at which King George V was crowned Emperor of India. This period also saw an increase in the activities of revolutionary groups, which included Bengal's Anushilan Samiti and the Punjab's Ghadar Party and mirrored other such movements in different parts of the world. The British authorities were, however, able to suppress them swiftly, in part, because the revolutionaries lacked the support of mainstream politicians in the Congress and the League.

World War I, Lucknow Pact, Home Rule Leagues: 1914-1918

Image:Indiantroops medical ww1.jpg|Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers with the ''Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force'' in Mesopotamia during World War I. Image:Khudadad khan vc1915.jpg|Sepoy Khudadad Khan, the first Indian to be awarded the Victoria Cross, the British Empire's highest war-time medal for gallantry. Khan, who hailed from Chakwal District, Punjab, in present-day Pakistan, died in 1971. Image:Gandhi back in india1915.gif|Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (seated in carriage, on the right, eyes downcast, with black flat-top hat) receives a big welcome in Karachi in 1916 after his return to India from South Africa. Image:Jinnah lucknow pact1916.jpg|Muhammad Ali Jinnah, seated, third from the left, was a supporter of the Lucknow Pact, which, in 1916, ended the three-way rift between the Extremists, the Moderates and the League.

World War I would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. 1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of the British Indian Army would take part in the war and their participation would have a wider cultural fallout: news of Indian soldiers fighting and dying with British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia, would travel to distant corners of the world both in newsprint and by the new medium of the radio. India’s international profile would thereby rise and would continue to rise during the 1920s. It was to lead, among other things, to India, under its own name, becoming a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and participating, under the name, "Les Indes Anglaises" (British India), in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. Back in India, especially among the leaders of the Indian National Congress, it would lead to calls for greater self-government for Indians.

After the 1906 split between the moderates and the extremists, organized political activity by the Congress had remained fragmented until 1914, when Bal Gangadhar Tilak was released from prison and began to sound out other Congress leaders about possible re-unification. That, however, had to wait until the demise of Tilak’s principal moderate opponents, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, in 1915, whereupon an agreement was reached for Tilak’s ousted group to re-enter the Congress. In the 1916 Lucknow session of the Congress, Tilak’s supporters were able to push through a more radical resolution which asked for the British to declare that it was their, "aim and intention … to confer self-government on India at an early date.” Soon, other such rumblings began to appear in public pronouncements: in 1917, in the Imperial Legislative Council, Madan Mohan Malaviya spoke of the expectations the war had generated in India, “I venture to say that the war has put the clock … fifty years forward … (The) reforms after the war will have to be such, … as will satisfy the aspirations of her (India’s) people to take their legitimate part in the administration of their own country.”

The 1916 Lucknow Session of the Congress was also the venue of an unanticipated mutual effort by the Congress and the Muslim League, the occasion for which was provided by the wartime partnership between Germany and Turkey. Since the Turkish Sultan, or ''Khalifah'', had also sporadically claimed guardianship of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and since the British and their allies were now in conflict with Turkey, doubts began to increase among some Indian Muslims about the “religious neutrality” of the British, doubts that had already surfaced as a result of the reunification of Bengal in 1911, a decision that was seen as ill-disposed to Muslims. In the Lucknow Pact, the League joined the Congress in the proposal for greater self-government that was campaigned for by Tilak and his supporters; in return, the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in the provincial legislatures as well as the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1916, the Muslim League had anywhere between 500 and 800 members and did not yet have its wider following among Indian Muslims of later years; in the League itself, the pact did not have unanimous backing, having largely been negotiated by a group of “Young Party” Muslims from the United Provinces (UP), most prominently, two brothers Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, who had embraced the Pan-Islamic cause; however, it did have the support of a young lawyer from Bombay, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was later to rise to leadership roles in both the League and the Indian freedom movement. In later years, as the full ramifications of the pact unfolded, it was seen as benefiting the Muslim minority ''élites'' of provinces like UP and Bihar more than the Muslim majorities of Punjab and Bengal, nonetheless, at the time, the “Lucknow Pact,” was an important milestone in nationalistic agitation and was seen so by the British.

During 1916, two Home Rule Leagues were founded within the Indian National Congress by Tilak and Annie Besant, respectively, to promote Home Rule among Indians, and also to elevate the stature of the founders within the Congress itself. Mrs. Besant, for her part, was also keen to demonstrate the superiority of this new form of organized agitation, which had achieved some success in the Irish home rule movement, to the political violence that had intermittently plagued the subcontinent during the years 1907-1914. The two Leagues focused their attention on complementary geographical regions: Tilak’s in western India, in the southern Bombay presidency, and Mrs. Besant’s in the rest of the country, but especially in the Madras Presidency and in regions like Sind and Gujarat that had hitherto been considered politically dormant by the Congress. Both leagues rapidly acquired new members – approximately thirty thousand each in a little over a year – and began to publish inexpensive newspapers. Their propaganda also turned to posters, pamphlets, and political-religious songs, and later to mass meetings, which not only attracted greater numbers than in earlier Congress sessions, but also entirely new social groups such as non-Brahmins, traders, farmers, students, and lower-level government workers. Although they did not achieve the magnitude or character of a nation-wide mass movement, the Home Rule leagues both deepened and widened organized political agitation for self-rule in India. The British authorities reacted by imposing restrictions on the Leagues, including shutting out students from meetings and banning the two leaders from traveling to certain provinces.

The year 1915 also saw the return of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to India. Already known in India as a result of his civil liberties protests on behalf of the Indians in South Africa, Gandhi followed the advice of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale and chose not to make any public pronouncements during the first year of his return, but instead spent the year traveling, observing the country first-hand, and writing. Earlier, during his South Africa sojourn, Gandhi, a lawyer by profession, had represented an Indian community, which, although small, was sufficiently diverse to be a microcosm of India itself. In tackling the challenge of holding this community together and simultaneously confronting the colonial authority, he had created a technique of non-violent resistance, which he labeled ''Satyagraha'' (or, Striving for Truth). For Gandhi, ''Satyagraha'' was different from “passive resistance,” by then a familiar technique of social protest, which he regarded as a practical strategy adopted by the weak in the face of superior force; ''Satyagraha'', on the other hand, was for him the “last resort of those strong enough in their commitment to truth to undergo suffering in its cause.” Ahimsa or "non-violence," which formed the underpinning of ''Satyagraha'', came to represent the twin pillar, with Truth, of Gandhi’s unorthodox religious outlook on life. During the years 1907-1914, Gandhi tested the technique of ''Satyagraha'' in a number of protests on behalf of the Indian community in South Africa against the unjust racial laws.

Also, during his time in South Africa, in his essay, ''Hind Swaraj'', (1909), Gandhi formulated his vision of ''Swaraj'', or “self-rule” for India based on three vital ingredients: solidarity between Indians of different faiths, but most of all between Hindus and Muslims; the removal of untouchability from Indian society; and the exercise of ''swadeshi'' – the boycott of manufactured foreign goods and the revival of Indian cottage industry. The first two, he felt, were essential for India to be an egalitarian and tolerant society, one befitting the principles of Truth and ''Ahimsa'', while the last, by making Indians more self-reliant, would break the cycle of dependence that was not only perpetrating the direction and tenor of the British rule in India, but also the British commitment to it. At least until 1920, the British presence itself, was not a stumbling block in Gandhi’s conception of ''swaraj''; rather, it was the inability of Indians to create the right society.

''Satyagraha'', Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms: 1917-1919

Image:Gandhi Kheda 1918.jpg|Gandhi at the time of the Kheda Satyagraha, 1918. Image:Montagu left.jpg|Edwin Montagu, left, the Secretary of State for India, whose report, led to the Government of India Act 1919, also known as the Montford Reforms or the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. Image:Rowlatt bills1919.gif|Headlines about the Rowlatt Bills (1919) from a nationalist newspaper in India. Although all non-official Indians on the Legislative Council voted against the Rowlatt Bills, the government was able to force their passage by using its majority. Image:Jallianwallah.jpg|The Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919, a few months after the massacre which had occurred on April 13.

Gandhi made his political debut in India in 1917 in Champaran district in Bihar, near the Nepal border, where he was invited by a group of disgruntled tenant farmers who, for many years, had been forced into planting indigo (for dyes) on a portion of their land and then selling it at below-market prices to the British planters who had leased them the land. Upon his arrival in the district, Gandhi was joined by other agitators, including a young Congress leader, Rajendra Prasad, from Bihar, who would become a become a loyal supporter of Gandhi and go on to play a prominent role in the Indian freedom movement. When Gandhi was ordered to leave by the local British authorities, he refused on moral grounds, setting up his refusal as a form of individual Satyagraha. Soon, under pressure from the Viceroy in Delhi who was anxious to maintain domestic peace during war-time, the provincial government rescinded Gandhi’s expulsion order, and later agreed to an official enquiry into the case. Although, the British planters eventually gave in, they were not won over to the farmers’ cause, and thereby did not produce the optimal outcome of a Satyagraha that Gandhi had hoped for; similarly, the farmers themselves, although pleased at the resolution, responded less than enthusiastically to the concurrent projects of rural empowerment and education that Gandhi had inaugurated in keeping with his ideal of ''swaraj''. The following year Gandhi launched two more Satyagrahas – both in his native Gujarat – one in the rural Kaira district where land-owning farmers were protesting increased land-revenue and the other in the city of Ahmedabad, where workers in an Indian-owned textile mill were distressed about their low wages. The satyagraha in Ahmedabad took the form of Gandhi fasting and supporting the workers in a strike, which eventually led to a settlement. In Kaira, in contrast, although the farmers’ cause received publicity from Gandhi’s presence, the satyagraha itself, which consisted of the farmers' collective decision to withhold payment, was not immediately successful, as the British authorities refused to back down. However, like Champaran, the agitation in Kaira gained for Gandhi another life-long lieutenant in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organized the farmers, and who too would go on to play a leadership role in the Indian freedom movement. Champaran, Kaira, and Ahmedabad were important milestones in the history of Gandhi’s new methods of social protest in India.

The previous year (1916), in the face of new strength demonstrated by the nationalists with the signing of the Lucknow Pact and the founding of the Home Rule leagues, and the realization, after the disaster in the Mesopotamian campaign, that the war would likely last longer, the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, cautioned that the Government of India needed to be more responsive to Indian opinion. Towards the end of the year, after discussions with the government in London, he suggested that the British demonstrate their good faith – in light of the Indian war role – through a number of public actions, including awards of titles and honors to princes, granting of commissions in the army to Indians, and removal of the much-reviled cotton excise duty, but, most importantly, an announcement of Britain's future plans for India and an indication of some concrete steps. After more discussion, in August 1917, the new Liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, announced the British aim of “increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.” Although the plan envisioned limited self-government at first only in the provinces – with India emphatically within the British Empire – it represented the first British proposal for any form of representative government in a non-white colony.

Earlier, at the onset of World War I, the reassignment of most of the British army in India to Europe and Mesopotamia, had led the previous Viceroy, Lord Harding, to worry about the “risks involved in denuding India of troops.” Revolutionary violence had already been a concern in British India; consequently, in 1915, to strengthen its powers during what it saw was a time of increased vulnerability, the Government of India passed the Defence of India Act, which allowed it to intern politically dangerous dissidents without due process, and added to the power it already had – under the 1910 Press Act – both to imprison journalists without trial and to censor the press. It was under the Defence of India act that the Ali brothers were imprisoned in 1916, and Annie Besant, a European woman, and ordinarily more problematic to imprison, in 1917. Now, as constitutional reform began to be discussed in earnest, the British began to consider how new moderate Indians could be brought into the fold of constitutional politics and, simultaneously, how the hand of established constitutionalists could be strengthened. However, since the Government of India wanted to ensure against any sabotage of the reform process by extremists, and since its reform plan was devised during a time when extremist violence had ebbed as a result of increased governmental control, it also began to consider how some of its war-time powers could be extended into peace time.

Consequently, in 1917, even as Edwin Montagu, announced the new constitutional reforms, a committee chaired by a British judge, Mr. S. A. T. Rowlatt, was tasked with investigating "revolutionary conspiracies," with the unstated goal of extending the government's war-time powers. The Rowlatt committee presented its report in July 1918 and identified three regions of conspiratorial insurgency: Bengal, the Bombay presidency, and the Punjab. To combat subversive acts in these regions, the committee recommended that the government use emergency powers akin to its war-time authority, which included the ability to try cases of sedition by a panel of three judges and without juries, exaction of securities from suspects, governmental overseeing of residences of suspects, and the power for provincial governments to arrest and detain suspects in short-term detention facilities and without trial.

With the end of World War I, there was also a change in the economic climate. By year’s end 1919, 1.5 million Indians had served in the armed services in either combatant or non-combatant roles, and India had provided £146 million in revenue for the war. The increased taxes coupled with disruptions in both domestic and international trade had the effect of approximately doubling the index of overall prices in India between 1914 and 1920. Returning war veterans, especially in the Punjab, created a growing unemployment crisis, and post-war inflation led to food riots in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal provinces, a situation that was made only worse by the failure of the 1918-19 monsoon and by profiteering and speculation. The global influenza epidemic and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 added to the general jitters; the former among the population already experiencing economic woes, and the latter among government officials, fearing a similar revolution in India.

To combat what it saw as a coming crisis, the government now drafted the Rowlatt committee's recommendations into two Rowlatt Bills. Although the bills were authorized for legislative consideration by Edwin Montagu, they were done so unwillingly, with the accompanying declaration, “I loathe the suggestion at first sight of preserving the Defence of India Act in peace time to such an extent as Rowlatt and his friends think necessary.” In the ensuing discussion and vote in the Imperial Legislative Council, all Indian members voiced opposition to the bills. The Government of India was, nevertheless, able to use of its "official majority" to ensure passage of the bills early in 1919. However, what it passed, in deference to the Indian opposition, was a lesser version of the first bill, which now allowed extrajudicial powers, but for a period of exactly three years and for the prosecution solely of “anarchical and revolutionary movements,” dropping entirely the second bill involving modification the Indian Penal Code. Even so, when it was passed, the new Rowlatt Act aroused widespread indignation throughout India, and brought Gandhi to the forefront of the nationalist movement.

Meanwhile, Montagu and Chelmsford themselves finally presented their report in July 1918 after a long fact-finding trip through India the previous winter. After more discussion by the government and parliament in Britain, and another tour by the Franchise and Functions Committee for the purpose of identifying who among the Indian population could vote in future elections, the Government of India Act 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was passed in December 1919. The new Act enlarged both the provincial and Imperial legislative councils and repealed the Government of India’s recourse to the “official majority” in unfavorable votes. Although departments like defense, foreign affairs, criminal law, communications, and income-tax were retained by the Viceroy and the central government in New Delhi, other departments like public health, education, land-revenue, local self-government were transferred to the provinces. The provinces themselves were now to be administered under a new dyarchical system, whereby some areas like education, agriculture, infrastructure development, and local self-government became the preserve of Indian ministers and legislatures, and ultimately the Indian electorates, while others like irrigation, land-revenue, police, prisons, and control of media remained within the purview of the British governor and his executive council. The new Act also made it easier for Indians to be admitted into the civil service and the army officer corps.

A greater number of Indians were now enfranchised, although, for voting at the national level, they constituted only 10% of the total adult male population, many of whom were still illiterate. In the provincial legislatures, the British continued to exercise some control by setting aside seats for special interests they considered cooperative or useful. In particular, rural candidates, generally sympathetic to British rule and less confrontational, were assigned more seats than their urban counterparts. Seats were also reserved for non-Brahmins, landowners, businessmen, and college graduates. The principal of “communal representation,” an integral part of the Minto-Morley reforms, and more recently of the Congress-Muslim League Lucknow Pact, was reaffirmed, with seats being reserved for Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, and domiciled Europeans, in both provincial and Imperial legislative councils. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms offered Indians the most significant opportunity yet for exercising legislative power, especially at the provincial level; however, that opportunity was also restricted by the still limited number of eligible voters, by the small budgets available to provincial legislatures, and by the presence of rural and special interest seats that were seen as instruments of British control. Its scope was unsatisfactory to the Indian political leadership, famously expressed by Annie Beasant as something "unworthy of England to offer and India to accept".

Noncooperation, ''Khilafat'', Simon Commission, Jinnah's fourteen points: 1920s

Image:Gandhi besant madras1921.jpg|Mahatma Gandhi with Dr. Annie Besant ''en route'' to a meeting in Madras in September, 1921. Earlier, in Madurai, on September 21, 1921, Gandhi had adopted the loin-cloth for the first time as a symbol of his identification with India's poor. Image:Noncooperation khilafat1921.gif|An early 1920s poster advertising a Congress non-cooperation "Public Meeting" and a "Bonfire of Foreign Clothes" in Bombay, and expressing support for the "Karachi Khilafat Conference." Image:Noncooperation movement1922.jpg|Hindus and Muslims, displaying the flags of both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, collecting clothes to be later burnt as a part of the non-cooperation movement initiated by Gandhi. Image:Bhagat singh noncooperation.jpg|Photograph of the staff and students of the National College, Lahore, founded in 1921 by Lala Lajpat Rai for students preparing for the non-cooperation movement. Standing, fourth from the right, is future revolutionary Bhagat Singh. In 1920, after the British government refused to back down, Gandhi began his campaign of noncooperation, prompting many Indians to return British awards and honours, to resign from civil service, and to again boycott British goods. In addition, Gandhi reorganized the Congress, transforming it into a mass movement and opening its membership to even the poorest Indians. Although Gandhi halted the noncooperation movement in 1922 after the violent incident at Chauri Chaura, the movement revived again, in the mid-1920s.

The visit, in 1928, of the British Simon Commission, charged with instituting constitutional reform in India, resulted in widespread protests throughout the country. Earlier, in 1925, non-violent protests of the Congress had resumed too, this time in Gujarat, and led by Patel, who organized farmers to refuse payment of increased land taxes; the success of this protest, the Bardoli Satyagraha, brought Gandhi back into the fold of active politics.

Communists, Trade Unionists, Revolutionaries: 1920s and early 1930s

Image:Mn roy2.jpg|M. N. Roy. Early associate of Bagha Jatin and later a Marxist revolutionary, office-holder in Comintern, and friend of V. I. Lenin, who called him the "Oriental Marx." Image:Chandrasekhar azad.jpg|Chandrashekhar Azad, who founded the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in the 1920s. Image:Bhagat Singh's execution Lahore Tribune Front page.jpg|Front page of ''The Tribune'', Lahore, announcing Bhagat Singh's execution. Image:Pritilata-waddedar.jpg|Pritilata Waddedar, who along with Surya Sen, participated in the Chittagong Armoury Raid on September 23, 1932.

This period also saw an increase in acts of revolutionary violence, among them the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly building by the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh. His subsequent conviction and execution by the British authorities, fired the popular imagination and attracted many young Indians to nationalist politics.

Image:Iqbal_Allahabad.jpg|Allama Muhammad Iqbal, fifth from left, arriving at the 1930 session of the All India Muslim League, where he delivered his presidential address outlining his plan for a homeland for the Muslims of British India. Image:Salt March.jpg|Mahatma Gandhi at Dandi, April 5, 1930, at the end of the Salt March.

Complete Independence, Muslim Homeland, Salt March: 1929-1931

At midnight on December 31, 1929, during its annual session in Lahore, the Indian National Congress, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, raised the flag of independent India for the first time, and afterwards issued a demand for ''Purna Swaraj'' (Sanskrit: “complete independence”), which Nehru was to later refer to as "a tryst with destiny." The declaration was drafted by the Congress Working Committee, which included Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. Gandhi subsequently led an expanded movement of civil disobedience, culminating in 1930 with the Salt Satyagraha, in which thousands of Indians defied the tax on salt, by marching to the sea and making their own salt by evaporating seawater. Although, many, including Gandhi, were arrested, the British government eventually gave in, and in 1931 Gandhi traveled to London to negotiate new reform at the Round Table Conferences.

Round Table Conferences, Government of India Act (1935), Elections of 1937: 1931-1937

In 1935, after the Round Table Conferences, the British Parliament approved the Government of India Act 1935, which authorized the establishment of independent legislative assemblies in all provinces of British India, the creation of a central government incorporating both the British provinces and the princely states, and the protection of Muslim minorities. The future Constitution of independent India would owe a great deal to the text of this act. The act also provided for a bicameral national parliament and an executive branch under the purview of the British government. Although the national federation was never realized, nationwide elections for provincial assemblies were held in 1937. Despite initial hesitation, the Congress took part in the elections and won victories in seven of the eleven provinces of British India, and Congress governments, with wide powers, were formed in these provinces. In Great Britain, these victories were to later turn the tide for the idea of Indian independence.

Image:Second round tableconf.gif‎|British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to the right of Mahatma Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference in London, October 1931. Fourth from the left in the foreground is Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, representative of the "Depressed Classes."

World War II, Muslim League's Lahore Resolution: 1938-1941

Image:Ncert gandhi tomeet linlithgow1939.jpg|Mahatma Gandhi and Rajendra Prasad (left) on their way to meet the viceroy Lord Linlithgow (October 13, 1939) after the outbreak of World War II. Image:Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman.jpg|Chaudhari Khaliquzzaman (left) seconding the 1940 Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League with Jinnah (right) presiding, and Liaquat Ali Khan centre. File:Newly-arrived Indian troops.jpg|Newly arrived Indian troops on the quayside in Singapore, November 1941 File:Operation Crusader.jpg|Indian Army Sikh personnel in action during the successful Operation Crusader in Western Desert Campaign in North Africa in December 1941. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on India’s behalf without consulting Indian leaders, leading the Congress provincial ministries to resign in protest. The Muslim League, in contrast, supported Britain in the war effort; however, it now took the view that Muslims would be unfairly treated in an independent India dominated by the Congress. On March 24, 1940, on the last day of its three-day general session in Lahore, the League passed, what came to be known as the Lahore Resolution, demanding that, "the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign." Although there were other important national Muslim politicians such as Congress leader Ab'ul Kalam Azad, and influential regional Muslim politicians such as A. K. Fazlul Huq of the leftist Krishak Praja Party in Bengal, Sikander Hyat Khan of the landlord-dominated Punjab Unionist Party, and Abd al-Ghaffar Khan of the pro-Congress Khudai Khidmatgar (popularly, "red shirts") in the North West Frontier Province, the British, over the next six years, were to increasingly see the League as the main representative of Muslim India.

Cripps Mission, Quit India Resolution, INA: 1942-1945

Image:Strafford cripps gandhi 1942.jpg|Sir Stafford Cripps during his negotiations with Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi, March 1942. Image:Womens procession during quit india1942.JPG|Women's procession in Bombay during the Quit India Movement, 1942. File:Monty, wavvel, auk.jpg|Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India (centre), with the C-in-C of the Indian Army Auchinleck (right) and Montgomery of Alamein. File:Bose addressing rally tokyo1945.jpg|Subhas Chandra Bose addressing a rally in Tokyo, 1945. The British government—through its Cripps' mission—attempted to secure Indian nationalists' cooperation in the war effort in exchange for independence afterwards; however, the negotiations between them and the Congress broke down. Gandhi, subsequently, launched the “Quit India” movement in August 1942, demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British from India or face nationwide civil disobedience. Along with all other Congress leaders, Gandhi was immediately imprisoned, and the country erupted in violent demonstrations led by students and later by peasant political groups, especially in Eastern United Provinces, Bihar, and western Bengal. The large war-time British Army presence in India led to most of the movement being crushed in a little more than six weeks; nonetheless, a portion of the movement formed for a time an underground provisional government on the border with Nepal. In other parts of India, the movement was less spontaneous and the protest less intensive, however it lasted sporadically into the summer of 1943.

With Congress leaders in jail, attention also turned to Subhas Bose, who had been ousted from the Congress in 1939 following differences with the more conservative high command; Bose now turned to the Axis powers for help with liberating India by force. With Japanese support, he organised the Indian National Army, composed largely of Indian soldiers of the British Indian army who had been captured at Singapore by the Japanese. From the onset of the war, the Japanese secret service had promoted unrest in South east Asia to destabilise the British war effort, and came to support a number of puppet and provisional governments in the captured regions, including those in Burma, the Philippines and Vietnam, the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India), presided by Bose. Bose's effort, however, was short lived; after the reverses of 1944, the reinforced British Indian Army in 1945 first halted and then reversed the Japanese U Go offensive, beginning the successful part of the Burma Campaign. Bose's Indian National Army surrendered with the recapture of Singapore, and Bose died in a plane crash soon thereafter.

Elections, Cabinet Mission, Direct Action Day: 1946

File:Attlee with GeorgeVI HU 59486.jpg|Clement Attlee, Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, meeting King George VI after Labour's victory in the 1945 British general elections. File:Cabinet mission to india1946.jpg|Members of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India meeting Muhammad Ali Jinnah. On the extreme left is Lord Pethick Lawrence; on the extreme right, Sir Stafford Cripps. File:ZAFAR4.JPG|Khan Sahib Qazi Zafar Hussain, member of the Muslim rural elite of Punjab, who during the 1946 Punjab Provincial Assembly Election, supported Punjab Muslim League. Image:Calcutta 1946 riot.jpg|Dead and wounded after the Direct Action Day which developed into pitched battles as Muslim and Hindu mobs attacked and killed each other across Calcutta in 1946. In January 1946, a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain. The mutinies came to a head with mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, followed by others in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi. Although the mutinies were rapidly suppressed, they had the effect of spurring the new Labour government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick Lawrence, and including Sir Stafford Cripps, who had visited four years before.

Also in early 1946, new elections were called in India. Earlier, at the end of the war in 1945, the colonial government had announced the public trial of three senior officers of Bose's defeated Indian National Army who stood accused of treason. Now as the trials began, the Congress leadership, although ambivalent towards the INA, chose to defend the accused officers. The subsequent convictions of the officers, the public outcry against the convictions, and the eventual remission of the sentences, created positive propaganda for the Congress, which only helped in the party's subsequent electoral victories in eight of the eleven provinces. The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of the partition. Jinnah proclaimed August 16, 1946, Direct Action Day, with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a Muslim homeland in British India. The following day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and quickly spread throughout India. Although the Government of India and the Congress were both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India’s prime minister.

The Plan for Partition: 1947

Image:Hindu percent 1909.jpg |Percentage of Hindus by district. Map of British Indian Empire, 1909. Image:Muslim percent 1909.jpg|Percentage of Muslims by district. Map of British Indian Empire, 1909. Image:India Pakistan1947a.jpg‎|Map of India and Pakistan as envisaged in the Partition Plan Later that year, the Labour government in Britain, its exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, and conscious that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support, nor the reliability of native forces for continuing to control an increasingly restless India, decided to end British rule of India, and in early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948.

As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated. With the British army unprepared for the potential for increased violence, the new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power, allowing less than six months for an mutually agreed plan for independence. In June 1947, the nationalist leaders, including Sardar Patel, Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad on behalf of the Congress, Jinnah representing the Muslim League, B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines in stark opposition to Gandhi's views. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan; the plan included a partition of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal.

Violence, Partition, Independence: 1947

Image:Gandhi bela bihar1947.jpg|Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan consoling victims of communal violence in Bela, Bihar, on March 28, 1947. File:Jinnah oath ceremony.jpg|Muhammad Ali Jinnah (right) taking oath from Justice Sir Mian Abdul Rashid (left) as Governor-General of Pakistan on 14 August 1947

Many million Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu refugees trekked across the newly drawn borders. In Punjab, where the new border lines divided the Sikh regions in half, ghastly bloodshed followed; in Bengal and Bihar, where Gandhi's presence assuaged communal tempers, the violence was more limited. In all, anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people on both sides of the new borders died in the violence. On August 14, 1947, the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor General in Karachi. The following day, August 15, 1947, India, now a smaller ''Union of India'', became an independent country with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru assuming the office of the prime minister, and the viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, staying on as its first Governor General; Gandhi, however, remained in Calcutta, preferring instead to work with the new refugees of the partitioned subcontinent.

Economic impact

According to Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray, India's share of global income slipped from 22.6% in 1700 (nearly equal to that of Europe's of 23.4%) to 3.8% by the time of Indian independence in 1947. In 1780 the conservative British politician Edmund Burke raised the issue of India's position: he vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray (1998) continues this line of attack, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of "plunder" and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India. Ray accuses the British of depleting the food and money stocks and of imposing high taxes that helped cause the terrible famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal.

P. J. Marshall shows that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy. Marshall argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past. The British largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century. Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation. Instead of the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, Marshall presents the interpretation (supported by many scholars in India and the West) that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent cooperation with Indian elites. Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still rejected by many historians.

Famines, epidemics, and public health

According to Angus Maddison, "The British contributed to public health by introducing smallpox vaccination, establishing Western medicine and training modern doctors, by killing rats, and establishing quarantine procedures. As a result, the death rate fell and the population of India grew by 1947 to more than two-and-a- half times its size in 1757."

During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people died. Recent research, including work by Mike Davis and Amartya Sen, attributes most of the effects of these famines to British policy in India.

Having been criticised for the badly bungled relief effort during the Orissa famine of 1866, British authorities began to discuss famine policy soon afterwards, and, in early 1868, Sir William Muir, Lieutenant-Governor of Agra Province, issued a famous order stating that:

"...every District officer would be held personally responsible that no deaths occurred from starvation which could have been avoided by any exertion or arrangement on his part or that of his subordinates."

The first cholera pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. 10,000 British troops and countless Indians died during this pandemic. Deaths in India between 1817 and 1860 are estimated to have exceeded 15 million persons. Another 23 million died between 1865 and 1917. The Third Pandemic of plague started in China in the middle of the 19th century, spreading disease to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone. Waldemar Haffkine, who mainly worked in India, was the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1925, the Plague Laboratory in Bombay was renamed the Haffkine Institute.

Fevers had been considered one of the leading causes of death in India in the 19th century. It was Britain's Sir Ronald Ross working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calcutta who finally proved in 1898 that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes. In 1881, around 120,000 leprosy patients existed in India. The central government passed the Lepers Act of 1898, which provided legal provision for forcible confinement of leprosy sufferers in India. Under the direction of Mountstuart Elphinstone a program was launched to propagate smallpox vaccination. Mass vaccination in India resulted in a major decline in smallpox mortality by the end of the 19th century. In 1849 nearly 13% of all Calcutta deaths were due to smallpox. Between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths from smallpox.

Sir Robert Grant directed his attention to the expediency of establishing a systematic institution in the Bombay for imparting medical knowledge to the natives. In 1860, Grant Medical College became one of the four recognised colleges for teaching courses leading to degrees (others being Elphinstone College, Deccan College and Government Law College, Mumbai).

See also

Delhi Durbar

Imperialism in Asia

Colonialism

British Empire

India Office

Colonial India

Historiography of the British Empire

Indian independence movement

List of Indian Princely States

List of Indian Federal Legislation

Governor-General of India

Commander-in-Chief of India

British Indian Army

Indian Civil Service

Order of the Indian Empire

Anglo-Indian

Anglo-Burmese people

Macaulayism

Notes

References and further reading

Contemporary general textbooks

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Monographs and collections

. . . . .

Gilmartin, David. 1988. ''Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan''. Berkeley: University of California Press. 258 pages. ISBN 978-0-520-06249-8.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Articles in journals or collections

.

Classic histories and gazetteers

. .

Tertiary sources

. Archived 2009-10-31. .

Related reading

Bairoch, Paul, ''Economics and World History'', University of Chicago Press, 1995

Bhatia, B. M., ''Famines in India: A study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special Reference to Food Problem'', Delhi: Konark Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 1985

Bosma, Ulbe: ''Emigration: Colonial circuits between Europe and Asia in the 19th and early 20th century'', European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: May 23, 2011.

Bowle, John, ''The Imperial Achievement'', Secker & Warburg, London, 1974, ISBN 978-0-316-10409-8

Chapman, Pat ''Taste of the Raj'', Hodder & Stoughton, London—ISBN 978-0-340-68035-3 (1997)

Coates, Tim, (series editor), ''The Amritsar Massacre 1919 - General Dyer in the Punjab'' (Official Reports, including Dyer's Testimonies), Her Majesty's Stationary Office (HMSO) 1925, abridged edition, 2000, ISBN 978-0-11-702412-0

Davis, Mike, ''Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World'' 2001, ISBN 978-1-85984-739-8

Masood Ashraf Raja. ''Constructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim National Identity'', 1857–1947, Oxford 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-547811-2

Dutt, Romesh C. ''Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India'', first published 1900, 2005 edition by Adamant Media Corporation, Elibron Classics Series, ISBN 978-1-4021-5115-6

Dutt, Romesh C. ''The Economic History of India under early British Rule'', first published 1902, 2001 edition by Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-24493-0

Forbes, Rosita, ''India of the Princes', London, 1939

Forrest, G. W., CIE, (editor), ''Selections from The State Papers of the Governors-General of India - Warren Hastings'' (2 vols), Blackwell's, Oxford, 1910

James, Lawrence, ''Raj - The Making and Unmaking of British India'', London, 1997, ISBN 978-0-316-64072-5

Keay, John, ''The Honourable Company - A History of the English East India Company'', HarperCollins, London, 1991, ISBN 0-00-217515-0

Moorhouse, Geoffrey, ''India Britannica'', Book Club Associates, UK, 1983

Morris, Jan with Simon Winchester, ''Stones of Empire - The Buildings of the Raj'', Oxford University Press, 1st edition 1983 (paperback edition 1986, ISBN 978-0-19-282036-5

Sen, Amartya, ''Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation'', Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982

Srivastava, H.C., ''The History of Indian Famines from 1858-1918'', Sri Ram Mehra and Co., Agra, 1968

Voelcker, John Augustus, ''Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture'', Indian Government publication, Calcutta, 2nd edition, 1897.

Woodroffe, Sir John, ''Is India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture'', Madras, 1919.

Category:British rule in India

ar:الهند البريطانية bn:ব্রিটিশ ভারত be-x-old:Брытанская Індыя bg:Британска Индия ca:Raj Britànic cs:Britská Indie da:Britisk Indien de:Britisch-Indien es:Raj británico eo:Brita Hindio eu:Britainiar Raj fr:Raj britannique ga:Réimeas Briotanach gl:Raj Británico ko:영국령 인도 제국 hi:ब्रिटिश राज hr:Britanska Indija id:Kemaharajaan Britania it:Raj Britannico sw:Uhindi ya Kiingereza lt:Britų Indija hu:Brit-India ml:ബ്രിട്ടീഷ് രാജ് mr:ब्रिटिश भारत ms:Raj British nl:Brits-Indië ne:ब्रिटिश राज ja:イギリス領インド帝国 no:Britisk India nn:Britisk India pnb:انونڈئیا ہندستان pl:Indie Brytyjskie pt:Índia britânica ro:India Britanică ru:Британская Индия simple:British Raj sk:Britská India sr:Британска Индија fi:Brittiläinen Intia sv:Brittiska Indien ta:பிரித்தானியாவின் இந்தியப் பேரரசு tt:Британия Һиндстаны th:บริติชราช tr:Britanya Hindistanı uk:Британська Індія ur:برطانوی راج vi:Raj thuộc Anh fiu-vro:Briti India wuu:英属印度 zh:英属印度

native name	中华人民共和国''Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó''
conventional long name	People's Republic of China
common name	the People's Republic of China
image coat	National Emblem of the People's Republic of China.svg
symbol type	National Emblem
map width	220px
national anthem	File:March of the Volunteers instrumental.ogg"March of the Volunteers"《义勇军进行曲》 (Pinyin: "Yìyǒngjūn Jìnxíngqǔ")
official languages	{{nobr|Modern Standard Mandarin(or Putonghua)}}

| languages_type = Official written language | languages = Vernacular Chinese | languages_sub = yes | languages2_type = Official script | languages2 = Simplified Chinese | languages2_sub = yes | regional_languages = Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Zhuang, and various others | ethnic_groups = 91.51% Han; 55 recognised minorities | capital = Beijing | latd=39 |latm=55 |latNS=N |longd=116 |longm=23 |longEW=E | largest_city = Shanghai | demonym = Chinese | government_type = Nominally Marxist–Leninist single-party state | leader_title1 = President | leader_name1 = Hu Jintao | leader_title2 = Premier | leader_name2 = Wen Jiabao | leader_title3 = General Secretary | leader_name3 = Hu Jintao | leader_title4 = Congress Chairman | leader_name4 = Wu Bangguo | leader_title5 = Conference Chairman | leader_name5 = Jia Qinglin | legislature = National People's Congress | sovereignty_type = Establishment | established_event1 = Unification of China under the Qin Dynasty | established_date1 = 221 BC | established_event2 = Republic established | established_date2 = 1 January 1912 | established_event3 = People's Republic of China proclaimed | established_date3 = 1 October 1949 | area_footnote = or 9,671,018 km² | area_km2 = 9,640,821 | area_sq_mi = 3704427 | area_rank = 3rd/4th | area_magnitude = 1 E12 | percent_water = 2.8 | population_census = 1,339,724,852 | population_census_year = 2010 | population_census_rank = 1st | pop_den_footnote = | population_density_km2 = 139.6 | population_density_sq_mi = 363.3 | population_density_rank = 53rd | GDP_nominal = $6.988 trillion | GDP_nominal_rank = 2nd | GDP_nominal_year = 2011 | GDP_nominal_per_capita = $5,184 | GDP_nominal_per_capita_rank = 90th | GDP_PPP_year = 2011 | GDP_PPP = $11.316 trillion | GDP_PPP_rank = 2nd | GDP_PPP_per_capita = $8,394 | GDP_PPP_per_capita_rank = 91st | Gini = 41.5 | Gini_year = 2007 | HDI_year = 2011 | HDI = 0.687 | HDI_rank = 101st | HDI_category = medium | currency = Renminbi (yuan) (¥) | currency_code = CNY | time_zone = China Standard Time | utc_offset = +8 | date_format = yyyy-mm-dd ''or'' yyyymd (CE; CE-1949) | drives_on = right, except for Hong Kong & Macau | cctld = .cn .中國 .中国 | calling_code = +86 | footnotes = a. Simple characterizations of the political structure since the 1980s are no longer possible.

b. Since its founding, the most important position in the PRC has been that of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (as Chairman before 1982). The Communist party and its leader hold ultimate power and authority over state and government.

c. excludes all disputed territories. Includes Chinese-administered area (Aksai Chin and Trans-Karakoram Tract, both territories claimed by India), Taiwan is not included. d. Information for mainland China only. Hong Kong, Macau, and territories under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China (Taiwan) are excluded. }}

China (; ; see also Names of China), officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is the most populous state in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles). It is the world's second-largest country by land area, and the third- or fourth-largest in total area, depending on the definition of total area.

The People's Republic of China is a single-party state governed by the Communist Party of China. It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four directly controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (SARs), Hong Kong and Macau. Its capital city is Beijing. The PRC also claims the island of Taiwan, which is controlled by the government of the Republic of China, as its 23rd province, a claim controversial due to the complex political status of Taiwan and the unresolved Chinese Civil War.

China’s landscape is vast and diverse, with forest steppes and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts occupying the arid north and northwest near Mongolia and Central Asia, and subtropical forests being prevalent in the wetter south near Southeast Asia. The terrain of western China is rugged and elevated, with the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separating China from South and Central Asia. The world’s apex, Mt. Everest (8,848 m), lies on the China-Nepal border, while the world's second-highest point, K2 (8,611 m), is situated on China's border with Pakistan. The country’s lowest and the world’s third-lowest point, Lake Ayding (-154 m), is located in the Turpan Depression. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, have their sources in the Tibetan Plateau and continue to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China’s coastline along the Pacific Ocean is long (the 11th-longest in the world), and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East and South China Seas.

The ancient Chinese civilization—one of the world's earliest—flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, known as dynasties, beginning with the semi-mythological Xia of the Yellow River basin (approx. 2000 BC) and ending with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912. Since 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty first conquered several states to form a Chinese empire, the country has fractured and been reformed numerous times. The Republic of China (ROC), founded in 1912 after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949. In the 1946–1949 phase of the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) on the mainland and established the People's Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The Kuomintang relocated the ROC government to Taiwan, establishing its capital in Taipei. The ROC's jurisdiction is now limited to Taiwan and several outlying islands, including Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (now widely known as "Taiwan") have remained in dispute over the sovereignty of China and the political status of Taiwan, mutually claiming each other's territory and competing for international diplomatic recognition. In 1971, the PRC gained admission to United Nations and took the Chinese seat as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the G-20. As of September 2011, all but 23 countries have recognized the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China.

Since the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1978, China has become the world's fastest-growing major economy. As of 2012, it is the world's second-largest economy, after the United States, by both nominal GDP and purchasing power parity (PPP), and is also the world's largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. On per capita terms, China ranked 90th by nominal GDP and 91st by GDP (PPP) in 2011, according to the IMF. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army, with the second-largest defense budget. In 2003, China became the third nation in the world, after the former Soviet Union and the United States, to independently launch a successful manned space mission. China has been characterized as a potential superpower by a number of academics, military analysts, and public policy and economics analysts.

Etymology

| zha=Cunghvaz Yinzminz Gunghozgoz | order=st }} The word "China" is derived from ''Cin'' (چین), a Persian name for China popularized in Europe by the account of the 13th-century explorer Marco Polo. The first recorded use in English dates from 1555. The Persian word is, in turn, derived from the Sanskrit word ''Cīna'' (चीन), which was used as a name for China as early as AD 150. There are various scholarly theories regarding the origin of this word. The traditional theory, proposed in the 17th century by Martino Martini, is that "China" is derived from "Qin" (), the westernmost of the Chinese kingdoms during the Zhou Dynasty, or from the succeeding Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). The word ''Cīna'' is used in two Hindu scriptures – the ''Mahābhārata'' of the 5th century BC and the ''Laws of Manu'' of the 2nd century BC – to refer to a country located in the Tibetan-Burman borderlands east of India.

In China, common names for the country include ''Zhōngguó'' () and ''Zhōnghuá'' (), although the country's official name has been changed numerous times by successive dynasties and modern governments. The term ''Zhongguo'' appeared in various ancient texts, such as the ''Classic of History'' of the 6th century BC, and in pre-imperial times it was often used as a cultural concept to distinguish the ''Huaxia'' from the barbarians. Sometimes ''Zhongguo'', which can be either singular or plural, referring to the group of states in the central plain. The Chinese were not unique in regarding their country as "central", since other civilizations had the same view.

History

Prehistory

Archaeological evidence suggests that early hominids inhabited China between 250,000 and 2.24 million years ago. A cave in Zhoukoudian (near present-day Beijing) exhibits fossils dated at between 300,000 and 780,000 BC. The fossils are of Peking Man, an example of ''Homo erectus'' who used fire.

The earliest evidence of a fully modern human in China comes from Liujiang County, Guangxi, where a cranium has been found and dated at approximately 67,000 years old. Controversy persists over the dating of the Liujiang remains (a partial skeleton from Minatogawa in Okinawa).

Early dynastic rule

Chinese tradition names the first dynasty Xia, but it was considered mythical until scientific excavations found early Bronze Age sites at Erlitou in Henan Province in 1959. Archaeologists have since uncovered urban sites, bronze implements, and tombs in locations cited as Xia's in ancient historical texts, but it is impossible to verify that these remains are of the Xia without written records from the period.

The first Chinese dynasty that left historical records, the loosely feudal Shang (Yin), settled along the Yellow River in eastern China from the 17th to the 11th century BC. The oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty represent the oldest forms of Chinese writing found and the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters used throughout East Asia. The Shang were invaded from the west by the Zhou, who ruled from the 12th to the 5th century BC, until their centralized authority was slowly eroded by feudal warlords. Many independent states eventually emerged out of the weakened Zhou state, and continually waged war with each other in the Spring and Autumn Period, only occasionally deferring to the Zhou king. By the time of the Warring States Period, there were seven powerful sovereign states, each with its own king, ministry and army.

Imperial China

The first unified Chinese state was established by Qin Shi Huang of the Qin state in 221 BC. Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the "First Emperor" (始皇帝), and imposed many reforms throughout China, notably the forced standardization of the Chinese language, measurements, length of cart axles, and currency. The Qin Dynasty lasted only fifteen years, falling soon after Qin Shi Huang's death, as its harsh legalist and authoritarian policies led to widespread rebellion.

The subsequent Han Dynasty ruled China between 206 BC and 220 AD, and created a lasting Han cultural identity among its populace that extends to the present day. The Han Dynasty expanded the empire's territory considerably with military campaigns reaching Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia and Central Asia, and also helped establish the Silk Road in Central Asia. China was for a large part of the last two millennia the world's largest economy. However, in the later part of the Qing Dynasty, China's economic development began to slow and Europe's rapid development during and after the Industrial Revolution enabled it to surpass China.

After the collapse of Han, another period of disunion followed, including the highly chivalric period of the Three Kingdoms. Independent Chinese states of this period such as Wu opened diplomatic relations with Japan, introducing the Chinese writing system there. In 580 AD, China was reunited under the Sui. However, the Sui Dynasty was short-lived after a failure in the Goguryeo-Sui Wars (598–614) weakened it.

Under the succeeding Tang and Song dynasties, Chinese technology and culture reached its zenith. The Tang Empire was at its height of power until the middle of the 8th century, when the An Shi Rebellion destroyed the prosperity of the empire. The Song Dynasty was the first government in world history to issue paper money and the first Chinese polity to establish a permanent standing navy. Between the 10th and 11th centuries, the population of China doubled in size. This growth came about through expanded rice cultivation in central and southern China, and the production of abundant food surpluses.

Within its borders, the Northern Song Dynasty had a population of some 100 million people. The Song Dynasty was a culturally rich period for philosophy and the arts. Landscape art and portrait painting were brought to new levels of maturity and complexity after the Tang Dynasty, and social elites gathered to view art, share their own, and trade precious artworks. Philosophers such as Cheng Yi and Chu Hsi reinvigorated Confucianism with new commentary, infused Buddhist ideals, and emphasized a new organization of classic texts that brought about the core doctrine of Neo-Confucianism. In 1271, the Mongol leader and fifth Khagan of the Mongol Empire Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty, with the last remnant of the Song Dynasty falling to the Yuan in 1279. Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people.

Late dynastic rule

A peasant named Zhu Yuanzhang overthrew the Yuan Dynasty in 1368 and founded the Ming Dynasty. Ming Dynasty thinkers such as Wang Yangming would further critique and expand Neo-Confucianism with ideas of individualism and innate morality that would have tremendous impact on later Japanese thought. Chosun Korea also became a nominal vassal state of Ming China and adopted much of its Neo-Confucian bureaucratic structure.

Under the Ming Dynasty, China had another golden age, with one of the strongest navies in the world, a rich and prosperous economy and a flourishing of the arts and culture. It was during this period that Zheng He led explorations throughout the world, possibly reaching America. During the early Ming Dynasty China's capital was moved from Nanjing to Beijing. In 1644 Beijing was sacked by a coalition of rebel forces led by Li Zicheng, a minor Ming official turned leader of the peasant revolt. The last Ming Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide when the city fell. The Manchu Qing Dynasty then allied with Ming Dynasty general Wu Sangui and overthrew Li's short-lived Shun Dynasty, and subsequently seized control of Beijing, which became the new capital of the Qing Dynasty.

The Qing Dynasty, which lasted until 1912, was the last dynasty in China. In the 19th century the Qing Dynasty adopted a defensive posture towards European imperialism, even though it engaged in imperialistic expansion into Central Asia. At this time China awoke to the significance of the rest of the world, the West in particular. As China opened up to foreign trade and missionary activity, opium produced by British India was forced onto Qing China. Two Opium Wars with Britain weakened the Emperor's control. European imperialism proved to be disastrous for China:''

''The Arrow War (1856–1860) [2nd Opium War] saw another disastrous defeat for China. The subsequent passing of the humiliating Treaty of Tianjin in 1856 and the Beijing Conventions of 1860 opened up more of the country to foreign penetrations and more ports for their vessels. Hong Kong was ceded over to the British. Thus, the "unequal treaties system" was established. Heavy indemnities had to be paid by China, and more territory and control were taken over by the foreigners.''

The weakening of the Qing regime, and the apparent humiliation of the unequal treaties in the eyes of the Chinese people had several consequences. One consequence was the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war which lasted from 1851 to 1862. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, who was partly influenced by an idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity. Hong believed himself to be the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus. Although the Qing forces were eventually victorious, the civil war was one of the bloodiest in human history, costing at least 20 million lives (more than the total number of fatalities in World War I), with some estimates of up to two hundred million. Other costly rebellions followed the Taiping Rebellion, such as the Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855–67), Nien Rebellion (1851–1868), Miao Rebellion (1854–73), Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873) and the Dungan revolt (1862–1877). These rebellions resulted in an estimated loss of several million lives each and led to disastrous results for the economy and the countryside. The flow of British opium hastened the empire's decline. In the 19th century, the age of colonialism was at its height and the great Chinese Diaspora began. About 35 million overseas Chinese live in Southeast Asia today. The famine in 1876–79 claimed between 9 and 13 million lives in northern China. From 108 BC to 1911 AD, China experienced 1,828 famines, or one per year, somewhere in the empire.

While China was wracked by continuous war, Meiji Japan succeeded in rapidly modernizing its military and set its sights on Korea and Manchuria. At the request of the Korean emperor, the Chinese government sent troops to aid in suppressing the Tonghak Rebellion in 1894. However, Japan also sent troops to Korea, leading to the First Sino-Japanese War, which resulted in Qing China's loss of influence in the Korean Peninsula as well as the cession of Taiwan to Japan.

Following this series of defeats, a reform plan for the empire to become a modern Meiji-style constitutional monarchy was drafted by the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, but was opposed and stopped by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who placed Emperor Guangxu under house arrest in a coup d'état. Further destruction followed the ill-fated 1900 Boxer Rebellion against westerners in Beijing.

By the early 20th century, mass civil disorder had begun, and calls for reform and revolution were heard across the country. The 38-year-old Emperor Guangxu died under house arrest on 14 November 1908, suspiciously just a day before Cixi's own death. With the throne empty, he was succeeded by Cixi's handpicked heir, his two year old nephew Puyi, who became the Xuantong Emperor. Guangxu's consort became the Empress Dowager Longyu. In another coup de'tat, Yuan Shikai overthrew the last Qing emperor, and forced empress Dowager Longyu to sign the abdication decree as regent in 1912, ending two thousand years of imperial rule in China. She died, childless, in 1913.

Republic of China (1912–1949)

On 1 January 1912, the Republic of China was established, heralding the end of the Qing Dynasty. Sun Yat-sen of the Kuomintang (the KMT or Nationalist Party) was proclaimed provisional president of the republic. However, the presidency was later given to Yuan Shikai, a former Qing general, who had ensured the defection of the entire Beiyang Army from the Qing Empire to the revolution. In 1915, Yuan proclaimed himself Emperor of China but was forced to abdicate and return the state to a republic when he realized it was an unpopular move, not only with the population but also with his own Beiyang Army and its commanders.

After Yuan Shikai's death in 1916, China was politically fragmented, with an internationally recognized but virtually powerless national government seated in Beijing. Warlords in various regions exercised actual control over their respective territories. In the late 1920s, the Kuomintang, under Chiang Kai-shek, was able to reunify the country under its own control with a military campaign and deft political maneuverings known as the "Northern Expedition". The Kuomintang moved the nation's capital to Nanjing and implemented "political tutelage", an intermediate stage of political development outlined in Sun Yat-sen's program for transforming China into a modern, democratic state. Sun had outlined this program with his "San Min Zhu Yi" Doctrine. Effectively, political tutelage meant one-party rule by the Kuomintang, but the party was politically divided into competing cliques. This political division made it difficult for Chiang to battle the Communists, which the Kuomintang had been warring against since 1927 in the Chinese Civil War. This war continued successfully for the Kuomintang, especially after the Communists were forced to retreat in the Long March, until the Xi'an Incident and Japanese aggression forced Chiang to confront Imperial Japan.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) (part of World War II) forced an uneasy alliance between the Nationalists and the Communists as well as causing around 20 million Chinese civilian deaths. The Japanese "three-all policy" in north China—''"kill all, burn all and destroy all"'', was one example of wartime atrocities committed on a civilian population. With the surrender of Japan in 1945, China emerged victorious but financially drained. The continued distrust between the Nationalists and the Communists led to the resumption of the Chinese Civil War. In 1947, constitutional rule was established, but because of the ongoing Civil War many provisions of the ROC constitution were never implemented in mainland China.

1949 to present

Major combat in the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949 with the Communist Party of China in control of mainland China, and the Kuomintang (KMT) retreating to Taiwan, reducing the ROC's territory to only Taiwan, Hainan, and their surrounding islands. On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. "Communist China" and "Red China" were two common names for the PRC. In 1950, the Chinese Red Army – newly renamed the People's Liberation Army – succeeded in capturing Hainan from the Republic of China, occupying Tibet, and defeating the majority of the remaining Kuomintang forces in Yunnan and Xinjiang provinces, though some Kuomintang holdouts survived until much later.

Mao encouraged population growth, and under his leadership China's population almost doubled from around 550 million to over 900 million. However, the economic and social plan known as the Great Leap Forward resulted in an estimated 45 million deaths, mostly from starvation. In 1966, Mao and his allies launched the Cultural Revolution, which would last until Mao's death a decade later. The Cultural Revolution, motivated by power struggles within the Party and a fear of the Soviet Union, led to a major upheaval in Chinese society. In 1972, at the peak of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao and Zhou Enlai met Richard Nixon in Beijing to establish relations with the United States. In the same year, the PRC was admitted to the United Nations in place of the Republic of China for China's membership of the United Nations, and permanent membership of the Security Council.

After Mao's death in 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four, blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping quickly wrested power from Mao's anointed successor Hua Guofeng. Although he never became the head of the party or state himself, Deng was in fact the Paramount Leader of China at that time, his influence within the Party led the country to significant economic reforms. The Communist Party subsequently loosened governmental control over citizens' personal lives and the communes were disbanded with many peasants receiving multiple land leases, which greatly increased incentives and agricultural production. This turn of events marked China's transition from a planned economy to a mixed economy with an increasingly open market environment, a system termed by some "market socialism"; the Communist Party of China officially describes it as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The PRC adopted its current constitution on 4 December 1982.

The death of pro-reform official Hu Yaobang helped to spark the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, during which students and others campaigned for several months, speaking out against corruption and in favour of greater political reform, including democratic rights and freedom of speech. However, they were eventually put down on 4 June when PLA troops and vehicles entered and forcibly cleared the square, resulting in numerous casualties. This event was widely reported and brought worldwide condemnation and sanctions against the government. The "Tank Man" incident in particular became famous. President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, both former mayors of Shanghai, led the nation in the 1990s. Under Jiang and Zhu's ten years of administration, China's economic performance pulled an estimated 150 million peasants out of poverty and sustained an average annual gross domestic product growth rate of 11.2%. The country formally joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Although China's economic growth has made it the world's second-largest economy, the government has begun to worry that rapid economic growth has negatively impacted the country's resources and environment. Another concern is that certain sectors of society are not sufficiently benefiting from the PRC's economic development; one example of this is the wide gap between urban and rural areas. As a result, under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, the PRC initiated policies to address these issues of equitable distribution of resources, though the outcome remains to be seen. More than 40 million farmers have been displaced from their land, usually for economic development, contributing to the 87,000 demonstrations and riots across China in 2005. For much of the PRC's population, living standards have seen extremely large improvements, and freedom continues to expand, but political controls remain tight and rural areas poor.

Geography

Political geography

The People's Republic of China is the second-largest country in the world by land area after Russia and is either the third- or fourth-largest by total area, after Russia, Canada and, depending on the definition of total area, the United States. China's total area is generally stated as being approximately . Specific area figures range from according to the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', according to the UN Demographic Yearbook, to according to the CIA World Factbook, and including Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract, which are controlled by China and claimed by India. None of these figures include the of territory ceded to China by Tajikistan following the ratification of a Sino-Tajik border agreement in January 2011.

According to the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', the total area of the United States, at , is slightly smaller than that of China. Meanwhile, the CIA World Factbook states that China's total area was greater than that of the United States until the coastal waters of the Great Lakes was added to the United States' total area in 1996.

China has the longest combined land border in the world, measuring from the mouth of the Yalu River to the Gulf of Tonkin. China borders 14 nations, more than any other country except Russia, which also borders 14. China extends across much of East Asia, bordering Vietnam, Laos, and Burma in Southeast Asia; India, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan in South Asia; Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia; a small section of Russian Altai and Mongolia in Inner Asia; and the Russian Far East and North Korea in Northeast Asia.

Additionally, China shares maritime boundaries with South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. The PRC and the Republic of China (Taiwan) make mutual claims over each other's territority and the frontier between areas under their respective control is closest near the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, off the Fujian coast, but otherwise run through the Taiwan Strait. The PRC and ROC assert identical claims over the entirety of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and the southern-most extent of these claims reach ''Zengmu Ansha'' (James Shoal), which would form a maritime frontier with Malaysia.

Landscape and climate

The territory of China lies between latitudes 18° and 54° N, and longitudes 73° and 135° E. The country's vast size gives it a wide variety of landscapes. In the east, along the shores of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, there are extensive and densely populated alluvial plains, while on the edges of the Inner Mongolian plateau in the north, broad grasslands are visible. Southern China is dominated by hill country and low mountain ranges, while the central-east hosts the deltas of China's two major rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. Other major rivers include the Xi, Mekong, Brahmaputra and Amur. To the west, major mountain ranges, most notably the Himalayas, and high plateaus feature among the more arid landscapes of the north, such as the Taklamakan and the Gobi Desert. China's highest point, Mt. Everest (8848m), lies on the Sino-Nepalese border. The country's lowest point is the dried lake bed of Ayding Lake (-154m) in the Turpan Depression.

A major environmental issue in China is the continued expansion of its deserts, particularly the Gobi Desert, which is currently the world's fifth-largest desert. Although barrier tree lines planted since the 1970s have reduced the frequency of sandstorms, prolonged drought and poor agricultural practices have resulted in dust storms plaguing northern China each spring, which then spread to other parts of East Asia, including Korea and Japan. According to China's environmental watchdog, Sepa, China is losing a million acres (4,000 km²) per year to desertification. Water quality, erosion, and pollution control have become important issues in China's relations with other countries. Melting glaciers in the Himalayas could potentially lead to water shortages for hundreds of millions of people.

China's climate is mainly dominated by dry seasons and wet monsoons, which lead to a pronounced temperature differences between winter and summer. In the winter, northern winds coming from high-latitude areas are cold and dry; in summer, southern winds from coastal areas at lower latitudes are warm and moist. The climate in China differs from region to region because of the country's extensive and complex topography.

Biodiversity

China is one of 17 megadiverse countries, lying in two of the world's major ecozones: the Palearctic and the Indomalaya. In the Palearctic zone, mammals such as the horse, camel, tapir, and jerboa can be found. Among the species found in the Indomalaya region are the Leopard Cat, bamboo rat, treeshrew, and various monkey and ape species. Some overlap exists between the two regions due to natural dispersal and migration; deer, antelope, bears, wolves, pigs, and numerous rodent species can all be found in China's diverse climatic and geological environments. The famous giant panda is found only in a limited area along the Yangtze River. China suffers from a continuing problem with trade in endangered species, although there are now laws to prohibit such activities.

China also hosts a variety of forest types. Cold coniferous forests predominate in the north of the country, supporting animal species such as moose and the Asian black bear, along with over 120 bird species. Moist conifer forests can have thickets of bamboo as an understorey, replaced by rhododendrons in higher montane stands of juniper and yew. Subtropical forests, which dominate central and southern China, support as many as 146,000 species of flora. Tropical and seasonal rainforests, though confined to Yunnan and Hainan Island, contain a quarter of all the plant and animal species found in China.

Environment

In recent decades, China has suffered from severe environmental deterioration and pollution. While regulations such as the 1979 Environmental Protection Law are fairly stringent, enforcement of them is poor, as they are frequently disregarded by local communities and government officials in favour of rapid economic development.

Environmental campaigners such as Ma Jun have warned of the danger that water pollution poses to Chinese society. According to the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources, roughly 300 million Chinese do not have access to safe drinking water, and 40% of China’s rivers have been polluted by industrial and agricultural waste as of late 2011. This crisis is compounded by the perennial problem of water shortages, with 400 out of 600 surveyed Chinese cities reportedly short of drinking water.

However, China is the world's leading investor in renewable energy technologies, with $34.6 billion invested in 2009 alone. China produces more wind turbines and solar panels than any other country, and renewable energy projects, such as solar water heating, are widely pursued at the local level. By 2009, over 17% of China's energy was derived from renewable sources – most notably hydroelectric power plants, of which China has a total installed capacity of 197 GW. In 2011, the Chinese government announced plans to invest four trillion yuan (US$618.55 billion) in water infrastructure projects over a ten-year period, and to complete construction of a flood prevention and anti-drought system by 2020.

Politics

The PRC is regarded by several political scientists as one of the world's five remaining Communist states (along with Vietnam, North Korea, Laos, and Cuba), but simple characterizations of PRC's political structure since the 1980s are no longer possible. The PRC government has been variously described as communist and socialist, but also as authoritarian, with heavy restrictions remaining in many areas, most notably on the Internet, the press, freedom of assembly, reproductive rights, and freedom of religion. Its current political/economic system has been termed by its leaders as "Socialism with Chinese characteristics".

Compared to its closed-door policies until the mid-1970s, the liberalization of the PRC has resulted in the administrative climate being less restrictive than before. The PRC is far different from liberal democracy or social democracy that exists in most of Europe or North America, and the National People's Congress (highest state body) has been described as a "rubber stamp" body. The PRC's incumbent President is Hu Jintao, who is also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, and its Premier is Wen Jiabao, who is also a senior member of the CPC Politburo Standing Committee.

The country is ruled by the Communist Party of China (CPC), whose power is enshrined in China's constitution. The political system is partly decentralized, with limited democratic processes internal to the party and at local village levels, although these experiments have been marred by corruption. There are other political parties in the PRC, referred to in China as democratic parties, which participate in the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

There have been some moves toward political liberalization, in that open contested elections are now held at the village and town levels, and that legislatures have shown some assertiveness from time to time. However, the Party retains effective control over government appointments: in the absence of meaningful opposition, the CPC wins by default most of the time. Political concerns in the PRC include lessening the growing gap between rich and poor and fighting corruption within the government leadership.

The level of support to the government action and the management of the nation is among the highest in the world, with 86% of people who express satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation's economy according to a 2008 Pew Research Center survey.

Administrative divisions

The People's Republic of China has administrative control over 22 provinces, and considers Taiwan to be its 23rd province, although Taiwan is currently governed by the Republic of China, which disputes the PRC's claim. The PRC also has five autonomous regions, each with a designated minority group; four municipalities; and two Special Administrative Regions (SARs), which enjoy a degree of political autonomy. These 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, and four municipalities can be collectively referred to as "mainland China", a term which usually excludes the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau.

Foreign relations

The PRC has diplomatic relations with 171 countries and maintains embassies in 162. Its legitimacy is disputed by the Republic of China and a few other countries; it is thus the largest and wealthiest state with limited recognition. Sweden was the first western country to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic on 9 May 1950. In 1971, the PRC replaced the Republic of China as the sole representative of China in the United Nations and as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The PRC was also a former member and leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and still considers itself an advocate for developing countries.

Under its interpretation of the One-China policy, the PRC has made it a precondition to establishing diplomatic relations that the other country acknowledges its claim to Taiwan and severs official ties with the government of the Republic of China. PRC officials have protested on numerous occasions when foreign countries have made diplomatic overtures to Taiwan, especially in the matter of armament sales. Political meetings between foreign government officials and the 14th Dalai Lama are also opposed by the PRC, as it considers Tibet to be formally part of China.

Much of China's current foreign policy is reportedly based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence of Zhou Enlai—non-interference in other states' affairs, non-aggression, peaceful coexistence, equality and mutual benefits. China's foreign policy is also driven by the concept of "harmony without uniformity", which encourages diplomatic relations between states despite ideological differences. This policy has led China to support states that are regarded as dangerous or repressive by Western nations, such as Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Iran. Conflicts with foreign countries have occurred at times in China's recent history, particularly with the United States; for example, the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict in May 1999 and the US-China spy plane incident in April 2001. The PRC's foreign relations with many Western nations suffered for a time following the military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, although in recent years China has improved its diplomatic links with the West.

Trade relations

In recent decades, the PRC has played an increasing role in calling for free trade areas and security pacts amongst its Asia-Pacific neighbors. In 2004, the PRC proposed an entirely new East Asia Summit (EAS) framework as a forum for regional security issues, pointedly excluding the United States. The EAS, which includes ASEAN Plus Three, India, Australia and New Zealand, held its inaugural summit in 2005. The PRC is also a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), along with Russia and the Central Asian republics.

In 2000, the U.S. Congress approved "permanent normal trade relations" (PNTR) with China, allowing Chinese exports in at the same low tariffs as goods from most other countries. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush asserted that free trade would gradually open China to democratic reform. Bush was furthermore an advocate of China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). China has a significant trade surplus with the United States, its most important export market. In the early 2010s, U.S. politicians argued that the Chinese yuan was significantly undervalued, giving China an unfair trade advantage.

Sinophobic attitudes often target Chinese minorities and nationals living outside of China. Sometimes, such anti-Chinese attitudes turn violent, as occurred during the 13 May Incident in Malaysia in 1969 and the Jakarta riots of May 1998 in Indonesia, in which more than 2,000 people died. In recent years, a number of anti-Chinese riots and incidents have also occurred in Africa and Oceania. Anti-Chinese sentiment is often rooted in socio-economics.

Sino-Japanese relations

The relationship between China and Japan has been strained at times by Japan's perceived refusal to acknowledge its wartime past to the satisfaction of the PRC. Revisionist comments made by prominent Japanese officials and some Japanese history textbooks regarding the 1937 Rape of Nanking have been a focus of particular controversy. Sino-Japanese relations warmed considerably after Shinzo Abe became the Prime Minister of Japan in September 2006, and a joint historical study conducted by the PRC and Japan released a report in 2010 which pointed toward a new consensus on the issue of World War 2-era atrocities. However, in the early 2010s, relations cooled once more, with Japan accusing China of withholding its reserves of valuable rare earth elements.

Territorial disputes

China has been involved in a number of international territorial disputes, mostly resulting from the legacy of unequal treaties imposed on China during the historical period of New Imperialism. Since the 1990s, the PRC has been entering negotiations to resolve its disputed land borders, usually by offering concessions and accepting less than half of the disputed territory with each party. The PRC's only remaining land border disputes are a disputed border with India and an undefined border with Bhutan. China is additionally involved in more minor multilateral disputes over the ownership of several small islands in the East and South China Seas.

China and the developing world

China is heavily engaged, both politically and economically, with numerous nations in the developing world. Most notably, they have followed a policy of engaging with African nations for trade and bilateral co-operation. Xinhua, China's official news agency, states that there are no less than 750,000 Chinese nationals working or living in Africa. China has furthermore strengthened its ties with larger developing economies, becoming the largest trading partner of Brazil and building strategic links with Argentina. Along with Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, China is a member of the BRICS group of emerging major economies, and hosted the group's third official summit at Sanya in Hainan Province in April 2011.

Emerging superpower

China is regularly cited as a potential new superpower, with certain commentators pointing out that its rapid economic progress, military might, very large population, and increasing international influence could see it attain a prominent global role in the 21st century. Others, however, warn that economic bubbles and demographic imbalances could slow China's growth as the century progresses.

Sociopolitical issues and reform

The Chinese democracy movement, social activists, and some members of the Communist Party of China have all identified the need for social and political reform. While economic and social controls have been greatly relaxed in China since the 1970s, political freedom is still tightly restricted. The Constitution of the People's Republic of China states that the "fundamental rights" of citizens include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, universal suffrage, and property rights. However, in practice, these provisions do not afford significant protection against criminal prosecution by the State.

As the Chinese economy expanded following Deng Xiaoping's 1978 reforms, tens of millions of rural Chinese who have moved to the cities find themselves treated as second-class citizens by China's ''hukou'' household registration system, which controls state benefits. Property rights are often poorly protected, and eminent domain land seizures have had a disproportionate effect on poorer peasants. In 2003, the average Chinese farmer paid three times more taxes than the average urban dweller, despite having one-sixth of the annual income. However, a number of rural taxes have since been reduced or abolished, and additional social services provided to rural dwellers.

Censorship of political speech and information, most notably on the Internet, is openly and routinely used in China to silence criticism of the government and the ruling Communist Party. In 2005, Reporters Without Borders ranked the PRC 159th out of 167 states in its Annual World Press Freedom Index, indicating a very low level of perceived press freedom. The government has suppressed demonstrations by organizations that it considers a potential threat to "social stability", as was the case with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The Communist Party has had mixed success in controlling information: a powerful and pervasive media control system faces equally strong market forces, an increasingly educated citizenry, and technological and cultural changes that are making China more open to the wider world, especially on environmental issues. However, attempts are still made by the Chinese government to control public access to outside information, with online searches for politically sensitive material being blocked by the so-called Great Firewall.

A number of foreign governments and NGOs routinely criticize the PRC's human rights record, alleging widespread civil rights violations, including systematic use of lengthy detention without trial, forced confessions, torture, mistreatment of prisoners, and restrictions of freedom of speech, assembly, association, religion, the press, and labor rights. China executes more people than any other country, accounting for 72% of the world's total in 2009, though it is not the largest executioner per capita.

The PRC government has responded to foreign criticism by arguing that the notion of human rights should take into account a country's present level of economic development, and focus more on the people's rights to subsistence and development in poorer countries. The rise in the standard of living, literacy, and life expectancy for the average Chinese in the last three decades is seen by the government as tangible progress made in human rights. Efforts in the past decade to combat deadly natural disasters, such as the perennial Yangtze River floods, and work-related accidents are also portrayed in China as progress in human rights for a still largely poor country.

The PRC government remains divided over the issue of political reform. Some high-ranking politicians have spoken out in favor reforms, while others remain more conservative. In 2010, Premier Wen Jiabao stated that the PRC needs "to gradually improve the democratic election system so that state power will truly belong to the people and state power will be used to serve the people." Despite his status, Wen's comments were later censored by the government.

As the social, cultural and political consequences of economic growth and reform become increasingly manifest, tensions between the conservatives and reformists in the Communist Party are sharpening. Zhou Tianyong, the vice director of research of the Central Party School, argues that gradual political reform as well as repression of those pushing for overly rapid change over the next thirty years will be essential if China is to avoid an overly turbulent transition to a democratic, middle-class-dominated polity. Some Chinese look back to the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, and fear chaos if the Communist Party should lose control of the domestic situation.

Military

With 2.3 million active troops, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the largest standing military force in the world, commanded by the Central Military Commission (CMC). The PLA consists of the People's Liberation Army Ground Force (PLAGF), the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), and a strategic nuclear force, the Second Artillery Corps. The official announced budget of the PLA for 2009 was $70 billion. However, the United States government has claimed that China does not report its real level of military spending, which is allegedly much higher than the official budget. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the real Chinese military budget for 2008 was between US$105 billion and US$150 billion. According to SIPRI, China's military expenditure in 2010 totalled US$114.3 billion (808 billion yuan), constituting the world's second-largest military budget.

As a recognised nuclear weapons state, China is considered both a major regional military power and an emerging military superpower. As of August 2011, China's Second Artillery Corps is believed to maintain at least 195 nuclear missiles, including 75 ICBMs. Nonetheless, China is the only member of the UN Security Council to have relatively limited power projection capabilities. To offset this, it has begun developing power projection assets, such as aircraft carriers, and has established a network of foreign military relationships that has been compared to a string of pearls.

The PRC has made significant progress in modernizing its military since the early 2000s. It has purchased state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets, such as the Sukhoi Su-30s, and has also produced its own modern fighters, most notably the Chinese J-10s and the J-11s. China is furthermore engaged in developing an indigenous stealth aircraft, the Chengdu J-20. The PRC's ground forces have also undergone significant modernisations, replacing its ageing Soviet-derived tank inventory with numerous variants of the modern Type 99 tank, and upgrading its battlefield C3I systems to enhance its network-centric warfare capabilities.

China has also acquired and improved upon the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile system, which is considered to be among the most effective aircraft-intercepting systems in the world. Russia has since produced the next-generation S-400 Triumf system, with China reportedly having spent $500 million on a downgraded export version of it. A number of indigenous missile technologies have also been developed – in 2007, China conducted a successful test of an anti-satellite missile, and its first indigenous land-attack cruise missile, the CJ-10, entered service in 2009. In 2011, the Pentagon reported that China was believed to be testing the JL-2 missile, a new submarine-launched nuclear ICBM with multiple-warhead delivery capabilities.

In recent years, much attention has been focused on enhancing the blue-water capabilities of the People's Liberation Army Navy. In August 2011, China's first aircraft carrier, the refurbished Soviet vessel ''Varyag'', began sea trials. China furthermore maintains a substantial fleet of submarines, including several nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines. On 13 March 2011, the PLAN missile frigate ''Xuzhou'' was spotted off the coast of Libya, marking the first time in history a Chinese warship sailed into the Mediterranean. The ship's entrance into the Mediterranean was officially part of a humanitarian mission to rescue PRC nationals from the 2011 Libyan civil war, though analysts such as Fareed Zakaria viewed the mission as also being an attempt to increase the PRC's global military presence.

Little information is available regarding the motivations supporting China's military modernization. A 2007 report by the US Secretary of Defense noted that "China's actions in certain areas increasingly appear inconsistent with its declaratory policies". For its part, China claims it maintains an army purely for defensive purposes.

Economy

From its founding in 1949 until late 1978, the People's Republic of China was a Soviet-style centrally planned economy, without private businesses or capitalism. To propel the country towards a modern, industrialized communist society, Mao Zedong instituted the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s, although this had decidedly mixed economic results. Following Mao's death in 1976 and the consequent end of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping and the new Chinese leadership began to reform the economy and move towards a more market-oriented mixed economy under one-party rule. Collectivization of the agriculture was dismantled and farmlands were privatized to increase productivity. In 1978, China and Japan began normalized diplomatic relations, and China started borrowing money from Japan in soft loans. Since 1978, Japan has been China's most significant foreign donor. Modern-day China is mainly characterised as having a market economy based on private property ownership, and is one of the leading examples of state capitalism.

Under the post-Mao market reforms, a wide variety of small-scale private enterprises were encouraged, while the government relaxed price controls and promoted foreign investment. Foreign trade was focused upon as a major vehicle of growth, leading to the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), first in Shenzhen and then in other Chinese cities. Inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were restructured by introducing western-style management systems, with unprofitable ones being closed outright, resulting in massive job losses. By the latter part of 2010, China was reversing some of its economic liberalization initiatives, with state-owned companies buying up independent businesses in the steel, auto and energy industries.

Since economic liberalization began in 1978, China's investment- and export-led economy has grown almost a hundredfold and is the fastest-growing major economy in the world. According to the IMF, China's annual average GDP growth between 2001 and 2010 was 10.5%, and the Chinese economy is predicted to grow at an average annual rate of 9.5% between 2011 and 2015. Between 2007 and 2011, China's economic growth rate was equivalent to all of the G7 countries' growth combined. According to the Global Growth Generators index announced by Citigroup in February 2011, China has a very high 3G growth rating.

As of 2012, China has the world's second-largest nominal GDP, totalling approximately 47.2 trillion yuan (US$7.47 trillion) according to the country's National Bureau of Statistics. However, China's 2011 nominal GDP per capita of US$5,184 puts it behind around ninety countries (out of 183 countries on the IMF list) in global GDP per capita rankings. If PPP is taken into account in GDP figures, China is again second only to the United States – in 2010, its PPP GDP reached $10.085 trillion, corresponding to $7,518 per capita. In 2009, China's primary, secondary, and tertiary industries contributed 10.6%, 46.8%, and 42.6% respectively to its total GDP.

The PRC is the third-most-visited country in the world, with 55.7 million inbound international visitors in 2010. It is a member of the WTO and is the world's second-largest trading power behind the US, with a total international trade value of US$2.97 trillion–1.58 trillion in exports (#1) and US$1.39 trillion in imports (#2). Its foreign exchange reserves had reached US$2.85 trillion by the end of 2010, an increase of 18.7% over the previous year, making its reserves by far the world's largest. The PRC owns an estimated $1.6 trillion of US securities. The PRC, holding US$1.16 trillion in US Treasury bonds, is the largest foreign holder of US public debt. China is the world's third-largest recipient of inward FDI, attracting US$92.4 billion in 2008 alone, and China increasingly invests abroad, with a total outward FDI of US$52.2 billion in 2008 making it the world's sixth-largest outward investor. In 2010, China's inward FDI was $106 billion, marking a 16% increase over 2009.

The PRC's success has been primarily due to manufacturing as a low-cost producer. This is attributed to a combination of cheap labor, good infrastructure, relatively high productivity, favorable government policy, and a possibly undervalued exchange rate. The latter has been sometimes blamed for the PRC's huge trade surplus (US$262.7 billion in 2007) and has become a major source of dispute between the PRC and its major trading partners—the US, EU, and Japan—despite the yuan having been de-pegged and having risen in value by 20% against the US dollar since 2005. China is moreover widely criticised for manufacturing large quantities of counterfeit goods – in 2005, the Asia Business Council alleged that the counterfeiting industry accounted for 8% of China's GDP at the time.

The state still dominates in strategic "pillar" industries (such as energy and heavy industries), but private enterprise (composed of around 30 million private businesses) has expanded enormously; in 2005, it accounted for anywhere between 33% to 70% of national GDP, while the OECD estimate for that year was over 50% of China's national output, up from 1% in 1978. Its stock market in Shanghai, the SSE, has raised record amounts of IPOs and its benchmark Shanghai Composite index has doubled since 2005. SSE's market capitalization reached US$3 trillion in 2007, making it the world's fifth-largest stock exchange.

China now ranks 29th in the Global Competitiveness Index, although it is only ranked 135th among the 179 countries measured in the Index of Economic Freedom. 46 Chinese companies made the list in the 2010 Fortune Global 500 (Beijing alone with 30). Measured using market capitalization, four of the world's top ten most valuable companies are Chinese. Some of these include first-ranked PetroChina, third-ranked Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (the world's most valuable bank), fifth-ranked China Mobile (the world's most valuable telecommunications company) and seventh-ranked China Construction Bank.

Although a middle-income country by Western standards, the PRC's rapid growth has pulled hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty since 1978. Today, about 10% of the Chinese population live below the poverty line of US$1 per day (down from 64% in 1978), while life expectancy has increased to 73 years. More than 93% of the population is literate, compared to only 20% in 1950. Urban unemployment in China reportedly declined to 4% by the end of 2007, although true overall unemployment may be as high as 10%.

China's middle-class population (defined as those with annual income of at least US$17,000) has reached more than 100 million as of 2011, while the number of super-rich individuals worth more than 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million) is estimated to be 825,000, according to Hurun Report. Based on the Hurun rich list, the number of US dollar billionaires in China doubled from 130 in 2009 to 271 in 2010, giving China the world's second-highest number of billionaires. China's retail market was worth RMB 8.9 trillion (US$1.302 trillion) in 2007, and is growing at 16.8% annually. China is also now the world's second-largest consumer of luxury goods behind Japan, with 27.5% of the global share.

The PRC's growth has been uneven, with some geographic regions growing faster than others, and a pronounced urban-rural income gap contributing to a national Gini coefficient of 46.9%. Development has been mainly concentrated in the heavily urbanised eastern coastal regions, while the remainder of the country has lagged behind. To counter this, the government has promoted development in the western, northeastern, and central regions of China.

In recent years, China's rapid economic growth has contributed to severe consumer inflation, causing the prices of basic goods to rise steeply. Food prices in China increased by over 21% in the first four months of 2008 alone. To curb inflation and moderate rising property prices, the Chinese government has instituted a number of fiscal regulations and amendments, raising interest rates and imposing limits on bank loans. In September 2011, consumer prices rose by 6.1% compared to a year earlier, marking a reduction in inflation from the peak of 6.5% in July 2011. A side-effect of increased economic regulation was a slowdown in overall growth – China's quarterly GDP growth fell to 9.1% in October 2011, down from 9.5% in the previous quarter.

The Chinese economy is highly energy-intensive and inefficient—on average, industrial processes in China use 20%–100% more energy than similar ones in OECD countries. China became the world's largest energy consumer in 2010, but still relies on coal to supply about 70% of its energy needs. Coupled with lax environmental regulations, this has led to massive water and air pollution, leaving China with 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities. Consequently, the government has promised to use more renewable energy, planning to make renewables constitute 30% of China's total energy production by 2050. In 2010, China became the largest wind energy provider in the world, with a total installed wind power capacity of 41.8 GW. In January 2011, Russia began scheduled oil shipments to China, pumping 300,000 barrels of oil per day via the Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean oil pipeline.

Science and technology

Ancient Chinese inventors were responsible for pioneering a vast number of technologies. These included papermaking, woodblock printing and movable type printing, the early lodestone and needle compass, gunpowder, toilet paper, early seismological detectors, matches, pound locks, the double-action piston pump, blast furnace and cast iron, the iron plough, the multi-tube seed drill, the suspension bridge, natural gas as a fuel, the differential gear for the South Pointing Chariot, the hydraulic-powered armillary sphere and trip hammer, the mechanical chain drive and belt drive, the raised-relief map, the propeller, the crossbow, the cannon, and the multistage rocket.

Chinese astronomers were among the first to record observations of a supernova. Chinese mathematics evolved independently of Greek mathematics and is therefore of great interest in the history of mathematics. Moreover, the Chinese were keen on documenting all of their technological achievements, such as in the ''Tiangong Kaiwu'' encyclopedia written by Song Yingxing (1587–1666).

Despite its earlier sophistication, China's grasp of science and technology had fallen behind that of Europe by the 17th century. Political, social and cultural reasons have been given for this, although recent historians focus more on economic causes, such as the high level equilibrium trap. Since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's market reforms, China has grown increasingly connected to the global economy and information sphere, and the government has placed a heavy emphasis on the development of science and technology.

After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s and '70s, China started to develop its own nuclear weapons and delivery systems, successfully detonating its first surface nuclear test in 1964 at Lop Nur. A natural outgrowth of this was a satellite launching program, which culminated in 1970 with the launching of Dong Fang Hong I, the first Chinese satellite. This made the PRC the fifth nation to independently launch a satellite. China has the world's second-largest research and development budget, and invested over $136 billion in science and technology in 2006, an increase of more than 20% over 2005. Stem cell research and gene therapy, which some in the Western world see as controversial, face minimal regulation in China. China has an estimated 926,000 researchers, second only to the 1.3 million in the United States. Through domestic development and foreign partnerships, China has significantly increased the sophistication of its transport network in recent decades, becoming a world leader in high-speed rail technology.

In 1992, the Shenzhou manned spaceflight program was authorized. After four unmanned tests, ''Shenzhou 5'' was launched on 15 October 2003, using a Long March 2F launch vehicle and carrying Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei, making the PRC the third country to put a human being into space through its own endeavors. In 2008, China successfully completed the ''Shenzhou 7'' mission, making it the third country to have the capability to conduct a spacewalk. China maintains an active lunar exploration program – it successfully launched the Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2 lunar survey probes in 2007 and 2011 respectively, and is planning to launch a lunar rover in 2013, as a precursor to a possible manned lunar landing in the 2020s. In September 2011, the first Chinese space station module, Tiangong-1, was successfully launched, marking the first step in a decade-long project to construct a large manned space station. China is furthermore considering a manned mission to Mars, and made its first attempt at the robotic exploration of Mars in November 2011.

China is also actively developing its software, semiconductor and energy industries, including renewable energies such as hydroelectric, wind and solar power. In an effort to reduce pollution from coal-burning power plants, China has been pioneering the deployment of pebble bed nuclear reactors, which run cooler and safer than conventional nuclear reactors, and have potential applications for the development of a hydrogen economy. In 2010, China developed Tianhe-IA, for a time the world's fastest supercomputer, at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin. China is also rapidly advancing in the field of robotics, and is predicted to have the world's fifth-largest industrial robot workforce by 2014.

Infrastructure

Communications

China currently has the most cellphone users of any country in the world, with over 800 million users as of July 2010. It also has the world's largest number of internet and broadband users. By December 2010, China had around 457 million internet users, an increase of 19% over the previous year, and by the end of 2011 the number of internet users had exceeded 500 million. According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China's average internet connection speed is 100.9 kbit/s, less than half of the global average of 212.5 kbit/s.

China Telecom and China Unicom, the country's two largest broadband providers, accounted for 20% of global broadband subscribers, whereas the world's ten largest broadband service providers combined accounted for 39% of the world's broadband customers. China Telecom alone serves 55 million broadband subscribers, while China Unicom serves more than 40 million. The massive rise in internet use in China continues to fuel rapid broadband growth, whereas the world's other major broadband ISPs operate in the mature markets of the developed world, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth.

Transport

Transportation in mainland China has been prioritised by the government in recent decades, and has undergone intense state-led development since the late 1990s. The national road network has been massively expanded through the creation of a network of expressways, known as the National Trunk Highway System (NTHS). By 2011, China's expressways had reached a total length of , second only to the road network of the United States.

China also possesses the world’s longest high-speed rail network, with over of service routes. Of these, serve trains with top speeds of . In 2011, China unveiled a prototype train capable of reaching speeds of , the first ultra-high-speed train developed solely by its domestic railway industry.

Private car ownership is growing rapidly, with China surpassing the United States as the largest automobile market in the world in 2009, with total car sales of over 13.6 million.

Domestic air travel has also increased significantly, but remains too expensive for most. Long-distance transportation is dominated by railways and charter bus systems. Railways are the vital carrier in China; they are monopolized by the state, divided into various railway bureaux in different regions. Due to huge demand, the system is regularly subject to overcrowding, particularly during holiday seasons, such as ''Chunyun'' during the Chinese New Year.

Rapid transit systems are also rapidly developing in China's major cities, in the form of networks of underground or light rail systems. Hong Kong has one of the most developed transport systems in the world, while Shanghai has a high-speed maglev rail line connecting the city to its main international airport, Pudong International Airport.

Demographics

As of July 2010, the People's Republic of China has an estimated total population of 1,338,612,968. About 21% of the population (145,461,833 males; 128,445,739 females) are 14 years old or younger, 71% (482,439,115 males; 455,960,489 females) are between 15 and 64 years old, and 8% (48,562,635 males; 53,103,902 females) are over 65 years old. The population growth rate for 2006 was 0.6%.

By end of 2010, the proportion of mainland Chinese people aged 14 or younger was 16.60%, while the number aged 60 or older grew to 13.26%, giving a total proportion of 29.86% dependents. The proportion of the population of workable age was thus around 70%.

With a population of over 1.3 billion and dwindling natural resources, the PRC is very concerned about its population growth and has attempted, with mixed results, to implement a strict family planning policy. The government's goal is one child per family, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and a degree of flexibility in rural areas. It is hoped that population growth in China will stabilize in the early decades of the 21st century, though some projections estimate a population of anywhere between 1.4 billion and 1.6 billion by 2025. China's family planning minister has indicated that the one-child policy will be maintained until at least 2020.

The one-child policy is resisted, particularly in rural areas, because of the need for agricultural labour and a traditional preference for boys (who can later serve as male heirs). Families who breach the policy often lie during the census. Official government policy opposes forced sterilization or abortion, but allegations of coercion continue as local officials, who are faced with penalties for failing to curb population growth, may resort to forcible measures, or manipulation of census figures.

The decreasing reliability of PRC population statistics since family planning began in the late 1970s has made evaluating the effectiveness of the policy difficult. Data from the 2010 census implies that the total fertility rate may now be around 1.4. The government is particularly concerned with the large imbalance in the sex ratio at birth, apparently the result of a combination of traditional preference for boys and family planning pressure, which led to a ban on using ultrasound devices in an attempt to prevent sex-selective abortion.

According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls, which is 0.53 points lower than the ratio obtained from a population sample survey carried out in 2005. However, the gender ratio of 118.06 is still beyond the normal range of around 105 percent, and experts warn of increased social instability should this trend continue. For the population born between the years 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males. Other demographers argue that perceived gender imbalances may arise from the underreporting of female births. A recent study suggests that as many as three million Chinese babies are hidden by their parents every year. According to the 2010 census, males accounted for 51.27 percent of the total population, while females made up 48.73 percent of the total.

Ethnic groups

|- |Han||91.59% |- |Zhuang||1.28% |- |Manchu||0.84% |- |Hui||0.78% |- |Miao||0.71% |- |Uyghur||0.66% |- |Tujia||0.63% |- |Other||3.51% |} The PRC officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Han Chinese, who constitute about 91.51% of the total population. The Han Chinese outnumber the minority groups in every province, municipality and autonomous region except Tibet and Xinjiang, and are descended from ancient Huaxia tribes living along the Yellow River.

Ethnic minorities account for about 8.49% of the population of China, according to the 2010 census. Compared with the 2000 population census, the Han population increased by 66,537,177 persons, or 5.74%, while the population of the 55 national minorities combined increased by 7,362,627 persons, or 6.92%.

The 2010 census recorded a total of 593,832 foreign citizens living in China. The largest such groups were from South Korea (120,750), the United States (71,493) and Japan (66,159).

Languages

The languages most spoken in China belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family. There are also several major linguistic groups within the Chinese language itself. The most spoken varieties are Mandarin (spoken by over 70% of the population), Wu (includes Shanghainese), Yue (includes Cantonese and Taishanese), Min (includes Hokkien and Teochew), Xiang, Gan, and Hakka. Non-Sinitic languages spoken widely by ethnic minorities include Zhuang, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Hmong and Korean. Standard Mandarin, a variety of Mandarin based on the Beijing dialect, is the official national language of China and is used as a lingua franca between people of different linguistic backgrounds.

Classical Chinese was the written standard in China for thousands of years, and allowed for written communication between speakers of various unintelligible languages and dialects in China. Written vernacular Chinese, or ''baihua'', is the written standard based on the Mandarin dialect and first popularized in Ming Dynasty novels. It was adopted with significant modifications during the early 20th century as the national standard. Classical Chinese is still part of the high school curriculum and is thus intelligible to some degree to many Chinese. Since its promulgation by the government in 1956, Simplified Chinese characters have become the official standardized written script used to write the Chinese language within mainland China, supplanting the use of Traditional Chinese characters used earlier there.

Urbanization

Since 2000, China's cities have expanded at an average rate of 10% annually. It is estimated that China will add 400 million people to its urban population, accounting for 64% of the total population, by 2025. The country's urbanization rate increased from 17.4% to 46.8% between 1978 and 2009, a scale unprecedented in human history. Between 150 and 200 million migrant workers work part-time in the major cities, returning home to the countryside periodically with their earnings.

Today, the People's Republic of China has dozens of cities with one million or more long-term residents, including the three global cities of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The figures in the table below are from the 2008 census, and are only estimates of the urban populations within administrative city limits; a different ranking exists when considering the total municipal populations (which includes suburban and rural populations). The large "floating populations" of migrant workers make conducting censuses in urban areas difficult; the figures below do not include the floating population, only long-term residents.

Education

In 1986, China set the long-term goal of providing compulsory nine-year basic education to every child. As of 2007, there were 396,567 primary schools, 94,116 secondary schools, and 2,236 higher education institutions in the PRC. In February 2006, the government advanced its basic education goal by pledging to provide completely free nine-year education, including textbooks and fees. Free compulsory education in China consists of elementary school and middle school, which lasts for 9 years (ages 6–15); almost all children in urban areas continue with three years of high school.

, 93.3% of the population over age 15 are literate. In 2000, China's literacy rate among 15-to-24-year-olds was 98.9% (99.2% for males and 98.5% for females). In March 2007, the Chinese government declared education a national "strategic priority"; the central budget for national scholarships was tripled between 2007 and 2009, and 223.5 billion yuan (US$28.65 billion) of extra state funding was allocated between 2007 and 2012 to improve compulsory education in rural areas.

In 2009, Chinese students from Shanghai achieved the world's best results in mathematics, science and literacy, as tested by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance.

The quality of Chinese colleges and universities varies considerably across the country. The consistently top-ranked universities in mainland China are:

Beijing: Peking University, Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, Beijing Normal University

Shanghai: Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, East China Normal University

Harbin: Harbin Institute of Technology

Tianjin: Nankai University, Tianjin University

Xi'an: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Nanjing: Nanjing University

Hefei: University of Science and Technology of China

Hangzhou: Zhejiang University

Wuhan: Wuhan University

Guangzhou: Sun Yat-sen University (aka Zhongshan University)

Health

The Ministry of Health, together with its counterparts in the provincial health bureaux, oversees the health needs of the Chinese population. An emphasis on public health and preventive medicine has characterized health policy since the early 1950s. At that time, the Communist Party started the Patriotic Health Campaign, which was aimed at improving sanitation and hygiene, as well as treating and preventing several diseases. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid and scarlet fever, which were previously rife in China, were nearly eradicated by the campaign.

After Deng Xiaoping began instituting economic reforms in 1978, the health of the Chinese public improved rapidly due to better nutrition, although many of the free public health services provided in the countryside disappeared along with the People's Communes. Healthcare in China became mostly privatised, and experienced a significant rise in quality. The national life expectancy at birth rose from about 35 years in 1949 to 73.18 years in 2008, and infant mortality decreased from 300 per thousand in the 1950s to around 23 per thousand in 2006. Malnutrition stood at 12% of the population, according to United Nations FAO sources.

Despite significant improvements in health and the construction of advanced Western-style medical facilities, China has several emerging public health problems, such as respiratory illnesses caused by widespread air pollution and hundreds of millions of cigarette smokers, a possible future HIV/AIDS epidemic, and an increase in obesity among urban youths. China's large population and densely populated cities have led to serious disease outbreaks in recent years, such as the 2003 outbreak of SARS, although this has since been largely contained.

Estimates of excess deaths in China from environmental pollution (apart from smoking) are placed at 760,000 people per annum from air and water pollution (including indoor air pollution). In 2007, China overtook the United States as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide. Some 90% of China's cities suffer from some degree of water pollution, and nearly 500 million people lacked access to safe drinking water in 2005. Reports by the World Bank and the ''New York Times'' have claimed industrial pollution, particularly of the air, to be a significant health hazard in China.

Religion

In mainland China, the government allows a degree of religious freedom to members of state-approved religious organizations. An accurate number of religious adherents is hard to obtain because of a lack of official data, but there is general consensus that religion has been enjoying a resurgence over the past 20 years. A 1998 survey by Adherents.com found that 59% (over 700 million) of the population was irreligious. A later survey, conducted in 2007, found that there are 300 million believers in China, constituting 23% of the population, as distinct from an official figure of 100 million.

Despite the surveys' varying results, most agree that China's traditional religions—Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religions—are the dominant faiths. According to various sources, Buddhism in China accounts for between 660 million (~50% of the population) and over 1 billion (~80%), while Taoists number 400 million (~30%). However, because of the fact that one person may subscribe to two or more of these traditional beliefs simultaneously and the difficulty in clearly differentiating Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religions, the number of adherents to these religions can be overlaid. In addition, subscribing to Buddhism and Taoism is not necessarily considered religious by those who follow the philosophies in principle but stop short of believing in any kind of deity or divinity.

Most Chinese Buddhists are merely nominal adherents, because only a small proportion of the population (around 8% or 100 million) may have taken the formal step of going for refuge. Even then, it is still difficult to estimate accurately the number of Buddhists because they do not have congregational memberships and often do not participate in public ceremonies. Mahayana (大乘, ''Dacheng'') and its subsets Pure Land (Amidism), Tiantai and Chán (better known in the west by its Japanese pronunciation Zen) are the most widely practiced denominations of Buddhism. Other forms, such as Theravada and Tibetan, are practiced largely by ethnic minorities along the geographic fringes of the Chinese mainland.

Christianity was first introduced to China during the Tang Dynasty, with the arrival of Nestorian Christianity in 635 AD. This was followed by Franciscan missionaries in the 13th century, Jesuits in the 16th century, and finally Protestants in the 19th century. Of China's minority religions, Christianity is one of the fastest-growing. The total number of Christians is difficult to determine, as many belong to unauthorized house churches, but estimates of their number have ranged from 40 million (3% of the total population) to 54 million (4%) to as many as 130 million (10%). Official government statistics put the number of Christians at 16 million, but these count only members of officially sanctioned church bodies. China is believed to now have the world's second-largest evangelical Christian population—behind only the United States—and if current growth rates continue, China will become a global center of evangelical Christianity in coming decades.

Islam in China dates to a mission in 651, only 18 years after Muhammad's death. Muslims came to China for trade, becoming prominent in the trading ports of the Song Dynasty. They became influential in government circles, including Zheng He, Lan Yu and Yeheidie'erding. Nanjing became an important center of Islamic study. Statistics are hard to find, and most estimates give a figure of between 20 and 30 million Muslims (1.5% to 2% of the population).

China also plays host to numerous minority religions, including Hinduism, Dongbaism, Bön, and a number of more modern religions and sects (particularly Xiantianism). In July 1999, the Falun Gong spiritual practice was officially banned by the authorities, and many international organizations have criticized the government's treatment of Falun Gong that has occurred since then. There are no reliable estimates of the number of Falun Gong practitioners in China, although informal estimates have given figures as high as 70 million.

Culture

Since ancient times, Chinese culture has been heavily influenced by Confucianism and conservative philosophies. For centuries, opportunities for social advancement could be provided by high performance in the prestigious Imperial examinations, which were instituted in 605 AD to help the Emperor select skilful bureaucrats. The literary emphasis of the exams affected the general perception of cultural refinement in China, such as the belief that calligraphy and literati painting were higher forms of art than dancing or drama.

A number of more authoritarian and rational strains of thought were also influential, with Legalism being a prominent example. There was often conflict between the philosophies – for instance, the individualistic Song Dynasty neo-Confucians believed that Legalism departed from the original spirit of Confucianism. Examinations and a culture of merit remain greatly valued in China today. In recent years, a number of New Confucians have claimed that modern democratic ideals and human rights are compatible with traditional Confucian values.

The first leaders of the People's Republic of China were born into the traditional imperial order, but were influenced by the May Fourth Movement and reformist ideals. They sought to change some traditional aspects of Chinese culture, such as rural land tenure, sexism, and the Confucian system of education, while preserving others, such as the family structure and culture of obedience to the state.

Some observers see the period following the establishment of the PRC in 1949 as a continuation of traditional Chinese dynastic history, while others claim that the Communist Party's rule has damaged the foundations of Chinese culture, especially through political movements such as the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, where many aspects of traditional culture were destroyed, having been denounced as 'regressive and harmful' or 'vestiges of feudalism'. Many important aspects of traditional Chinese morals and culture, such as Confucianism, Chinese art, literature, and performing arts like Peking opera, were altered to conform to government policies and propaganda at the time.

Today, the Chinese government has accepted numerous elements of traditional Chinese culture as being integral to Chinese society. With the rise of Chinese nationalism and the end of the Cultural Revolution, various forms of traditional Chinese art, literature, music, film, fashion and architecture have seen a vigorous revival, and folk and variety art in particular have sparked interest nationally and even worldwide.

Prior to the beginning of maritime Sino-European trade in the 16th century, medieval China and the European West were linked by the Silk Road, which was a key route of cultural as well as economic exchange. Artifacts from the history of the Road, as well as from the natural history of the Gobi desert, are displayed in the Silk Route Museum in Jiuquan.

Cuisine

Chinese cuisine is highly diverse, drawing on several millennia of culinary history. The dynastic emperors of ancient China were known to host banquets with over 100 dishes served at a time, employing countless imperial kitchen staff and concubines to prepare the food. Such royal dishes gradually became a part of wider Chinese culture. China's staple food is rice, but the country is also well known for its meat dishes. Spices are endemic to Chinese cuisine.

Numerous foreign offshoots of Chinese food, such as Hong Kong cuisine and American Chinese food, have emerged in the various nations which play host to the Chinese diaspora.

Sports

China has one of the oldest sporting cultures in the world. There is evidence that a form of association football was played in China around 1000 AD. Besides football, some of the most popular sports in the country include martial arts, table tennis, badminton, swimming, basketball and snooker. Board games such as go (''weiqi''), xiangqi, and more recently chess, are also played at a professional level.

Physical fitness is widely emphasized in Chinese culture. Morning exercises are a common activity, with elderly citizens encouraged to practice qigong and t'ai chi ch'uan. Young people in China are also keen on basketball, especially in urban centers with limited space and grass areas. The American National Basketball Association has a huge following among Chinese youths, with Chinese players such as Yao Ming being held in high esteem.

Many more traditional sports are also played in China. Dragon boat racing occurs during the annual nationwide Dragon Boat Festival, and has since gained popularity abroad. In Inner Mongolia, sports such as Mongolian-style wrestling and horse racing are popular. In Tibet, archery and equestrianism are a part of traditional festivals.

China has participated at the Olympic Games since 1932, although it has only participated as the PRC since 1952. China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and received 51 gold medals – the highest number of gold medals of any participating nation that year. China will host the 2013 East Asian Games in Tianjin and the 2014 Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing.

See also

International rankings of the People's Republic of China

References

Further reading

Farah, Paolo, ''Five Years of China’s WTO Membership. EU and US Perspectives on China’s Compliance with Transparency Commitments and the Transitional Review Mechanism'', Legal Issues of Economic Integration, Kluwer Law International, Volume 33, Number 3, pp. 263–304, 2006. Abstract.

Heilig, Gerhard K., ''China Bibliography – Online.'' 2006, 2007.

External links

Overviews

China at a Glance ''People's Daily''

BBC News – ''Country Profile: China''

Modern China: A Primer—slideshow by ''Life'' magazine

"Rethinking ‘Capitalist Restoration’ in China" by Yiching Wu

Key Development Forecasts for China from International Futures

Documentaries

"China on the Rise" PBS Online NewsHour. October 2005.

''China in the Red'', 1998–2001. PBS Frontline.

''China From the Inside'' A documentary series co-produced by KQED Public Television and Granada Television.

Government The Central People's Government of People's Republic of China China Internet Information Center —Authorized government portal site to China

Studies

Assertive Pragmatism: China's Economic Rise and Its Impact on Chinese Foreign Policy Minxin Pei, IFRI Proliferation Papers n°15, 2006

The Dragon's Dawn: China as a Rising Imperial Power 11 February 2005.

History of The People's Republic of China Timeline of Key Events since 1949.

Media, advertising, and urban life in China.

Travel

Maps

Google Maps—China

Google Maps—China—Interesting locations

Category:Central Asian countries Category:Chinese-speaking countries and territories Category:Communist states Category:Countries bordering the Pacific Ocean Category:Countries bordering the South China Sea Category:East Asian countries Category:Member states of the United Nations Category:Persian loanwords Category:G20 nations Category:Republics Category:Single-party states Category:Socialist states Category:States and territories established in 1949 Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles

ace:Rèpublik Rakyat Cina kbd:Хъутей Джылэ Республикэ af:Volksrepubliek van Sjina als:Volksrepublik China am:የቻይና ሕዝባዊ ሪፐብሊክ ang:Cīnan Folclicu Cyneƿīse ab:Ачынҭатәи Ажәлартә Республика ar:الصين an:Republica Popular de China frp:Rèpublica populèra de Ch·ina ast:China gn:China Tekoha Tetã ay:Markani Republika China az:Çin Xalq Respublikası bm:China bn:গণচীন zh-min-nan:Tiong-hoâ Jîn-bîn Kiōng-hô-kok ba:Ҡытай be:Кітай be-x-old:Кітай bh:चीन (जनवादी प्रजातंत्र) bcl:Tsina bi:China bg:Китайска народна република bar:Kina bo:ཀྲུང་ཧྭ་མི་དམངས་སྤྱི་མཐུན་རྒྱལ་ཁབ། bs:Narodna Republika Kina br:Republik Pobl Sina ca:República Popular de la Xina cv:Китай Халăх Республики ceb:Republikang Popular sa Tsina cs:Čínská lidová republika cbk-zam:China cy:Gweriniaeth Pobl Tsieina da:Kina de:Volksrepublik China dv:ސީނުކަރަ dsb:Chinska ludowa republika et:Hiina el:Λαϊκή Δημοκρατία της Κίνας eml:Cina es:República Popular China eo:Ĉina Popola Respubliko ext:China eu:Txinako Herri Errepublika ee:China fa:جمهوری خلق چین hif:People's Republic of China fo:Kina fr:République populaire de Chine fy:Sina ga:Daon-Phoblacht na Síne gv:Deynphobblaght ny Sheen gd:Sluagh-Phoblachd na Sìne gl:República Popular da China gan:中華人民共和國 gu:ચીન hak:Chûng-fà Ngìn-mìn Khiung-fò-koet xal:Китдин Улс Орн ko:중화인민공화국 ha:Sin haw:Kina hy:Չինաստանի Ժողովրդական Հանրապետություն hi:चीनी जनवादी गणराज्य hsb:China hr:Kina io:Chinia ilo:China bpy:গণচীন id:Republik Rakyat Cina ia:China ie:China os:Китай is:Alþýðulýðveldið Kína it:Cina he:הרפובליקה העממית של סין jv:Républik Rakyat Cina kl:Kina kn:ಚೀನಿ ಜನರ ಗಣರಾಜ್ಯ pam:Maldang Republika ning Tsina krc:Къытай Халкъ Республика ka:ჩინეთი ks:چیٖن csb:Chińskô Lëdowô Repùblika kk:Қытай kw:Repoblek Werin China rw:Ubushinwa sw:China kv:Китай kg:Sina ku:Çîn ky:Кытай lad:Repuvlika Popular de Kina la:Res Publica Popularis Sinarum lv:Ķīna lb:Volleksrepublik China lt:Kinijos Liaudies Respublika li:Volksrepubliek China ln:Sína jbo:jugygu'e lmo:Cina hu:Kína mk:Народна Република Кина mg:Repoblika Entim-bahoakan'i Sina ml:ചൈന mt:Repubblika Popolari taċ-Ċina mi:Haina mr:चीन xmf:ჩინეთი arz:الصين mzn:چین ms:Republik Rakyat China mwl:República Popular de la China mdf:Китай mn:Бүгд Найрамдах Хятад Ард Улс my:တရုတ်ပြည်သူ့သမ္မတနိုင်ငံ nah:China na:Tsiene nl:Volksrepubliek China nds-nl:Volksrippebliek China ne:जनबादी गणतन्त्र चीन ja:中華人民共和国 frr:China pih:Shiina no:Folkerepublikken Kina nn:Folkerepublikken Kina nrm:Républyique du Peupl'ye d'la Chinne nov:Populen Republike de China oc:Republica Populara de China mhr:Китай or:ଚୀନ uz:Xitoy Xalq Respublikasi pa:ਚੀਨ ਦਾ ਲੋਕ ਰਾਜੀ ਗਣਤੰਤਰ pnb:چین pap:China ps:د خلکو جمهوري چين koi:Китай pcd:République populoère d' Chine pms:Cin-a tpi:Ol Manmeri Ripablik bilong Saina nds:Volksrepubliek China pl:Chińska Republika Ludowa pnt:Κίνα pt:República Popular da China kaa:Qıtay crh:Çin Halq Cumhuriyeti ty:Tinitō ro:Republica Populară Chineză qu:Chunwa Runallaqta Republika rue:Кітайска Народна Републіка ru:Китай sah:Кытай Дьон Республиката se:Kiinná sm:Saina sg:Sînä sc:Cina sco:Fowkrepublic o Cheenae stq:Foulksrepublik China st:Tjhaena nso:Tšhaena sq:Kina scn:Cina si:චීන මහජන ජනරජය simple:People's Republic of China ss:IShayina sk:Čína sl:Ljudska republika Kitajska cu:Срѣдинꙗнє szl:Chińsko Ludowo Republika so:Shiinaha ckb:کۆماری گەلی چین srn:Sneysa sr:Кина sh:Narodna Republika Kina fi:Kiina sv:Kina tl:Republikang Popular ng Tsina ta:சீன மக்கள் குடியரசு kab:Ccinwa roa-tara:Repubbleche Populare Cenise tt:Кытай te:చైనా tet:Xina th:ประเทศจีน tg:Ҷумҳурии Халқии Чин chr:ᏓᎶᏂᎨᏍᏛ tr:Çin Halk Cumhuriyeti tk:Hytaý Halk Respublikasy udm:Китай uk:Китайська Народна Республіка ur:چین ug:جۇڭخۇا خەلق جۇمھۇرىيىتى za:Cunghvaz Yinzminz Gunghozgoz vec:Cina vi:Cộng hòa Nhân dân Trung Hoa vo:Tsyinän fiu-vro:Hiina Rahvavabariik zh-classical:中華人民共和國 war:Kanan Katawhan Republika han Tsina wo:Siin wuu:中华人民共和国 ts:China yi:כינע yo:Orílẹ̀-èdè Olómìnira àwọn Ará ilẹ̀ Ṣáínà zh-yue:中華人民共和國 diq:Çin zea:China bat-smg:Kėnėjės Liaudėis Respoblėka zh:中华人民共和国

name	Sonali
birth date	November 03, 1974
birth place	Pune, Maharashtra, India
yearsactive	1990–present
occupation	Film actress, Television presenter
website	http://www.sonalikulkarni.org }}

Sonali Kulkarni () (born 3 November 1974) is an Indian actress. She was born in Pune.

Career

Kulkarni first made her appearance on the silver screen in a Kannada movie titled 'Cheluvi', and thereafter has appeared in a total of 32 movies, which includes an Italian film titled 'Fuoco Si Di Me' for which she won an award in the 2006 Milan International Film Festival.

She has received a Special Jury Award (non-feature film) in the 49th National Film Awards (2002) for her role in a short film in Marathi Chaitra (film).

Apart from acting, she is also an editor with 'Viva', a supplement of 'Loksatta', and pens a weekly column called 'So Kool'. Now, these columns are being published in book 'So Kool' by Rajahansa Prakashan.

Sonali has shown her dancing skills in a popular dance program (Jhalak dikla jaa) on Sony TV.

Personal life

She did her schooling from Abhinava Vidyalaya Marathi Medium School, Pune. She was married to famous Marathi play director Chandrakant Kulkarni for a while, but the couple divorced. In May 2010, she married the Managing Director of Fox Television Studio India, Nachiket Pantvaidya, in a low profile wedding ceremony.

Awards

Filmfare Awards(Marathi), ''Best Actress'', Doghi(1996)

National Film Award - Special Jury Award / Special Mention (Non-Feature Film), Chaitra (film)(2002)

Star Screen Awards(Marathi), ''Best Actress'', Devrai(2004)

Milan International Film Festival, ''Best Actress'', Fouco Di Su Me(2005)

2001:''Nominated'':Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award-Mission Kashmir

Filmography

Singham (2011)...Megha Kadam

Ringa Ringa (2010) (Marathi Film)

Well Done Abba (2009)

Love Khichdi (2009) .... Shanta Bheemrao Bhansode

Shadow (2009/I) .... Sanjana Singh

Mohandas (2009) .... Meghna

Gandh(2009) (Marathi Film)....

Gabhricha Paus(2009) (Marathi Film)....

Tya Ratri Paus Hota(2009) (Marathi Film)....

Gulmohar(2009) (Marathi Film)....

Mumbai Cutting (2009) .... (segment "Parcel")

Rishton Ki Machine (2008) (Bollywood Film) ....

Vasudev Balwant Phadke (2008) (Marathi Film) ....

Via Darjeeling (2008) ....Rimli Sharma

Sirf....: Life Looks Greener on the Other Side (2008) .... Namita Ranade

Strangers (2007) ....

Restaurent (2007) (2007) (Marathi Film)....

I See You (2006) ....

Darna Zaroori Hai (2006) ... Mrs. Pilgaonkar

Taxi Number 9211 (2006) ... Mrs. Shastri

Love Is Blind

White Rainbow (2005) .... Priya

Fuoco Su Di Me {Italian} (My Heart Is On Fire) (2005) ....

Bride & Prejudice (2004) .... Chandra Lamba

Devrai (2004) .... Seena

Hanan (2004) .... Bhagwati

Silence Please... The Dressing Room (2004) .... Reporter Aparna Sen

Danav (2003) .... Lakshmi

Dil Vil Pyar Vyar (2002) .... Gauri

Agni Varsha (2002) .... Nittilai

Kitne Door Kitne Paas (2002) .... Jaya

Chaitra (film) (2002)(Marathi film).. Krati, Won, National Film Award - Special Jury Award / Special Mention (Non-Feature Film)

Junoon (2002)

Dil Chahta Hai (2001) .... Pooja

Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya (2001) .... Geeta

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) .... Ramabai Ambedkar

Mission Kashmir (2000) .... Neelima Khan

Kairee (2000) .... The girl as grown up

Jahan Tum Le Chalo (1999)

Daayraa (1996) .... The Girl

"Badalte Rishte" (1996) TV Series .... Ulka

Vrindavan Film Studios (1996) .... Radha

Doghi (1995) .... Krishna

May Madham (1994) (Tamil film)

Mukta (1994) .... Mukta

Cheluvi (1992) .... Cheluvi

baja (1990)

TV shows

Fear Factor - Khatron Ke Khiladi on COLORS TV

So Kool (Marathi) on Star Majha

Jhalak Dikhlaja on Sony TV

References

External links

Sonali Kulkarni

Category:Indian film actors Category:Hindi film actors Category:Marathi film actors Category:Living people Category:1974 births

it:Sonali Kulkarni mr:सोनाली कुलकर्णी pl:Sonali Kulkarni

Vasudeo Balwant Phadke ( ) (4 November 1845 – 17 February 1883) was an Indian revolutionary and is widely regarded as the father of the armed struggle for India's independence. Phadke was moved by the plight of the farmer community during British Raj. Phadke believed that ‘Swaraj’ was the only remedy for their ills. With the help of Kolis, Bhils and Dhangars communities in Maharastra, Vasudev formed a revolutionary group called as ''Ramoshi''. The group started an armed struggle to overthrow the British Raj. The group launched raids on rich English businessmen to obtain funds for their liberation struggle. Phadke came into limelight when he got control of the city of Pune for a few days when he caught the British soldiers off guard during one of his surprise attacks.

Early years

Vasudev was born on 1845-11-04 in Shirdhon village of Panvel taluka based in Raigad district in Maharashtra state in a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin family. As a child Vasudev preferred learning skills like wrestling, riding over high school education and dropped out of school. Eventually he moved to Pune and took the job as a clerk with military accounts department in Pune for 15 years. Krantiveer Lahuji Vastad Salve a then prominent social figure based in Pune was the mentor of Vasudev. Lahuji Salve, an expert wrestler operated a gymnasium. Lahuji preached the importance of independence from British Raj. Lahuji belonged to Mang community an untouchable community, taught Vasudev the importance of getting backward castes into mainstream freedom movement . It was during this period that Vasudev began attending lectures by Govind Ranade which mainly focused on how the British Raj policies hurt the Indian economy. Vasudev was deeply hurt by how this was leading to widespread suffering in the society. In 1870, he joined a public agitation in Pune that was aimed at addressing people's grievances. Vasudev founded an institution, the ''Aikya Vardhini Sabha'', to educate the youth. While working as clerk, Vasudev was not able to see his dying mother due to the delay in approval of his leave. This incident enraged Vasudev and happened to be the turning point in his life

Revolt with the help of the Ramoshi's

In 1875, after the then Gaikwad ruler of Baroda was deposed by the British, Phadke launched protest speeches against the government. Severe famine coupled with the evident apathy of the British administration propelled him to tour the Deccan region, urging people to strive for a free republic. Unable to get support from the educated classes, he gathered a band of people from the Ramoshi caste. People from the Kolis, Bhils and Dhangars were also included later. He taught himself to shoot, ride and fence. He organised around 300 men into an insurgent group that aimed at liberating India from British rule. Vasudev intended to build an army of own but lacking funds they decided to break into government treasuries. The first raid was done in a village called Dhamari in Shirur taluka in Pune district. The income tax which was collected for British Raj was kept in the house of local business man Mr. Balchand Fojmal Sankla. They attacked the house and took the money for the benefit of famine stricken villagers. There they collected about four hundred rupees but this led to his being branded as a dacoit. To save himself Vasudev had to flee from village to village, sheltered by his sympathisers and well-wishers, mostly the lower class of the society. Impressed by his zeal and determination, the villagers of Nanagaum offered him protection and cover in the local forest. The general plot would be to cut off all the communications of British forces and then raid the treasury. The main purpose of these raids was to feed famine-affected farmer communities. Vasudev performed many such raids in areas near Shirur and Khed talukas in Pune.

Meanwhile, the leader of ''Ramoshi'' Daulatrav naik who is the main supporter of vasudev, headed towards western coastal area - ''konkan'' . On the date 10, 11 May 1879, they raided ''palaspe'' and ''chikhali''. They looted near about 1.5 lakh rupees. While returning towards ''ghat matha'' Major Daniel planted attack on the Daulatrav naik. The war is held in between both forces.During this war Daulatrav naik shot dead. Daulatrav naik's death gave a big setback to vasudev's revolt against the British raj. Due to the death of Daulatrav naik, vasudev lost the support. That's why he decided to move to south, and headed for Shri Shaila Mallikarjun shrine. After overcoming the moral defeat, Vasudev again recruited about 500 Rohilas to form strong army to start a fresh fight against the British Raj. [ref - mahan bharatiy krantikarak pratham parv 1770-1900 - by jhambare.]

Capture and death

Vasudev's plans to organize several simultaneously attacks against the British Raj nationwide were met with very limited success. He once had a direct engagement with the British army in the village of Ghanur, whereafter the government offered a bounty for his capture. Not to be outdone, Phadke in turned offered a bounty for the capture of the Governor of Bombay, announced a reward for the killing of each European, and issued other threats to the government. He then fled to Hyderabad State to recruit Rohilla and Arabs into his organisation. A British Major, Henry William Daniell and Abdul Haque, Police Commissioner to the Nizam of Hyderabad, pursued the fleeing Vasudev day and night. The British move to offer a bounty for his capture met with success: someone betrayed Phadke, and he was captured in a temple after a fierce fight at the district of Kaladgi on 20 July 1879 while he was on his way to Pandharpur . From here he was taken to Pune for trial. Vasudev and his comrades were housed in the district session court jail building, near Sangam bridge, which now happens to be the state C.I.D. building. His own diary provided evidence to have him sentenced for life. Vasudev was transported to jail at Aden, but escaped from the prison by taking the door off from its hinges on 13 February 1883. But his escape was too short lived: he was recaptured and put back in prison. Vasudev then went on a hunger strike to death. On 17 February 1883 Vasudev breathed his last breath as a result of his protest hunger strike.

Differences

Vasudev sought help from many prominent people of his time to help achieve his goals. One of these was Swami Samarth Maharaj in Akkalkot, Solapur district of Maharastra. Swamiji saw this revolution with a different perspective and said that the time was not right for an armed revolution and then asked another devotee to place Phadke's sword on a tree, indicating that Phadke shouldn't fight the war, but Phadke took the sword from the tree and left

Inspirational figure

Vasudev became known as the father of the Indian armed rebellion in that he provided the inspiration for fellow freedom fighters. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's famous patriotic novel ''Anand Math'' incorporated various contemporary acts of patriotism performed by Vasudev during his freedom struggle. As the British government didn't like this, Bankim had to print up to 5 editions of the book to tone down these stories..

Trivia

Even though Vasudev played a very important role in India's struggle for freedom there is not much recognization for his contribution in present day. In 1984, the Indian Postal Service issued a 50 paise stamp in honour of the revolutionary. A chowk in South Mumbai near Metro Cinema is named in his honour.

The 3rd BC old, Thanale-Khadsamble caves where Vasudev took refuge to escape from British, are about 8 km from Nadsur village near Pali.

A Marathi movie by the name "Vasudev Balawant Phadke" has been released in December 2007

References

Deccan Riots

Vasudeo Balwant Phadke – Indian Posts

Historical perspective

Vasudev Balwant Phadke

Remembering a hero: Vasudev Balwant Phadke gets a memorial at Sangam

History of Dhamari

C.I.D. : About us

Short biography of Akkalkot swami Samarth

Delayed, but modern revolutionary gets memorial

Biased PMC demolished Hindu Shrine

See also

Deccan Riots

Category:1845 births Category:1883 deaths Category:Indian revolutionaries Category:Marathi people Category:People who died on hunger strike

hi:वासुदेव बलवंत फडके mr:वासुदेव बळवंत फडके