British India

British foreign policy in the Middle East has involved multiple considerations, particularly over the last two and a half centuries. These included maintaining access to British India, blocking Russian or French threats to that access, protecting the Suez Canal, supporting the declining Ottoman Empire against Russian threats, guaranteeing an oil supply after 1900 from Middle East fields, protecting Egypt and other possessions in the Middle East, and enforcing Britain's naval role in the Mediterranean. The timeframe of major concern stretches from the 1770s when the Russian Empire began to dominate the Black Sea, down to the Suez Crisis of the mid-20th century and involvement in the Iraq War in the early 21st. These policies are an integral part of the history of the foreign relations of the United Kingdom.

The Great Game was a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. The colonial empire and great land power (heartland state) used military interventions and diplomatic negotiations to acquire and redefine territories in Central and South Asia. Russia conquered Turkestan, and Britain expanded and set the borders of British India. By the early 20th century, a line of independent states, tribes, and monarchies from the shore of the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Himalayas were made into protectorates and territories of the two empires.

Though the Great Game was marked by distrust, diplomatic intrigue, and regional wars, it never erupted into a full-scale war directly between Russian and British colonial forces. However, the two nations battled in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, which affected the Great Game. The Russian and British Empires also cooperated numerous times during the Great Game, including many treaties and the Afghan Boundary Commission.

The Third Anglo-Afghan War was a short war which began on 3 May and ended on 8 August 1919. The new Amir of the Emirate of Afghanistan Amanullah Khan declared a Jihad against the British in the hope to proclaim full independence, as well as to strengthen his own legitimacy. Amanullah's forces invaded British India on three fronts taking advantage of the unrest in India, in an effort to seize the old Afghan provinces west of the River Indus.

Initial victories saw the Afghans invade across the border, defeating the British and occupying Bagh. The British retaliated, leading a counterattack that routed the Afghans. Conflict continued in Kurram, which saw the British overwhelmed. Taking their own initiative, the British seized Spin Boldak in the south, while an Afghan offensive in Thal was contained, with the British occupying Dacca in turn by the end of May. The Royal Air Force were also used in bombing and strafing attacks on the frontier tribes as well as targets within Afghanistan, including Kabul and Jalalabad. Although small in scale, it was a contributing force for Amanullah to call for an armistice in June.

Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mainly situated in the Himalayas, but also includes parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to the north, and India to the south, east, and west, while it is narrowly separated from Bangladesh by the Siliguri Corridor, and from Bhutan by the Indian state of Sikkim. Nepal has a diverse geography, including fertile plains, subalpine forested hills, and eight of the world's ten highest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point above mean sea level on Earth. Kathmandu is the nation's capital and its largest city. Nepal is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, and multi-cultural state, with Nepali as the official language.

The name "Nepal" is first recorded in texts from the Vedic period of the Indian subcontinent, the era in ancient Nepal when Hinduism was founded, the predominant religion of the country. In the middle of the first millennium BC, Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, was born in Lumbini in southern Nepal. Parts of northern Nepal were intertwined with the culture of Tibet. The centrally located Kathmandu Valley is intertwined with the culture of Indo-Aryans, and was the seat of the prosperous Newar confederacy known as Nepal Mandala. The Himalayan branch of the ancient Silk Road was dominated by the valley's traders. The cosmopolitan region developed distinct traditional art and architecture. By the 18th century, the Gorkha Kingdom achieved the unification of Nepal. The Shah dynasty established the Kingdom of Nepal and later formed an alliance with the British Empire, under its Rana dynasty of premiers. The country was never colonised but served as a buffer state between Imperial China and British India. Parliamentary democracy was introduced in 1951 but was twice suspended by Nepalese monarchs, in 1960 and 2005. The Nepalese Civil War in the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in the establishment of a secular republic in 2008, ending the world's last Hindu monarchy. The Constitution of Nepal, adopted in 2015, affirms the country as a federal parliamentary republic divided into seven provinces. In September 2025, protests against a social media ban and economic inequality caused riots, resulting in casualties and resignation of the prime minister.

The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia.

The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions.Smaller literary languages are Tulu and Kodava.Together with several smaller languages such as Gondi, these languages cover the southern part of India and the northeast of Sri Lanka, and account for the overwhelming majority of speakers of Dravidian languages.Malto and Kurukh are spoken in isolated pockets in eastern India.Kurukh is also spoken in parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Brahui is mostly spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iranian Balochistan, Afghanistan and around the Marw oasis in Turkmenistan. During the British colonial period, Dravidian speakers were sent as indentured labourers to Southeast Asia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean, and East Africa. There are more-recent Dravidian-speaking diaspora communities in the Middle East, Europe, North America and Oceania.

Faisalabad, formerly known as Lyallpur, is the second-largest city and primary industrial center of the Pakistani province of Punjab. Located in the Rachna Doab of the central Punjab, it is the third-most populous city in Pakistan. Established in 1890s as a planned city, the population of the city increased six times in the decade following the partition of British India as hundreds of thousands of East Punjabi Muslim immigrants settled the city.

Historically one of the largest villages of Punjab, Lyallpur was one of the first planned cities within British India. It became headquarters of the lower Chenab Colony and in 1898 was incorporated as a municipality. It was restructured into city district status; a devolution promulgated by the 2001 local government ordinance (LGO). The city is the headquarters of the Faisalabad District the total area of which is around 5,856 km (2,261 sq mi) while the urban area controlled by the Faisalabad Development Authority (FDA) is around 1,300 km (500 sq mi).

Himachal Pradesh (Hindi: Himācal Pradeś, pronounced [ɦɪˈmäːtʃəl pɾəˈd̪eːʃ]; Sanskrit: himācāl prādes; lit. "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the 13 mountain states and is characterised by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks and extensive river systems. Himachal Pradesh is the northernmost state of India and shares borders with the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh to the north, and the states of Punjab to the west, Haryana to the southwest, Uttarakhand to the southeast and a very narrow border with Uttar Pradesh to the south. The state also shares an international border to the east with the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Himachal Pradesh is also known as Dev Bhoomi, meaning 'Land of Gods' and Veer Bhoomi which means 'Land of the Brave'.

The predominantly mountainous region comprising the present-day Himachal Pradesh has been inhabited since pre-historic times, having witnessed multiple waves of human migrations from other areas. Through its history, the region was mostly ruled by local kingdoms, some of which accepted the suzerainty of larger empires. Prior to India's independence from the British, Himachal comprised the hilly regions of the Punjab Province of British India. After independence, many of the hilly territories were organised as the Chief Commissioner's province of Himachal Pradesh, which later became a Union Territory. In 1966, hilly areas of the neighbouring Punjab state were merged into Himachal and it was ultimately granted full statehood in 1971.

Islam is the second largest religion in the Netherlands, after Christianity, and is practised by 6% of the population according to 2023. estimates. The majority of Muslims in the Netherlands belong to the Sunni denomination. Many reside in the country's four major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.

The early history of Islam in the Netherlands can be traced back to the 16th century, when a small number of Ottoman merchants began settling in the nation's port cities. As a result, improvised mosques were first built in Amsterdam in the early 17th century. In the ensuing centuries, the Netherlands experienced sporadic Muslim immigration from the Dutch East Indies, during their long history as part of the Dutch overseas possessions. From the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War until the independence of Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies contained the world's second largest Muslim population, after British India. However, the number of Muslims in the European territory of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was very low, accounting for less than 0.1% of the population.

The Dominion of India, officially the Union of India, was an independent dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations existing between 15 August 1947 and 26 January 1950. Until its independence, India had been ruled as an informal empire by the United Kingdom. The empire, also called the British Raj and sometimes the British Indian Empire, consisted of regions, collectively called British India, that were directly administered by the British government, and regions, called the princely states, that were ruled by Indian rulers under a system of paramountcy, in favour of the British. The Dominion of India was formalised by the passage of the Indian Independence Act 1947, which also formalised an independent Dominion of Pakistan—comprising the regions of British India that are today Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Dominion of India remained "India" in common parlance but was geographically reduced by the lands that went to Pakistan, as a separate dominion. Under the Act, the King remained the monarch of India but the British government relinquished all responsibility for administering its former territories. The government also revoked its treaty rights with the rulers of the princely states and advised them to join in a political union with India or Pakistan. Accordingly, one of the British monarch's regnal titles, "Emperor of India," was abandoned.

The Dominion of India came into existence on the partition of India and was beset by religious violence. Its creation had been preceded by a pioneering and influential anti-colonial nationalist movement which became a major factor in ending the British Raj. A new government was formed led by Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister, and Vallabhbhai Patel as deputy prime minister, both members of the Indian National Congress. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, stayed on until June 1948 as independent India's first governor-general; he was replaced by C. Rajagopalachari.

Odisha (Odia: oṛiśā, pronounced [oˈɽisa] ) is a state located in Eastern India. It is the eighth-largest state by area, and the eleventh-largest by population, with over 41 million inhabitants. The state also has the third-largest population of Scheduled Tribes in India. It neighbours the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal to the north, Chhattisgarh to the west, and Andhra Pradesh to the south. Odisha has a coastline of 485 kilometres (301 mi) along the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean. The region is also known as Utkaḷa and is mentioned by this name in India's national anthem, Jana Gana Mana.

The ancient kingdom of Kalinga, which was invaded by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka in 261 BCE resulting in the Kalinga War, coincides with the borders of modern-day Odisha. The modern boundaries of Odisha were demarcated by the British Indian government, the Orissa Province was established on 1 April 1936, consisting of the Odia-speaking districts of Bihar and Orissa Province, Madras Presidency and Central Provinces. Utkala Divas (lit. 'Odisha Day') is celebrated on 1 April. Cuttack was made the capital of the region by Anantavarman Chodaganga in c. 1135, after which the city was used as the capital by many rulers, through the British era until 1948. Thereafter, Bhubaneswar became the capital of Odisha.

Subhas Chandra Bose (23 January 1897 – 18 August 1945) was an Indian nationalist whose defiance of British authority in India made him a hero among many Indians, but his wartime alliances with Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan left a legacy vexed by authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and military failure. The honorific 'Netaji' (Hindustani: "Respected Leader") was first applied to Bose in Germany in early 1942—by the Indian soldiers of the Indische Legion and by the German and Indian officials in the Special Bureau for India in Berlin. It is now used throughout India.

Bose was born into wealth and privilege in a large Bengali family in Orissa during the British Raj. The early recipient of an Anglo-centric education, he was sent after college to England to take the Indian Civil Service examination. He succeeded with distinction in the vital first exam but demurred at taking the routine final exam, citing nationalism to be the higher calling. Returning to India in 1921, Bose joined the nationalist movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. He followed Jawaharlal Nehru to leadership in a group within the Congress which was less keen on constitutional reform and more open to socialism. Bose became Congress president in 1938. After reelection in 1939, differences arose between him and the Congress leaders, including Gandhi, over the future federation of British India and princely states, but also because discomfort had grown among the Congress leadership over Bose's negotiable attitude to non-violence, and his plans for greater powers for himself. After the large majority of the Congress Working Committee members resigned in protest, Bose resigned as president and was eventually ousted from the party.

A zamindar in the Indian subcontinent was an autonomous or semi-autonomous feudal lord of a zamindari (feudal estate). The term itself came into use during the Mughal Empire, when Persian was the official language; zamindar is the Persian for landowner. During the British Raj, the British began using it as a local synonym for "estate". Subsequently, it was widely and loosely used for any substantial landed magnates in the British India. Zamindars as a class were equivalent to lords and barons; in some cases, they were independent sovereign princes. Similarly, their holdings were typically hereditary and came with the right to collect taxes on behalf of imperial courts or for military purposes. This continued in states like Bihar, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal even after independence until the abolition of zamindari in 1950.

During the Mughal Empire, as well as the British rule, zamindars were the land-owning nobility of the Indian subcontinent and formed the ruling class. Emperor Akbar granted them mansabs and their ancestral domains were treated as jagirs. Most of the big zamindars belonged to the Hindu high-caste, usually Brahmin, Rajput, Bhumihar or Kayastha. During the colonial era, the Permanent Settlement consolidated what became known as the zamindari system. The British rewarded supportive zamindars by recognising them as princes. Many of the region's princely states were pre-colonial zamindar holdings elevated to a greater protocol. The British also reduced the land holdings of many pre-colonial princely states and chieftaincies, demoting their status to noble zamindars from previously higher ranks of royalty. During the period of British colonial rule in India, many wealthy and influential zamindars were bestowed with noble and royal titles such as Maharaja, Raja/Rai, Babu, Rai sahib, Rai Bahadur, Nawab and Khan.

Provincial elections were held in British India in the winter of 1936–37 as mandated by the Government of India Act 1935. Elections were held in all gubernational eleven provinces - Madras, Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, United Provinces, Bombay, Assam, North-West Frontier Province, Bengal, Punjab and Sind. No elections were held in the British provinces of Delhi, Ajmer-Merwara, Coorg & Baluchistan and in the princely states.

The final results of the elections were declared on 20 February 1937. The Indian National Congress emerged in power in five of the provinces, Bombay, Madras, the Central Provinces, the United Provinces, the North-West Frontier Province, Bihar, and Orissa. The exceptions were Punjab, Sindh (where it failed to obtain majority), Assam & Bengal (where it was nevertheless the single-largest party). The All-India Muslim League failed to form the government in any province on its own.

The Indian Independence Act 1947 (10 & 11 Geo. 6. c. 30) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that partitioned British India into the two new independent dominions of India and Pakistan. The act received Royal Assent on 18 July 1947 and thus modern-day India and Pakistan, comprising west (modern day Pakistan) and east (modern day Bangladesh) regions, came into being on 15 August.

The legislature representatives of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh community came to an agreement with Lord Mountbatten, then Viceroy and Governor-General of India, on what has come to be known as the 3 June Plan or Mountbatten Plan.

The partition of India in 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. The Union of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wise non-Muslim (mostly Hindu and Sikh) or Muslim majorities. It also involved the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury, between the two new dominions. The partition was set forth in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, or Crown rule in India. The two self-governing countries of India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947.

The partition displaced between 12 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises associated with the mass migration and population transfer that occurred across the newly constituted dominions; there was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present.

Before it gained independence in 1947, India (also called the Indian Empire) was divided into two sets of territories, one under direct British rule (British India), and the other consisting of princely states under the suzerainty of the British Crown, with control over their internal affairs remaining to varying degrees in the hands of their hereditary rulers. The latter included 562 princely states which had different types of revenue-sharing arrangements with the British, often depending on their size, population and local conditions. In addition, there were several colonial enclaves controlled by France and Portugal. After independence, the political integration of these territories into an Indian Union was a declared objective of the Indian National Congress, and the Government of India pursued this over the next decade.

In 1920, Congress (party) under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi declared swaraj (self-rule) for Indians as its goal and asked the princes of India to establish responsible government. Jawaharlal Nehru played a major role in pushing Congress to confront the princely states and declared in 1929 that "only people who have the right to determine the future of the States must be the people of these States". In 1937, the Congress won in most parts of British India (not including the princely states) in the provincial elections, and started to intervene in the affairs of the states. In the same year, Gandhi played a major role in proposing a federation involving a union between British India and the princely states, with an Indian central government. In 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India. In January 1947, Nehru said that independent India would not accept the divine right of kings. In May 1947, he declared that any princely state which refused to join the Constituent Assembly would be treated as an enemy state. Vallabhbhai Patel, Louis Mountbatten and V. P. Menon were more conciliatory towards the princes, and as the men charged with integrating the states, were successful in the task. Having secured their accession, they then proceeded, in a step-by-step process, to secure and extend the union government's authority over these states and transform their administrations until, by 1956, there was little difference between the territories that had been part of British India and those that had been princely states. Simultaneously, the Government of India, through a combination of military and diplomatic means, acquired de facto and de jure control over the remaining colonial enclaves, which too were integrated into India.

The North-West Frontier Province (abbr. NWFP), commonly known as Sarhad (lit. 'Frontier'), was a province of Pakistan from 1947 to 1955 and from 1970 to 2010; and prior, a province of British India from its establishment in 1901 to Pakistan's independence in 1947. It was established from the north-western districts of British Punjab during the British Raj. Following the referendum in 1947 to join either Pakistan or India, the province voted hugely in favour of joining Pakistan and it acceded accordingly on 14 August 1947. It was dissolved to form a unified province of West Pakistan in 1955 upon promulgation of One Unit Scheme and was reestablished in 1970. It was known by this name until 19 April 2010, when it was dissolved and redesignated as the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa following the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan.

The province covered an area of 70,709 km (27,301 sq mi), including much of the current Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province but excluding the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the former princely states of Amb, Chitral, Dir, Phulra and Swat. Its capital was the city of Peshawar, and the province was composed of six divisions (Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan, Hazara, Kohat, Mardan, and Peshawar Division; Malakand was later added as the seventh division). Until 1947, the province was bordered by five princely states to the north, the minor states of the Gilgit Agency to the northeast, the province of Punjab to the east and the province of Balochistan to the south. The Kingdom of Afghanistan lay to the northwest, with the Federally Administered Tribal Areas forming a buffer zone between the two.

Malwa (IPA: [maːlʋaː]) is a historical region of west-central India occupying a plateau of volcanic origin. Geologically, the Malwa Plateau generally refers to the volcanic upland north of the Vindhya Range. Politically and administratively, it is also synonymous with the former state of Madhya Bharat which was later merged with Madhya Pradesh. At present the historical Malwa region includes districts of western Madhya Pradesh and parts of south-eastern Rajasthan. Sometimes the definition of Malwa is extended to include the Nimar region south of the Vindhyas.

The Malwa region had been a separate political unit from the time of the ancient Malava Kingdom, and has been ruled by several kingdoms and dynasties. Malwa continued to be an administrative division until 1947, when the Malwa Agency of British India was merged into Madhya Bharat (also known as Malwa Union) state of independent India.

Hindu law, as a historical term, refers to the code of laws applied to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs in British India. Hindu law, in modern scholarship, also refers to the legal theory, jurisprudence and philosophical reflections on the nature of law discovered in ancient and medieval era Indian texts. It is one of the oldest known jurisprudence theories in the world, beginning three thousand years ago, and is based on the Hindu texts.

Hindu tradition, in its surviving ancient texts, does not universally express the law in the canonical sense of ius or of lex. The ancient term in Indian texts is Dharma, which means more than a code of law, though collections of legal maxims were compiled into works such as the Nāradasmṛti. The term "Hindu law" is a colonial construction, and emerged after the colonial rule arrived in Indian subcontinent, and when in 1772 it was decided by British colonial officials, that European common law system would not be implemented in India, that Hindus of India would be ruled under their "Hindu law" and Muslims of India would be ruled under "Muslim law" (Sharia).

The secretary of state for the colonies or colonial secretary was the Cabinet of the United Kingdom's minister in charge of managing certain parts of the British Empire.

The colonial secretary never had responsibility for the provinces and princely states of India, which had its own secretary of state.