The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 4: The Modern Age: From Victoria's Empire to the End of the USSR by Susan Wise Bauer

Author:Susan Wise Bauer [Bauer, Susan Wise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781933339726
Publisher: Peace Hill Press
Published: 2013-05-12T06:00:00+00:00

With the rebellion over, the British tried to improve India for their subjects. They built railroads and roads, laid telegraph lines, and improved India’s harbors so that more ships could trade in Indian ports. The British in India thought that they had a duty to bring English customs and ways to India, because they believed that English customs were much better than Indian ways. The writer Rudyard Kipling called this duty the “white man’s burden.”

But Indians wished that the British would set down this “burden.” No matter how much the British talked about doing good for India, the Indians could see clearly that the British had more privileges, more wealth, and a better life. British citizens lived in separate neighborhoods, where the only Indians were servants. Most British in India had plenty of Indian servants, nursemaids, cooks, and nannies. The Indians called the white men sahibs, and the white women memsahibs—Indian words that meant “master” and “mistress.”

The Indians didn’t want masters and mistresses. The British knew this; as a matter of fact, before World War I, the British had begun to agree that they might try to treat India in the same way that they had treated Canada and Australia, by giving the Indians self-rule.

After World War I, the British no longer paid attention to this promise. They were too occupied with trying to recover from the dreadful fighting that had killed so many Englishmen. But the Indians had also suffered from World War I. Over a hundred thousand Indian soldiers had also died, fighting in British regiments and in defense of Great Britain. At the very least, India should be rewarded with freedom!

The loudest group of Indians calling for independence was called the Congress Party. By the time World War I ended, the Congress Party was led by a lawyer named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He had grown up in a Hindu family, studied law in England, and then travelled to South Africa. There, he spent years working to improve the lives of Indian immigrants. In South Africa, Indians were treated as badly as blacks, because their skin was dark.

Gandhi stayed away from India for twenty-one years. When he returned to his home country, he felt like a stranger. But news of his work for Indians in South Africa had spread back to India. Gandhi already had a reputation as a man ready to work for justice and independence.

In the first year after he came back to India, Gandhi decided to travel around his country by train and see the villages and cities that he had not visited for over two decades. What he found was an India in which there was poverty, dirt, disease, and misery. So he joined the Congress Party, and tried to get Indians from every small village in India to join it. The Congress Party swelled to include millions of people!

In 1919, demonstrators from the Congress Party met in the holy city of Amritsar, to protest against British rule. Amritsar, in the north of India, was the most sacred city on earth for the Sikhs (followers of the Sikh religion) who lived in India.

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