The History of Freedom in India

British influence in Bengal arose from Clive’s victory in the 1757 battle of Plassey. That period also coincided roughly with significant developments of political thought in England (e.g. John Locke in the 1680s, Edmund Burke who became influential from the mid 1700s and Adam Smith a little later) and in the USA (e.g. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton). After the consolidation of Bengal by Robert Clive, the economic advantages of learning English started becoming increasingly obvious. As a result Indians started to show interest in learning the English language and its literature. By 1835, Indians were paying good money to be taught English. T B Macaulay noted in his famous ‘Minute’ that ‘the natives’ had become ‘desirous to be taught English’ and were no longer ‘desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic’. Indians picked up English very well. ‘[I]t is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the Continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos.’[i] While the British may have wanted to teach English only so that Indians could become their clerks, once the Pandora’s Box of knowledge is opened, its consequences are unstoppable. Indians quickly became aware of the enormous leaps made by Western political thought over the centuries. This awareness laid the seeds for subsequent demands for self-rule. But India faced a steep learning curve first. It had not paid the slightest heed to what had been going on elsewhere for centuries, if not millennia. But in the meantime the world had completely changed. People’s power was on the rise as never before in Britain. While British kings still existed, their powers had been dramatically truncated. In 1757, a young man of 24 years in Scotland by the name of Adam Smith was thinking about the entire world and examining how the wealth of nations was created. His ideas would convert the tiny island of England into the world’s most