India was Britain’s “jewel in the crown,” the centerpiece of its expanding empire in Asia and Africa. Until the late 1850s, Britain’s growing involvement with South Asia was organized and led by the British East India Company, a private trading firm that had acquired a charter from the Crown allowing it to exercise military, political, and administrative functions in India as well as its own commercial operations. But after the explosive upheaval of the Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858, the British government itself assumed control of the region until India’s independence in 1947.

Throughout the colonial era, the British relied heavily on an alliance with established elite groups in Indian society — landowners; the “princes” who governed large parts of the region; and the Brahmins, the highest-ranking segment of India’s caste-based society. These alliances strengthened or hardened elements of “traditional” India and brought them under British control. At the same time, colonial rule changed India in a hundred ways. Its schools gave rise to a class of Western-educated and English-speaking Indians; its economic and cultural policies fostered rebellion in the rural areas; its railroads, telegraphs, and postal services linked India more closely together; its racism provoked a growing sense of an all-Indian identity; its efforts to define, and thus control, India’s enormously diverse population contributed to a growing divide between its Hindu and Muslim communities.

This collection begins with a group of images that evoke familiar features of British colonial rule in India, followed by a series of documents that present a range of Indian responses to the colonial experience.