1、The East India Company,The East India Companys origins were much humbler. On 31 December 1600, a group of merchants who had incorporated themselves into the East India Company were given monopoly privileges on all trade with the East Indies.The Companys ships first arrived in India, at the port of S
2、urat, in 1608.,Sir Thomas Roe reached the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, as the emissary of King James I in 1615, and gained for the British the right to establish a factory at Surat. Gradually the British eclipsed (使衰落) the Portugese and over the years they saw a massive expansion of their
3、trading operations in India.,Numerous trading posts were established along the east and west coasts of India, and considerable English communities developed around the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. In 1717, the Company achieved its hitherto most notable success when it rece
4、ived a firman（皇帝的敕令） or royal dictat（圣旨） from the Mughal Emperor exempting（免除） the Company from the payment of custom duties in Bengal.,The Company saw the rise of its fortunes, and its transformation from a trading venture to a ruling enterprise, when one of its military officials, Robert Clive, de
5、feated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah , at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. A few years later the Company acquired the right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, but the initial years of its administration were calamitous( 多灾多难) for the people of Bengal.,The Company
6、s plunder of Bengal left the formerly rich province in a state of utter destitution. The famine of 1769-70, which the Companys policies did nothing to alleviate, may have taken the lives of as many as a third of the population.,The Company, despite the increase in trade and the revenues coming in fr
7、om other sources, found itself burdened with massive military expenditures, and its destruction seemed imminent. State intervention put the ailing Company back on its feet, and Lord Norths India Bill, also known as the Regulating Act of 1773, provided for greater parliamentary control over the affai
8、rs of the Company, besides placing India under the rule of a Governor-General.,The first Governor-General of India was Warren Hastings. Under his dispensation（分配）, the expansion of British rule in India was pursued vigorously, and the British sought to master indigenous systems of knowledge.,Hasting
9、s remained in India until 1784 and was succeeded by Cornwallis, who initiated the Permanent Settlement, whereby an agreement in perpetuity was reached with zamindars or landlords for the collection of revenue. For the next fifty years, the British were engaged in attempts to eliminate Indian rivals,
10、 and it is under the administration of Wellesley that British territorial expansion was achieved with ruthless efficiency.,Major victories were achieved against Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the Marathas, and finally the subjugation（征服、镇压） and conquest of the Sikhs in a series of Anglo- Sikh Wars led to
11、 British occupation over the entirety of India.In some places, the British practiced indirect rule, placing a Resident at the court of the native ruler who was allowed sovereignty in domestic matters.,a native state became part of British India if there was no male heir at the death of the ruler Som
12、etimes, the annexation, such as that of Awadh Oudh in 1856, was justified on the grounds that the native prince was of evil disposition (性格), indifferent to the welfare of his subjects.,The annexation of native states, harsh revenue policies, and the plight of the Indian peasantry all contributed to
13、 the Rebellion of 1857-58, referred to previously as the Sepoy Mutiny. In 1858 the East India Company was dissolved, despite a valiant（勇敢的） defense of its purported achievements by John Stuart Mill, and the administration of India became the responsibility of the Crown.,Robert Clive,The foundations
14、of the British empire in India were, it is said, laid by Robert Clive, known to his admirers as the “conqueror of India“. Clive first arrived in India in 1743 as a civil servant of the East India Company; he later transferred to the military service of the Company and returned to England in 1753, wh
15、ere he able to follow a comfortable life-style.,But his penchant（趋向、趣味） for extravagance and ostentatious（卖弄的） displays of wealth, just as much as his electoral loss in his attempt to gain a seat in the House of Commons, opened him to the attacks of his creditors and political opponents.Meanwhile, i
16、n Bengal, where the British and the French were contesting for supremacy, the Company required the services of an able commander.,Clive was eager to return to India; and soon the summons（传唤）came. He arrived in India in 1756 and at once secured the British forces in Madras. He then moved to Calcutta,
17、 which had been captured by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, and early in 1757 he recaptured Bengal.,Later that year, on June 23rd, he defeated the Nawab, largely by means of bribes, at the so-called “Battle of Plassey“. On June 23rd of that year, at the Battle of Plassey, a small village and m
18、ango grove between Calcutta and Murshidabad, the forces of the East India Company under Robert Clive defeated the army of Siraj-ud-daulah, the Nawab of Bengal.,The “battle“ lasted no more than a few hours, and indeed the outcome of the battle had been decided long before the soldiers came to the bat
19、tlefield. The greater number of the Nawabs soldiers were bribed to throw away their weapons, surrender prematurely, and even turn their arms against their own army. Clive thought of the battle as the climax to his career,In one fundamental respect, the battle of Plassey signified the state of things
20、 to come: few British victories were achieved without the use of bribes, and few promises made by the British were ever kept.,Sir Muhammed Iqbal,Iqbal remains in India both a controversial and revered (受尊敬的) figure. To nationalists he is the misguided intellectual progenitor（祖先） of Pakistan; but to
21、many lovers of poetry he is one of Indias greatest 20th century poets, perhaps next only to Rabindranath Tagore.,Iqbal is sometimes labeled as a pan-Islamist and, hence, un-Indian given that his intellectual inspiration seemingly came from sources other than Indian.Indeed, some of his statements giv
22、e the impression that he forgot his Indian intellectual and aesthetic heritage in his earnestness to be regarded as a poet of Islam.,A closer examination of his poetry, however, has revealed that he used pan-Islam mainly with reference to those essential Islamic values that were of universal signifi
23、cance; and he felt that it was these universal values that should “conquer“ the world.,While he expressed a particular Islamic vision through his poetry, he was regarded by the outside world as an Indian poet; and though he wrote in both Urdu and Persian, it is mainly upon his Urdu poetry that his f
24、ame rests. Shaikh Muhammed Iqbal was born in Sialkot in North-Western Punjab in 1873. His parents were originally from Kashmir.,Having pursued higher studies in Lahore, by 1905 he was off to England; and it is in Munich that he wrote a doctoral thesis on Persian metaphysical thought. Prior to his de
25、parture, he had already become famous as a poet for such nationalist poems as Naya Shivala- The New Temple and Tarana-i-Hindi- The Song of India.,Western society had a major impact on him, though, and altered his intellectual direction. He very much admired the Wests vitality and self-assertion, but
26、 greatly disliked its materialism, competitiveness, and spiritual emptiness.,He felt that the East, in contrast, could renew itself by taking the best cultural values of the east and west and use this as a foundation to construct a new society. He further concluded that Islam in its earliest form of
27、fered this combination of dynamism and preservation of spiritual and moral values.,Therefore, if Muslims could recreate this Islam for modern-times, they could offer a model for the East and to the world in general. The general modular form of such thinking was, of course, extremely pervasive, and I
28、qbal was scarcely alone in desiring to wed Indian or more specifically Islamic spirituality to Western material and political achievements.,Upon his return to India his writings took on a different tenor（进程，要旨）. Henceforth his poetry was expressed in a prophetic manner and emphasized themes such as
29、the personality-strengthening role of Islam or the love for God as a conquering power, as in his first two major Urdu poems, Complaint and Answer. The most elaborate expression of his philosophy, however, occurs in his Persian poem, Secrets of the Self.,Iqbal believed that spiritual emancipation did
30、 not involve dissolution of the Self in the Absolute, but, rather, an increasing defining of the limits of the Self in relation to the Absolute.,His philosophy of the Self reminds one of the glorification of the Atman as expressed in the Upanishads 奥义书：形成古代印度教之神学理论的一组哲学论文中的任一篇，皆是对更早的吠陀的阐发 and the st
31、atements of Swami Vivekananda. As one comes down from high philosophy to the practical level, the self and mankind translated into Muslims and the Muslim community for him.,Both Iqbal and Abul Kalam Azad tried in their own time to highlight the universal aspects of their faith, and both felt that th
32、e universal concerns underlying human society were represented in Islam. Yet both radically differed on how this universalism was supposed to manifest itself politically.,Azad, for instance, envisioned a religiously diverse community bound together by commonly held rules of righteous conduct. Iqbal,
33、 on the other hand, felt that a universal brotherhood had to be first achieved via the consolidation and development of the Muslim communal identity within India.,While he deeply believed in the brotherhood of man, Iqbal did not feel that language, ethnicity, or geography were sufficient to unite In
34、dians. Therefore, in opposition to Azad, he saw separate statehood as a practical way to realize his Khudi philosophy and to deal with the communalism rampant（猖獗） in his time.,What is evident, though, is that Iqbal was never motivated by an enmity towards Hindus; he envisioned this state as a group
35、of self-governing territories operating within an Indian federation - not of the fully independent Pakistan that eventually emerged.,He believed that a polity created by Muslims in India could serve as a rallying point for Muslims throughout the world and the beginning step towards a global brotherh
36、ood.,Largely due to the course of the political events that ensued, Iqbal has ended up becoming the poet-patriot of Pakistan. Yet he remains a revered artistic figure in India, despite having contributed to certain political outcomes. One finds remarkable philosophical similarities between Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore, both of whom were knighted for their artistic contributions. Both shared a humanistic world-outlook,
