The notion that India endured several centuries of ‘foreign’ rule during the medieval period was firmly planted by colonial administrators and ideologues in the early decades of the 19th century. Thus, Lord Ellenborough (governor-general, 1842-44) proclaimed in 1842 that by transporting in that year the so-called ‘Gates of Somnath’ from Afghanistan to the East India Company’s territories, ‘the insult of eight hundred years’ had been ‘avenged’ by British troops.Ellenborough was a prominent Tory politician who presided over the Board of Control, the body which monitored the Company’s administration, several times between the 1820s and 1858 (he was president of the board when the bill for divesting the Company of its authority to govern the Indian empire was being drafted in 1858). Ellenborough had put together an armed force, the ‘Army of Retribution’, for marching through parts of Afghanistan in order to salvage imperial prestige following the crushing defeat inflicted on British forces in the First Afghan War.It was against this backdrop that he issued the ‘eight hundred years’ statement which sought to portray the British as saviours of Indian subjects of the empire! Already then by this time the medieval period had come to be equated in colonial writings with ‘Muslim period’. This in turn was portrayed as a period of ‘foreign’ rule, a view recently echoed by the prime minister in a speech in the US, which referred to India having been under ‘a thousand years of foreign rule in one form or another’. The British of course subtracted the period of colonial subjugation from their figure.This was the conventional understanding of India’s medieval past for a long time, and is succinctly summed up in a widely-read work published at the turn of the century, Stanley Lane-poole’s Mediaeval India Under Mohammedan Rule (1903). It might be worthwhile to quote the opening sentences of the Preface:‘The Mediaeval Period of Indian history, though it does not exactly correspond with the Middle Age of Europe, is not less clearly defined. It begins when the immemorial systems, rule, and customs of Ancient India were invaded, subdued, and modified by a succession of foreign conquerors who imposed a new rule … These conquerors were Muslims, and with the arrival of the Turks … at the beginning of the eleventh century, India entered upon her Middle Age. From that epoch for nearly eight hundred years her history is grouped round the Mohammedan rulers …’Leaving aside the evident factual inaccuracy in the last sentence of the above quotation (mention may be made of, among others, Cholas, Gajapatis, Ahoms, Kakatiyas; rulers of Vijayanagara, Mewar, Travancore; and the Marathas from the late 17th century onwards – none of whom fit into Lane-poole’s generalisation), one wonders whether it is historically meaningful to disregard the process of naturalisation. It is ironical that careers of contemporary western elites of Indian descent who are in positions of political power, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal or Rishi Sunak for example, are looked upon as migrant success stories which are worth admiring, whereas they are second or third generation settlers. On the other hand a fourth generation settler such as the Jahangir, born and brought up on the outskirts of Agra risks being regarded as an ‘outsider’.Also read: Sylhet Referendum Anniversary: A Time to Remember Partition Wasn’t Only About a Hindu-Muslim BinarySince the early 19th century, colonial historiography divided pre-British Indian history into periods labelled in terms of religious identity: Hindu and Muslim. The entire period prior to circa 1000 CE, was labelled as the ‘Hindu Period’ of Indian history. The period from the beginning of the 11th century came to be regarded as the ‘Muslim Period’ of Indian history, lasting till the first half of the 18th century. This period was further subdivided into the era of the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), which was followed by the Mughal era. The Mughal empire began to disintegrate after the death of Aurangzeb (1707). The conquest of Bengal by the East India Company was regarded as marking the beginning of the British period.This periodisation has been attributed to James Mill, whose History of British India published in 1817 remained one of the most influential colonial texts on the subject throughout the 19th century. While the roots of the periodisation scheme may be traced back to Mill’s work, a closer look at Mill’s History would show that he does not actually refer to ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ periods of Indian history. For Mill, non-European societies had no real history. According to this understanding, Indian society had been changeless before the British rule was introduced. Since India, unlike Europe, had no history, it could not therefore have had any historical epochs. The past could not be conceived in terms historical periods, with discontinuities indicating change.A short portion of the first volume of Mill’s book, dealing with ‘The Mahomedans’, sketches the political history of north India, from Mahmud’s forays into the subcontinent, to the accession of Shah Alam II in 1759. It begins with the assertion that, ‘At the time when the nations of Europe opened their communication with India, by the Cape of Good Hope [c.1498], the people … for a number of ages been subject to a race of foreigners’. At the time of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, ‘the political state of India … consisted of a Mahomedan government, supported by a Mahomedan force, over a Hindu population’. This was a key formulation picked up by some of the Indian historians writing in the early twentieth century. These historians sought to contest the colonial construction of India’s past by postulating that India had a glorious ancient civilisation which was disrupted when India came under Muslim rulers.The periodisation of the history of pre-British India, by dividing this history into a ‘Hindu’ period and a ‘Muslim’ period’, had become well-entrenched by the middle of the 19th century. It needs to be underlined that the historiography on India was almost the exclusive preserve of colonial bureaucrats dabbling in history till the 1880s. Therefore colonial narratives of India’s past remained unchallenged for almost three-quarters of a century and had an enormous impact on the ways in which this past was imagined. What is more, colonial historiography provided many of the building blocks for early nationalist historians, and subsequently for communal political assertions.Mill’s book had no serious competitor for a quarter of a century. As a general modern history of India, purporting to be a history of the entire subcontinent, it was the only book of its kind till the publication of a book which focused on the pre-British past of the subcontinent. It was written by a prominent employee of the East India Company, Mountstuart Elphinstone, who retired as governor of Bombay presidency in 1827. Elphinstone’s History of India was published in two volumes in 1841. The title was modified when the third edition was published in 1849: The History of India: The Hindu and Mahometan Periods. These labels had come to stay. A great deal of scholarly effort was required to undo such a chronological division. Historical works published since the 1950s have to a large extent undermined this understanding of India’s past, at least in academic writings. Simultaneously it continues to be central to communal assertions about India’s past.Without going into the complex historical problem of how ‘foreignness’ is to be defined in the context of pre-modern societies, before the emergence of modern nation-states, it is important to draw attention to the specific character of colonialism as a system of exploitation, of extraction of wealth which then is transferred to the metropole. The ruling elites of the metropole, in this case Britain, were the main beneficiaries of this system using it to augment their own wealth manifold. The Industrial Revolution in England, which gathered momentum in the latter half of the eighteenth century, could not have been sustained without the resources pumped out of Bengal and Bihar especially after the battles of Plassey (1757) and of Baksar (1764), and transferred in various ways to the metropole. While Britain grew rich and became the foremost capitalist economy in the world, India became poorer.The pioneers of economic nationalism, Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt, assiduously studied a mass of official statistics and were able to demonstrate that British rule had systematically impoverished the Indian people through a mechanism whereby their resources were drained away continuously. Salaries and pensions of the colonial establishment, in India as well as in Britain, were paid out of Indian revenues. The triangular trade which involved the purchase of Chinese tea for the European market with profits earned from smuggling opium produced in India into China (opium was a monopoly of the colonial state), i.e., opium to China, and tea to England. This was an important channel for transmitting private earnings from India to Britain.But the part of the mechanism which was not easily discernible was the one whereby India exported goods without getting anything in return. Whereas India had a favourable balance of trade with Britain till the 1860s, it had no real earnings from this trade. India’s growing export surplus with countries other than Britain was used to overcome Britain’s deficit vis-à-vis other countries through the Council Bills mechanism—a major source of the ‘drain of wealth’—from 1861 onwards. Importers of Indian goods made payments in pounds sterling to the secretary of state’s treasury in London, receiving Council Bills against these payments. These could be encashed by exporters in India in rupees, and were paid out of Indian revenues. The specificity of colonial rule lay in the operation of this mechanism, and some of the other means through which the British ruling elite extracted wealth from India over nearly two centuries.This was made possible by the political control which was exercised by the colonial state. It unleashed its full military might to brutally suppress the revolt of 1857, amounting to a reconquest of the empire. The drain of wealth could then continue for another 90 years. To club the centuries which preceded British rule with the era of colonialism is to trivialise colonial exploitation, the long history of resistance to it and the glorious legacy of the freedom struggle.Amar Farooqui taught history at Delhi University.Note: This article was edited slightly on July 24, 2023 for clarity.