History of the British Raj into being, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor General in Karachi. The following day, 15 August 1947, India, now a smaller "Union of India", became an independent country with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru assuming the office of the prime minister, and the viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, staying on as its first Governor General. History of the British Raj The history of the British Raj refers to the period of British rule on the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947. The system of governance was instituted in 1858 when the rule
Caste system in India mobility of property and creating consequent caste barriers in India. Khushwant Singh a Sikh historian, and Tony Ballantyne a professor of History, state that these British colonial era laws helped create and erect barriers within land-owning and landless castes in northwest India. Caste-based discrimination and denial of human rights by the colonial state had similar impact elsewhere in British India. Nicholas Dirks has argued that Indian caste as we know it today is a "modern phenomenon," as caste was "fundamentally transformed by British colonial rule." According to Dirks, before colonialism caste affiliation was quite loose and fluid, but the British