1947: the end of the Raj: thirty years of nonviolent protests led by Gandhi forced the British out of the Indian subcontinent, and gave birth to both India and Pakistan.

• Author: Edidin, Peter

Mohandas K. Gandhi bent down, grabbed a handful Jof salty mud, and held it up in the air. "With this," he declared, "I am shaking the foundations of the British empire."

It was April 6, 1930, and Gandhi, the 61-year-old Indian nationalist leader, had just completed a 240-mile walk from his home in Ahmedabad to the town of Dandi, on the Arabian Sea. What became known as the Great Salt March had begun 24 days earlier, as Gandhi and 78 followers set out on foot to protest British rule of India.

When they reached their destination, Gandhi, now surrounded by throngs of onlookers, took his muddy mixture and boiled it to make salt--an illegal act, since the British government required taxes to be paid on all salt made or sold in India.

BRITISH INDIA

Gandhi's act of civil disobedience (and the many others he staged, all nonviolent) would eventually help convince the British to give up their prized colony, which was given its independence and partitioned into India and Pakistan in August 1947.

The beginning of British rule in India is usually dated to 1757, when an army assembled by the British East India Company--British investors who wanted to trade with India--defeated the governor of Bengal in a battle near Calcutta.

This private company, with its own troops and powers of taxation, soon became the dominant force on a subcontinent with 400 million people. (The company's highest officers became so rich that their money, some historians have argued, financed the Industrial Revolution in England.)

The East India Company was a brutal and often racist overseer whose indifference helped create and exacerbate famines in the 1770s and '80s.

But colonial rule also brought some benefits, especially after the East India Company was abolished and India became an official British colony in 1858. The British introduced the rail-road and the telegraph, and the English language, which gave educated Indians, who spoke many languages, a common means of communication. And the British legal tradition introduced Western notions of individual and social rights. In fact, the greatest leaders of Indian independence--Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru (India's first Prime Minister) and Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Pakistan's first Governor General)--were all trained as lawyers in London.

GANDHI EMERGES

While there had been periodic rebellions against British rule, it was after World War I (1914-18) that the drive for self-rule gained traction. During the war, 1.3 million Indians served the British as soldiers or laborers, and the Raj (as the British administration in India was known) promised self-government after the war.

But in 1919, Britain adopted the Rowlatt Acts, giving the government emergency powers, including the right to imprison anyone deemed suspicious. It seemed to be a betrayal of promises of self-rule, and protests broke out.

This was the...