Colonial India
Colonial India was the part of the Indian subcontinent that was occupied by European colonial powers during and after the Age of Discovery. European power was exerted both by conquest and trade, especially in spices. Near the end of the 15th century, Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama became the first European to re-establish direct trade links with India by being the first to arrive by circumnavigating Africa. Arriving in Calicut – by then one of the major trading ports of the eastern world – he obtained permission to trade in the city from the Saamoothiris. The next to arrive were the Dutch, with their main base in Ceylon, but their expansion into India was halted after their defeat in the Battle of Colachel to the Kingdom of Travancore, during the Travancore–Dutch War on the hands of Marthanda Varma.
Trading rivalries among the seafaring European powers brought other coastal powers from the empires of Europe to India. The Dutch Republic, England, France, and Denmark–Norway all established trading posts in India in the early 17th century. As the Mughal Empire disintegrated in the early 18th century, and then as the Maratha Empire became weakened after the third battle of Panipat, many relatively weak and unstable Indian states which emerged were increasingly open to manipulation by the Europeans, through dependent Indian rulers.
In the later 18th century, Great Britain and France struggled for dominance, partly through proxy Indian rulers but also by direct military intervention. The defeat of the formidable Indian ruler Tipu Sultan in 1799 marginalised the French influence. This was followed by a rapid expansion of British power through the greater part of the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century. By the middle of the century, the British had already gained direct or indirect control over almost all parts of India. British India, consisting of the directly ruled British presidencies and provinces, contained the most populous and valuable parts of the British Empire and thus became known as "the jewel in the British crown".
During its colonial era, India was a founding member of the League of Nations, a participating nation in the Summer Olympics, and a founding member of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. In 1947, India gained its independence and was partitioned into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan, the latter of which was created as a homeland for colonial India's Muslims.
Portuguese
The first successful voyage to India by sea was by Vasco da Gama in 1498, when after sailing around the Cape of Good Hope he arrived in Calicut, now in Kerala. Having arrived there, he obtained permission from Saamoothiri Rajah to trade in the city. The navigator was received with traditional hospitality, but an interview with the Saamoothiri failed to produce any definitive results. Vasco da Gama requested permission to leave a factor behind in charge of the merchandise he could not sell; his request was refused, and the king insisted that Gama should pay customs duty like any other trader, which strained their relations. The ruler of the Kingdom of Tanur, who was a vassal to the Zamorin of Calicut, sided with the Portuguese, against his overlord at Calicut. As a result, the Kingdom of Tanur became one of the earliest Portuguese allies in India. The ruler of Tanur also sided with Cochin. Many of the members of the royal family of Cochin in 16th and 17th members were selected from Vettom. However, the Tanur forces under the king fought for the Zamorin of Calicut in the Battle of Cochin. However, the allegiance of the Mappila merchants in Tanur region still stayed under the Zamorin of Calicut.Francisco de Almeida was appointed Viceroy of India in 1505. During his reign, the Portuguese dominated Kochi and established a few fortresses on the Malabar Coast. The Portuguese suffered setbacks from attacks by Zamorin forces in South Malabar; especially from naval attacks under the leadership of Calicut admirals known as Kunjali Marakkars, which compelled them to seek a treaty. The Kunjali Marakkars were credited with organising the first naval defence of the Indian coast. Tuhfat Ul Mujahideen written by Zainuddin Makhdoom II of Ponnani in 16th-century CE is the first-ever known book fully based on the history of Kerala, written by a Keralite. It is written in Arabic and contains pieces of information about the resistance put up by the navy of Kunjali Marakkar alongside the Zamorin of Calicut from 1498 to 1583 against Portuguese attempts to colonise Malabar coast. In 1571, the Portuguese were defeated by the Zamorin forces in the battle at Chaliyam Fort.
File:Thangassery Fort.jpg|right|thumb|Ruins of the Portuguese built St Thomas Fort at Tangasseri in Kollam city, est. in 1518
Though Portugal's presence in India initially started in 1498, their colonial rule lasted from 1505 until 1961. The Portuguese Empire established the first European trading centre at Quilon in 1502. It is believed that the colonial era in India started with the establishment of this Portuguese trading centre at Quilon. In 1505, King Manuel I of Portugal appointed Dom Francisco de Almeida as the first Portuguese viceroy in India, followed in 1509 by Dom Afonso de Albuquerque. In 1510, Albuquerque conquered the city of Goa, which had been controlled by Muslims. He inaugurated the policy of marrying Portuguese men with native women who had converted to Catholicism, the consequence of which was a great miscegenation in Goa and other Portuguese territories in Asia. The first revolt against the Portuguese was the Conspiracy of the Pintos in 1787.
File:Coat of Arms of the Pintos April 1770.jpg|thumb|Coat of Arms of the Pintos, the ethnic Goan family that had the first anti-colonial revolt in India.
For decades after, the Conspiracy was used as a stick to defame and denigrate Goan missionaries and priests in British India by their opponents, the Vicars Apostolic of the Propaganda party, Goans being of the Padroado party. The incident was used to represent the Goans to the British government and to the Christians in British India as untrustworthy, rebellious and willing to compromise with their own enemies. This became Goa's black legend.
Abbé Faria teamed up with the revolutionaries of the French Revolution and participated along with the "juring" clerics in the Revolutionaries' brutal persecution of the Catholic Church in France and elsewhere. Two Pinto brothers Lt. Col Francisco and Jose Antonio joined the army of the Maratha Empire under Baji Rao II and fought against the British in the Second Anglo-Maratha War and Third Anglo-Maratha War.
While the revolt failed, Goans did achieve stronger forms of Government and when the Portuguese Constitution of 1822 was adopted, two native Goans Bernardo Peres da Silva and Constâncio Roque da Costa were elected to the first parliament in Portugal, a practice that continued till the Annexation of Goa in 1961
An account of this was done by the Portuguese civil servant Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara which is one of the major accounts of the Pinto Revolt and subsequently translated into English by Dr. Charles Borges.
Goa was annexed by India on 19 December 1961. Another feature of the Portuguese presence in India was their promotion of Catholicism by sponsoring missionaries from various orders, such as the Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier, who is revered among the Catholics of India.
Dutch
The Dutch East India Company established trading posts along different parts of the Indian coast. For some time, they controlled the Malabar southwest coast and the Coromandel southeastern coast and Surat. They conquered Ceylon from the Portuguese. The Dutch also established trading stations in Travancore and coastal Tamil Nadu as well as at Rajshahi in present-day Bangladesh, Hugli-Chinsura, and Murshidabad in present-day West Bengal, Balasore in Odisha, and Ava, Arakan, and Syriam in present-day Myanmar. However, their expansion into India was halted, after their defeat in the Battle of Colachel to the Kingdom of Travancore, during the Travancore-Dutch War. The Dutch never recovered from the defeat and no longer posed a large colonial threat to India.Ceylon was lost at the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, where the Dutch having fallen subject to France, saw their colonies captured by Britain. The Dutch later became less involved in India, as they had the Dutch East Indies.
English and British India
Rivalry with the Netherlands
At the end of the 16th century, England and the United Netherlands began to challenge Portugal's monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages: the English East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, were chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. These companies were intended to carry on the lucrative spice trade, and they focused their efforts on the areas of production, especially the Indonesian archipelago the "Spice Islands", and on India as an important market for the trade. The close proximity of London and Amsterdam across the North Sea, and the intense rivalry between England and the Netherlands, inevitably led to conflict between the two companies, with the Dutch gaining the upper hand in the Moluccas after the withdrawal of the English in 1622, but with the English enjoying more success in India, at Surat, after the establishment of a factory in 1613.File:Fort St. George, Chennai.jpg|thumb|right|180px|Fort St. George was founded at Madras in 1639
The Netherlands' more advanced financial system and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left the Dutch as the dominant naval and trading power in Asia. Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Dutch prince William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between the Netherlands and England. A deal between the two nations left the more valuable spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles overtook spices in terms of profitability, so that by 1720, in terms of sales, the English company had overtaken the Dutch. The English East India Company shifted its focus from Surat—a hub of the spice trade network—to Fort St. George.