Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"For whatever the policies of Indian empire, its economic and administrative realities continued to weaken and disrupt the forces of tradition, to strengthen the forces of innovation and to intensify the conflicts between these and the British. . . . By the end of the 1880s the Indian National Congress--the main vehicle of Indian nationalism and ruling party of independent India--was already in existence. In the twentieth century the Indian masses themselves were to follow the ideological lead of the new nationalism." [Hobsbawm: Capital, p. 124-5]
"Around 1890 a little over 6000 British officials governed almost 300 million Indians with the help of a little over 70,000 European soldiers, the rank-and-file of whom were, like the much more numerous indigenous troops, mercenaries who took orders, and who indeed were disproportionately drawn from that older reservoir of native colonial fighters, the Irish." [Hobsbawm: Empire, p. 81]