India: A History. Revised and Updated (83 page)

The ‘commercialisation of agriculture’, begun in late Mughal times, was thus an established fact by the mid-nineteenth century. Facilitated by the new railways, export booms in cotton during the 1860s (courtesy of the American Civil War) and in wheat from the 1870s onwards enriched and entrenched these middle-men as well as sustaining the mainly British business houses which handled overseas shipping and brokerage. Yet such was this superstructure of agents and rentiers, and such the extractive culture of the revenue system, that profits rarely found their way back into production other than as advances on the next crop. The actual cultivator thus became, if anything, even more indebted. Commercialisation only ‘led to differentiation without genuine growth’. In effect India’s rural economy was already experiencing the down-side of plantation economics, in terms of labour exploitation, without the usual up-side of capital investment. ‘The point is not that so many peasants suffered (they would have suffered under capitalist modernisation, too) but that they suffered for nothing.’
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The British preferred to emphasise their investment in infrastructure, especially railways and irrigation works (‘trains and drains’). They also pointed to the country’s generally favourable balance of payments. Critics, though, were less impressed by India’s theoretical prosperity and more exercised by Indians’ actual poverty. As early as 1866 Dadabhai Naoroji, the future ‘Grand Old Man of Congress’, had begun to wonder whom the trains actually benefited and whither the drains actually led. In fact he developed a ‘drain theory’ which, with ramifications provided by his successors, would run like an undercurrent throughout the nationalist debate.

This ‘drain theory’ maintained that India’s surplus, instead of being invested so as to create the modernised and industrialised economy needed to support a growing population, was being drained away by the ruling power. The main drain emptied in London with a flood of what the government called ‘home charges’. These included salaries and pensions
for government and army officers, military purchases, India Office overheads, debt servicing, and the guaranteed interest payable to private investors in India’s railways. Calculated in sterling at an increasingly unfavourable rate of exchange, they came to something like a quarter of the government of India’s total revenue. With much of what remained being squandered on administrative extravagances and military adventures in Burma and Afghanistan, it was not surprising that Indians lived in such abject poverty or that famines were so frequent.

The theory also included an analysis of how the drain actually worked. The Secretary of State for India in London obtained sterling to meet his ‘home charges’ by selling bills of exchange to British importers. Presented in India, these bills could be converted into rupees out of government revenues and so used for the purchase of Indian produce. The private sector therefore played an important part in the drain since its exports from India constituted the drain’s flow. By the same token the export surplus was of little economic benefit to Indians; and worse still, since they consisted mostly of raw materials, exports gave no encouragement to India’s industrialisation. The classic case was cotton. In the days of the Company, British purchases had been mainly of finished piece-goods. Latterly, with Lancashire’s mills underselling India’s handloom weavers, British purchases switched to raw cotton and yarn. Now, when new and often Indian-owned mills in Bombay were at last in a position to compete, they were repeatedly frustrated by tariff policies which favoured British imports and by regulations which handicapped Indian production.

India’s embryonic industries – principally jute, cotton, coir and coal – needed protection; the British insisted on free trade. Their
laissez faire
attitudes extended even to the land revenue, where rising prices meant that fixed revenue assessments actually became somewhat less onerous during the latter half of the nineteenth century. But rather than adjust such assessments the government now preferred to explore other sources of revenue, like introducing an income tax. For the Great Rebellion, far from emboldening the British to remodel India’s agrarian economy along the regimented plantation lines suggested by Money, was seen to have demonstrated the extreme danger of intervention.

Such governmental conservatism did not mean that Indians were entirely spared the plantation experience. In regions of marginal cultivation, and especially on the tea estates which proliferated in the Assam hills from the 1850s onwards, indentured labour was widely employed. Further afield the abolition of slavery and the introduction of new crops created more exotic markets for indentured Indian labour in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya,
Fiji, Mauritius, south and east Africa and the Caribbean. Mortality rates amongst these migrants were so high in the nineteenth century, and the terms of indenture so oppressive, that critics saw only another form of slavery. The plight of emigrant Indian labour would feature prominently amongst early nationalist grievances, and in Africa M.K. Gandhi would find a challenging field for his first experiments in
satyagraha
.

The young Gandhi had found his way to Natal in south-east Africa in the employ of a Gujarati trading firm. India’s maritime and mercantile contacts with south-east Asia had been sustained ever since the Pala and Chola periods, but under Muslim, Portuguese and British dispensations had been considerably extended. They now reached round the Indian Ocean and the Pacific rim to Aden, Zanzibar, east and south Africa, China, Japan and even the Pacific coast of North America. Latterly small communities of Indian clerks, police, dock-workers and other service personnel had become as sure a sign of a British presence in these places as the Union Jack. From as far afield as Vancouver and Singapore, as well as Gandhi’s Natal, such expatriate groups would make a valuable contribution to the struggle for Indian independence. Conversely they, and the mass of indentured migrants, brought Indian issues to an international audience.

The accompanying diaspora of religious and social traditions established a score of ‘Little Indias’ from Singapore to Georgetown, Guyana, which were as much colonies of Indianisation as their parent settlements were colonies of Anglicisation. As in the long-forgotten days of Kanishka and the Karakoram route, India was successfully projecting its cultural influence just when politically it was in deepest eclipse. But, linked by the telegraph and the shipping line, such agents of outward acculturation now also served as antennae for inward politicisation. From Japan came word of Asian regeneration, from Europe came news of Ireland’s struggle against British rule, and from the white settler colonies of Africa and Canada came ideas of autonomy and dominion status. India was not alone. British rule was not immutable. Nor was it invincible.

Augmented by a further exodus in the twentieth century, mainly to Europe, North America and the Gulf states, the diaspora would make the peoples of the subcontinent amongst the most numerous and recognisable of global societies. In Britain alone the number of immigrants from the subcontinent would eventually exceed the total of British civilian residents in India during the nearly two hundred years of British rule. Between 1880 and 1930 the average exodus was running at around a quarter of a million Indians a year, mainly from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Gujarat. But although they made a significant impact on most of the receiving countries, they
had little effect on India’s teeming demography. This was in part because most indentured emigrants returned after the expiry of their five-year indenture. So did the troops of the British Indian army who were increasingly deployed on imperial service in China, south-east Asia, Persia and Africa. And so did the barristers, like Gandhi, the administrators, doctors and others who, bursting from India’s universities in ever greater numbers, sometimes travelled abroad to complete their studies or pursue their professions. A few Indians were at last acquiring the first-hand experience of other cultures by which they would be enabled to judge their own identity as Indians rather than as members of a particular Indian community. It would be no coincidence that most of the giants of the independence movement, from Dadabhai Naoroji to M.A. Jinnah, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, were returnees.

Overseas study was an option only for the privileged. For most Indians an acquaintance with the traditions of Western thought depended on a university education, supported by access to newspapers and books. In the increasingly politicised and cosmopolitan atmosphere of the three main ‘presidencies’ – by which was now meant the cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras – the level of graduate debate was sophisticated and intense. Participants drew on a wide range of argument and ideology, and they avidly followed developments elsewhere in the world, especially Japan’s modernisation and the course of Anglo–Irish disentanglement. Their enthusiasm for association and mutual collaboration over a range of political and social issues was equally impressive. But in cities where all manner of caste, professional, communal and linguistic groups were well represented, nationalism was perhaps seen more as the sum of its parts than as an indivisible whole. It was something to be laboriously constructed from within rather than being self-evidently defined from without.

Higher education was restricted to a minute elite; books and newspapers circulated sluggishly outside the main cities. The homespun nationalist in the
mofussil
had only the ubiquitous British presence against which to measure and define his identity. As in 1857, all manner of different definitions resulted. Yet recent studies, like that undertaken by Christopher Bayly in respect of Allahabad and other north Indian towns, discover a significant continuity between traditional urban groupings and the later ‘nationalist’ groups and interests which would subscribe to the National Congress. ‘In all the major centres of Hindi-speaking north India, the new religious and political associations had links with existing shrines,
sabhas
[councils, societies] and commercial solidarities. In Allahabad, for instance, commercial and devotional relationships generated by the great bathing
fair, the Magh [or Kumbh] Mela, contributed as much to the emergence of modern political associations as the camaraderies of the Bar Library.’
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Similar links are traced between Muslim associations of service gentry and membership of the later Muslim League. In Maharashtra the devotional allegiances of Pune’s brahmans would see their festivals transformed into political protest gatherings and their cults being promoted as nationalist propaganda. Nor was this a passing phenomenon. ‘The style of Hindu politics which emerged from the corporate urban life of the later nineteenth century remains vital … whether in the guise of the Hindu Mahasabha of the 1930s or of the Jana Sangh in the 1970s’
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– or indeed of the Jana Sangh’s later reincarnation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Here, in short, was (and is) a third perspective, one by which nationalism was perceived, neither from without as an indivisible whole, nor from the metropolitan centres as the sum of its parts, but from deep within as a projection of entrenched sectional interests which were proud to owe very little to extraneous ideologies or a foreign-language education.

EVERYTHING IN MODERATION

Lord Lytton’s 1877 Imperial Assemblage at Delhi was the sort of wasteful extravaganza to which Indians of almost every perspective took strong exception. That it happened to coincide with the worst famine of the century, which claimed perhaps 5.5 million lives in the Deccan and the south, added to the outrage. It may therefore be deeply unacceptable to suggest that the Assemblage provided the format, eight years later, for the first meeting of the Indian National Congress. But parallels have been noted. ‘The early meetings of the All India Congress Committees were much like durbars, with processions and the centrality of leading figures and their speeches…’ The sentiments expressed were not dissimilar either. The Congress leaders spoke of progressive government and the welfare and happiness of the Indian people, just like the viceroy; and when they demanded fair access to the civil service and greater representation in the councils of state they were merely reminding the Calcutta government of pledges already made, as for instance in the Queen’s 1858 Proclamation which promised that all suitably qualified Indians would be ‘freely and impartially admitted to office in Our service’. Indeed, some had already been admitted; but as the supply of qualified Indians increased, so did the government’s reluctance to honour such pledges. Hence the reminders. Framed in the British ‘idiom’ of the great Delhi durbar, they ‘set the terms
of discourse of the national movement in its beginning phases. In effect, the early nationalists were claiming that they were more loyal to the true goals of the Indian empire than were their British rulers.’
⁷

Nor was this claim obviously mischievous. Gandhi himself would invoke the 1858 Proclamation when demanding British redress against racial discrimination in Natal. Earlier in India, on the assumption – all too correct during Lytton’s viceroyalty – that the Calcutta government was dragging its feet and was less receptive to Indian aspirations than were the British people, leading Indian protest groups despatched representatives to London and set up branches there. One of the earliest such organisations was the East India Association founded in 1866 by Dadabhai Naoroji, a successful businessman and a member of Bombay’s small but immensely influential Parsi community (so-called because they subscribed to the Zoroastrian faith of pre-Islamic ‘Pars’, or Persia, whence their forebears had sought sanctuary in India). Much of Dadabhai Naoroji’s career was spent in London, where he attracted a succession of high-flying Indian professionals who returned to India to lead many of the associations which eventually subscribed to Congress. He himself attended the first Indian National Congress and was elected president for the second. The better to represent Indian opinion in London he later became a Westminster MP. In 1893, while still sitting in the House of Commons, he would again return to India and the presidency of Congress.