Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  In the midst of the horrors of the Revolt and its suppression, one name stands out, a bright spot against a dark background. This is the name of Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, a girl-widow, twenty years of age, who donned a man’s dress and came out to lead her people against the British. Many a story is told of her spirit and ability and undaunted courage. Even the English general who opposed her has called her the “best and bravest” of the rebel leaders. She died while fighting.

  The Revolt of 1857-58 was the last flicker of feudal India. It ended many things. It ended the line of the Great Moghal, for Bahadur Shah’s two sons and a grandson were shot down in cold blood, without any reason or provocation, by an English officer, Hodson, as he was carrying them away to Delhi. Thus, ignominiously, ended the line of Timur and Babar and Akbar.

  The Revolt also put an end to the rule of the East India Company in India. The British Government now took direct charge, and the British Governor-General blossomed out into a “Viceroy”. Nineteen years later, in 1877, the Queen of England took the title of “Kaiser-i-Hind”, the old title of the Caesars and of the Byzantine Empire, adapted to India. The Moghal dynasty was no more But the spirit and even symbols of autocracy remained, and another Great Moghal sat in England.

  110

  The Indian Artisan Goes to the Wall

  December 1, 1932

  We have done with the nineteenth-century wars in India. I am glad of it. We can now proceed to consider more important happenings of this period in India. But remember that these wars for the benefit of England were carried on at the expense of India. The British people practised with great success the method of making the people of India pay for their own conquest. The Indian people also paid with blood and treasure for the conquest of neighbouring peoples with whom they had no quarrel—the Burmese and Afghans. The wars impoverished India to some extent, for all war means destruction of wealth. War also meant prize money for the conquerors, as we have seen in the case of Sindh. In spite of this impoverishment, due to these and other causes, the flow of gold and silver to the East India Company continued so that fat dividends might be paid to their shareholders.

  I think I have told you previously that the early days of the British power in India were the days of merchant adventurers who traded and plundered indiscriminately. The East India Company and its agents carried off in this way a vast amount of the accumulated wealth of India This was practically without any return to India. In the case of ordinary trade there is some give and take, but in the second half of the eighteenth century, after Plassey, the money all went one way—to England. India was thus deprived of a great deal of its old wealth and this went to help the industrial development of England at a vital period of transition. This first British period in India, based on trade and naked plunder, ended roughly by the end of the eighteenth century.

  The second period of British rule covered the nineteenth century, when India became a great source for raw materials which were sent to the factories of England, and a market for British manufactured goods. This was done at the expense of India’s progress and economic development. For the first half of the century the East India Company, a trading company, started originally to make money, governed India. The British Parliament, however, paid more and more attention to Indian affairs. Then, after the Revolt of 1867-58, as we have seen in the last letter, the British Government took direct charge of India. But this made no vital difference in the fundamental policy, for the government represented the same class which controlled the East India Company.

  Between the economic interests of India and England there was an obvious conflict. This conflict was always decided in England’s favour, as all power lay with England. Even before the industrialization of England a famous English writer had pointed out the harmful effects of the East India Company’s rule in India. This man was Adam Smith, who is called the father of political economy. In a famous book of his called The Wealth of Nations, which was published as early as 1776, he said, referring to the East India Company:

  The government of an exclusive company of merchants is perhaps the worst of all governments for any country whatever . . . It is the interest of the East India Company considered as sovereigns that the European goods which are carried to their Indian dominions should be sold there as cheaply as possible; and that the Indian goods which are brought from there should be sold there as dear as possible. But the reverse of this is their interest as merchants. As sovereigns their interest is exactly the same with that of the country which they govern. As merchants their interest is directly opposite to that interest.

  I have told you that when the British came to India the old feudal order was breaking up. The fall of the Moghal Empire produced political chaos and disorder in many parts of India. But, even so, “India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as a great agricultural country, and the Indian hand-loom supplied the markets of Asia and Europe”, as an Indian economist, Romesh Chundra Dutt, has written. In the course of these letters I have told you of India’s control over foreign markets in ancient days. Four-thousand-year-old mummies in Egypt were wrapped in fine Indian muslin. The skill of the Indian artisan was famous in the East as well as the West. Even when political downfall came, the artisans did not forget the cunning of their hands. The English and other foreign merchants who came to India in quest of trade, came not to sell foreign goods here, but to buy the fine and delicate articles made in India and to sell them at a great profit in Europe. Thus the European traders were attracted first not by raw materials, but by the manufactured wares of India. The East India Company, before it gained dominion in India, carried on a very profitable business by selling Indian-made linens and woollens and silks and embroidered goods. In particular a high degree of efficiency was reached in India in the textile industry—that is, in the making of cotton, silk and woollen goods. “Weaving,” says R.C. Dutt, “was the national industry of the people and spinning was the pursuit of millions of women.” Indian textiles went to England and other parts of Europe, to China and Japan and Burma and Arabia and Persia and parts of Africa.

  Clive has described the city of Murshidabad in Bengal in 1757 as a city “as extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London, with this difference, that there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property than in the last”. This was in the very year of Plassey when the British finally established themselves in Bengal. At the very moment of political downfall, Bengal was rich and full of many industries, and sending out her fine fabrics to different parts of the world. The city of Dacca was especially famous for its fine muslins, and did a huge export trade in them.

  Thus India at this period had developed far beyond the purely agricultural and village stage. Of course India was, and still is, and must long remain, predominantly agricultural. But with village life and agriculture a town life had also developed. In these towns the artisans and craftsmen gathered, and collective production took place—that is, there were little factories employing 100 or more artisans. Of course these factories could not be compared to the huge factories of the Machine Age which came later. In western Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, there were many such factories before industrialism began.

  India was in a transition stage. It was a manufacturing country, and a bourgeois class was being evolved in these towns. The owners of these factories were capitalists who supplied raw material to the craftsmen. In course of time this class would no doubt have grown powerful enough, as in Europe, to replace the feudal class. Just then the British intervened, with fatal results to India’s industries.

  At first the East India Company encouraged Indian industries because they made money out of them. The sale of Indian goods in foreign countries brought gold and silver to the country. But the manufacturers in England did not like this competition, and so they induced their government, early in the eighteenth century, to tax Indian goods coming to England. Some Indian articles were entirely prohibited from entering England, and
I believe it was made a crime for anyone to wear in public some Indian material. They could enforce their boycott with the help of the law. Here in India at present a mention of the boycott of British cloth lands one in gaol! This policy of boycott of Indian goods by England would not, by itself, have done much harm, for many other markets remained. But England happened to control a great part of India at the time, through the East India Company, and England deliberately began a policy of pushing on British industries at the cost of Indian industries. English goods could enter India without the payment of any duty. In India the artisans and craftsmen were harassed and forced to work in the East India Company’s factories. Even the internal trade of India was crippled by means of certain transit duties—that is, duties which had to be paid if goods were sent from place to place.

  So efficient was the textile industry of India that even the rising English machine-industry could not compete with it, and had to be protected by a duty of about 80 per cent. Early in the nineteenth century some Indian silks and cottons could be sold in the British market at a much lower price than those made in England. But this could not last when England, the ruling Power in India, was bent on crushing Indian industries. In any event the products of the Indian cottage-industries could not long compete with machine-industry as this improved. For machine-industry is a far more efficient way of manufacturing large quantities of goods, which are thus much cheaper than cottage-made goods. But England forcibly hurried the process and prevented India from adapting herself gradually to changed conditions.

  So India, which had been for hundreds of years “the Lancashire of the Eastern world”, and had, in the eighteenth century, supplied cotton goods on a vast scale to Europe, lost her position as a manufacturing country, and became just a consumer of British goods. The machine did not come to India, as it might have done in the ordinary course; but machine-made goods came from outside. The current which was flowing from India, bearing Indian goods to foreign countries, and bringing back gold and silver, was reversed. Henceforth foreign goods came to India and gold and silver went out of it.

  The textile industry of India was the first to collapse before this onslaught. As machine-industry developed in England, other Indian industries followed the way of the textile industry. Ordinarily it is the duty of a country’s government to protect and encourage the country’s industries. But far from protecting and encouraging, the East India Company crushed every industry which came into conflict with British industry. Shipbuilding in India collapsed, and the metal workers could not carry on, and the manufacture of glass and paper also dwindled away.

  At first foreign goods reached the port towns and the interior near them. As roads and railways were built, foreign goods went farther and farther inland, and drove out the artisan even from the village. The cutting through of the Suez Canal brought England nearer to India, and it became cheaper to bring British goods. So more and more foreign machine-goods came, and they went even to the remote villages. The process went on right through the nineteenth century, and indeed it is going on to some extent still. During the last few years, however, there have been some checks to this which we shall consider later.

  This spreading, creeping movement of British goods, chiefly cloth, brought death to the hand-industries of India. But there was another aspect which was more terrible still. What of the millions of artisans who were thrown out of work? What of the vast numbers of weavers and other workers who became unemployed? In England also the artisans were thrown out of work when the big factories came. They suffered greatly, but they found work in the new factories, and so they adapted themselves to the new conditions. In India there was no such alternative. There were no factories to go to; the British did not want India to become a modern industrial country and did not encourage factories. So the poor, homeless, workless, starving artisans fell back on the land. But even the land did not welcome them; there were enough people already on it, and there was no land to be had. Some of the ruined artisans managed to become peasants, but most of them became just landless labourers on the look-out for a job. And large numbers must have simply starved to death. In 1834 the English Governor-General in India is said to have reported that “the misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”

  Most of these weavers and artisans had lived in towns and cities. Now that their occupation was gone they drifted back to the land and to the villages. And so the population of the towns went down and the population of the villages went up. That is, to put it in another way, India became less urban and more rural. This ruralization continued right through the nineteenth century, and even now it has not stopped. Now, this is a very curious thing about India during this period. All over the world the effect of machine-industry and industrialization was to draw people from the villages to towns. In India there was the opposite tendency. The cities and towns grew smaller and languished. And more and more people hung on to agriculture to find a very difficult livelihood.

  Together with the main industries, many an auxiliary or subsidiary industry also began to disappear. Carding, dyeing, printing became less and less; and hand-spinning stopped and charkhas disappeared from millions of homes. This meant that the peasantry lost an additional source of income, for spinning by the members of the peasant household had helped to add to the income from land. All this had happened, of course, in western Europe when machine-industry had begun. But the change had been natural there, and if there was the death of one order, there was at the same time the birth of a new one. In India the change was violent. The old order of manufacturing cottage-industries was killed, but there was no rebirth; it was not permitted by the British authorities in the interests of British industry.

  We have seen that India was a prosperous manufacturing country when the British gained power here. The next stage, in the ordinary course, should have been to make the country industrial and to introduce the big machine. But instead of going forward, India actually went back as a result of British policy. She ceased even to be a manufacturing country, and became, more than ever, an agricultural country.

  So poor agriculture had to support all these vast numbers of unemployed artisans and others. The pressure on land became terrible, and yet it still went on increasing. This is the foundation and the basis of the Indian problem of poverty. From this policy most of our ills have resulted. And till this basic problem is solved there can be no ending of the poverty and misery of the Indian peasant and village-dweller.

  Too many people having no profession but agriculture, hanging on to the land, cut up their farms and holdings into tiny little bits. There was not more to go round. The little land each peasant household had was too small to support it decently. Poverty and semi-starvation always faced them at the best of times. And often enough the times were far from good. They were at the mercy of the seasons and the elements and the monsoons. And famines came and terrible diseases spread and carried off millions. They went to the bania—the village money-lender—and borrowed money, and their debts grew bigger and bigger and all hope and possibility of payment passed, and life became a burden too heavy to be borne. Such became the condition of the vast majority of the population of India under British rule in the nineteenth century.

  111

  The Village, the Peasant, and the Landlord in India

  December 2, 1932

  I have told you in my last letter of the British policy in India which resulted in the death of Indian cottage-industries and the driving of the artisan to agriculture and the village. This overpressure or burden on the land of far too many people who have no other occupation is, as I have said, the great problem in India. It is due to this, largely, that India is poor. If these people could be diverted from the land and given other wealth-producing occupations, they would not only add to the wealth of the country, but the pressure on land would be greatly relieved, and even agriculture would prosper.

  It is often said that this ov
er-pressure on land is due to the growth of the population of India, and not so much to British policy. This argument is not a correct one. It is true that the population of India has gone up during the last 100 years, but so have the populations of most other countries. In Europe, indeed, the proportionate increase, especially in England and Belgium and Holland and Germany, has been far greater. The question of the growth of population of a country, or of the world as a whole, and how to provide for it, and how to restrict it, when necessary, is a very important one. I cannot enter into it here, as it might confuse the other issues. But I should like to make it clear that the real cause of the pressure on land in India is the want of occupations other than agriculture, and not the growth of population. The present population of India could probably be easily absorbed and thrive in India if other occupations and industries were forthcoming. It may be that later we shall have to deal with the question of the growth of population.

  Let us now examine some other aspects of British policy in India. We shall go to the village first.

  I have often written to you about the village panchayats of India, and how they persisted through invasion and change. As late as 1830 a British Governor in India, Sir Charles Metcalfe, described the village communities as follows:

  The village communities are little republics having nearly everything they want within themselves; and almost independent of foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate little State in itself . . . is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence.