Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India

For our entire range of books please use search strings "Orient
BlackSwan", "Universities Press India" and "Permanent Black" in
store.
Nationalism and Colonialism
in
Modern India

Bipan Chandra
with a Prologue by Aditya Mukheijee
Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India

Orient Blackswan Private Limited

Registered Office
3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029 (A.P.), INDIA
e-mail: info@orientblackswan.com

Other Offices
Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur,
Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Patna, Vijayawada

© Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd.

First Published 1979
First Paperback edition 1981
Reprinted 1984, 1987, 1989, 1996, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012,
2013, 2015, 2017, 2018

eISBN 978-81-250-5038-4

e-edition: First Published 2018

ePUB Conversion: TEXTSOFT Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other
noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests
write to the publisher.
 To
Kamla and Shri Gopal
 Acknowledgements

The author and publishers would like to thank the editors and publishers of
the journals and books listed below for the permission they granted for the
inclusion in the volume of the material cited.
For ‘Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History’
from Indian Economic and Social History Review.
For ‘British and Indian Ideas on Indian Economic Development, 1858–
1905’ and ‘The Ideological Development of the Revolutionary Terrorists in
Northern India in the 1920s’ from the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library.
For ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936’ from Economic and
Political Weekly.
For ‘Modem India and Imperialism’ from the Bertrand Russell Peace
Foundation Ltd.
For ‘Lenin and the National Liberation Movements’ from India Quarterly.
For Review article on ‘Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy’
from Seminar.
The copyright of all other articles included here lies with the author.
 Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Prologue by Aditya Mukherjee
1. Colonialism and Modernization
2. Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History
3. British and Indian Ideas on Indian Economic Development, 1858–
1905
4. Elements of Continuity and Change in the Early Nationalist Activity
5. The Indian Capitalist Class and Imperialism before 1947
6. Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936
7. Modern India and Imperialism
8. The Ideological Development of the Revolutionary Terrorists in
Northern India in the 1920s
9. The Indian National Movement and the Communal Problem
10. Lord Dufferin and the Character of the Indian Nationalist
Leadership
11. Lenin and the National Liberation Movements
12. Peasantry and National Integration in Contemporary India
13. Tilak
14. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
 Preface

I have tried in these essays to probe some aspects of the twin phenomena of
colonialism and nationalism which have dominated the history of modern
India. The essays are in the nature of explorations, the first hesitant efforts
and the Initial sketches for more detailed studies of these two important
themes. They do not pretend to give definitive or exhaustive answers. If the
succeed in making the reader feel that the questions raised are significant
and the approach indicated fruitful, my purpose in bringing them together
would have been amply served. The essays are also based on the conviction
that the study of social and economic changes, political developments, and
intellectual endeavours make sense only when they are seen together, in
mutual interrelationships. The close connection between politics,
economics, and ideology, between state structure, government policy and
economic goals, between a movement, its social base, its objectives, its ideas,
and its leadership is nowhere more clear or more fruitfully studied than in
the case of colonialism and nationalism.
The need for a fresh approach also arises because much of the writing on
both themes has been dominated for the last nearly 150 years by the colonial
school of historiography. It has not made much difference that many of the
writers have been Indians. A minor strand did develop in opposition to this
school so far as the study of nationalism was concerned, but it was either
dominated by the simple glorification of the national leadership or it
confined itself to the study of the political ideas and activities of the major
leaders of the movement. The social character of the movement, its origins
and stages of development, the nature of social support and popular
participation, the tactics and strategies evolved or used, and even its real
intellectual history were not properly studied. There have been of course,
exceptions; for example, the works of A.R. Desai, R. Palme Dutt, and several
economists during the 1920s and 1930s. But it is only in the last few years
that several Indian. Soviet and Japanese scholars have started asking a
different set of questions. Much new and useful writing has also come from
British and American scholars. Unfortunately, most of it is marred by the
tendency to ignore the reality of colonialism and hence also to seriously
misinterpret the national movement.
Urgency has been given to the study of colonialism by the need to initiate
developmental processes in ex-colonial countries to chose from many
available strategies of development, and hence to study the roots and causes
of their backwardness. Very often the obstacles to development in these
countries are seen as remnants of their pre-capitalist, precolonial or
traditional backwardness. Even when these obstacles are seen in a “historical
perspective” an understanding of the role of colonialism is drained out.
Moreover the post-Second World War period has in both historical and
economic writing generated a new school of apologetics of colonialism.
Some of these writers have portrayed colonialism as an effort at
modernization which failed because of the weight of the past, traditional
backwardness. (The second essay ‘Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century
Indian Economic History’ examines the views of one of these writers,
Morris D. Morris.) Similarly, others have seen the colonial period as a
period of transition to modernity.
Undoubtedly, India did undergo a fundamental transformation during
the colonial period. And it is precisely for this reason that the initial
conditions from which it started the development process after political
freedom were not those of its pre-colonial past: they were, in fact, the
creation of the colonial period. Any meaningful development strategy has,
therefore, to be based on a fuller understanding of the mechanism of
colonialism as it actually operated in India and on the policy of shattering
and replacing this mechanism. The first essay, ‘Colonialism and
Modernization’~*, makes a plea for the study of colonialism as a distinct
structure and of the process of the evolution of this structure through its
different stages, and suggests that this approach provides a more fruitful
framework for the study of modern Indian history. Scholars are just
beginning the long effort in this direction. Consequently, the intellectual
resources do not yet exist to understand this structure fully and to trace the
multifarious channels and ties—the veins and arteries—through which this
structure is articulated. There is, however, little doubt that colonial interests,
policies, the state and its institutions, culture and society, ideas and
ideologies, and personalities are to be seen as functioning within the
parameters of the colonial structure, which is itself to be defined by their
interrelationships as a whole.
The nature: of British colonialism and colonial policies in India and the
desirable definitions and strategies of economic growth came under intense
discussion by the early nationalists and the imperialist writers and
administrators during the second half of the nineteenth century. The third
essay, ‘British and Indian Ideas on Indian Economic Development, 1858–
1905’, brings out the fact that the transformation of India into a classic
colony occurred under the banner of modernization, economic
development, and transplantation of capitalism in industry and agriculture
with the aid of foreign capital when found necessary. The nationalist writers
made a sharp critique of the contemporary colonial theories of development
and took the first steps towards an overall view of colonialism. Clearly the
nationalist critique was a giant step forward and would have made possible a
more scientific analysis of colonialism and economic development if it had
been built upon. Equally clearly, it is no longer adequate. It has to be
transcended, though not by going back to the colonial historiography or
economics.
In the fourth essay, ‘Elements of Continuity and Change in the Early
Nationalist Activity’, I have discussed the basic continuities in the Indian
national movement and in particular, its strategy of Pressure-Compromise-
Pressure (P-C-P) and a prolonged stage-by-stage evolution. The social
character of the movement during its different stages is also examined.
One of the important features of Indian social development which
demarcates it from the development of the other colonial countries is the
rise and growth of an independent capitalist class which did not develop as a
comprador or subordinate ally of British capital. This was to have important
consequences for the national movement. On the one hand, it brought the
movement, especially after 1918, the support of this powerful class; on the
other, it strengthened the conservative sections of the nationalist leadership
and contributed to the complete domination of the P-C-P strategy or the
non-revolutionary path of anti-imperlalist struggle. The role of the capitalist
class vis-a-vis imperialism and the national movement is discussed in the
essays on The Indian Capitalist Class and Imperialism before 1947’ and
‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936’. The latter essay also brings
out the successful effort of the leadership of this class to contain the left-
wing challenge within the nationalist leadership on the question of the basic
strategy of the movement. The basic anti-imperialism of the national
movement and the freedom from direct foreign control of the capitalist class
was to have an important impact on the post-1947 social development in
general and the official policy towards Imperialism in particular. This aspect
is discussed rather sketchily in ‘modern India and Imperialism’.
While a proper social or class analysis of the national movement has yet
to be made there has existed a tendency since its beginnings to follow a
short cut and to see it as a conspiracy of the ‘‘middle classes” or ‘elites” to use
nationalism to serve their own narrow purposes. Dufferin, the Viceroy of
India during 1884–1889, was one of the first to start this hare and may be
considered as its godfather. His assertions in this respect have been
examined in ‘Lord Dufferin and the Character of the Indian Nationalist
Leadership’. In The Ideological Development of the Revolutionary Terrorists
in Northern India in the 1920s,’ ‘Lenin and the National Liberation
Movements’, and partly ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936’, I
have discussed the development of some of the alternative ideologies and
paths of national struggle which did not fructify in the specific historical
situation.
A major failure of the nationalist movement during the 20th century lay
in its unsuccessful struggle against the disruptive communal forces despite
its own secular outlook. The essay on the ‘Indian National Movement and
the Communal Problem’ discusses some of the reasons for this failure.
One of the major problems faced by the nationalist leadership before 1947
was that of the integration of the peasantry into the nation and the national
movement. The manner in which this task was attempted is examined in
‘Peasantry and National Integration in Contemporary India’. The essay also
discusses the problems posed before the organizers of peasant movements
by the high degree of differentiation within the peasantry after 1947.
Two book reviews have also been included: Pradhan and Bhagwat’s
biography of Tilak to clarify certain aspects of Tilak’s political role which are
otherwise widely misunderstood, and that of Barrington Moore’s Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy as a comment on the failure of even
well-intentioned social scientists to grasp the historical significance of the
role of colonialism in the social and political development of India, China,
and other colonies and semicolonies.
Through the years I have been helped by many friends and students with
whom these essays were discussed at their various stages, and above all by
Romila Thapar, Mohit Sen, Randhir Singh and Harbans Mukhia who went
through all the first drafts and made useful suggestions.
My wife, Usha, read and corrected all of these essays in all their
incarnations and otherwise helped at every stage in every way.

New Delhi BIPAN CHANDRA

August 1979

* Presidential address delivered to the thirty-second session of the modern

Indian History Section of the Indian History Congress, December 1970. The
error on page 1 is regretted. Publisher
 Prologue

Bipan Chandra is arguably among the most eminent historians that India
has produced since independence. He has made critical breakthroughs in a
large number of areas in the writing of modern Indian history. On the one
hand he brought about a fundamental change in how the early nationalists
or the so-called Moderates were viewed,1 how Gandhiji, Nehru, Bhagat
Singh and the revolutionary terrorists, indeed, how the Indian national
movement as a whole, was understood and analysed. On the other hand, he
vastly deepened the understanding of colonialism as a structure with its
wide and pervasive economic, political and other implications. He has also
written extensively on communalism, the Indian Left, Marxism and the
political economy of post-independence India,2 in each case breaking away
from conventional wisdom. Perhaps the best tribute to his originality, the
courage to pursue a lonely path when necessary and the ability to create a
large team of scholars around him, is that, as far as I know, he is the only
Indian historian in whose name an entire school of thought is said to exist—
the Bipan Chandra school!
This book, first published in 1979, captures to a great extent the width and
depth of Bipan Chandra’s scholarship. It carries fourteen essays spanning
many of the areas mentioned above. The position taken in many of the
essays remains unchanged though other scholars have in some cases
extended the argument further. In the case of some of the essays Chandra
himself has substantially changed or advanced his views as one would expect
of a scholar who has been an active thinker, teacher and writer over a span
of nearly half a century. Yet, these essays in the volume remain markers of
significant breaks from existing historiography of that time.
The first three essays address the question of colonialism and its economic
impact on the colony. The first essay, ‘Colonialism and Modernisation’,
argues that colonialism does not lead to development or modernisation. It
does not lead to partial or restricted growth and neither does it have any
residual benefits. In fact it is demonstrated that whatever little spurts of
industrial growth that occurred during the colonial period were not due to
colonialism, but were a product of the breaks from the colonial stranglehold,
caused by various crises faced by the metropolitan countries. The second
essay ‘Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History’
systematically critiqued (some say demolished) the reassertion of the
colonial position by Morris D. Morris in the 1960s. The third essay ‘British
and Indian Ideas on Indian Economic Development, 1858–1905’ traced the
colonial argument in defense of colonial rule and its refutation by the
nationalist intelligentsia. It also demonstrated how Morris’s arguments were
not new, but a reiteration of the position taken more than half a century
earlier!
The positions taken by Bipan Chandra in these three essays have not
changed subsequently. The critique of the colonial argument, however, has
been extended by others as the colonial position resurfaced subsequently,
such as in the Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. II in the 1980s and
by Tirthankar Roy’s writings3 in the new millennium. Among the scholars
who did major critiques were Amiya Bagchi, Irfan Habib and myself.4
The fourth essay, ‘Elements of Continuity and Change in the Early
Nationalist Activity’, written in 1972 made an important break at that time
by arguing that the Indian national movement had a common long-term
strategy beginning with the Moderates and Extremists in the nineteenth
century and continuing through the Gandhian phase in the twentieth
century, a strategy which Bipan Chandra characterised as pressure-
compromise-pressure or P-C-P. It was also argued in that essay that it was
not the social base or the class origins of the leadership of the movement
which determined the class character of the movement, which was, in fact,
determined by the political and economic programme, policies and ideology
of the movement. It was further argued that, in terms of the programme and
policies or the social vision, the Indian national movement from its
inception to independence, from the Moderates to Gandhi, remained within
bourgeois parameters. The P-C-P strategy followed by the movement
throughout was also seen as non-revolutionary. There is thus the suggestion
that such a strategy suited the bourgeoisie.
Bipan Chandra made a very substantial advance in his understanding on
this issue over the years. The basic kernel of the advance made in this area
was put forward in his Presidential Address to the Indian History Congress
in 1985, which was later printed as The Indian National Movement: The
Long-Term Dynamics.5 Chandra in this book continued to argue that the
Indian national movement had a long-term strategy which he now called S-
T-S (Struggle-Truce-Struggle), that is, phases of active struggle like civil
disobedience, etc. combined with phases of truce where the movement
paused, regenerated itself through various mass programmes like the
‘constructive work’ promoted by Gandhiji, so that it could go back to higher
phase of active struggle. The movement would thus keep strengthening itself
in an upward spiral till struggle led to victory, S-V. Here the strategy of the
Indian national movement was not seen as ‘non-revolutionary’ or
‘bourgeois’. It was argued that this strategy of non-violence and S-T-S was
adopted not because it was a bourgeois strategy, but because it was suited to
a multi-class, mass movement against the semi-democratic, semi-
authoritarian hegemonic British colonial state. Most important, Bipan
Chandra now saw Gandhiji as a brilliant leader of a popular movement who
far from being bourgeois or non-revolutionary played a critical role in
trying to ensure that the class adjustment that necessarily had to happen in
any multi-class movement happened in India, increasingly infavour of the
oppressed. This was an understanding which seriously questioned the views
of a section of the orthodox Left and radical sounding, but essentially
conservative ‘Subaltern’ school.6 Bipan Chandra’s new thinking in this area
evolved in close collaboration with his students and colleagues in Jawaharlal
Nehru University (JNU) and now has spawned a series of about 15
monographs which were subsequently published.7
 In the essays, five to seven, Chandra deals primarily with the question of
the Indian Capitalist Class and its relationship with imperialism and the
entire spectrum of the Indian national movement. These essays marked a
major break with the existing historiography among a very influential
section of the Left, which saw the Indian capitalist class as comprador or at
least compromising towards imperialism and the Indian National Congress
as being critically influenced by the Indian Capitalist Class. Chandra showed
how the Indian Capitalist Class saw its long-term interest to be in conflict
with imperialism. It, therefore, evolved a critique of imperialism and placed
itself on the side of Indian nationalism, despite the threat of the growing Left
within the national movement. He also emphasised the relative autonomy of
the national movement from this class and argued that the class at no point
was ‘the driving element’ behind the national struggle for independence. It
was this completely new approach to the study of the Indian Capitalist Class
which led me to undertake a full length study of the subject which
confirmed many of the generalisations made in these essays.8
It is in his understanding of Nehru as reflected in the essay called,
‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936’, that Bipan Chandra makes
a substantial advance in his later writings. His understanding that the Indian
Capitalist Class on the whole was not unduly frightened of Nehru’s Marxist
‘revolutionary’ phase (1933–36) and reacted to it in a complex and mature
manner, did not undergo any change. However, a fundamental change
occurred in his understanding that Nehru retreated from being at the verge
of making a revolutionary breakthrough in a socialist or communist
direction in this period. In the essay in this volume, Chandra’s view was that,
on the one hand, there was a slow watering down of Nehru’s Marxist
radicalism to a ‘mild form of Fabianism’ and, on the other, there was a
gradual acceptance by Nehru of Gandhiji and the ‘non-revolutionaiy’, P-C-P
paradigm for the national movement. However, in a seminal work presented
in 1990,9 which evaluated several facets of Nehru in a historical perspective,
Chandra characterised the shift in Nehru’s position as his abandonment of
‘Stalin Marxism’, and argued that he was among the first in the world to take
a stand which has become increasingly globally accepted. His abandonment
of the sectarian, dogmatic, Stalin Marxist position enabled Nehru to now
‘re-evaluate the Gandhian strategy’ (what Antonio Gramsci described as a
successful practice of the ‘war of position’) positively and put his weight
behind it.
One of Bipan Chandra’s long-term efforts has been to try and understand
how the Left could best situate itself in the national liberation struggles in
the colonies and why and at what cost it often failed to do so.10 In a very
important essay in this volume, ‘Lenin and the National Liberation
Movements’, Chandra brings out in detail Lenin’s brilliant understanding of
what position Marxist revolutionaries ought to take vis-a- vis liberation
movements in the colonies; an understanding which was unfortunately
largely abandoned in the Stalinist era. Lenin’s characterisation of national
liberation movements as ‘revolutionary’ (even if they remained under
‘bourgeois’ leadership) provided they met the three criteria of (i) struggling
against imperialism, (ii) politicising the masses and bringing them into mass
movements and (iii) not opposing the communists’ effort at educating and
organising the peasants and the broad masses, created possibilities which
the Indian Left largely missed. By these criteria Gandhi could be seen as a
‘revolutionary’ by the communists. In 1920, Lenin in fact did look upon
Gandhi, the inspirer and leader of a mass movement, as a revolutionary. This
essay written in 1970 appears to be the first marker of the change in
understanding which led Chandra to completely overhaul his appreciation
of Gandhi from a Left perspective.
Another issue close to Chandra’s heart is the struggle against
communalism. The volume contains an insightful essay which analyses
critically how the Indian national movement tried to deal with the
communal problem. It is an effort to understand why, despite being secular,
the national movement was eventually unsuccessful in preventing the
disruptive communal forces from seriously damaging the national effort.
This was a theme which Chandra later developed into a full-length study.11
The volume contains an essay, perhaps the first of the kind, which tries to
bring out the social ideology of the ‘revolutionary terrorists’ in the 1920s,
showing how it was substantially moving in the socialist direction. This was
a strand in Indian politics which was widely valorised for its ‘patriotism’, but
the social content of its ideology is mostly not known or ignored.
 It also contains essays on the critical question of the peasantry and
national integration in contemporary India both before and after
independence, on the ‘extremist’ leader Tilak, on Viceroy Lord Dufferin and
the Indian national leadership and a powerful critique of Barrington Moore’s
influential book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
Nationalism and Colonialism in Modem India thus covers a breathtaking
array of subjects, each bringing an original insight into the most important
issues of our times. Thirty years after it was first published, the book remains
an important and critical contribution to the historiography of modern
India.

New Delhi, 2011 Aditya Mukheijee

NOTES
1 See Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi: PPH, 1966).

2 Among his pioneering work on contemporary history is Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukheijee and

Aditya Mukheijee, India Since Independence (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000, 2008) and Bipan Chandra, In
the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).
3 Economic History of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, 2006).

4 Aditya Mukherjee, Presidential Address to the Indian History Congress (Modern India) entitled,

“The Return of The Colonial in Indian Economic History: The Last Phase of Colonialism in India” in
December 2007. (Reprinted in Social Scientist, vol. 36, nos 3–4, March–April 2008: 2–44, and in Social
Science Probings, June 2008). See also Aditya Mukherjee, ‘Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern
Britain’ (Economic and Political Weekly, 11 December 2010, vol. XLV, no. 50).
5 Bipan Chandra, The Indian National Movement: The Long-term Dynamics (New Delhi: Vikas, 1988,

reprinted by Har-Anand, New Delhi, 2008). This perspective was also seen in his best-selling book,
Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukheijee, Aditya Mukheijee, K. N. Panikkar and Sucheta Mahajan, India's
Struggle for Independence (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988, 45th Reprint in 2009).
6 Mridula Mukheijee, student, colleague and co-author of Bipan Chandra, made an important and

detailed critique of the treatment of nationalism and popular resistance to colonialism by the
‘subaltern studies’ and associated scholarship extending Chandra’s argument. See Mridula Mukherjee,
Peasants in India's Non-violent Revolution, Practice and Theory (New Delhi: Sage, 2004), especially
Book II in this work titled “Interrogating Peasant Historiography: Peasant Perspectives, Marxist
Practice and Subaltern Theory”. Also see Mridula Mukheijee, “Peasant Resistance and Peasant
Consciousness in Colonial India: ‘Subalterns’ and Beyond”, (Economic and Political Weekly, 8 and 15
October, 1988: 2109–120). The ‘subalterns’, to my knowledge, have not responded to this critique.
7 See for example the works of Mridula Mukheijee, Aditya Mukherjee, Sucheta Mahajan, Vishalakshi

Menon, Salil Mishra, Rakesh Batabyal, C. P Nanda, Pritish Acharya, D. N. Gupta, Gyanesh Kudaisya
and Shri Krishan in this series.
8 See Aditya Mukherjee, Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class (New

Delhi: Sage, 2002).

9 “Jawaharlal Nehru in Historical Perspective”, D. D. Kosambi Memorial Lecture, Bombay, 1990,

reprinted in Bipan Chandra, Essays on Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Har Anand, 1993).
10 See Bipan Chandra, ‘A Strategy in Crisis—The CPI Debate 1955–56’, in Bipan Chandra, ed. The

Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, (New Delhi: 1983); Bipan Chandra, ‘Marxism in India, A Total
Rectification’ (Seminar, 178, June 1974); Bipan Chandra, ‘Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies,
and Colonial Rule’ (Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, UNESCO, 1980). An abbreviated
version in Review, 1, Summer 1981.
11 Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modem India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1984) and second revised

edition in 1987.
 Colonialism and Modernization

The last twenty-three years have witnessed a great deal of interest and
discussion in academic as well as non-academic circles on the problem of
how to take India out of the present state of economic underdevelopment.
Along with other social scientists, historians have also felt the need to make
a contribution to this discussion. While as historians we are seldom in a
position to prescribe remedies for the present, we may help those who are
making the present by explaining to them its origins and the possibilities
that inhere in it.
The need for a historical approach to the problem of development is today
widely, perhaps universally, recognized. The importance of the study of
modem Indian history in this respect arises from the fact that the process
and pattern of economic development (capitalist or socialist) of post-
independence India depends to a considerable extent upon its inherited
pattern of underdevelopment, as also on the strategies or policies of
economic development, which in turn are influenced by the inherited
structure. As historians we have to ask the question: what were the
economic, political, social, cultural, and intellectual forces retarding
economic development before 1947? How were they evolved or generated?
What was their inter-relationship? In other words, what was their history?1
Thus a historical study of India’s underdevelopment was and is needed
before policies and programmes for its development could be fruitfully
formulated.
Surprisingly enough, however, the intensive discussion which followed
among the economists and economic historians after the Second World War,
on the problem of the economic development of the underdeveloped
countries, as also of India, took a rather unhistorical turn from the
beginning. In this discussion the dominant tendency has been to equate the
condition of India at the time of independence with the pre-capitalist or pre-
industrial stages of countries which are today economically developed, thus
implying that India’s underdevelopment was traditional in character or was a
remnant of the traditional pre-British past. The underlying assumption is
that today’s developed capitalist countries were once underdeveloped or
backward in the same manner as India is today. The task is then declared to
be the modernization of India’s economy, following in the footsteps of the
successful example. In fact, some writers suggest that the colonial rulers
made an attempt to modernize India but with little success, due to the hold
of tradition. This failure, they hold, led to the rise of nationalism and the
coming of independence. The Government of India is now engaged, they
say, in the task of modernization left uncompleted by the British.
Consequently, it is said, India is at present in a transitional stage towards
modernity.
On occasions, the differences between the two situations are recognized,
but no structural differences are seen; and their link with recent history is
supposed to be minimal. The differences, such as those of per capita income
or man-land ratio, are seen to be accidental, situational, or ‘pre-modem’.
They are merely quantitative differences, differences of degree or intensity of
backwardness, not of type, or pattern, or structure, or ‘quality’.2
Consequently, India is treated in most of the literature on the subject as a
pre-capitalist, or pre-industrial, or traditional or at the most a dual society,
part-traditional part-modern, whose links with the ‘international economy’
were weak.
This view is, however, basically and historically incorrect because India of
1947 was not pre-capitalist or traditional or dualistic. It is a historical fallacy
to assume that India under British rule did not undergo a fundamental
transformation, or that it remained basically traditional. From the mid-18th
century and, in particular, from the beginning of the 19th century, India had
been gradually integrated into the world of modern capitalism though in a
subordinate or colonial position.
 Thus India under Britain was not basically similar to Mughal India, nor
was its backwardness of the same kind as the latter’s because in the
intervening years India had undergone a long and full course of colonial
modernization.3 Nor was it like the pre-capitalist stage of today’s developed
countries because the latter had never undergone colonial modernization of
the Indian pattern. It was also not pre-industrial for it had felt the full
impact of industrial capitalism, though without industrializing in the
process. Moreover, it possessed an industrial Capitalist class of its own. Here
what has to be kept in view is that colonialism in India was as modern a
historical phenomenon as industrial capitalism in Britain — in fact the two
developed together.4 Further, the colonial Indian economy was as much a
part of world capitalism which needs to be viewed as a single, world-wide
system of which colonial economies were an integral part. The historical
process that led to this colonial integration, or this pattern of
modernization, inevitably led to the underdevelopment of India or “the
development of underdevelopment” to put it in the apt and vivid manner of
the pithy phrase of Andre Gunder Frank.
The following question is sometimes posed: could India have developed
to a greater extent if colonial rule had not intervened? This question,
intrinsically of great historical interest, is misplaced in the present context.5
The significant question here is not why there was no autonomous
development of capitalism in the Mughal period but why there was no
induced development of capitalism once the country came to be ruled for
nearly 200 years by the most advanced industrial nation of the time. After all
the industrial revolution occurred in only one country; other countries did
not have to ‘originate’ it, but simply ‘borrowed’ it. The question is even more
pertinent for the historian because the British rulers did not at this stage
suffer from another fit of absent-mindedness: as I have shown elsewhere,6
the basic integration of India with the world capitalist economy, its
transformation into a classic colony and a classic underdeveloped country,
occurred during the 19th century precisely under the banner of
modernization, economic development and transplantation of capitalism.7
The error in the characterization of Indian economy under British rule
arises in part from the belief that because British India was economically,
socially, culturally and politically backward it was ipso facto non-modern,
traditional, or precapitalist. But the characteristics of backwardness were not
confined to the traditional Indian society alone, which was, in the heyday of
the Mughal period, quite advanced by contemporary standards. These
characteristics are also the hallmarks of a modern colony of a modem
imperialist state. In other words, the backward aspects of British India’s
economy and society were not just the left-overs from the rich feast of its
vast history, but rather they were well structured parts of the modern
colonial economy. The incapacity of indigenous Indian capitalism to
industrialize the country also did not mean that it was traditional or that it
was overwhelmed by tradition, but that this incapacity itself was the product
of the same process of colonialism which gave birth to this capitalism in
India.
The basic fact is that the same social, political and economic process that
produced industrial development and social and cultural progress in Britain,
the metropolis, also produced and then maintained economic
underdevelopment and social and cultural backwardness in India, the
colony. The two countries were organically linked with each other and
participated for nearly two centuries in a common, integrated world
economic system, though with dissimilar, indeed opposite, consequences.
Nor were these consequences accidental or the result of some special villainy
on the part of some British Viceroy or the other, or some special imbecility
or historical proclivity of the Indian people or institutions. This uneven
development of capitalism — the development of one part and
underdevelopment of the other and unequal distribution of the benefits of
the development of the system — has been a basic characteristic of modem
capitalism. From the very beginning, capitalism has developed by becoming
a fetter on the social, economic and political progress of its colonies — the
other countries involved in the growth of capitalism. It was, therefore, not an
accident nor was it historically exceptional that India was integrated into
world capitalism without enjoying any of the benefits of capitalism, without
taking part in the industrial revolution. It was modernized and
underdeveloped at the same time!
In fact, the degree or intensity of underdevelopment or backwardness and
the potentialities of development, viewed not narrowly but broadly as the
totality of political, economic, social and cultural structure (which latter
includes patterns of intellectual development) are precisely determined by
the level of this integration and colonial modernization. This also means
that the capacity to develop depends on the extent to which the colonial
pattern of integration with the world capitalist system is shattered. It is
perhaps for these two reasons that India, the classical colony, the most
developed of the colonial countries on the eve of independence, which
because of ‘peaceful transition’ to independence continued to maintain
‘friendly’ relations with the previous as well as the new metropolis, has
found it more difficult to carry out an industrial revolution—to ‘take off—
than the much less closely integrated and therefore seemingly less developed
semi-colony of China,8 which completely broke loose from the capitalist
world in 1949 and decided to follow the socialist road.
I would, therefore, venture to suggest that the manner of looking at
modern Indian history outlined above — i.e., viewing it as the process of the
evolution of the modern colonial structure through different stages and in
its different facets and of its integration with the world capitalist economy as
also of the emergence of the forces which arose in opposition to this
structure—provides a more fruitful framework for historical research in
general and for understanding the nature and historical roots of India’s
underdevelopment in particular.
The implications of this approach for the current strategies of
development are also far reaching. While for European capitalism the pre-
conditions were provided by feudalism and pre-capitalism, for present day
India the basic pre-condition was provided not by Mughal India but by the
colonial economy and society which were integral parts of world capitalism.
In other words, the political economy of growth in India had to start from
this, the colonial ‘model’, and not the tradition—modernization ‘model’.
Our present historical resources are not adequate enough to supply a full
and detailed analysis of the colonial phenomenon. But this approach will
enable us to at least ask the right questions. A solid groundwork for such an
approach was laid by the nineteenth century nationalist Indian writers such
as Dadabhai Naoroji, M.G. Ranade, G.V. Joshi and R.C. Dutt, who were
among the first in modern intellectual and political history to take such an
overall view of colonial transformation.9 The broad analytical structure for
the study of colonial India was developed further in the 1940s by R. Palme
Dutt.10 However, instead of enriching this model and further amplifying or
modifying it through empirical and analytical studies, Indian scholars have
increasingly neglected it after 1947.
I do not, of course, suggest that the evolution of the internal structure and
institutions of the Indian economy and society as well as of the social and
political movements are not important from the historical as well as the
contemporary developmental point of view. This evolution, however,
occurred not only in constant interaction with imperialism and under its
hydra-headed domination, but as an integral part of the development of
colonialism, and it may not be properly studied without grasping the
essential structure of colonialism.11 In fact, the colonial structure
encompassed the internal structure of society. And, above all, we may keep
in view that colonialism, though not the only obstacle to development,
provided the chief contradiction of the history of the last two centuries. In
other words, the overthrow of the colonial structure, i.e., the restructuring of
the economy and society without the colonial element, was a necessary
though not a sufficient condition for economic and social development.
It is also not suggested that an analysis of colonialism must occupy the
centre of the stage in the treatment of each of the problems of modem
Indian history, or even that it must intrude everywhere. What is suggested is
that it should form the constant backdrop to all historical work on the
period, for every major development occurs within the framework of
colonialism. And in no case we afford to abstract away the role of
colonialism from the discussion of any major problem of recent history.
Otherwise we are likely to continue to get the sort of research with which we
have become familiar in recent years in which ideas and ideologies—of
conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, nationalism, and most of all
‘modernization’—are seen as the mainsprings of administrative policy and
political action.
A study of colonialism has, of course, to encompass almost every area of
modern Indian history. Colonial modernization involved not only the
Indian economy but also the patterns of social, political, administrative and
cultural life. A whole world was lost, an entire social fabric was dissolved,
and a new social framework came into being that was stagnant and decaying
even as it was being born. To turn around a wellknown phrase, India
underwent a thorough going colonial ‘cultural revolution’. I have, however,
confined myself to a few of the economic aspects of colonialism, partly
because of the needs of time and space, partly because of intellectual
convenience, and partly because, as Furnivall has put it, “colonial relations
are primarily economic”. But a similar analysis may be applied to other
aspects of the colonial structuring of Indian society.
I may, for example, mention a few of the interesting problems in non-
economic fields waiting investigation and analysis: the emergence of a new
status system or hierarchical ‘ladder of success’ the structuring into the
administrative machinery of corruption and an attitude of neglect, hostility,
and oppression towards the common people; breakdown of old loyalties and
value systems leading to increasing social atomization and anomie (or
normlessness); the emergence of an intelligentsia which, on the one hand,
was one of the rays of hope in colonial society and a prime mover for its
reconstitution, and, on the other hand, accepted the role of an intellectual
satellite of the metropolis even when struggling against it in the realm of
economy and politics.
In fact, the need for such analysis is perhaps greater in the non-economic
fields where the model of tradition-modernization has made even more of a
headway.

The proposition, that whatever industrial development occurred in India in

the past occurred as a result of the integration of the Indian economy with
the world capitalist system through trade and capital investment, is
disproved by the very interesting historical phenomenon that the major
spurts in Indian industrial development took place precisely during those
periods when India’s colonial economic links with the world capitalist
economy were temporarily weakened or disrupted. On the other hand, the
strengthening of these links led to backwardness and stagnation. In India’s
case foreign trade and the inflow of foreign capital were reduced or
interrupted thrice during the twentieth century, i.e., during the two world
wars and the Great Depression, 1929–34. Yet on each occasion far from
production being checked, there occurred its further development; in fact
the roots of the industrial capitalist class reached deeper.12 On the other
hand, as the ‘international economy’ pressed back to reforge the links, the
gains of the Indian capitalist class were threatened and it hastened to
support the nationalist movement which was, at the time, pledged to break
these links.13
Briefly, the impact of the First World War on India was as follows:14
foreign trade, the ‘great engine of development’, declined drastically;15
consequently, the domestic market, even though extremely limited, became
available to Indian industries, and the Government was compelled to buy a
large part of its normal as well as war-time stores in India. There was a
sharper rise in the prices of manufactures than in those of raw materials due
to a decline in the export of agricultural products.16 The process of British
capital imports was temporarily slackened. The period from 1919 to 1922
saw in addition the Non-Cooperation Movement with its swadeshi and
boycott programme, which may be seen in our context as being
instrumental in weakening the integration of the Indian economy with the
world capitalist economy.
The result was that even the otherwise weak Indian capitalism took a
spurt forward. Not only this, but it can be said that the firm foundations of
Indian capitalism were laid during this period. It could not, however, take
full advantage of the situation because of another of its basic weaknesses,
structured into it by its colonial integration with British capitalism, namely,
that the country had no machine-making industries and the same war that
opened up the opportunities for growth also choked off the imports of mill-
machinery and other accessories.17 Consequently, the pent up pressure for
industrial growth found expression in frenzied company promotion
immediately after the war.
The major impact of the war on Indian capitalist activity has been
indicated in Table 1.
 During these years, Indian capitalists also earned fabulous profits. The
cotton textile industry, for example, paid an average dividend of 53 per cent
between 1915 and 1922.18
Gradually Britain and the capitalist world recovered from the war damage
and India’s economic links with them were restored. Foreign trade recovered
after 1921,19 and, what is more important, the high profits of Indian
industry attracted British capital on a large scale.20 Furthermore, British
capital pegged the rupee-poundsterling exchange ratio high in order to
favour imports. The resultant strengthening of integration with the British
economy and foreign domination weakened the Indian industrial push. The
re-emergence of relative stagnation led to the Indian economy being once
again described as ‘transitional’ instead of modern.21 The relative stagnation
in industrial production is brought out in Table 2.
There was also a drastic fall in the index figure of the capital of new
companies registered in India.22
The depression23 was particularly severe in the cotton textile industry,
which was still the main enterprise of Indian capitalism. Production
continued to creep upward, though registering considerable excess
capacity.24 Moreover there was a severe fall in profits.25 The iron and steel
industry was faced with virtual liquidation in the beginning of the period.26
The industry recovered only after the grant of protective tariffs. Thus the
reinforcement of integration with world capitalism not only led to the loss of
the momentum gained during the war but threatened to wipe out the war-
time gains. This led to the intensification of the contradiction between the
Indian capitalist class and the metropolitan power. Faced with a vigorous
mass nationalist movement, the latter decided to conciliate the Indian
capitalists with a policy of hesitant protection and other concessions.

TABLE 1
Source: Sastry, except for the last line which Is taken from Bimal C. Ghose,
A Study of the Indian Money Market, 1943, p. 17.
* This section of cotton industry had been virtually stagnant from 1910 to
1914, the production year-wise being 246 (1910), 267(1911), 267(1912),
274(1913). Sastry, p. 91.
* The industry operated at full capacity. It possibly could not expand
much in the absence of machine-imports. It made huge profits, however.
Immediately after the war, the industry built up productive capacity and
then got into financial trouble.

TABLE 2
Source: Sastry, except for the last row which is based on Subramanian and
Homfray, Recent Social and Economic Trends in India, 1946.
• Iron and Steel Industry was granted tariff protection in 1924.
The stagnation of 1922-29 contrasts strongly with the period 1929-34, the
period of the Depression, when the ‘international economy’ was temporarily
disrupted with its godhead, the gold-standard, vanishing and never to
return. Once again the British hold on the Indian economy was weakened.
India’s foreign trade was sharply reduced and the domestic market which
was otherwise shrinking became available to Indian industries.27 The foreign
capital investments fell off and after 1931 there was a net outflow of foreign
capital.28 The loosening of the economic links with the metropolis had
another important consequence. Commercial capital, the product of the
imperial connection and engaged in foreign trade, had its sphere of
employment suddenly contracted. Similarly, the capital invested in usury,
which was no less a product of the colonial economic structure, had its
avenue of employment also narrowed due to the crisis in agriculture. Land
also was no longer an attractive field of investment. The loosening of the
economic ties with the metropolis, therefore, compelled the mercantile and
usury capital to shift to industry even though the rates of profit in industry
were low. The clogging of foreign trade as a field of investment also
compelled the industrialists to plough back the profits from the existing
industries.
A change in the tariff policy occurred at this time. The Government
extended protection to the sugar and cotton textile industries in order to
prevent a drastic fall in agricultural earnings and thus to prevent the
peasants, hard hit by the Depression, from joining the emerging left
movement in India. Similarly, these and several other industries were given
protection to keep the industrial as also the commercial bourgeoisie from
giving more active support to the nationalist struggle.29 Moreover, during
the crucial Depression years, the indigenous industries were once again able
to derive social protection from the anti-imperialist programme of swadeshi
and boycott. Some of the industries were also helped by the fact that the fall
in the prices of agricultural raw materials was far greater than the fall in the
prices of industrial products.30
Industrial production during the years of the Depression and recession is
given in Table 3.
Thus in the period of the Depression, in which industrial production
throughout the capitalist world was tumbling down and in which the
domestic market was shrinking so drastically as to compel the people to
surrender their silver and gold trinkets,31 the Indian industries based on the
home market were not only saved from the worst effects of the Depression
— no mean achievement by any standards—but were even able to grow and
branch out into new fields. Furthermore, capital for the major sectors of the
new industry was provided by the Indians.32 Progress in banking and
insurance was also made mostly by Indian capital.33 It may also be noted
that the sugar, cement, matches, and even steel industries were firmly
established only during the 1930s. In fact if the First World War marked the
firm foundation of Indian capitalism, the Depression can be said to be the
period of its coming of age, when it took full advantage of the economic and
political difficulties of the metropolis to strengthen itself. These are the years
when several major groups of modem Indian capitalists—the Birlas, the
DalmiaJains, the Singhanias, the Thapars, among others—ventured into the
industrial field. We may also note that the fate of the industries that catered
to the export market was very different. They felt the full impact of the
Depression.34
As Table 3 shows, Indian industries did not suffer from a post-Depression
phase of stagnation.35 This was because world capitalism did not recover
fully after 1934 and quickly went into a recession. Moreover the major
capitalist economies were soon engaged in a competitive armament
programme. In particular, the depression in India’s foreign trade and
agricultural prices did not lift. Consequently, its commercial, industrial,
speculative and money-lending capital continued to find its outlet in
industry. Imports of capital also remained insignificant.
The conditions of the First World War were fully revived during the
Second World War except that the magnitude of the war effort through the
purchase of materials, stationing of foreign soldiers, and employment of
Indian personnel was far greater.36 In addition, Japan was no longer there to
usurp part of the market. Not only did no fresh British capital enter but
there was even some repatriation. The international connection was virtually
snapped for the time being. The result is well known. The spurt in industrial
production is brought out by Table 4.

TABLE 3
Source: Sastry, except for the last row which are taken from Subramanian
and Homfray.
• The weak and ineffective protection given to steel industry was diluted
by the grant of Imperial Preference to British steel in 1927 and by the
lowering of import duties and withdrawal of subsidy to the Tatas in the same
year. Increased trariffs came in 1934 but steel production had improved even
before that.

TABLE 4

Source: Subramanian and Homfray, pp. 42-44, 56. The 1937 figures for
cotton yam and piecegoods are however taken from Sastry.
The Indian capitalists made huge profits.37 Moreover the Indian capitalist
class strengthened its financial base enormously within India and left British
capital far behind in this respect.38 It has been estimated that investment in
Indian economy increased by seven or eight per cent of the national income
39

Thus the Indian capitalist class entered the post-war period with greater
strength as well as greater forebodings. On the one hand, it looked boldly for
new investment opportunities, as is clear from a perusal of the Bombay Plan,
formulated in 1943-44 by nearly all the major industrial capitalists of the
country; on the other hand, it feared that British capital would make an
attempt to recover its weakened position at India’s cost by increasing the
integration of its economy with that of the metropolis.40 It therefore put
forward demands for heavy industry, even if it had to be brought into
existence under state ownership, and for state planning and active and direct
support even through the development of a powerful public sector.41 It also
protested against any fresh entry of foreign capital and demanded the
loosening of its existing stranglehold. Thus G.D. Birla demanded that “all
British investments in India be repatriated,”42 and M.A. Master, President of
the Indian Merchants’ Chamber warned: “India would prefer to go without
industrial development rather than allow the creation of new East India
Companies in this country, which would... militate against her economic
independence.”43 The Bombay Plan did not provide for any direct foreign
capital investment and for only seven per cent of its total investment outlay
through foreign loans.44
This study of the development of the industrial capitalist class in India
makes it clear that such a development did not occur as a result of the forces
of economic modernization represented by foreign capital investment and
international trade, which, when capitalism is seen as a world system,
merely produced economic development in Britain and in the Crown
colonies of Australia and Canada and underdevelopment in India. Rather,
such development occurred only when the forces of colonial modernization
were weakened.45 The development of Indian capitalism was, of course,
stunted and limited.46 This was because it occurred within the parameters of
overall colonial relations. The two wars and the Depression merely loosened
the ties with the metropolis; the ties were clear and present all the time. The
structural aspects of colonialism were at no stage shattered or transformed.
Consequently, the result was merely industrial growth and not industrial
revolution.47 The country continued to be the classical model of an
underdeveloped economy.
At the same time. this limited industrial growth provided a glimpse of the
potential for development inherent in the economy. When opportunity
beckoned the entrepreneurs were not lacking, nor did the value system
(‘spiritualism’, ‘asceticism’ etc.), the caste system, joint-family, the supposedly
inherent proclivities of the Indians to prefer semi-feudal patterns of
investment, the shortage of industrial labour, and such other shibboleths
(that were often used to explain underdevelopment in the past and which
continue to be so used even now occasionally) stand in the way.

An interesting method of understanding the nature of the

underdevelopment of countries like India has been provided by what may be
called the ‘initial conditions’ approach. I will use a critical examination of
this approach to come to the crux of the colonial condition. This approach,
expounded in its more recent version by Simon Kuznets, underlines the
differences in the basic economic indicators or characteristics or the initial
conditions from which the underdeveloped countries (including India) had
to start their developmental programmes after independence and the initial
conditions preceding the industrial development of the presently developed
countries.48 This approach holds great initial promise. It undertakes to
clarify the basically dissimilar aspects of the two initial conditions with a
view to demonstrate that the methods and policies of development followed
in the past by the developed countries are not fully applicable to the
underdeveloped countries which should evolve their own variants of
developmental strategy.49 The proponents of this approach are very critical
of W.W. Rostow and others who try to apply universalistic remedies
assuming that the underdeveloped countries are currently at some stage or
the other which the developed countries were at earlier.50 Surprisingly,
however, their own assessment of the contrast between the two sets of initial
conditions remains confined to the technoeconomic (functional) or
quantitative aspects.51 The structural differences, the basic dissimilarities,
and the historical origins of these differences are seldom touched upon or
are skirted round. Their promise remains tantalizingly unfulfilled. And then,
with a twist of the wrist, the differences between the two conditions are put
forward, explicitly or implicitly, as the cause of the present state of the
underdeveloped countries. Some discuss the same initial conditions in the
form of obstacles to development implying that these techno-economic
obstacles have no recent history and are, therefore, their own causes or are
the expression of their ‘traditional’ or primordial backwardness.52 Kuznets
does emphasise the historical heritage but an understanding of the role of
colonialism is drained out. Alexander Gerschenkron promises to study the
initial conditions and ‘economic backwardness in historical perspective’ but
his perspective does not extend beyond degrees of backwardness.53
From the point of view of understanding the structure of India’s
underdevelopment in terms of its historical evolution, its causation, and its
economic roots, the question of differences in initial conditions has been
wrongly posed. For meaningful results and to be able to ask more
meaningful questions from history, a comparison should be made between
the initial conditions of the pre-British past and the beginning of the
colonial era, on the one hand, and the initial conditions of the industrial
revolution in the developed countries, on the other. I will therefore first set
out the differences in initial conditions as given by Kuznets and others and
then briefly indicate to what extent these differences apply to pre-British
India.
The initial conditions of present-day India and other underdeveloped
countries are invariably seen to be more unfavourable in the following
respects: (1) lower per capita income; (2) lower savings or surplus or
investible capital in the economy (this results from the first factor which is
itself the result of low savings and other factors enumerated below); (3)
much lower availability of land per capita or underemployment in
agriculture; (4) lower productivity in agriculture, also leading to lower
marketable agricultural surplus for the urban areas; (5) greater dependence
on agriculture; (6) high population density and high rate of population
growth; (7) lower level of means of communication and therefore lower level
of internal trade; (8) low level of market or ‘money’ economy or monetized
sector; (9) poor availability of credit and financial institutions; (10) low level
of economic performance; (11) low cultural level of the people expressed in
lower level of skill, lower literacy rates, etc., leading to shortage of skilled
labour and technical personnel; (12) weak political structure leading to
instability and insecurity on the one hand and absence of “effective interplay
between the government and the interests of the population”; (13) different
civilizational heritage (on the one hand, the absence of Renaissance,
Protestant and secular revolutions, a capitalist spirit, and the pre-1800
development of capitalist institutions; on the other hand, the prevalence of
social and economic institutions of the feudal or semi-feudal pattern); (14)
social and cultural values and attitudes inimical to economic growth; (15)
low level of industry and technology; and (16) the colonial heritage.54
Ishikawa and Myrdal add a few more, and I may say more meaningful,
differences: (17) a lack a basic investment in agricultural land, such as flood
control, irrigation and drainage; (18) the inability of agriculture to finance a
programme of industrialization, as was the case in Meiji Japan; (19) changed
conditions of world trade which restrict overseas market for the exports of
underdeveloped countries, leading to exchange crisis and inability to buy
imports of machinery and raw materials; (20) the greater complexity of
techniques and technologies requiring highly sophisticated engineers and
scientists and plants of larger size and scale which in turn means very much
higher initial capital investment which the capital starved countries find
difficult to make and large sized markets for their efficient and economic
functioning which are precisely lacking in poor countries; and (21) absence
of colonies whose markets, people and resources could be exploited.
If we see these differences in initial conditions in the light of conditions
prevailing in Mughal India or early 19th century India, we will discover that
most of them do not apply or that there was not much of a gap between the
initial conditions of India and those of the pre-industrial state of the
developed countries in Europe and of Japan;55 some of them explain the
failure of capitalism to arise autonomously in Mughal India and the success
of Britain in conquering it;56 some of them were changed in a ‘favourable’
direction but were utilized to impose a colonial structure;57 and, lastly,
others arose because of the failure of colonial India to take advantage of the
emerging technological forces.58 Thus but for the social attitudes and values,
whose roles in the economic underdevelopment of India in the recent
period I shall discuss later, the unfavourable initial conditions of today came
into existence during the colonial era, the era in which there occurred “the
onslaught of modernization from outside”59 and the Indian economy was
integrated into the world capitalist economy.60 I may make it clear that the
intention here is not to rake up the past, to be able ‘to blame’ imperialism, to
provide alibis to the internal factors and forces that have held back
development, nor to give expression to psychological anti-westernism of
which the leaders, scholars and citizens of underdeveloped countries are so
often suspected.61 The aim is to understand our past and present, to use
history to shed light on the present. Moreover, the entire question of the
character of underdevelopment (the initial conditions) and its historical
roots has crucial implications for the strategy of development which is of
contemporary importance.
The modified initial conditions approach does not, of course, tell us how
these differences have come about,62 i.e., about the process of evolution of
the traditional Indian economy into a colonial economy, nor what the
structural dimensions of these differences are. But it does to some extent
clear the field of the weeds and lead us to ask the question: why did
development not occur during the last 150 years of British rule?
Except when the initial conditions are in themselves seen as the causes of
underdevelopment or when the underdeveloped condition is seen as
archaic, three factors apart from colonialism are often assigned a major
responsibility.
Firstly, it is said that the internal social institutions, such as the caste
system and joint family, and the prevailing mores, habits, beliefs, attitudes,
values, and traditions inhibited growth, especially by affecting the behaviour
of workers, peasants, entrepreneurs, and those in a position to save. This
explanation is rather reluctantly accepted by most economists and economic
historians as a sort of residual and perhaps regrettable product of their effort
at historical explanation.63 This explanation has been found increasingly
unsatisfactory in recent years. Sociologists and historians have shown that
there is hardly any correlation between economic growth in India and social
institutions, values and traditions.64 Very clearly the lack of industrial
capitalist enterprise in modern times is explained by the lack of economic
opportunities in the field and not by the deficiencies of the Indian capitalist
class in qualities of enterprise, i.e., profit-making and risk-taking. These very
qualities explain its addiction to trade and usury. But as I have shown in
section 2 above, this class did not hesitate to shift to industry when it suited
its interests.65 It has also gradually become clear that values and institutions
have not remained static and have tended to adapt themselves to economic
necessity. Sometimes, this question is also confused with that of social and
political revolutions on which these institutions and values act as a definite
drag.66
Secondly, it is suggested that the weight of the past backwardness was so
huge that modernization from outside could not make a big enough dent in
it. This view seems to have drawn new strength from Gerschenkron’s theory
that different countries possess different degrees of backwardness in their
pre-industrial condition. Pre-British India is then said to have possessed
such an extreme degree of backwardness in comparison with Japan or
Russia that a very long period of preparation for the ‘take-off was needed.67
There is no historical proof of such weight of centuries.68 Even
Gerschenkron has been misread here. He uses the concept of degrees of
backwardness not to explain the failure of some countries to undergo
industrial revolution but to explain the diversity of efforts and means or
substitution of factors utilized to accomplish this end in different countries.
The third explanation relies on a theory of leakages: namely, that the
positive impact of colonial modernization was there but because of its
unfortunate foreign character, the exploitative mentality of the rulers,
indigenous social outlook, etc., large scale leakages occurred.69 Though this
explanation often prompts a critical look at colonialism, by its very nature it
directs attention to techno-economic factors. However, even though its
value as a theory of causation is severely limited, it does provide an intricate
and fascinating method of tracing the inner workings of the colonial
economy.
If these three explanations are rejected as inadequate we are left with only
one other: the role of colonialism. The recognition of colonialism as a cause
of underdevelopment certainly marked a major step forward in the political
development of modem India as also of history as a discipline. Today,
however, this recognition does not in itself contribute much to our historical
grasp of the period or to the discussion of developmental policy.70 Today
hardly any major writer discusses the problems of history or
underdevelopment without mentioning the role of colonialism or the
colonial heritage. But many of them treat it as just one of the many factors or
causes and indeed seldom examine or analyse its economic impact.71 Their
criticism often concentrates on the political and dominational aspects of
colonialism.72
Historians have also, therefore, to explain the role that colonialism played
in India’s social, political and economic evolution in general and in the
evolution of underdevelopment in particular. Here again we see different
approaches. A major approach, which may be described as the liberal-
radical critique—plain liberal or radical in the case of writers from the
developed capitalist countries and liberal nationalist in the case of Indian
writers—has existed from the beginning of the 19th century.73 Its
proponents are quite willing to see the failure of colonialism and even to
criticize it freely. But they see the failure of colonialism mainly in terms of
the failure of colonial policies. Their critique basically pertains to the
negative role of the colonial state as expressed in its policies. For example,
the liberals criticize the role of the colonial state in preventing
industrialization and in inhibiting growth.74 They even point to economic
exploitation in very general terms. At its sharpest this critique assigns the
primary responsibility for under-development to the failure and
unwillingness of the colonial government to take positive steps to aid the
process of internal capitalist development. More specifically, it concentrates
on such matters as the British Government’s imposition of free trade upon
India, its failure to give tariff protection to Indian industries and to aid and
encourage them through direct state support in the form of state subsidies,
purchase of stores, encouragement to credit institutions, etc., and its
negative policy towards irrigation.75 The origin of these colonial policies is
seen in a lack of understanding, colour and racial prejudice, the basically
foreign character of the bureaucracy and the regime itself, British devotion
to laissez faire, the self-interest of the dominant classes in Britain who
compelled the colonial government to follow deliberately discriminatory
policies.76 Thus the liberals are basically critical of colonialism, they do
point to colonialism as the major cause of the lack of economic
development. Undoubtedly, the colonial government’s policies were anti-
growth and the denial of state support, perhaps the most powerful
instrument of development in almost all countries, including Britain, greatly
hampered the growth of the Indian capitalist class. And this gives the liberal
approach not only a degree of historical validity but also a certain worth as
an analytical tool. This approach is, however, limited in its capacity to go to
the heart of the matter for it does not fully explain the process of
underdevelopment under British rule. It does not concentrate attention on,
rather it diverts attention from, the structural changes that imperialism
brought about, the new network of institutions and factors that emerged, the
obstacles to growth which were essentially the products of India’s integration
with world capitalism and not of government policy, which were brought
about through policy but which could stand without it. It may even be
suggested that the necessity to blame colonial state policy was forced upon
the liberal critics because of their failure to make an analysis of colonial
structure.77 This concentration on colonial policy is also to some extent
responsible for the failure of the liberals to study the differential impact of
colonialism on different classes in India and the diverse relations of different
classes with each other and with imperialism. In the post-independence
India it has led to another basic weakness both in research and in the
prescription of policies for the present.
The liberal critique of colonialism led to the belief that once the political
or state power was taken away from the foreign rulers and the full weight of
the new power was thrown behind the indigenous economic effort, the
colonial content of the economy would gradually disappear. The new,
independent state would release, so to speak, the full forces of development
and modernization that colonialism had ‘arrested’. Once the new engine of
growth, the state planning commission, was coupled to the old modernizing
forces, i.e., contact with the ‘world market forces’ in general and
international trade and foreign capital in particular, the road to development
would be wide open even if the speed was less than that of the allegedly
‘totalitarian’ socialist states. This approach had also an ideological
component. Popular attention need no longer be focussed on the colonial
question in history or theory. The anti-imperialist ideology had, it was said,
exhausted its positive creative role; it was to be replaced in toto by ‘the
ideology of state planning development’. The only role the former could play
lay in political mobilization behind foreign policy and at times of elections;
but it was no longer of any use to the intellectuals. In economics as in
history all that was needed was to add the new ideology of state planning to
the ideology of contemporary capitalism, the new economics and new
sociology based essentially on the contemporary structure of ‘world market
forces’, i.e., capitalism.78
This liberal emphasis on the role of the state also partly explains the
abandonment by Indian scholars after 1947 of the approach towards an
understanding of the structure of colonialism that was initiated so brilliantly
by Dadabhai Naoroji, G.V. Joshi and R.C. Dutt,79 developed further by R.
Palme Dutt, and was still of interest to some writers such as Jawaharlal
Nehru, K.S. Shelvankar, H. Venkatasubbiah, and A.R. Desai.80 Since the
essence of colonialism was seen as colonial state policy, colonialism was
considered to be already dead on 15th August, 1947. The social scientists,
some of whom had earlier, under the impact of the anti-imperialist struggle,
paid some attention to the study of colonialism, could now start helping the
evolution of a state policy of development by asking techno-economic
questions. They were to concentrate on what Paul Baran has called ‘the study
of observable facts’. They were to ignore the interconnections. The task of the
modem historian was also increasingly seen as the study of the evolution of
functional and dysfunctional social and economic indicators from the point
of view of economic growth; for example, population growth, urbanization,
stagnation or otherwise in agricultural or industrial technology, caste
movements, elite evolution, etc. I am of course not suggesting that these are
not legitimate or very useful subjects for study, but only that they may not, at
present, because of our limited intellectual resources, constitute the basic
direction of research in modem Indian history.
An interesting example of the new, post-independence outlook is
provided by the first, theoretical chapter of the First Five Year Plan
document.81 Entitled ‘The Problem of Development”, the chapter contains
quite a few statements about changing “the socio-economic framework” or
the “re-adaptations of social institutions and relationships”,82 but not a single
word on colonialism or the inherited colonial structure of the economy and
society. The only remarks regarding the recent past refer to India having
suffered from “cramped”, “partial” and “limited” development.83 The task
therefore was to develop in “many directions” through planning which
political independence made possible. After this brief homage to a structural
approach, the remaining part of the theoretical, guiding chapter is devoted
to technical aspects of the planning process such as the question of savings
and capital formation. The active overthrow or smashing of the colonial
structure, or the delinking of the colonial economy from that of the
metropolis does not figure anywhere in the Plan document. On the contrary,
foreign capital is assigned an important role in the process of capital
formation and development.84 True there is a warning against the danger
posed by foreign assistance, but the danger is only to “the country’s ability to
take art independent line in international affairs,”85 i.e., it is a political
danger. There is thus a complete unawareness of the role that foreign capital
has played in the structuring of a colonial economy. A plea for welcoming “a
free flow of foreign (equity) capital” therefore follows. Lastly, the document
emphasises the decisive role of the state in economic development.86
Colonialism was, however, something much more than political control
or colonial policy. The colonial state was undoubtedly a part of the colonial
system; it was the instrument through which the system was best enforced;
and colonial policies helped evolve and maintain the colonial structure. But
the colonial state and colonial policies did not constitute the essence of
colonialism. Colonialism was the complete but complex integration and
enmeshing of India’s economy and society with world capitalism carried out
by stages over a period lasting nearly two centuries. The essence of India’s
underdevelopment, therefore, lay not in colonial policies but in the nature of
its ‘contacts’ with the world capitalist economy through trade and capital.
Colonial policy was responsible not for limiting India’s contacts with the
‘world market forces’ but for making it a full though unequal member of the
‘international economy’.
Consequently, political independence did not automatically lead to a new
stage of the economy. It could merely create the political conditions for the
adoption of new state policies which could now be designed to shatter or
disintegrate the colonial structure. But this shattering or restructuring of the
colonial economy and society had to be a conscious task, to be undertaken
actively, and to be struggled for on the basis of a full grasp of the mechanism
of colonialism as it had operated in India and in other parts of the world.
This was, and still is, the challenge that faces the historians of modern
India. We have yet to trace the deep roots of the underdevelopment of our
economic, social, political, administrative, cultural and intellectual structure
in the colonial period, to trace the evolution of the multifarious channels
and ties through which India was integrated into world capitalism.
Reverting to colonial policies, I may point out that it is only when they are
seen as a prop of the colonial structure that they are studied adequately. The
tendency to apportion individual blame or praise to the cogs in the
machinery, except within the very narrow limits of their individual sphere,
tends then to disappear. Nor does the researcher’s task get limited to
evaluating from writings, speeches, official records, or private papers the
motives and ideologies of the statesmen and administrators involved.
Colonial policy, administration, and administrators are then seen as both
bolstering the colonial structure and being limited by its parameters. Within
these parameters prevails a variety of policies designed and operated by men
who are all too human and as capable of rising to great heights as falling
down to the lower depths.

In the end, I would like to suggest that the study of colonialism would be
helped if it was seen as a distinct historical stage or period in the modem
historical development of India which intervenes between the traditional,
pre-British society and economy and the modem capitalist or socialist
society and economy. It is not a mere adaptation or distortion of the old, nor
a partially modernized society, nor a transitional state of society.87 It is also
not an unhappy and badly mixed amalgam of positive and negative
features.88 It is a well-structured ‘whole’,89 a distinct social formation
(system) or sub - formation (sub-system) in which the basic control of the
economy and society is in the hands of a foreign capitalist class which
functions in the colony (or semi-colony) through a dependent and
subservient economic, social, political, and intellectual structure whose
forms can vary with the changing conditions of the historical development
of capitalism as a world-wide system.90
 I may reiterate here that the British rule did shatter the economic and
political basis of the old society. It dissolved the old pre-capitalist mode of
production;91 but a new capitalist system did not follow; instead a new
colonial mode of production came into being. For example, the land tenure
systems introduced after 1793 completely overturned the old agrarian
relations. The new agrarian structure that was evolved to suit the needs of
colonialism and under the impact of economic forces released by it was
undoubtedly semi-feudal but it was nevertheless new; it was not the
perpetuation of the old.92 In fact, throughout the Indian social structure,
new relations and new classes—a new internal class structure—were evolved
which were the product of, and fully integrated with, colonialism. The
confusion partly arises from the complexity of the historical situation. World
capitalism is a single system and colonialism is a basic constituent of this
system. Yet colonialism has distinct characteristics of its own. We have,
therefore, to view the same system of imperialism-colonialism in the form of
two separate entities, one in the colony and the other in the metropolis.
It is from this, the colonial, stage that India had to begin after 1947 its
process of transition to a new social system. In other words, the task of the
post-independence era was not to complete the transition begun in the
colonial era but to make a transition from the colonial system or stage to a
new system or stage of history. Any transitional stage is something different
from the stage that precedes as well as the stage that succeeds. At the same
time it is also the essence of a transitional stage that it is pulled in both
directions, that it can either go forward to a new stage or go back in all
essential characteristics to the old one. The recognition of colonialism as a
distinct social formation would not only enable the historians of modem
India to draw up a better ‘structural model’ for their researches, but also
enable them, by analysing the evolution of the basic characteristics of
colonialism, to contribute to the prevention of the slide back.
Thus, the choice between the approach outlined above and the approach
that sees modem Indian history in terms of the bipolarities of tradition—
modernity, pre-capitalist-capitalist, or pre-industrial-industrial—is
significant from both points of view: the study of the past and the making of
the present. The vague and undifferentiated concept of modernization
hardly serves a useful purpose in the study of history. On the other hand,
just as during the 19th century modernization stood for development of
industrial capitalism in Britain and development of colonialism and
underdevelopment in India, so also modernization today could stand for
socialism, or an under-developed capitalism which is constantly threatened
by the back-sliding transition, or neo-colonialism . In contrast, if our past
economic relationship with world capitalism represented ‘guided
underdevelopment’ then the way out does not lie in integration with the
same world capitalism but in the effort to break ‘the vicious circle’ by opting
out of its sphere of influence. But then I have already encroached far into the
domain of the political scientists.

NOTES

Presidential Address delivered at the thirty-second session of the Indian

History Congress , December 1970.
1 An answer to this question is also vital for the particular path that we may choose for economic

development. Today it is also often accepted that the structural basis of our society has to be changed,
that some of the economic, political and social institutions have to be transformed. But the disputed
and crucial question here is: which ones?
2 See section 3 below.

3 And for that very reason Mughal India, the real traditional India, was very different from the

underdeveloped India of today. What are regarded as present day’s ‘traditional’ Indian economy,
polity, society, culture, and intellectual life are really the Modern colonial economy, etc. As a recent
writer has put it: “To speak of the traditional feudal structure of India is to confuse recent history with
past history.” Joseph R. Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced polarities in the study of social
change”. American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1967, p. 353.
4 As J.S. Furnivall put it: “Modern India grew up with Modern Europe.” Colonial Policy and Practice,

1956 reprint, pp. 537-39.

5 For a meaningful discussion of this subject, see R. Palme Dutt, India Today, 1949, pp. 95-96; K.S.

Shelvankar, The Problem of India, 1940, pp. 136-44; Irfan Habib, Potentialities of Capitalist
Development in the Economy of Mughal India, 1968, Enquiry No. 15; Satish Chandra, Why did an
Industrial Revolution not take place in India, 1968, mimeographed; Paul A. Baran, The Political
Economy of Growth, 1962 Indian ed., pp. 179-80, 191-92; S.C. Jha, Studies in the Development of
Capitalism in India, 1963, chaps I, II.
6 See “British and Indian Ideas of Indian Economic Development, 1858-1905”, in this volume.

7 In this respect, it is impermissible to postulate the continuation of the old order even for heuristic

purposes. Capitalism was a worldwide system because of its very nature. On the one hand, it must
expand its markets to ever wider frontiers, on the other hand, it gave the precapitalist societies only
one of the two choices: namely, to become capitalist or be absorbed in the capitalist system as colonies
or semi-colonies. Hence the historical question never was what would have happened if India had
retained the old order. The rise of capitalism closed that option not only to India but also to all other
countries. India had to become an independent capitalist country a la Russia or Japan or a colonial
component of world capitalism. Witness the fate of the other contemporaneous mighty empires,
China and Turkey. Witness also the fate of the independent ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal in Latin
America.
8 In 1949 China had about 14,000 miles in contrast to India’s over 40,000 miles of railways, one of the

chief instruments and indicators of the level of colonial integration as also of ‘modernization’ in the
modem period.
9 See, Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, 1966, in particular chap.

XV.
10 India Today, 1949.

11 The national movement, for example, derives its raison d'etre, its causation and driving force, as

well as its objective historical legitimacy from the colonial process and its impact on society. This is
one reason why those who deny the objective existence of colonialism as a basic economic structure—
as distinguished from its political and racial dominational aspects—tend to view the national
movement primarily as originating in the needs of the indigenous elites. The tradition is of course as
old as John Strachey, India, 1893, and V. Chirol, Indian Unrest, 1910, and its ideological basis
continues to be the same: the view that British rulers, with all their limitations as foreigners,
introduced a process of modernization and development rather than that of economic domination
and underdevelopment which gradually produced a basic contradiction between the development of
Indian people and the colonial structure.
12 Even the foundations of the Indian textile industry were laid during the depression of 1873-96

when the fall in the exchange value of the rupee weakened the competitive position of British goods in
the Indian market, made capital imports more difficult, and strengthened links with the backward Far
East.
13 This connection between industrial development and the weakening of imperial economic ties

during the two world wars was clearly seen by G.E. Hubbard in Eastern Industrialisation and its Effect
on the West, 1938, R. Palme Dutt, Kate L. Mitchell, Industrialization of the Western Pacific, 1942, and
N.S.R. Sastry, A Statistical Study of India’s Development, 1947. Mitchell (p. 7), Sastry (p. 5), and
Furnivall (p. 318) also saw the connection between development and the Depression. More recently,
A. Gunder Frank has put it in the form of a clear-cut hypothesis. See, “The Development of
Underdevelopment” Monthly Review, Sept. 1966 and Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin
America, 1967, p. 149.
14 The First World War period is taken to include the years from 1914-21 since the impact of the war

on Indian industry was felt till then. Moreover the British economy and capital also took some time to
recover from the war.
15 P. Ray, India’s Foreign Trade since 1870, 1934, p. 116.

16 For cotton, see Sastry, p. 174.

17 Japan, which was not hampered by any such constraint, rapidly mopped up India’s war time

demand.
18 Vera Anstrey, The Economic Development of India, 1946 reprint, p. 267 f.n. 4.

19 Though the recovery hardly exceeded the pre-war figures of India. P. Ray, pp. 116 & 126.

20 A.K. Banerji has calculated that the net inflow of foreign capital to India amounted to Rs. 37 crores

in 1921, Rs. 55.3 crores in 1922, and Rs. 38.7 crores in 1923. After 1923, however, the amount tapered
off to Rs. 6.7 crores in 1924 and Rs. 4.1 crores in 1925. By the indirect method of calculation, based on
the study of balance of payments, these amounts appear to be even greater. Rs. 87.47 crores in 1921,
Rs. 63.50 crores in 1922, Rs. 9.36 crores in 1923 and Rs. 40.37 crores in 1924. A.K. Banerji, India’s
Balance of Payments, 1963, pp. 195 & 200.
21 V. Anstey, Introduction.

22 If the base is taken as 100 in 1914, the index figures were as follows:

New capital issues in British India

1914 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927
100 221 121 51 40 31 45 29
Statist, 6 August 1927, quoted in R.P. Dutt, p. 148.
23 To quote Vera Anstey (writing in 1929): “the boom of 1919-21 developed ‘into a crisis, which was

followed by a crash and violent depression... The period since about 1922-23 has been one of
industrial retrenchment and reorganization....” (p 220).
24 Ibid., pp. 266 ff.; D.R. Gadgil, Industrial Evolution of India, 1948 reprint, pp. 232 ff.

25 The net profits of Bombay mills “fell from Rs. 338 lakhs in 1922 to Rs. 33 lakhs in 1923 and became

a loss of Rs. 92 lakhs in 1924 and 134 lakhs in 1925.” V. Anstey, p. 267.
26 It paid no dividends during 1922-23 and 1923-24 and by 1925 its 100 rupee share had fallen to 10

rupees. Ibid., p. 245; R.P. Dutt, p. 149.

27 G.E. Hubbard, p. 254.

28 According to the two estimates of A.K. Banerji, from 1929 to 1931 the net inflow of foreign capital

was Rs. 19.46 crores and 44.92 crores, respectively, and from 1931 to 1938 there was net outflow of Rs.
30.35 crores: and Rs. 23.37 crores, respectively, (p. 200)
29 The weakening of the world position of British imperialism also facilitated the grant of this

concession. Many of the Indian industries were no longer competing with British products but with
the products from Japan, Germany, Dutch Indonesia, etc. The British position was safeguarded
through Imperial Preferences.
30 For cotton textiles and sugar, see Sastry, pp. 174-75.

31 For fall in the consumption of piece-goods, sugar and kerosene, see Subramanian and Homfray, p.

78.
32 Thus, Indian capital’s share of the labour force employed in sugar was 89 per cent, and nearly 90

per cent in cement. In paper Indian share of the total product was 66 per cent. M. Kidron, Foreign
Investments in India, 1965, p. 42.
33 Subramanian and Homfray, pp. 56, 60 & 61.

34 This was the case with jute, tea and coal. The contrasting fate of pig iron and steel is of interest.

Steel production based on the home market went up, while the production of pig iron, nearly 40 per
cent of which was exported before the Depression, went down and stagnated.
35 It may however be noted that the rate of growth was on the whole not higher either.

36 The Government purchase of indigenous goods increased from Rs. 5.6 crores in 1938 to Rs. 21.1

crores in 1939, Rs. 78.8 crores in 1940, Rs. 196 crores in 1941, Rs. 247.8 crores in 1942, Rs. 133.4
crores in 1943 and Rs. 145.8 crores in 1944. Ibid., p. 172.
37 Ibid., p. 67 and R.P. Dutt, p. 172.

38 While in 1914 foreign banks had held 70 per cent of all deposits and in 1937 nearly 57 per cent, by

1947 their share had dropped to 17 per cent Kidron, P. 42.

39 B.N. Datar and I.G. Patel, “Employment During the Second World War,” Indian Economic Review,

Vol. Ill, No. 1, Feb. 1956, p. 16.

40 Kidron, p. 66.

41 Purshotamdas Thakurdas, J.R.D. Tata, G.D. Birla, and others, A Brief Memorandum outlining a

Plan of Economic Development for India. 1944.

42 Kidron, p. 65.

43 Eastern Economist 18 May, 1945, p. 658.

44 Even the foreign loans were to be taken only if they did not lead to “foreign influence” or, what is of

greater interest here, “interference of foreign vested interests.” pp. 46 & 48.
45 This was, moreover, no exceptional phenomenon. It occurred all over the colonial world—in

China, Indonesia, Burma, Latin America—as the studies of Kate Mitchell, J.S. Furnivall, and A
Gunder Frank clearly bring out
46 Thus the number of workers finding employment in modem factories was only 1,340,675 in 1931

and 2,522,753 in 1944. Subramanian and Homfray, p. 30.

47 In fact the de-industrialization of India and the deepening of its structural underdevelopment

continued in spite of these three periods of industrial spurts. Thus the percentage of the total
population of the present Indian Union engaged in agriculture increased from 67.58 in 1901 to 70.26
in 1931 and 72.01 in 1951. J. Krishnamurty, “Secular Changes in Occupational Structure”, The Indian
Economic and Social History Review, Jan, 1965, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 50.
48 Simon Kuznets, “Present Underdeveloped Countries and Past Growth”, in his Economic Growth

and Structure, Selected Essays, Indian edition, 1969 (hereafter cited as Kuznets), and “Underdeveloped
Countries and the Pre-industrial Phase in the Advanced Countries” (hereafter referred to as Kuznets
II), in AN. Agarwal and S.P. Singh, The Economics of Development, Galaxy Book edition, 1963. Also
see Shigeru Ishikawa. Economic Development in Asian Perspective, 1967: Gunnar Myrdal, Asian
Drama, Penguin edition, 1968, chapter 14. Nurkse’s pioneering work in growth economics, Problems
of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries, is based on a similar approach.
49 Kuznets I, pp. 177 & 191-93; Kuznets II, pp. 151-53; Ishikawa, p. i, 1,2, Gunnar Myrdal, pp. 673-74

as also 16-24.
50 See for example, Myrdal, pp. 674-76, 679, 703-04. Also see Ishikawa, p. 4 (f.n.)

51 Thus Myrdal writes that, “as scholars like Simon Kuznets have shown”, in making comparative

analysis of development the ‘possible and valuable’ generalizations that research can look for are “the
changing importance of different sectors or the changing distribution of income by size, occupation,
and region, or into sectoral savings, investment, capital/output ratios, population trends, urbanization,
and so on.” But precisely for this reason, he says, this approach yields “no all-embracing explanations;
only limited insights.” pp. 1856-57. He condemns both Rostow, the anti-Marxist, and the Marxists for
looking for such all-embracing, i.e.,structural explanations. See pp. 1847 ff., and p. 674. Also see
Kuznets I, p. 177.
52 One expression of this view is Nurkse’s often quoted phrase: “A country is poor because it is poor”,

p. 4.
53 A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Praeger edition, 1965.

54 See references in f.n. 48. Also H. Leibenstein, Economic Backwardness and Economic Growth, 1962

reprint, pp. 15 ff., 40 ff.; G. Meier, Leading Issues in Economic Development, pp. 43 ff,; G. Meier,
“Limited Economic Development”, in Agarwal and Singh; and J. Viner, “The Economics of
Development”, in Agarwal and Singh.
55 For initial condition number (1), see Brij Narain, Indian Economic Life, Past and Present, 1929 p2ff.;

R.K. Mukerjee, The Economic History of India: 1600-1800, 1945, p.4; S.J. Patel, “Economic Distance
between Nations”, in Essays on Economic Transition, 1965. For (2) re-large accumulation of merchant
capital, see Habib, p.57 ff.; S. Chandra, p. 3; N.C. Sinha, Studies in Indo-British Economy Hundred
Years Ago, 1946, pp. 17-23; N.K. Sinha, The Economic History of Bengal, Vol. I, 1961 edition, pp. 148ff.;
Vol. III, 1970, Chap. V.; V.I. Pavlov, The Indian Capitalist Class, 1964 chap. III. For (3), see Habib, p. 3;
H.H. Mann, Land and Labour in a Deccan Village (PimpliSaudagar), 1917, p. 46 and (Jategaon
Budruk), 1921, p. 42. For (4), re-agricultural productivity, see Habib, p. 4 (moreover, as Habib points
out, so long as productivity per worker was high due to abundance of fertile land, productivity per
acre is not of much importance as an initial condition); also see Voelcker, Report on the Improvement
of Indian Agriculture, 1891, quoted in R.P. Dutt, p.206-07; re-marketable surplus, it may be noted that
during the 19th century India was an exporter of food and agricultural raw materials. For (5), see
Habib, p.41, S. Chandra, p. 2; as late as 1891, after a long period of deindustrialization, only 61.1 per
cent of the population was dependent on agriculture. (6) does not apply at all. For (7), re-internal
trade, see R.K. Mukerjee, pp. 117.19; Habib, p. 59; re-roads, T. Morison, The Economic Transition in
India, 1911, pp. 22-23. For (8), see Habib; pp. 8, 11 & 12, 68. For (9), see Habib, pp. 61-63. For (10),
see Habib; R.C. Dutt, The Economic History of India, Vol. I, 1956 reprint chaps XII, XIII; Anstey, p. 5;
T. Raychaudhuri in The Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century, A Symposium, by him and others,
pp. 79ff.; Benjamin Higgins, “Western Enterprise and the Economic Development of Southeast Asia”.
Pacific Affairs, March 1958, Vol 31, No. 1, p. 76. For (11), re-skill, see V.V. Bhatt, Aspects of Economic
Change and Policy in India, 1800-1960, pp. 14-18; Karl Marx, On Colonialism, 2nd impression, p. 87;
Industrial Commission Report 1918, p. 6; re-general level of culture, see Malcolm and Munro, quoted
in R.C. Dutt, Vol. I, pp. 259-60; also see Myrdal, p. 695. For (12), see Habib, p. 58, S. Chandra, p. 1. Re-
(15) India was certainly backward in science and technology but was not stagnant: Habib,
Technological Changes and Society, 1969; it was not so very backward in industry and organization
either: Myrdal, pp. 453-54; S. Chandra, pp. 3-4: Higgins, p. 76. Re-(18), it may be noted that
agriculture yielded enough surplus for the British to finance all their wars of expansion in India from
1756; it also maintained the costliest military machine and civil bureaucracy in the world throughout
the 19th century; it also bore the cost of railway construction and other measures of ‘modernization’.
Re-(19), India had a large foreign trade and a huge export (commodity) surplus in the pre-British
period as also during the 19th century.
56 Applies to initial conditions numbers 13 and 15.

57 Applies to 12, 13, 18, 19.

58 In this special sense, this applies to 10, 15, 17 and 20 (this last aspect has been very well explained

by Ishikawa (pp. 23, 359, 369-70 & 384-85) and Myrdal (pp. 692-95).
59 Myrdal, p. 704.

60 In fact some of the initial conditions continued to be favourable throughout the 19th century when

the colonial modernization was occurring; it was only after 1918 by which date the structuring of
India as a colony had been completed that the negative initial conditions emerged fully.
61 See, for example, J. Viner, p. 31; Kuznets I, p. 182; Leibenstein, p. 31. Also see M.N. Srinivas, Social

Change in Modem India, 1966, p. 51.

62 Though it does direct us to study this process and not to take the differences for granted.

63 See Anstey, pp. 2 ff., 475-76; Buchanan, Chap. II; D.R. Gadgil, Economic Policy and Development,

1955, pp. 153-55; N.V. Sovani, “Non-Economic Aspects of India’s Economic Development”,, in
Administration and Economic Development in India, ed. by Braibanti and Spengler, 1963; U.N.,
Measures for the Development of UnderDeveloped Countries, 1951, pp. 13-15; K. Davis in Economic
Growth—Brazil India, Japan, ed. by Kuznets, Moore, and Spengler, 1955; Kuznets I, pp. 183-84;
Leibenstein, pp. 31 ff.; Myrdal, pp. 690-91, 1872-73.
64 See Joseph R. Gusfield, pp. 351 ff.; Structure and Change in Indian Society, ed. by Milton Singer and

Bernard S. Cohen; Morris D. Morris: “Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in South Asia: An
Historical Survey”, Journal of Economic History, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Dec. 1967; Kidron, p. 22;
Levkovsky; pp. 243-45. Also see Habib, p. 47.
65 Also see Kidron, pp. 41-42. For pre-British entrepreneurial energy, see works cited in f.n. 55(2)

above. For a burst of this energy in late 18th and early 19th century, see N.C. Sinha, pp. 23 ff. For a
general discussion of the subject, see Paul Baran, pp. 278-81.
66 An example may be given. An attitude of passive acceptance of the social and personal condition

and of fatalism on the part of the common people is a negative factor in the struggle on the colonial
and social questions; but it is most conducive to the growth of capitalism or the march of colonial
modernity. In the heyday of the age of science, reason, and enlightenment (and Utilitarianism), it was
actively encouraged among the workers by the early British factory owners with the aid of the clergy
and the Church of England.
67 Morris D. Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of 19th century Indian Economic History’,

reprinted in Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Symposium, by T. Raychaudhuri and others,
pp. 2 ff., 13-14. During the 19th century, nearly all the British writers on India maintained this view,
only they were convinced of the transition in their own times. See, for example, W.W. Hunter, India of
the Queen and other Essays, 1903, pp. 135 ff; John Adye, Jan. 1880 p. 89; “The Poverty of India”,
Westminster Review, No. 1887, pp. 990-1001, 1004; Curzon, Speeches, Vol. IV, 1906, p.37.
68 My entire discussion of the initial conditions of pre-Mughal India seeks to show this. The one dead

weight of the centuries was perhaps the ‘feudal’ structure of the social relations of production and the
state power; both of them were shattered by Britain. The new ruling class of India was bourgeois, and
very modern, in character. Also see, T. Raychaudhuri, “A Re-interpretation of Nineteenth Century
Indian Economic History”, in the work cited above in f. n. 67, pp. 79-88.
69 This is also a ‘residual’ explanation. Meier, in Agarwal and Singh, p. 67-7; Berrill, p.24ff; E.A.G.

Robinson in Berrill, p. 218. Because of the encyclopaedic character of his work and because of his
eclecticism in permitting all sorts of historical theories and explanations to filter through to his work,
it is hard to say where Myrdal occupies his main ground. But I have a feeling that in the end he would
be found among the proponents of the leakage theory.
70 I am of course ignoring the school of celebrators of imperialism in whose individual intellectual

development such a recognition can still play a useful role.

71 See. for example, Kuznets, I, p. 182; Kuznets II, pp. 141 & 151-52; Ishikawa, p. 364.

72 See, for example, Leibenstein, p. 103; Kuznets, pp. 182-83.

73 Its early proponents were men like James Mill, John Bright, W.S. Caine, A.O. Hume, Henry Cotton,

and A.K. Connell.

74 Myrdal, pp. 455-56; Berrill, pp. 238-40. Meier, pp. 70-74; W.H. Nicholass in Berrill, p. 352; P.S.

Lokanathan, “The Indian Economic System”, in Calvin B. Hoover, ed., Economic Systems of the
Commonwealth, 1962, p. 263. For an earlier liberal view, see D.H. Buchanan, The Development of
Capitalist Enterprise in India, 1934, Chap. XIX.
75 In India, the beginning can be said to have been made by Ranade and his followers. See Bipan

Chandra, p. 112 ff, and Chapter XIV. This was almost the entire brunt of nationalist academic writing
before 1947. For two recent statements of this view, see V.V. Bhatt, pp. 2-6, 36 ff., 58-60 & 70, and T.
Raychaudhuri, “The Indian Economy (1905-1947)”, in R.C. Majumdar (ed.), Struggle for Freedom,
1969, p. 866.
76 Buchanan, Chap. XIX. See Myint, pp. 108-09 (he does not of course accept the view.)

77 For a precocious critique of the liberal approach—i.e, of viewing colonialism as colonial policy and

role of the state—by Dadabhai Naoroji, see Bipan Chandra, pp. 699, 703-06. For a brilliant failure in
basic analysis because of the liberal approach, see Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, which still
remains one of the most perceptive works in the field. In the case of Indian writers, the difficulty has
also related to their attitude towards capitalism and to the interests of the capitalist class itself. The
basically capitalist character of colonialism could be criticised only by socialists. The others therefore
concentrated on colonial policy which could delink anti-imperialism in India from any criticism of
capitalism as a system.
78 The task was made easier by the fact that the new Keynesian economics also assigned a pivotal role

in the economic process to the state.

79 The early nationalists too started with quantitative analysis, went on to discuss first the motives of

the rulers and then their policies, and only near the end began to ask questions regarding the
structure on which these policies were based. They were led to ask ‘structural’ or basic questions
because they had to determine and define their attitude towards the path of development that the
Indian economy was following i.e., the colonial structuring of the economy. See Bipan Chandra, Chap.
XV.
80 The beginning of this abandonment had been made in the colonial era itself, starting with the

doyen of Indian academic economists and economic historians, V.G. Kale. Its sources were two.
Firstly, because of their deep involvement with the colonial academic structure, they, on the one hand,
found it difficult to make a fundamental critique of colonialism, and, on the other, for their academic
esteem or ‘standing’ had to win the intellectual esteem of their peers in the metropolis and
consequently to work within the four walls of the academic ideology and tradition prevailing in the
metropolis. In other words they remained, in spite of their nationalism, intellectual satellites of the
metropolitan intellectual world. The contradiction between nationalism and their academic ideology
and considerations of ‘safety’ could be resolved by seeing and criticising colonialism as colonial policy.
They could also thus join hands with the liberal-labour critics of colonialism in Britain. The second
reason, i.e., their failure to see beyond capitalism, has already been discussed in f.n. 77 above. I may
also point out that all the four later writers mentioned above were at the time of writing outside the
colonial academic establishment and were committed to socialism. To my knowledge, the only
academic effort to try to understand colonialism as a structure was made by B.N. Ganguli in 1958. See
his article, “India—A Colonial Economy (1757- 1947)”, Enquiry, old series, No. 1.
81 Planning Commission, Government of India, The First Five Year Plan, 1952. The document bore

the signatures of the Chairman of the Commission, Jawaharlal Nehru.

82 Ibid., p. 7.

83 Ibid. pp. 9-12. According to the document, the following were the important developments to

occur in the Indian economy in the colonial era leading to the ‘limited development: “the impact of
modern industrialism” on “the traditional patterns of economic life” leading to the ruin of handicrafts
and the consequent pressure on land; decline in productivity per person in agriculture; “the growth of
an attitude of pathetic contentment on the part of the people”; diversion of economic surplus to the
purchase of imports and the construction of railways “designed primarily in the interests of foreign
commerce”; very limited development of industry, increase in capital formation in the period of the
depression due to a more positive policy on the part of the Government” and a change in the terms of
trade in favour of manufacturers and against agriculturists; and deterioration of agriculture. Ibid, pp.
28-29.
84 Ibid., pp. 26, 473-78.

85 Ibid., p. 26.
86 Ibid., pp. 31-32.

87 The concept of transitional economy (see D.R. Gadgil, Industrial Evolution of India, pp. 1-2; T.

Morison, The Economic Transition of India; Anstey, Introduction and Chap. XVII) does not answer the
question: transition to what? The implication is, however, clear that colonial India would have
developed into a ‘modem’ or industrial capitalist economy in its normal or ‘natural’ development, that
is, without a sharp break with colonialism. Certain schools of modem economics, political science,
and sociology fall into this error as the very result of their definition of the problem. In their models
only two social systems exist—traditional and modem. Consequently the colonial era is seen either as
a period of tradition or as a period of transition to modernity or in a few extreme cases of modernity
itself.
88 Nor is it that the positive role belongs to one period and the negative to another. It was producing

underdevelopment from the beginning.

89 This quality of colonialism also makes it impossible to disintegrate it without active struggle. A

shift in political power does help this struggle, this shift does not by itself lead to this disintegration.
90 This point deserves to be stressed. The virtual absence of industrial capitalism or a ‘zero rate of

growth’ in industry are not basic to modem colonialism. The traditional syndrome of raw-material
exports and manufactured-goods imports also does not exhaust the definition of colonialism. Even
the investment of metropolitan capital need not be massive. The essence of colonialism lies in the
subordination of the colonial economy to the economy of the imperialist part of the world and in the
latter’s ability to determine the basic trends in the former. For this reason, in the modem times,
colonialism can be imposed not only on the industrially backward or semi-feudal countries but also
on the developed or the developing capitalist countries.
91 This was noted first by Karl Marx in 1853. He wrote: “England has broken down the entire

framework of Indian society... (This) separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient
traditions, and from the whole of its past history.” (p.34). He declared that the British had produced
the greatest “social revolution” in Indian history (pp. 38-39). Also see p. 84.
92 See S.J. Patel, “Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan”, in Essays on Economic

Transition; Ramakrishna Mukherjee, The Dynamics of a Rural Society, 1957, Chap. I. Marx noted this
in 1853. p. 80.
Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century
Indian Economic History*

It is axiomatic that a proper interpretation of the economic history of India

during the nineteenth century is important both for historical and
contemporary reasons. It is very important to understand the nature of
India’s economic backwardness and of its lag vis-a-vis developed countries
and the causes of this backwardness and this lag because the nature of the
economic and political remedies to be applied depends on this
understanding. Every set of economic policies competing for acceptance
today is based on its own broad set of ideas regarding the nature of British
impact on India and the nature of structural weaknesses which emerged as a
result of interaction between the indigenous socio-economic structure and
British imperialism. Academically, the history of nineteenth century India is
just beginning to be investigated on a large scale. The types of hypotheses
with which research is carried on and the types of questions asked will have
an abiding impact on the fruitfulness of the harvest. I have taken up Dr.
Morris’s interpretation1 for detailed discussion because he has summed up
in one place and at a high level of generalization and cogency one of the two
sets of ideas on the subject.

1
In a detailed critique of an author, it may not be far wrong to start with the
title of his work. How far is Morris D. Morris moving towards a new
interpretation or reinterpretation?
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first of the
twentieth a debate has gone on between two opposing schools of economists
and economic historians on the nature of the economic process India
underwent under British rule. One school declared that India was growing
more prosperous as well as undergoing economic development as a by-
product of pax Britannica (ending ‘a long anarchy’), law and order, an
efficient administration run by the most honest and efficient bureaucracy in
the world, development of railways, growing commerce, especially foreign
commerce, increased irrigation and increase in the area of cultivation. The
other school believed instead that British rule was not leading to nor had led
to industrial growth, or an ‘industrial revolution’, or economic development,
or even to the economic improvement of the lives of the mass of the people,
that British rule had produced economic changes in the country without
generating economic development, and that, on the other hand, the rule as a
system had gradually become the main obstacle to the country’s economic
development and modernization whose removal was an essential, though
not sufficient, condition if India was to develop.
As students of Indian economic history and of its various interpretations
we would be well advised to keep the above fact in view. And when we are
tempted to describe the second school as nationalist—I would prefer to call
it anti - imperialist2—we should acknowledge the existence of the first
school, which may very properly be described as the imperialist school.
Among the chief spokesman of the latter have been the Strachey brothers,
General Chesney and Lord Curzon (and numerous other officials) and later
T. Morison, G.F. Shirras, L.C.A. Knowles, and to a lesser extent, Vera Anstey,
We may not use these classifications as normative, except that insofar as we
use one as a hallmark of bias so also can the other be recognized as such.
Such a classification cannot prove the validity or otherwise of a basic
approach. But, equally obviously, the opposite of the adjective ‘nationalist’ is
not ‘objective’ but ‘imperialist’,3 especially as on the basic issue there can be
no middle ground—one or the other is valid.
 It may now be noted that Morris is not presenting a new interpretation of
nineteenth century economic history, but only rearticulating with a bit more
of modem economic terminology—but not much more of that either since
his economic framework is that of laissez faire free enterprise— nineteenth
century imperialist approach which underlies most of British official and
unofficial writing of the time.4 This is not, of course, to assert that what
Morris says is incorrect. Certainly old theories are not to be declared false
simply because they are old. But, then, they may not be accepted as new
interpretations either.
In fact, one is surprised at Morris shying away from acknowledging his
intellectual debt to, or the existence of, his predecessors in the
interpretation. In the very beginning he states that there have been two sets
of economic writers: “Indian writers typically stress the exploitative features
of British rule as the cause of nineteenth century decay. Western scholars, to
the extent that they do not accept the ‘exploitative thesis,’ attribute the failure
of the Indian economy to respond to the warming influences of the
Industrial Revolution, to the society’s ‘other-worldliness,’ to its lack of
enterprise, and to the caste-exclusiveness of groups within the society.” (p.
607) But as a student of British economic and administrative writing on
India soon notices, this second has always been a minor, and a more
defensive posture—a posture of retreat one might say. The major posture,
especially in the nineteenth century, has been that of quiet confidence in the
beneficent results of the British raj, with the existing low level of production
and standard of living explained by the still lower level from which the
British rule had to start.
Secondly, Morris has not so much refuted the anti-imperialist school as
caricatured it and poured ridicule over it, often dismissing it as virtually
infantile. For example, he writes that “both interpretations suffer from
internal contradictions which become quickly apparent when exposed to the
touchstone of the simplest economic tools,” and that “neither of these
interpretations has any substantial support, because there has been no solid
research on which to base the conclusions” (p 608).5 Now, apart from the
fact that Morris-s examples of application of such simple tools land him into
making statements which make us suspicious of the applicability of such
tools or even their existence, or that his refutation of the basic anti-
imperialist thesis does not stand up to a critical examination, I would stress
at the very beginning that the issues that the anti-imperialist writers raised
were far too basic and deeply thought out to be so simply dismissed or
characterized. This is not the place to go into their basic approach at length,
but it may be pointed out that the main issue they raised was not that of per
capita income or destruction of handicrafts but of economic development.
The main questions they asked were whether British rule after 1858 was
inimical or favourable to economic development, and whether the economic
structure the British raj helped evolve was favourable to development or not.
When they found that India was not successfully following the road to
industrialism, they asked why not, what factors were holding back the
progress, and what was the role of British imperialism in it all. Only after
subjecting the structure of Indian economy and the British role in its
formation and maintenance to a thorough examination did they brand the
period of British rule as one of exploitation and decay and frustration. They
never criticised it for not maintaining and continuing the old, but always
because the new, i.e., modern economic development, was frustrated. In fact
they raised precisely those issues which Western ‘growth’ economists began
to raise after World War II. Furthermore, only some of the latter have just
begun to reach the vantage position of the former — the capacity to link and
integrate economic ideas to the socio political environment and to look at all
aspects of the economy simultaneously so as to form an integrated and
interrelated picture of it. In the end these writers became anti- imperialist.
They came to believe that British rule must go before the industrialization of
the country could be accomplished. In the course of their analysis, they
made full use of contemporary economic theories from those of Mill, List
and Carey to later those of Marx, Marshall, and Keynes. Also they tried to
utilize the experience of contemporary developing societies, not only of
Britain, France, Germany, and U.S.A., but also of Japan and later of the
Soviet Union.
Interestingly Morris also accepts in the end this basic criterion of
structural analysis for he writes: “In recent years, economists have been so
preoccupied with output as a measure of the tempo of economic
development that they have neglected the structural changes through which
an economy must go—changes which may initially appear to be
accompanied by stagnating output.” (p. 618 f.n) But he has forgotten this
injunction in his treatment of the reinterpretation of nineteenth century
economic history for he does not discuss any aspect of economic structure
as it developed during the nineteenth century or the relationship of the
structural changes to the processes of actual economic development. He has
not taken up basic questions like the structure of agrarian relations or even
methods of production in agriculture, the structure of the capitalist class or
of the saving and investing classes or their pattern of savings and
investment, the machine or capital goods or technological basis of the
industrial effort, the relation between foreign capital and indigenous capital,
the structure of the indigenous market or demand, the structure of social
overheads (means of transport, education, technical know-how, etc.) and
their relation to Indian economic life, the pattern of India’s involvement with
the world economy, and so on. The only major economic question he tackles
is that of per capita income growth or physical unilinear movement of
national product (precisely the question he declared in the above quotation
to be less meaningful if not entirely meaningless) and then, relying on
‘simple economic tools’, assumes that law and order, peace, the establishment
of the liberal state, development of transport, at least to the extent of linking
India with the world market, and growth of commerce, would take care of
the question of economic development. I am afraid that the questions of
structural change and economic development are far more complex than
that.
That Morris does not perhaps fully understand what is involved in the
traditional debate between the imperialist and the non-imperialist schools is
also brought out by his belief that the anti-imperialists believed in a crude
theory of the disintegration and decay of the Indian economy in the
nineteenth century. He quotes Marx with approval on the question. One
does not know what he hopes to prove by this quotation. For Marx not only
said that “bourgeois industry and commerce create these material
conditions of a new world,”6 but also, and in the same article, that
All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate
nor materially mend the social condition of the people, depending not only
on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by
the people... The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of
society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain
itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial
proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to
throw off the English yoke altogether.7
The important point here is that most of the major anti-imperialist writers
would agree with Marx. They all, without exception, accept that the English
introduced some structural changes and nearly all of them welcome these
changes as the entry of the progressive wind from the West. In fact, they all
bend over backwards in stressing the ‘constructive’ role of British rule.8
Their criticism was never merely or even mainly that the traditional social
order was disintegrated by British rule but that the structuring and
construction of the new was delayed, frustrated, and obstructed. From R.C.
Dutt, Dadabhai Naoroji and Ranade down to Jawaharlal Nehru and R.P.
Dutt, the anti-imperialist writers have not used the words “economic decay”
to mean decay of handicrafts but to signify the arrested nature of India’s
industrialization and modernization. None of them have really condemned
the destruction of the pre-British economic structure, except nostalgically
and out of the sort of sympathy that any decent man would have, that, for
example, Marx showed for the ‘poor Hindu’s’ loss of the old world. Even the
first generation nationalist writers rejected the classical economic or laissez
faire approach not because it was relentless in its modernity in promoting
the disintegration of the old order, but because its application in India
tended to perpetuate “the old legacies and inherited weaknesses” and “the
ancient bondage of feudalism and status.”9 In fact, their main fire was always
concentrated on the present—present poverty, present lack of industry,
present remedies—not on the past. Even their criticism of the destruction of
old industries was made to point out the neglect of Indian interests in the
past so that the present interests might be looked after better. And what was
their criticism of the ruin of Indian industries? That the old industries were
not helped to make a smoother transition to new patterns of
industrialization10 — an entirely sound proposition by any economic
criterion.
One more general remark before we take up Morris’s new interpretation
issue by issue.
 The basic question before the economic historians of modern India is:
why was India in 1947 so backward, so far away from economic
development or the ‘take off? Why was the economic distance between India
and Britain widened between, say, 1818 and 1947 instead of being narrowed
down? Why did the Indian economy not generate economic development
when U.S.A., France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Russia, and even Japan did?
This gives rise to questions in which nearly all the major anti-imperialist
writers were basically interested: what is the relationship of British policies,
British Indian administrative and political structure, and the British impact
on the Indian socio-economic structure to the problem of economic
development? Morris does not answer any of these three questions in an all-
sided manner. And in fact in terms of Morris’s new analysis, the absence of
economic development becomes even more difficult to comprehend.
According to him, (a) India had “a framework of the nineteenth century
liberal nation state”, (an advantage which Russia, Japan, Germany, and half
the time France did not have); (b) a government whose “general object...was
the welfare of the society” (I wonder whether that could be said of Russia or
Japan or even any other government!); a social structure which did not
hamper economic development (see his work on Bombay labour and f.n. 17,
p. 610); plenty of surplus land (his own analysis); no over-population
(according to him war, famine, and ‘anarchy’ had kept down India’s
population till the British raj came. And during the nineteenth century it
grew at a very slow rate); a rising per capita income including rising per
capita agricultural and industrial output (his own view) out of which there
should have been no difficulty in getting savings (at least he has not even
hinted at any such difficulty); a huge export surplus at the level of
commodities and bullion; law and order. An administration of “a high
degree of stability, standardization and efficiency” (p. 611); a “fairly
substantial system of road and rail transport” (p.611); rational taxation and
commercial regulations (p.611); and we may add ‘the guiding’ hand of the
most advanced country of the world. In fact early nationalist writers started
with similar assumptions but they soon came up against the facts of life.
They gradually traced the economic and political physiognomy of the raj
and then began to say that British policies were imperialistic (exploitative
and anti-industry), British administration was inimial to growth tendencies
(civil service, financial administration, lack of state support), there was
foreign expropriation of national savings and capital, and economic
structure in agriculture (high taxation, landlordism money-lendin
restriction of national market) and in industry (domination by foreign
capital, absence of machine industry, virtual absence of social overheads)
hampered economic development. This is the political economy of the anti-
imperialist school and not “a crude theory of disintegration” (p. 7608, f.n. 5)
or “the theory of infinite and increasing misery” (p. 608, f.n. 7). On the other
hand, contemporary defenders of the raj. the Stracheys and others,
emphasized the benefits arising out of the end of anarchy, the benefits of law
and order and justice, efficient administration, benevolence of the raj, pax
Britannica, growth of trade, construction of the railways, and growth in area
under cultivation. They then claimed that progress had occurred, that
Indians were better off than Europeans or even Englishmen. They firmly
rejected the ‘arrested growth’ thesis. But faced with the evidence of the
extreme poverty of the land, they blamed it on India’s size, pre-British
backwardness, Indian people’s proliferating proclivities, their social
organization and customs and habits, the climate and weather (gamble on
the monsoons), and the lack of natural resources.11 Some of them also put
some blame on British democracy’s addiction to laissez faire doctrines.
I Morris tends to ignore the basic question but when pressed for some
explanation basically falls back upon the pre-twentieth century imperialist
explanation and treatment.

What are the basic factors in the economic development of India in the
nineteenth century? Firstly, says Morris the rate of growth of population was
not high and therefore “the economy was not burdened by a high rate of
population expansion” (p. 611). On page 608 (f.n. 7) growth of population
was regarded as a, sign of economic progress, on p. 611 its low rate of
growth is a factor in development and prosperity. By this reasoning the
seventeenth century was a period of prosperity of even a higher order since
along with law and order, the population burden was even smaller. But, of
course, the whole issue is brought in uselessly for it plays no role in the
analysis of the economics of growth of the nineteenth century. High or low
rates of population growth can affect the economy either way. It is more
likely to happen in the nineteenth century demographic situation that a high
rate of population growth is accompanied by a high rate of economic
development while a low rate of population growth is accompanied by a low
rate of economic growth. High and low rates of population growth may be
similarly linked with economic stagnation or economic decline up to a
point.
One might also point out in this context that this makes Morris’s ‘simple
economic tools’ appear of rather doubtful validity. On page 608, f.n. 7, he
has used such a demographic theory to knock out what he calls “the theory
of infinite and increasing misery.” It cannot embrace, he says, “two
fundamental pieces of evidence, the growth of population and the apparent
lengthening of life expectancy.” Now, unfortunately we have still the ‘over-
population’ experts who say that it is the biggest cause of poverty today and
it may be conceded that there are many countries where population has
increased without economic development or even expansion. The type of
crude Malthusian checks Morris expects prevail in extreme situations and
usually through failure of crops and famines and diseases. In fact, one is
surprised to hear that in the modern era population cannot grow at the rate
of 0.4% per annum or so in a situation of economic stagnation and
‘increasing misery.’ Secondly, where is the proof of ‘apparent strengthening
of life expectancy’? K. Davis gives the figures shown in Table 1 for life
expectancy and death rate.12

TABLE 1
 Thus life expectancy did not lengthen till 1921, if anything it fell!
Similarly, death rate fell only after 1921; infant mortality rate also fell after
1921.13 So out goes the refutation. On the other hand population increased
not by 0.4% but by one per cent when according to G. Blyn’s estimate
published in 1955 the index of per capita food output was declining from 90
in 1916-17—1925-26 to 68 in 1936-37—1945-46 (with 100 as the base, it
declined from 84 in 1893 to 56 in 1895).14 Ac-cording to the recent estimate
of Blyn. the per capita availability of food declined during 1911-1941 by
29%.15 Similarly, according to Blyn’s 1955 figures per capita agricultural
product declined from 98 in 1916-17-1925-26 to 80 in 1936-37- 1945-46.16
Per capita agricultural output declined by 4% from 1921 to 1931 and 10%
from 1931 to 1941, according to his recent study.17 Similarly, it may be noted
that infant mortality and death rate decreased and average life expectancy
went up precisely in this period when every index of individual prosperity
was minus.18
All this exercise in demography, etc., has been necessary to show that
‘simple economic tools’ are neither as efficient nor is their application as easy
as Morris implies on page 608 and f.n. 7. Nor can he dismiss other writers
with a flourish of the wand. Nor were they, therefore, so stupid as to have
said things which could be disproved by being “exposed to the touchstone of
the simplest economic tools.”19
Next to the population factor comes an important political factor: “The
British raj introduced the political framework of the nineteenth century
liberal nation state”, (p. 611) (italics mine). This is an advance over even the
Strachey brothers, etc., for they claimed the raj to be a benevolent despotism
suited to Orientals. No comment is necessary.
 Morris insists throughout his essay on regarding law and order and
‘efficient’ administration—without defining efficient in what—as a factor
that must have led to economic growth (p. 611) and it therefore needs to be
pointed out that there is no such correlation between the two or even
between law and order and economic welfare. Obviously, there cannot be
economic growth if administrative anarchy prevails, but the converse is not
necessarily true.20 It all depends on what the law and order is used for. The
historian has precisely to analyse the impact of an administration on welfare
as well as growth.21 One cannot assume that it works one way or the other.
In fact law and order is a basic necessity not only for economic growth and
welfare but also for any systematized exploitation. After all the Mughals
maintained law and order in India, without generating economic
development,22 and the decline of the Mughal Empire came not because law
and order failed but because the Empire was economically weakened.23
Another positive aspect of British rule from the growth point of view,
according to Morris, was that “taxation and commercial regulations were
rationalized” (p. 611). But the fact of the matter, accepted by most if not all
research workers, is that rationalisation of land revenue resulted in
tremendous hardship as well as dissaving among the agriculturists, definitely
during the first half of the nineteenth century and more problematically up
to its end. Similarly, commercial regulations were rationalized only by the
1840s. Till then, as R.C. Dutt shows, internal customs duties hampered
India’s internal trade and industry. Later rationalisation of customs revenues
in the 1870s became, and rightly so, the main grouse of nationalist opinion.
In fact, it may be suggested as an alternative hypothesis, as was done by
the anti-imperialist writers, that rationalised taxation, the pattern of
commerce, law and order, and judicial system in time led to an extremely
regressive (in every sense of the term) agrarian structure.24
Next, Morris cites the development of a substantial system of roads and
railway transport. But development was not significant so far as roads are
concerned.
Railways, on the other hand, were rapidly built. It has, however, been
widely pointed out that their construction was not co-ordinated with the
economic needs of India, that they were built at the cost of other social
overheads and industries, that their ‘backward and forward linkages’ had
their positive effects in Britain,25 that their ‘demonstration effect’ was
severely limited, that their impact on economic development was far less
than should have been, that they created an ‘enclave’ economy, and that they
were, therefore, not so much a means of developing India as of exploiting
it.26 In fact, this aspect has been gone into by historians as well as
economists. A fresh analysis would, however, be most welcome.

Morris “suspects that average agricultural output per acre and per man rose
during the nineteenth century” (p. 612). This suspicion rests on three
grounds.
Firstly, he feels that the wide fluctuations in land under cultivation ceased
and more land was brought under cultivation. This is a statistical question
and should be so discussed. Undoubtedly, a large increase in area under
cultivation occurred. But the process was uneven in time and space.
Moreover, whether this increase occurred to match up population pressure
on land or vice versa is itself an important question. Morris does not discuss
the question whether there was any increase in rural savings and in
investment in agriculture. In effect no direct evidence on the question is yet
available. Throughout the first half of the century, land revenue was often in
arrears in large parts of the country. Unchecked and continuous growth of
indebtedness and the general and growing ubiquity of the money-lenders
during the century would indicate that there was no continuous or general
increase in rural savings or investment; that the government demand,
population pressure on land, landlords, and money-lenders rapidly
skimmed off any surplus that arose, while famines and scarcities, to obviate
which little was done in the nineteenth century, wiped out any net savings
and perhaps created net loss of savings; and that, therefore, hardly any
economic growth or welfare was generated in this process.
Secondly, Morris says that an increase in average output per acre occurred
(p. 612). What are the grounds for this belief which is contrary to the
prevailing opinion of the nineteenth century?

a. Political stability. But this can at the most have a short- run, one shot
effect on productivity per acre. It cannot have a long term effect and
Morris is after all discussing a tendency for an entire century.
b. Introduction of “superior technology” (p. 612). There is not a single
piece of evidence that any changes in methods of production or
techniques of production were brought about during the nineteenth
century. In fact, this is one of the major criticisms of British rule. To my
knowledge, no economic historian or writer or administrator has
claimed this. It is, on the other hand, difficult to believe that Morris
does not know the meaning of the term he is using. Therefore one can
but await the evidence for his statement.

In the meanwhile, the existing evidence is as follows:

a. Instruments: Not to mention machinery, in 1951 there were 931,000

iron ploughs and 31.78 million wooden ones.27 Blyn says of the period
1891-1941: “very little change occurred in the type of equipment used.”
28

b. Fertilizer. To quote Blyn “The benefits from use of chemical fertilizer

were generally not known and the amount used was insignificant.
Imports, which may be taken as a sufficiently approximate measure of
use, were less than 2000 tons average per year during 1898-99-1923-
24... Ironically, exports of fertilizer material, mostly cattle bones and
fish soil, were larger than imports. ”29
Blyn also points out that there was no measurable increase in the use of
‘night-soil’.30
c. Seeds: In 1922-23, only 1.9 per cent of all crop acreage was under
improved seeds. By 1938-39. it had gone up to 11.1%.31
d. Agricultural Education: This is another indicator of the extent of
technical change. In 1916, the number of agricultural colleges in India
was five and their students 445. There was also one lower level school
 with 14 students.32 As is known, there was hardly any spread of rural
primary education.

There was, therefore, no change in technology in Indian agriculture in the

nineteenth century. This is when India was ruled by agriculturally the most
advanced country!
Perhaps Morris is talking only of irrigation. Now irrigation is hardly an
element of new technology. It was known to Indians for centuries: in fact
Morris says that Indian civilization was based on ‘settled irrigation
agriculture.’ But there was undoubtedly some growth in area under
irrigation. R.C. Dutt has catalogued these additions joyfully but also pointed
out that in totality they did not amount to much in the nineteenth century.
Statistics should be able to give us an idea, when collected. But in 1891-92,
Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the single largest chunk of India had less than
1.5% of its area under irrigation: C.P., 3.3%; Madras, 24.3%: U.P., 29.3%;
Bombay and Sindh, 12.8%; Punjab, Delhi and N.W.F.P., 38.2%.33 It may also
be noted that there was no improvement in the system of land utilisation. To
the contrary, factors which would tend to reduce productivity per acre may
be noticed. There was increasing subdivision and fragmentation of
holdings.34 There was also growth in tenant-cultivation and share-cropping.
Thirdly, Morris believes that commercialization helped productivity per
acre. The first question here again is how much increase in commercial
cropping did occur. In 1891-92, out of total acreage of 168 millions, only
27.9 million acres were devoted to non-food crops,35 that is 16.5 per cent.
Obviously, the view that commercialization galloped forward and gave a big
push to agriculture is overdone, especially if we keep in view that Indians
previously also produced large quantities of cash crops, including cotton,
gur, oil seeds, jute, groundnut and spices. (Comparison with Mughal period
would be very interesting.)
Moreover, commercialization as such need not and did not introduce
higher technology. It may jpst lead to ‘specialization’ of land, i.e., shifting of
good land from subsistence crops to commercial crops. In any case, we
know that no superior technology was introduced. Commercialization did
not even promote capitalist agriculture. Often it intensified tenancy and
share-cropping. Commercialization in India merely meant producing crops
for sale. Moreover, if the limited commercialization is in response to
pressure of land revenue demand, rent and interest, and is merely an effort
to sow a costlier crop, it is not a source of strength to the peasant but a mere
recourse of the urban sector and foreign rule to increase the drain from the
countryside by forcing the peasant to ‘specialize’ without supplying any
inputs or making any institutional change. It becomes an instrument of
exploitation and may even impoverish the peasant by making him a helpless
victim of the forces, mechanism and fluctuations of the market. This is what
seems to have happened, at least during the nineteenth century. And the
benefits of increased commercialization—and also irrigation, since high
irrigation rates forced the peasant to produce commercial crops—were
reaped by the government, landlord, money-lender, merchant and foreign
exporter. The peasant often found himself in deeper debt and even less able
to improve agriculture.
Morris here entirely ignores the significance of the crucial question: who
was appropriating the surplus generated by agriculture and then putting it to
what use? Did any of it flow back into agriculture or industry, as apart from
money-lending activity, purchase of land, or consumption by the ‘extracting
classes’? This was in fact the crux of the problem. And RC. Dutt, Ranade,
Joshi, Dadabhai and later Radhakamal Mukeijee and RP. Dutt tried to
discuss it and find an answer to it. Whatever their answers, they were at least
heading the right way.36
Thus there is nothing automatic in law and order or commercialization
which increases productivity per acre or per man, apart from the deeper
question of their impact on agrarian structure and total economic structure.
The point is that such increases must be shown to have occurred. There is
nothing in economic history or “simple economic tools” which should lead
us to assume it.
In fact the three factors which could have increased agricultural
productivity were: (a) capital input, (b) intensification of labour input per
acre and (c) social incentives. In view of the fact that the peasant was losing
land and becoming a rack-rented tenant, even on grounds of economic theory
one would look for an explanation both for increase in acreage and for increase
in productivity, if any, to the second factor, which can be explained only by the
increasing pressure on land,37 unless man-land ratio had reached a stage
where additional input of labour would not increase productivity at all. But,
then, increase of food supply becomes not a cause of population increase
nor a sign of prosperity but rather the primeval response of the people to
meet population increase and the pressure on land. It then becomes an
aspect of a stagnant economy. Moreover, as the nationalists pointed out. this
increase in agricultural production was a reflection of the British desire to
make India an agrarian hinterland of Britain so that India could, by
increasing its agricultural production, supply its raw material and food
needs as well as act as a market for her industrial products and capital. After
all, it was not part of imperialist economic interests to produce all round
stagnation, though that might be the indirect consequence of their policies
and therefore one of the contradictions in which imperialism got involved.

Perhaps the most important re-writing that Morris suggests is on the

question of the ruin of Indian handicrafts and relative ruralisation of the
country. Here two points may be re-emphasized: (1) I have already pointed
out that this question was not important for the anti-imperialist approach
which was oriented towards British impact on economic structure and that
the nationalists did not give this ruin undue importance. They were more
interested in the quality of economic life and less in the more short-run
availability of goods. (2) In his re-writing of the question, Morris has offered
pure ‘suspicions’ ‘hunches’ etc., or relied on ‘economic tools’ but has not
offered an iota of qualitative or quantitative evidence or testimony.
R.C. Dutt and other writers gathered and published a mass of
contemporary evidence in favour of their viewpoint, including the evidence
of the lower-most British officials (‘men-on- the-spot and in the know’),
higher officials who had spent a life-time in the Indian countryside and
towns and who had witnessed first-hand the actual process of early British
impact and economic change, Governors and Governor-Generals, scholarly
officials, contemporary travellers, British and Indian merchants, official
enquiry commissions, and official records.
I need not repeat all this evidence—R.C. Dutt, G.V. Joshi, B.D. Basu, D.R.
Gadgil, R.P. Dutt and others have published masses of it. More recent
scholars going through similar materials have come to similar conclusions,
e.g., R.D. Choksey, Raman Rao, Sarda Raju, N.K. Sinha, and H.R. Ghoshal.
Early village studies by Harold Mann and J.C. Jack bore testimony to a
similar phenomenon. For example, J.C. Jack, a member of the ICS, and a
very favourable witness for the raj—he declared that his work was inspired
by the notion of proving the benefits of the raj and he concluded that
Faridpur peasants were better off than Italian peasants—wrote: “Weaving,
which used to be a vigorous industry, has been killed partly by the
importation of foreign or factory made cotton goods and partly by the
ravages of malaria.”38 In any case, it is not necessary to stress the point or
reproduce the evidence. The ruin of artisans is an established thesis and is
backed by a great deal of evidence. Now what is to be stressed is that it is just
not legitimate to refute it or ridicule it without presenting superior evidence,
quantitative or qualitative. Once some direct evidence be produced, we can
argue about the superiority of one set of evidence over the other. Certainly,
the old truths must be constantly reinvestigated and also turned out when
found false. We always search for new data and re-examine the old.39 And,
of course, a priori analysis can be used to suggest new lines of inquiry. But no
one may offer a priori. ‘economic arguments’, not to speak of hunches, and
suspicions, as refutations or reinterpretations.
Let me stress again: It is not true that the view Morries is contesting is
based on a “canonical tradition” or is based on nationalist prejudice. It is
based on a great mass of evidence— in fact the only evidence so far
available. Morries has not produced any evidence—statistical or qualitative
—in his refutation of this view.40
A word may be added here regarding the use of qualitative evidence in
economic history. Certainly whenever reliable quantitative evidence is
available and can be statistically analysed, we are on surer ground; and it
would be wonderful in this respect if village, district and town records could
be used comparatively to trace the impact of British rule on artisans and
handicraftsmen. But so long as such statistics are not available, qualitative
evidence has to be used, though, of course, critically, and with the full
awareness that it may yield only broad impressionistic results. Moreover,
often qualitative evidence is supehor to inaccurate and distorted statistics.41
This point is, however, of mere academic interest here since Morris has given
no statistics—not even bad ones— to question the evidence of R.C. Dutt and
others.
We can now proceed to the discussion of his economic “theorizing” on
the point, keeping in view all the while that ours is an exercise not in
economic history but in economic logic. For that reason sometimes there
may be no actual debate in process because he accepts the nineteenth
century theory of international trade and the laissez faire view of
competition and self-interest producing economic growth while I accept the
early Indian nationalist and Marxian approach (and perhaps post-war
growth approach) which sees economic growth as the result of the total
interaction of economic motives of individuals and firms, and of the social
and economic and political structure. This produces a classic difference:
according to the nineteenth century view all increase in total product (or
total income) in the short run is economic progress while the latter view
searches for the ‘quality’ of the economic process and its long term
implications. It then tends to see industrialization and the capacity to
continually generate it and increase it at a minimum rate of acceleration as
the supreme test of economic progress.
On page 612, Morris writes: “While British cloth was competitive with
Indian handloom production, machine-made yarn seems to have
strengthened the competitive position of the indigenous handloom sector
despite the fall in prices.”42 First let us get some idea of the quantities
involved, particularly the ratio of yam imports to imports of woven goods
which was in fact very low (see Table 2):

TABLE 2
 Secondly, what was it in relation to which the weaver strengthened his
competitive position? Imported cloth, we would have to assume. But how
can that be when the same yarn was available to British weavers whose
productivity was increasing rapidly while the Indian weavers’ productivity
was stationary? For example, wages per pound of yarn paid to British
weavers declined as shown in Table 3.44

TABLE 3

1819-21 15.5 d

1829-31 9.0 d

1844-46 3.5 d

1859-61 2.9 d

1880-82 2.3 d

Moreover, the export price of woven goods (cotton) was falling much
more rapidly than that of yam (see Table 4).45

TABLE 4
 This means that the competitive position of the Indian weaver vis-a-vis
the British weaver was weakening throughout most of the nineteenth
century. That is why the import of cloth goes up from 1849 to 1889 by 25.5
million sterling (12.5 times) while that of yam goes up by only 1.8 million
sterling (four times). Morris’s position also runs into logical difficulties. Why
is foreign cloth still imported in increasing quantities? What sort of
strengthening is this? Let us proceed further: in spite of or because of textile
imports there was a price differential one way or the other. Then what could
have led to a rise in the handicraft production?46 Only three situations
would explain that situation:

1. The price favoured Lancashire, but weavers could sell increasing

quantities because Lancashire was incapable of supplying the required
quantities at that price or could not reach the expanding market which
the weaver could. In the latter case, the Indian weavers had a monopoly
or protected market and did not need strengthening at all!
2. As a result of import of yam, the price favoured weavers, but
Lancashire still increased its sales, because the weavers would not get
enough yarn, or because they had full employment. There is another
sub-case of this case: that Indians preferred costlier foreign products to
the cheaper weavers products.
3. The weaver maintained his position by cutting into his necessary
livelihood. But this was a daily losing position. This case resembles the
second, but in this his competitive position does not improve but
deteriorates. He maintains his craft by cutting into his subsistence and
his capital.
 In fact, the artisans who survived—and a large number of rural artisans
did—did so either as the result of the third case and of sub-case two of the
first case, namely, failure of Lancashire to reach the vast Indian market (in
other words, he survived either by getting impoverished or because the
British impact on India was always incomplete, he was saved by the
backwardness of British rule! British rule was not efficient enough to even
produce the ideal of laissez faire economics— the perfect market);47 or, as
Dr. Gadgil has pointed out, because the peasant remained so poor and the
hand- produced cloth was so cheap due to low subsistence cost of the
producer that the former could not purchase the relatively finer Lancashire
product nor could this product compete with the hand- produced cloth. In
other words, whether the peasant’s income increased “substantially” (as
Morris believes) or not, he was still incapable of buying British cloth.48
Secondly, to be able to continue in this ‘improved’ competitive position the
artisan had to cut into his subsistence.
Then, again, Morris comes very near to giving us a scientific explanation.
He writes: “The demand for cloth in India seems to have been fairly elastic.
The fall in price led to a movement down the demand curve. In addition,
there seems to have been a shift to the right of the demand curve for cotton
cloth.” But from what evidence are such sophisticated tools of modern
economics as demand elasticity and demand curve derived, especially the
notion of the latter’s shift to the right? Not from any available statistics nor
from any other type of evidence.49 There is hardly any material in economic
literature to enable one to draw such an advanced curve and point to its
shifting. In fact, the curve is a fiction and words like ‘led’ and ‘a shift’ merely
give it an illusion of firm existence. And the only basis for this shift in the
curve seems to be once again theory: growth of population, and changes in
custom (like use of a bodice below a sari). But the impact of growth of
population on the income pattern and on the structure of effective demand
is precisely the complex question that has to be researched into. It cannot be
stated as simply as Morris does, unless one believes in the doctrine that
increase of population leads to automatic industrial development. In the
absence of any research on the subject, the change of fashion in bodices also
belongs to the fairyland times of the nineteenth century, when Lancashire
used to dream of putting an inch on the Chinese coat- tails and the U.S.
Southern senators of making the Chinese take to tobacco. In those good old
days the problems of effective demand used to get handled in such easy and
simple terms by the market hungry merchants and manufacturers.
The only effective economic argument here would be that growing
income increased the effective demand for textiles. But then one would have
to show that such a growth of income occurred, that increased income was
falling into the hands of those who would spend it on hand-made products,
and that imports of textiles and later domestic machine products did not
absorb the increased demand.50
In fact, the existing evidence points to the following picture:

1. Increasing ruin of urban handicrafts which played an important role in

the economy.
2. A major blow was given to spinning as an economic activity. This had
an important effect on the domestic economy of the peasant with
many-sided consequences which we do not have the space to go into—
including further strengthening of the merchant-money- lender’s hold
over the peasant and the artisan.
3. The rural artisans were gradually affected (even a slight fall in real
income can have drastic effect on a subsistence worker). This forced an
increasing number to leave their crafts, especially as more land was
being brought under cultivation, and the breakdown of the traditional
division of labour enabled them to bid for land as tenants-at-will and
share-croppers. Many could become agricultural workers.51 In a period
of rising population (about 0.4 per cent per year), this need not result
always in a fall in the absolute number engaged in particular handicraft
industries (though all the evidence points to that in most cases) but
only in their proportion in the total population. Of course, a large
number still stuck to their traditional crafts, more out of lack of any
other opportunity than out of economic choice, falling the first victims
to a famine, as the regular reports of the Famine Commissions noted.
Many combined their craft with dwarf holdings or agricultural labour
or petty trade.
 Moreover, many of the skilled artisans survived by producing goods
requiring lower degrees of skill. Many economists have emphasized that an
important factor in Japan’s rapid industrialization was the fact that the
traditional handicraft worker possessed a high degree of skill which enabled
him to master modern industrial skills quickly and efficiently. In India this
skill—a tangible factor in economic growth—was largely lost.
Morris concludes that the handloom weavers were “at least no fewer in
number and no worse off economically at the end of the period than at the
beginning” (p. 613). We have already dealt with both points. But it may be
noted that he is no longer saying that there was no decrease in the
proportion of handicraftsmen in the total population. Secondly, there is no
proof even for his amended statement. The disappearance of traditional
textile centres of India is there for all to see (e.g.. Murshidabad), while
hardly anywhere do we get instances of such new centres coming up. Nor
has any study so far shown that the number of artisans in villages or existing
cities went up. The only statistical study of occupations in a major existing
city made so far is by Krishan Lal who showed in a paper at the Indian
History Session of 1961 that in Delhi there was a virtual decimation of
handicrafts.
The second part of Morris’s statement will also not bear examination. In
face of the rising productivity of British labour.52 How could the Indian
handicraftsman have competed without reducing his own ‘wage cost’ unless
his own productivity went up—of which there is not a ghost of evidence—or
his cost was less, i.e., prices in India were falling or the cheapness of yarn
enabled him to both increase his competitive capacity vis-a-vis the factory
product as well as to increase his net profit. All these assumptions have only
to be spelled out to show how naive his suggestion is.
And if we have to build up such ‘logical’ economic history, certain
questions arise at the level of logic: If on balance employment in the
industrial sector was going up, if more land was being brought under
cultivation, if magnetization and therefore the number of traders was going
up, and if population growth was only at the rate of about 0.4 per cent per
year, i.e., about 40 to 50 per cent between 1820 and 1920, then why does
subdivision of holdings take place to such a large extent? And why are
tenants and share-croppers willing to pay rackrent? And from where do
agricultural labourers, including share-croppers, dwarf holders, etc., come
(since their number does increase), and why do their wages fall as drastically
as Dharma Kumar suggests? And as I have asked earlier, where do these
artisans live? Does the number and proportion of artisans in rural
population go up? What happens to the artisan villages? Does their number
go up or down? From where and why did labour migrate so freely to foreign
lands and to industrial cities like Bombay (as Morris has brilliantly shown in
his book on Bombay textile labour)? (Obviously, the answer is not over-
population in Mughal times since (a) no such evidence exists, and (b)
according to Morris, war and famine had kept Indian population within
Malthusian limits.)
Lastly, and as the coup de grace, Morris uses Alice and Daniel Thomer’s
authority and says that “the Classical argument is based on census data
which purported to show that between 1872 and 1931 a growing proportion
became dependent on agriculture. This evidence has recently been
effectively demolished” by the Thomers (p. 613). This is not the place to deal
with the Thomers’ assumptions and conclusions. But what they have proved
at the most is that census data are too unreliable to prove or disprove any
such point. Moreover, they could not have demolished the ‘Classical
argument’ because the Classical argument was given by Ranade, R.C. Dutt,
G.V. Joshi, etc., before the census of even 1901 (of 1931 in the case of
Gadgil) was published. What is much mere important in employment of
population statistics for showing the amount of economic development that
had taken place in India is the fact that in India in 1892 after 100 years of
‘gestation’ only 254,000 persons were involved in modem industrial
production under the Factory Acts. This number increased only by 1.1
million by 1931 and by another 1,180,000 by 1951, while population went up
from 236 millions in 1891 to 275.5 millions in 1931 and 357 millions in
1951, and labour force from 94 millions to 142 millions between 1891 and
1951.53 In view of these figures, one would think the controversy regarding
the ‘expansionist forces’ or census figures would be considered utterly sterile.
And it is with this aspect that writers from Ranade and Dutt to Radhakamal
Mukerjee and R. Palme Dutt have concerned themselves.54
 When Morris says later that while British rule had “the positive effects in
the nineteenth century that I have already described, its influence was
limited’’ (p. 615), we should consider his statement in the context of the
figures cited above and contrast them with similar statistics for Britain,
U.S.A., France, Russia, or Japan. In view of what we know of Indian
economic structure and performance at the end of the nineteenth century,
we have to ask what was the quality of this limited development? The
nationalists and the Marxists (and some of the post-war growth economists)
would precisely ask whether British rule had or had not generated an
‘industrial revolution’ or the process of economic development. While some
forces of change were introduced, while modern technological and
organizational innovations were introduced in industry, trade and banking,
was not the development of these innovations checked and frustrated? Then
there is little meaning in the phrase limited influence. One may suggest that
what occurred in India was at the most aborted modernization—which is
typical of a modern colonial economic structure as Marx had predicted
much earlier and which lay at the heart of the complaint by writers like
Ranade, Naoroji and R.C. Dutt as also by R. Palme Dutt, and more recently
B.N. Ganguli.55 And this is the interpretative framework which still seems to
be valid for the interpretation of the nineteenth and twentieth century
economic history of India.56

In the last section of his article, Morris deals with some of the sources of
official policy, for he is in the end conscious of the fact that he still must
explain India’s economic backwardness. For the reality is “that the economy
is even now very far from being industrialized” (p.614). He is even aware
that “this may seem rather bewildering, given my description of the
nineteenth century performance” (p. 614) and, he says that he has no
definite answer to the question why ‘no leading’ sector developed (p. 615).
He writes: “The causes are certainly complex and this is not the place to
examine the intricate interplay of relationships involved” (p. 615). I for one
felt cheated here. Can there be a discussion of nineteenth century economic
history—not to speak of reinterpretation—which has ‘no place’ for this
discussion? Are not ‘the relationships involved’ the very stuff of which
British impact is made?
But Morris is conscious of the fact that in the interests of the entire
validity of his new interpretation he cannot afford to leave it at this stage.
And he does attempt some answers though again in the context of laissez
faire economics and the Stracheyan way of thinking. But it should be seen
that he is now discussing causes of economic stagnation, not the fact of
progress. What he seems to be saying is that all his previous positive
tendencies would have borne fruit but for these contrary factors. Even now
he is not analysing economic structure, but finding scapegoats. In the event,
it turns out that the scapegoats are not independent entities but a part of the
structure of imperialism and its impact.
First of all he says that the British raj’s impact was limited because “the
Indian government obviously had no self-conscious programme of active
economic development,” because the raj “saw itself in the passive role of
night watchman” (p. 615). On the surface this answer seems to be correct
but it hides the ugly reality of the link between laissez faire and imperialism.
It all seems to be an ideological error! But was the Indian Government a
‘night watchman’? Sabyasachi Bhattacharya has effectively refuted this
view.57 Without repeating his argument I might point out that Justice
Ranade and others had clearly pointed out that the Indian government had
taken a direct and active part in pioneering and promoting industrial and
commercial enterprises, and granting special j privileges to British capitalists
in India. It had, at the height of laissez faire era, pioneered at state expense—
and at great cost—the introduction of cinchona, tea and coffee plantations in
India and actively promoted the cultivation and transport of cotton. The fact
that the Indian government was the pioneer in state construction of railways
and even the liberal’ Dal- housie promoted state guaranteed railways is a
well-known fact of Indian economic history.58 Similarly, India was the only
laissez faire liberal nation state’ whose government passed penal legislation
to force Indian labour to work on the tea and coffee plantations (that the
Radical Lord Ripon passed such a law is even more significant). Where was
lack of state interference, or devotion to a ‘passive role’ here? In fact the very
functions of law and order were handed over to the planters. Indians also
pointed out that the British would not let the American Standard Oil
Company operate in Burma.59 Moreover, a government that claimed to be
the landlord over the entire land and interfered so openly in the relations
between landlord and tenant and debtor and creditor as did the British
Indian Government in the second half of the nineteenth century, or that
introduced a government- managed inconvertible currency, can hardly be
said to be a champion of laissez faire political economy in practice or a ‘night
watchman.’ While the economic historians and economists point out that
Britain followed in the nineteenth century a policy of laissez faire because it
suited its interests, Indians long ago pointed out that the British Indian
Government had never followed a laissez faire policy in practice. The Indian
government’s inaction in promoting Indian industries and social overhead
facilities is no longer explained by its character as a ‘night watchman’. The
question now is: why did the Indian government follow state action in some
fields of economic activity and laissez faire in others? How is it that ‘the raw-
material based export economy’ was established with the active help and
participation of the government but the laissez faire doctrine was brought in
when the question of government support to industrialization came up?
Another reason for the Indian government’s inaction, according to
Morris, was “the preoccupation with a balanced annual budget. This
philosophy directly limited the size and effectiveness of government
expenditure allocated to the construction of social overhead facilities.”60 (p.
615). But the real question is again different. Why was the budget balanced
by cutting or avoiding one type of expenditure and not another, or by raising
one type of taxes and not others? Some facts, usually referred to by R.C.
Dutt and others, may be noted. In 1801, 45.5 per cent of India’s budgeted
expenditure was spent on the armed forces, 37.5 per cent on civil
administration (of which 18.7 per cent was spent on education and medical
and scientific departments and 81.3 per cent on non-developmental aspects
of administration).61 Indians pointed out very early that in the 1880s India
spent in absolute terms more on its army than Britain, or Germany, or
Russia, or Japan, or U.S.A., that India spent a larger part of its revenue on the
army than Britain or Russia did, that the cost per soldier in India was the
highest in the world — it was higher than that of the most efficient army in
the world.62 In 1891, 30 per cent of India’s revenues were spent on
Europeans;63 in 1898, Rs. 4.2 crores were spent on railways while only Rs.
0.6 crores were spent on irrigation. One could go on citing facts and
figures,64 What was surely involved was not balanced budgets but a
particular pattern of allocation of the budget to suit imperial interests.
This was also true of taxation. Government officials, professional groups,
traders, money-lenders, landlords and zamindars, planters, foreign trading
companies, etc., paid very little in taxation. When Income Tax was finally
imposed in 1886, its rate was less than 2.7 per cent, and it excluded incomes
derived from land (zamindars and landlords) and plantations. It also
excluded salaries, pensions, and leave allowances paid in England, profits, of
shipping companies, incorporated in England, interest on securities paid in
England, and profits of railways up to the amount of the guaranteed interest.
Moreover the exemption limit for military officers was placed at Rs. 6000
per year. Consequently, when the century ended the gross revenue from
income tax was only Rs. 1.9 crores, while from land revenue it was Rs. 26.2
crores and salt tax Rs. 8.8 crores.65 And the well- off hardly paid any other
taxes: there were hardly any excise taxes or customs duties which could have
affected them. That is why G.V. Joshi complained in 1888 that under the
official taxation policy “the richer few, who profited most by British
administration, British justice and British peace, paid least, while the poorer
millions, who profited least, paid most.”66 Once again the real question is:
why was the budget balanced in one way and not the other?
Another aspect of the budget to be noted, says Morris, is that it was a
‘gamble on the monsoon.’ This is again not in accordance with facts, unless
even a marginal change in revenue is considered enough to upset a budget.
Let me give some figures of the famine years (see Table 5).67

TABLE 5
 The statement that expenditure on education, irrigation and the railways
“proceeded by fits and starts” is also not correct. It was uniformly low, except
for railways when it was uniformly high. Let me cite actual figures again (see
Table 6).68
It can further be seen that the variation in railway expenditure is in no
way related to land revenue or the monsoons.
This point has perhaps been dealt with long enough. The real question in
considering the Indian government’s expenditure is: why was there
expenditure on the army and law and order but not irrigation or education
or spread of modem technology in agriculture or industry? I may also add
that Morris’s statement that the government did not develop irrigation
because ‘Government investment in social overheads was largely influenced
by the doctrine that such investments should typically pay their own way—
and very quickly—at going rates of interest” (p.616) seems to be an
oversight. After all railways development was not limited by any such
consideration, the government paid guaranteed interest, started state
railways, and not only did not collect ‘going rates of interest’ Very quickly’
but suffered a net loss until 1901.
 TABLE 6

Thus instead of explaining government inaction in promoting industrial

development by the ‘night watchman’ policies of the government, its
tendency to balance budgets, or the monsoons, the questions to be asked
are: why did the Government of India follow the policy of state action only
when it benefited British capital? Why did it waste its resources on the army
and law and order and ‘efficient’ administration and not use them for
education,69 technical education, sanitation, etc.? Why did it push on
railways but not irrigation? The answer would then go to the heart of the
character of British rule, its policies, and its impact. The nationalist answer
was that British rule was imperialistic. Its basic character—its raison d’etre—
was to subserve Indian interests to British interests. That determined its
inconsistent application of the principles of laissez faire and state action and
its budgeting priorities. One wonders what the other answer is.

A few other stray formulations of Morris also deserve attention. He says, for
example, that “we may see the nineteenth century as a period too brief to
achieve all the structural changes needed to provide the pre-conditions for
an industrial revolution,” and that “moved by the example of North Atlantic
experience in the nineteenth century, even economic historians tend to lose
sight of the long gestation needed before the pre-conditions of an industrial
revolution have matured sufficiently to permit a society to move into a phase
of high and sustained economic growth” (p. 617). But the contention of the
other school is that such a long ‘gestation’ period was not needed.70 After all,
neither Japan nor Russia are North Atlantic.71
Secondly, structural analysis would show that as a result of the ‘gestation’
period, the forces opposing growth were strengthened and even freshly
generated.72 One question can be asked. Does Morris believe that another 50
years of British rule would have generated economic development? This is
the question to which ‘no’ as an answer would utterly destroy his
reinterpretation and on the other hand he hesitates to give ‘yes’ as an answer.
For in the end he writes that he has “some sympathy” with the view that
during the interwar years “rather substantial structural modifications
occurred and the base was laid for a renewed upward surge after
independence” (pp. 617-18). But was independence a year, a mere change of
personnel, or was it a revolution which had to destroy a substantial part of
the ‘substantial structural modifications’? Are not the successes of the
Government of India after 1947 measurable by the extent to which this
structure has been destroyed and its failures by the extent to which it has
failed to do so—whether one takes agrarian relations, foreign trade, policy
towards indigenous capital and foreign capital, agricultural credit, building
up of machine and capital goods sector, technological changes in
agriculture, social overhead facilities (roads, railways, power, water-supply,
sanitation, education, etc,)?73 Interestingly, nowhere does Morris define
what these ‘pre-conditions’ are for which a ‘gestation’ period was needed? Is
the period of pre-conditions any period before the ‘take-off ’ or has it any
well-defined characteristics? Perhaps the trouble lies with the concept itself.
This issue of long gestation periods is also linked with the type of
economic history Morris is criticizing. The writers of that economic history
would not be satisfied with ‘long gestation’ for they were its victims. They
compared their development with the ‘possible’—the ‘possible’ which was
the reality in Germany, in Japan, even in Tsarist Russia, and most of all in
the Soviet Union. This also explains why R.C. Dutt possessed ‘the venom of
Burke’ and not the cold detachment of the smug and satisfied Lord Curzon
or the Stracheys. Often Morris holds this ‘venom’, this passion, this concern
for the role of growth to be the hallmark of immaturity and prejudice. He
forgets that this ‘Venom’ also characterized the writings of Adam Smith,
Ricardo, Marx, John Stuart Mill and J.M. Keynes. There is no reason to think
that intellectual frigidity (even the academic brand) contributes much to
scientific objectivity or penetration or depth of analysis. That ‘cool’ language
does not prevent Morris from being heavily biased is obvious from the
assertion that “certainly, the general object of the raj was the welfare of the
society” (p. 615).
Thirdly, to prove the positive achievements of the nineteenth century he
uses an astounding argument. If it is shown, he says, that per capita income
decreased after 1920, it would prove that per capita income had increased up
till then, otherwise how would the fall have been absorbed? True, but then if
a ‘substantial increase in per capita income accrued before the end of the
nineteenth century and the living standards were still as low as shown in the
Dufferin Enquiry of 1888 and by the famines of 1896-1990’ how could they
have been, by this same logic, so low in the beginning of the nineteenth
century as later ‘substantial growth’ would imply?74
 But the error is really much deeper, for Morris further writes: “However,
the rise in per capita output during the nineteenth century provided a
surplus above subsistence, which made it possible for the society to tolerate
a decline in real income without causing utter social disaster”. All this is
really too naive. For the question never was whether ‘society’ produced a
surplus above subsistence. Society everywhere since the most primitive
times has done so. This was the pre-condition for its growth into civilization.
India has produced a surplus above subsistence for centuries. The real
question is how much of this surplus is generated and what happens to it?
What are the patterns of control over and utilisation of this surplus? This
question arises both from the economic growth (saving-investment) and the
economic welfare points of view. If the surplus goes into the pockets of
foreigners who do not re-invest it but export it (or invest it in an
economically ‘backward’ manner), or into the pockets of merchants,
moneylenders, landlords, zamindars, professional men and princes, who use
it for conspicuous consumption or for further extending moneylending or
for intensifying the evils of intermediary tenures by ‘investing’ it in land, it
neither generates welfare nor economic growth. It often hampers it. That is
why we have been emphasizing that the question is far deeper than that of
per capita income growth, or of law and order, and is not one that the
‘simplest economic tools’ particularly of the laissez faire variety can handle.
Morris also refers to two other old stand-bys. Population increase after
1921 is brought in. though rather indirectly. It was “as adverse element”. Just
when “liberal economic policy had ceased being capable of generating rising
rates of growth”, population expansion occurred and expansionist forces
“had to proceed with a greater burden than ever before.” This is putting the
cart before the horse. Firstly, it may be kept in view that the rate of
population growth even during this period was one per cent—by no means
high, and even higher rates have been readily absorbed by developing
countries. Secondly, in the demographic situation of the time the
‘overpopulation’ was a symptom of economic backwardness not its cause.
Thirdly, even this rate of population growth was the result of
underdevelopment, particularly in the comparative sense—in the sense of
the widening of the gap between India and the North Atlantic countries and
Japan and the Soviet Union. The development of the latter countries led to
improved health and medical measures. But fall in their death rates was
accompanied by a fall in the birth rate which was the consequence of higher
standards of living, education, availability of birth- control knowledge and
materials, etc. If India had not ‘gestated’ from 1820 to 1920 but undergone
economic development, its birth rate would also have fallen along with the
fall in death rate. Thus the increase in ‘population burden’ after 1921 has to
be linked with the ‘long gestation period’. Then, the former does not become
a cause of the lower rate of growth after 1921, rather the ‘long gestation
period’ becomes the cause of the rising rate of population growth after 1951.
When talking of the ‘long gestation’ needed by a non-North Atlantic
country, Morris also suggests that we should not “ignore the geography of
the problem, the size and resources of the region within which the process
has to occur” (p. 617). The geography of the problem is not clear to me. So
far as the size75 and resources are concerned, it would be more correct to
think that in case of India they did match. It is true that years back it used to
be said that India lacked iron ore, coal, electric power potential, oil, etc. but
nobody talks of its now. So far as land is concerned, the land-man ratio till
recent times was not adverse. Moreover, population growth may under
certain conditions account for the slow rate of growth of per capita income,
it cannot explain the slow rate of growth in total national product.

A detailed examination of Morris’s new interpretation would thus lead us to

the conclusion that the traditional anti-imperialist argument that British
rule failed to generate economic growth; that having helped initiate
economic change, the rule rapidly became a fetter on industrial and
agricultural growth because it created a colonial economy and “semi-feudal”
agriculture; that economic policies of the British raj in all fields—finance,
tariffs, transport, trade, foreign capital, export of capital or the ‘drain’,
currency, education, technology, heavy industries, banking, agriculture—
were geared to the preservation of the colonial economy; and that, therefore,
the interests of national economic growth as also those of the majority of
Indian people—the capitalist class, the urban ‘middle class’, the peasantry,
and the workers—demanded that British rule be overthrown and the
political, social and economic structure that the raj had built up directly or
indirectly be dismantled, is based on a better view of economic history than
that on which Morris builds up his case, or on which anyone else has said
any thing else so far, in respect of the same subject.76
This is not to deny that the different strands of the anti-imperialist
approach as also the approach as a whole had many weaknesses. The anti-
imperialist writers failed to locate all the factors hampering growth. For one,
most of them concentrated on analysing the contradictions between British
imperialism and the Indian people, but failed to study the inner
contradictions of British imperialism itself. Even more important, they did
not study the contradictions within the internal social and economic
structure of Indian society—the extent to which the old contradictions
survived under British rule, the extent to which they were affected by British
rule, the extent to which new ones were generated by British rule. Their
emerging agrarian structure was not studied sufficiently carefully. The
internal differentiation of the peasantry was virtually ignored, except for the
emergence of agricultural labour. The complex phenomenon of share-
cropping was also not adequately studied. Similarly, while the nationalist
writers brought to light the phenomenon of the external drain, they paid
insufficient attention to factors which might prevent potential capital within
the country from becoming actual capital. The British impact on the
structure of the rising capitalist class was not seen sufficiently clearly. The
complicated love-hate relationship between Indian capital and foreign
capital deserves more detailed study. Similarly the impact of British rule on
regional economic patterns and disparities as well as communal and caste
disparities has yet to be fully studied. The study of the British impact on
social organization and its correlation to economic development has just
begun. For example, by a more thorough study of the jajmani system and
the British impact on it, the sociologists are adding a new dimension to the
question of occupational distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The agrarian structure has been, for example, brilliantly
illuminated by many studies of the old school. In fact, the main weakness of
the nationalist writers was that they did not make a sharper break with
contemporary economics. Many still believed that mere protection and state
aid would succeed in generating economic development. (Involved here was
also misreading of the nature of the state as such.) While they successfully
criticized British rule as a barrier to economic development, they failed to
find, in many cases, correct answers to the problem of how to generate such
growth.77
One thing is, however, clear. The traditional anti-imperialist
interpretation will be modified—as it deserves to be—by further study. But it
cannot be modified by going back to the 19th century imperialist view or
the economic theories which buttressed it. And its basic view that British
rule, by making India’s a colonial economy, was responsible for India’s
economic backwardness is not likely to be modified at all. At least no
evidence has been offered so far to justify even a hint of such modification.

NOTES

Published in Indian Economic and Social History Review, March 1968.

* My thanks are due to Dr. Irfan Ilabib, Mrs. Saira Habib, Dr. Bernard C.
Cohn, Dr. Martin D. Lewis, Dr. C.H. Hanumantha Rao and Dr. S.A. Shah for
their comments on an earlier draft of the article. Responsibility for any error
in facts or interpretation is, of course, entirely mine.
1 Morris D. Morris, “Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,”

Journal of Economic History, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, 1963, pp. 606-18.

2 For almost from the very beginning of the discussion, a large number of foreigners starting with

Marx and Hyndman and Digby and ending with R. Palme Dutt and a host of other British, American,
Russian, and other foreign writers have adopted the broad approach of this schools.
3 This distinction is of wider import. It has become a fashion today among some people to talk of

‘nationalist’ or ‘ideological’ distortions of historians without discussing the far more prevalent
imperialist distortion, which is almost universally present in the writings of the academic historians
belonging to the imperial countries and which was inevitably reflected in the works of some of the
academic historians of the colonies who were both economically and intellectually dependent on the
colonial power and its academic establishment. For example, in a seminar on Indian historiography
organized a few years ago at London, there was a paper on and discussion of the nationalist school of
Indian history but no discussion of the imperialist school. Or, to take another example, Kingsley Davis
in his scholarly work on the population of India clearly describes R.P. Dutt, Kumar Ghoshal, and Kate
Mitchell as pro-nationalist but he nowhere describes a single one of the large number of British
authors he relies upon as pro-imperialist. Many scholars even now adopt, though perhaps
unconsciously, the imperialist approach in order to avoid the so-called ‘nationalist distortions.’
4 There is hardly a proposition in Morris’s article which John Strachey, Lord Curzon, etc., have not

earlier put forward, though Morris has discarded a lot of their excess baggage and adopted some
modern economic terminology.
5 One is surprised at the off-hand, cavalier treatment of scholars and economists of the calibre of

Dadabhai Naoroji, G.V. Joshi, Justice Ranade, R.C. Dutt, K.T. Shah, Radhakamal Mukerjee, Brij
Narain D.R. Gadgil, R.P. Dutt, among others.
6 Quoted by Morris, p. 607 f.n.

7 K. Marx and F. Engels, On Colonialism, Moscow, no date, p. 80.

8 It is to be noted that once Marx’s writing or formulation on the dual Character of the impact of

British rule became available to Indians, nearly every writer of the anti-imperialist school, for
example, J.L. Nehru, K.S. Shelvankar, Wadia and Merchant, R.P. Dutt, unhesitatingly accepted it and
freely quoted it. In fact, if the debate was up to this point, there would be little controversy left
between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ interpretations.
9 M.G. Ranade, Essays on Indian Economics, Bombay, 1898, pp. 23 and 65.

10 See, for example, G.V. Joshi, Speeches and Writings, Poona, 1912, pp. 680 and 785; G.S. Iyer in

Indian Politics, Madras 1898, p. 193; R.C. Dutt, Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, 6th ed.,
London, pp. 163 and 518-19.
11 See my The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, New Delhi, 1966, Chapter I.

12 K. Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan, Princeton, 1951, p. 36.

13 Ibid., p. 34.

14 Quoted by Daniel Thomer in Simon Kuznets and others, Economic Growth: Brazil India, Japan,

Durham, 1955, p. 123.

15 George Blyn, Agricultural Trends in India, 1891-1947, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966, p.

102.
16 Quoted by Daniel Thomer, op.cit, p. 123.

17 Op.cit., p. 122. Similarly per capita income was also declining during the period 1921-1951. See M.

Mukherjee. “A Preliminary Study of the Growth of National Income,” Asian Studies in Income and
Wealth, Bombay, 1965, p. 101. Even more interesting exercises could be conducted. In Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa, total agricultural output fell by 45% per year from 1891 to 1941 while population
increased by 0.65% per year (Blyn, op.cit, p. 119). Food availability in the three provinces declined
during these years at the rate of 0. 46% per year (ibid., p. 104).
18 Economic history of other countries also shows that high or low death rates are not necessarily

linked to standards of living. See Habakkuk and Deane, “The Take-off in Britain,” in Economics of Take
off, ed. by W.W. Rostow, 1965, p. 68.
19 In fact there are economic tools and economic tools!

20 But ‘anarchy’ itself is hard to define. The theme of political anarchy in eighteenth century India has

been, as has been shown by Satish Chandra, Percival Spear, and others, exaggerated beyond any
resemblance to reality by nineteenth century writers and administrators. It may also be noted that,
according to E. Phelps Brown, high income per head prevailed in fifteenth century Britain despite the
Wars of Roses. The Growth of British Industrial Relations, 1959, p. 2.
21 After all it is by now well-known that British administration, with its pro-money-lender and pro-

landlord judicial system, its pro-landlord bureaucracy, its highly oppressive and corrupt village-level
administration and police system, was a major barrier to-economic growth as well as general welfare
in the village. Law and order are, after all, not neutral terms either in economic organization of society
or in its general organization. In any case, the historian of India has to be very chary of accepting
claims of British justice and law and order so far as the peasant and the poor were concerned.
22 Though, Mughal rule—as stable administration in other stagnant societies—also may have led to

growth of population and national income and even of per capita income, it did not initiate the
process of economic development.
23 We may put the issue in another way: the question is not whether there could be economic

development without law and order; nor whether law and order could have prevailed without British
rule; but rather why there was no economic development in spite of law and order?
24 One can speculate whether ‘a liberal nation state’ would dare, anywhere else in the world, to collect

55% of ‘economic rental’ as the British said they were doing even in the hey-day of land revenue
reform in nineteenth century.
25 It would be wrong to call them leakages as they were planned as such.

26 The point to consider here is not the potential benefit of railways but the nature of their impact on

the economy and the reasons for their failure in having a full and a truly many-sided impact.
Secondly, the admirers of railway construction in India forget that at any point of time the real
economic question is that of the maximum use or at least of the better use of the available resources.
In fact, as the anti-imperialist writers pointed out, the manner in which the railways were constructed
and operated in India increased India’s dependence on agriculture. They also pointed out that the basic
question involved was whether an alternative use of the same amount of capital on industrialization or
irrigation would not yield higher rates of economic growth (see my book cited above, Chapter 5).
Very relevant and apt are in this respect the remarks of Prof. Cootner in the Economics of Take-off
cited above. He points out that “If there were no reasons for expecting railways building to set off
other industries or to reduce the dependence of a region on agriculture, there is no reason why
railroad building should lead to growth” (p. 455). Also: “If the period before the asset in question
could be fully used was a very long one it might well be better to use the capital elsewhere, depending
on the interest rate” (p. 456). He also denies “any special role for social overhead capital in economic
development, particularly if one thinks of development in terms of the growth of the manufacturing
sector” (p. 261). He points out that “the real advantage of building social overhead capital in the
underdeveloped country may accrue not to that country but the users of its products” (p. 275).
27 G. Kotovsky, Agrarian Reforms in India, 1964, Delhi, pp. 29-30. The agricultural departments sold

only 17,000 improved ploughs in 1925-26. Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India,
1928, para 105.
28 Op. cit., p. 203.

29 Ibid., p. 195.

30 Ibid., p. 194. Also see Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, 1928, paras 80 and

91.
31 Blyn, op. cit., p. 200.

32 Ibid., p. 202.

33 Ibid., p. 340. The total acreage under irrigation at the time was 27.6 millions. Of this 10.1 millions

were under canal irrigation. Statistical Abstract of British India 1882- 83 to 1891-92, No. 27, p. 142.
34 We may here take note of the view that sub-division of holdings may increase productivity per acre

though not productivity per head due to greater labour input.

35 Blyn, op. cit., p. 316.

36 I may quote here the words of a ‘growth’ economist’ “...it does not necessarily follow that any

efficient development of natural resources resulting in an increase in total output will always and pari
passu reduce the backwardness of people. On the contrary, the problem of economic backwardness in
many countries has been made more acute, not because the natural resources have remained
‘underdeveloped’, but because they have been as fully and rapidly developed as market conditions
permitted while the inhabitants have been left out, being either unable or unwilling or both to
participate fully in the process... Thus again, we are led back from the consideration of the total
quantity of investment and the total volume of output and economic activity to a consideration of the
type of investment and the distribution of economic activities and economic roles between the
backward peoples and the others.” And regarding the framework of ‘the liberal 19th century state’ he
writes: “The formal framework which offers perfect equality of economic rights offers no protection,
and the result of the ‘free play of economic forces’ under conditions of fluctuating export prices is the
well-known story of rural indebtedness, land alienation, and agrarian unrest.” H. Myint, “An
Interpretation of Economic Backwardness,” The Economics of Underdevelopment, ed. by A.N. Agarwal
and S. P. Singh, New York, 1963, pp. 96, 106 and 125.
37 Apart from some increase in productivity due to irrigation.

38 J.C. Jack, The Economic Life of a Bengal District, 1916, p. 92.

39 For example, a mass of data on this point would be dredged out of the recent village studies,

economic as well as sociological.

40 It is fascinating to watch a technique of research and economic history which lets an author accept

the evidence of a traveller, Palsaert, for proving that in the seventeenth century Indians were
extremely poor and for characterizing an entire mode of production but makes him dismiss the
evidence of hundreds of travellers, administrators, and other observers regarding decline of
handicrafts or makes him ignore the Dufferin Enquiry of 1888 or the comments of men like W.W.
Hunter and Charles Eliot regarding the poverty and starvation of Indians at the end of the nineteenth
century; or which enables him to give as proof of his “own general impression” that “the traditional
Indian society (which century? B.C.) was supported at a lower level of real income per capita than was
the case in early modem Europe or even in Tokugawa Japan,” the statement of Thomas Kerridge in
1619: “though this countrie be esteemed rich, we find the common inhabitants to be verie needie...”
(p. 610, f.n. 16). How do we compare the per capita income of the ‘Verie needie’ in India, Japan, and
Europe? One stands aghast before the marvels which the ‘simplest economic tools’ can perform if they
can help one compare, on existing evidence, the levels of real income per capita in Tokugawa Japan,
early modem Europe, and India in 1619 !
41 Morris had pointed this out very well in another context: “The cotton textile industry in India, and

especially the Bombay sector of it, is perhaps better served by an abundance of statistics than almost
any other major part of the economy. Nevertheless, appearances are deceptive. At every point the
statistics are subject to serious question, and this study must depend, as historical studies unfortunately
so often must, on the qualitative rather than on the quantitative evidence.” (Emphasis mine). The
Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India, 1965, p. 9.
42 Once again no evidence is offered for this “seems to have strengthened.” In a theoretical derivation,

the apt phrase would be: “should have strengthened.” The words “seems to” indicate reality— but
without evidence. Of course, the opposite school does adduce evidence of the weakening of the
competitive position of the Indian handicraftsmen.
43 Based on tables in R.C. Dutt, p. 161 and Statistical Abstract Relating to
British India, relevant years.
44 Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, London, 1886, p. 69.

45 Ibid., p. 60.

46 Declining production could, of course, be maintained for a long time by imperfect market, force of

tradition, etc.
47 But for that very reason the urban handicrafts were mined.

48 The limitation of the internal market and demand was a major factor in first limiting foreign

imports, and then indigenous factory production. It was a major factor in India’s economic
backwardness in 1947. One of the major tasks before the economic historians is to study how British
rule as a whole affected the internal demand. Dadabhai Naoroji and others rejected the notion that
law and order, railways, foreign trade, commercialization, or magnetization necessarily or invariably
led to its growth. It is of interest to note that the main spurts in Indian industrial production before
1947 occurred only when existing limited effective demand was diverted from imports to indigenous
products by the two world wars.
49 No tables, no statistics, no actual curve, no authority are offered as evidence.

50 It is obvious that any real growth in effective demand for textiles would be absorbed by products of

Lancashire and/or Indian textile industries. The Indian weaver could hold his own to a limited extent
only after 1918 as a result of technological change, i.e., mechanisation.
51 In the twentieth century, when land could no longer absorb many of them, they tended to become

general labourers, partially employed agricultural labourers, beggars, and ‘men of commerce,’ i.e.,
peddlers, etc., thus ‘improving’ the ratio of population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits. Cf. S.
Kuznets, Economic Growth, 1959, p. 61.
52 Wages per pound in the British cotton textile industry:

Ellison, op. cit, pp. 68-69.

53 See Coale and Hoover, Population Growth and Economic Development, pp. 30, 231; D.H. Buchanan,

The Development of Capitalist Enterprise in India, N.Y., 1934, p. 139; Census of India, 1951, Part I-A,
Report, p. 122. A. Myers, Labour Problems in the Industrialization of India, Cambridge, Mass., 1958, p.
17. This is apart from the calculations of the Indian Planning Commission that the number of persons
engaged in processing and manufacturing fell from 10.3 millions in 1901 to 8.8 millions in 1951.
Indian Planning Commission, Occupational Pattern of Indian Union from 1901 to 1951, Table II, p. 6,
cited in Joseph E. Schwartzberg, Occupational Structure and Levels of Economic Development
—/Regional Analysis, unpublished, microfilm in Chicago University Library, p. 127. Having made a
detailed regional study, Schwartzberg says that the Planning Commission “evidently feels that it has
arrived at a meaningful picture of the occupational trends of the period 1901 to 1951. The author is in
agreement with this view” (p. 113). The Planning Commission’s note has attempted a detailed
breakdown to take account of old as well as new occupational groups. Schwartzberg also adds that
“evidence points to a much greater decline in the secondary sector (i.e. manufacturing and
processing) in the 19th century” (p. 123).
54 Cf. S. Kuznets: “Since old knowledge, in a form ready for extensive application, is limited, a

continuous and large rise in product per unit of labour is possible only with major additions of new
technological and related knowledge.” Economic Growth, p. 29.
55 See his “India—a Colonial Economy (1757 to 1947)” in Enquiry, No. 1 (old series), 1958.

56 That the nature and progress of economic backwardness or advancement cannot be understood

unless we study ‘the distribution of economic activities’ is widely accepted today. Even Marshall who
came at the tail end of laissez faire economics understood this, for he wrote: “It is to changes in the
forms of efforts and activities that we must turn when in search for the keynotes of the history of
mankind.” Principles, p. 85, quoted in H. Myint, op.cit, p. 123.
57 Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. II, No. 1, 1965. Also see, for example, Daniel

Thomer’s Investment in Empire, 1950, and Arthur Silver’s Manchester Men and Indian Cotton, 1966.
58 Ranade, op.cit., pp. 33, 86-89, 102, 165 ff.

59 Hindustan Review, Feb. 1903, pp. 193-194; G.S. Iyer, Some Economic Aspects of British Rule in India,

Madras, 1903, p. 123.

60 It may be pointed out that even at present all government attempts to balance their budgets and all

theoretical and political debate on budgeting is devoted to the questions of patterns of expenditure
and revenue. The economics of deficit financing does not obviate the need for ‘preoccupation with a
balanced budget’.
61 These figures are rather roughly worked out from Imperial Gazet-teer, Vol. IV, 1908, and C.N. Vakil,

Financial Development in Modem India, 1860-1924, Bombay, 1924.

62 See my The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, Chapter XII, for details.

63 India might have been under-administered but the amount spent on administration was not any

the less for that reason!

64 For example, the growth of military expenditure in Britain and India in the second half of the 19th

century was as follows:

Robert Giffin, Economic Inquiries and Studies, Vol. II, p. 329; Vakil, op. cit., pp. 547-48
65 Vakil, op. cit., Appendices.

66 Op. cit., p. 164.

67 Based on Vakil, op.cit., Appendices.

68 Ibid. It may also be noted that While expenditure on education went up from Rs. 0.8 crores in 1875

to Rs. 1.4 crores in 1901 (i.e., by Rs. 0.6 crores), military expenditure went up from Rs. 17.6 crores in
1875 to Rs. 25.8 crores in 1901 (i.e. by Rs. 8.2 crores).
69 Nor is the answer here lack of contemporary tradition. Official expenditure on education in Britain

took a big jump forward between 1877 and 1882, precisely the period during which virtually all
customs duties were remitted in India on the ground of budgetary surpluses. British expenditure on
education at home increased from £1.879 millions in 1871 to 4.281 millions in 1881 and to 12.662
millions in 1901. Robert Giffen, Economic Inquiries and Studies, Vol. II, 330.
70 To the contrary, the long ‘gestation’ period led to India missing a favourable opportunity for

economic development and it is now forced to do so at an unfavourable time and with a much larger
gap to make up. What is even more important, the long ‘gestation’ period led to increasing
backwardness, i.e., India was more backward compared to Britain in 1947 than in 1813.
71 This ‘North Atlantic Experience’ smacks of the old imperialist view that only countries with

temperate climates could industrialize, except that the theory had an additional plus point—it would
have covered Russia and Japan.
72 While ‘the gestation’ period was too short to generate economic growth, it was not too short to

produce an agrarian debt of Rs. 3,200 crores and a situation where 2% of population owned 70% of
agricultural land.
73 Some historians make the mistake of assuming that British rule at least provided an infrastructure

for economic growth. Without going into detail, one may point out that they are misled by the
hullabaloo about railways and law and order. In fact, from administration down to education, such an
infrastructure was not built. One must distinguish between an infrastructure sufficient to underpin a
modem colonial economy and an infrastructure needed to serve a developing economy. For example,
a major weakness lay in the neglect of technical education and scientific research. Another was the
neglect of electric power resources. Like the U.S.A., India was rich in these resources and their early
development in the manner of railways would have given a head start in many fields of industry. But,
then, it is well known that even railways in India were not built with the purpose of triggering off
industrial development. Moreover, the advantage of electrification could not be exported to Britain as
the advantages of rail-roadisation had been.
74 Morris has here perhaps tried to use S. Kuznets’s argument in Economic Growth (pp. 19-29). But

Kuznets uses the argument precisely to deny that countries with per capita annual incomes of $100 or
slightly above could have had substantial growth in per capita income over past decades. And it may
be remembered that during 1952-54 (the years of Kuznets’s calculations) per capita income in India
was far less than $100.
75 Size alone is hardly of any importance. Cf. S. Kuznets, Economic Growth, Chapter V.
76 Another school of historians is beginning to arise which tends to suggest that the British rule did

not basically change Indian economy during the nineteenth century. But this hypothesis has not yet
been clearly formulated or backed by any economic analysis. It seems to base itself on the similarities
between the pre-British economic structure and the nineteenth century economic structure, but it
fails to take note of the basic changes in the economic structure, both in terms of quantity and quality,
that British rule introduced. Some of Morris’s advice regarding the study of economics might be
fittingly turned towards this school as it now seems to stand.
77 The weakness of the traditional anti-imperialist writers was not that they were not familiar with

‘simple economic tools’ but that they failed to always choose correctly between varieties of economic
tools available. This recognition is particularly important today for a major burst of research in Indian
history is taking place and there is active search for new ways and approaches. At the outset, then, it
should be realised that there is, as the American phrase goes, little percentage in going back to the
bankrupt imperialist approach.
 British and Indian Ideas on Indian
Economic Development, 1858–1905

Before we take up the subject-matter of the paper a few preliminary remarks

have to be made.
Firstly, during the period under study, neither the British nor the Indian
ideas on economic growth were articulated by professional economists. In
Britain, economic comment on India was a virtual monopoly of the British
Indian officials. Hardly any contemporary British economist wrote at length
on the general problems of Indian economic development.1 Nor did any of
the British official writers on India devote his time and attention mainly to
economic topics. This may be one reason why the level of British economic
comments on India seldom rose high in terms of analysis.2 Similarly, not
one of the Indian writers on the subject was a professional economist.
However, several of them, like Dadabhai Naoroji, M.G. Ranade, G.V. Joshi,
G.S. Iyer, and R.C. Dutt. had made economic writing their special field of
activity.
Secondly, the objective basis for the rise of the two opposing schools of
economic thought on India—the imperialist school and the anti-imperialist
or the nationalist school—was provided by reality itself. If the second half of
the nineteenth century was the heyday of British economic expansion and
exploitation in India and of the effort to make Indian economy
complementary to British economy in a subservient position, i.e., to make it
a colonial economy, it was also the period in which the chief inner
contradictions of British imperialism matured, the agrarian basis of Indian
economy was firmly set on its process of decay and ruin, an indigenous
industrial capitalist class emerged, and the nationalist intelligentsia took
roots. In other words, If British ideas reflected one aspect of the reality, the
nationalist ideas reflected the other, neither set of ideas was merely
‘ideological’; both were rooted in the same reality.
Thirdly, in both British and Indian writings, what was often involved was
not economic thought or ideas but economic policies. We can, however,
construct a general picture—if not a model—of their ideas of economic
development by combining the basic elements of the measures for economic
progress that they put forward, for both of them did put forward distinct
sets of economic policies.3 Moreover, their approaches and ideas can be
contrasted and compared for both schools shared one common assumption
—that economic development constituted the essence, and the chief
measure, of society’s or nation’s progress and that every other progress
depended upon it.4 Neither the British writers nor the nationalists put
forward the view that spiritual, cultural, or political progress could
compensate for, or was as important as, economic development.
Lastly, the entire discussion of the problems of economic development
occurred in the context of certain views regarding the existing economic
situation and the nature of economic changes, both quantitative and
structural, then taking place in India. Differences on these two questions set
the British and the Indians on two different rails—they developed opposing
views of the barriers to economic development in India and of the ways and
means of promoting it, that is, they developed diverging theories of
economic development.
The nationalists believed that India was extremely poor, was growing
poorer, was lagging behind Europe in economic development, and was in
the contemporary context becoming more backward or underdeveloped.
Given this lag and growing underdevelopment, radically different economic
remedies than the current ones were needed. The British view was that the
lag was being rapidly overcome and that the existing policies would suffice
to overcome it.
Similarly, while both the British and the Indians recognized that India
was undergoing rapid economic change, the nature of the change came to be
severely disputed. The British writers saw the current economic
transformation as modernization of the traditional economy or as economic
development. The Indians, on the other hand, saw it as a transition from
traditional or ‘feudal’ pattern of backwardness to colonial back-wardness
where limited modern development, especially in the fields of trade and
transport, occurs transforming the country into a raw material producing
and processing as well as capital absorbing country, leading to backward
agriculture, repressed industry, and foreign domination of economic life.
They, thus, evolved the concept of a ‘modernizing’ economy which was not
developing, that is, the concept of a colonial economy. In this respect, they
even made a basic advance in economic theory. While the British writers
could see only two types of contemporary economic structure, the
traditional and the modern, each being bolstered by its own sets of
economic and cultural values—and this is where a great deal of present-day
economic and sociological theory is still bogged down—the Indian writers
could clearly see that a third type of economic structure—the colonial
economy—was coming into being which was as modern as industrial
capitalism, which was bolstered by its own ideology of colonialism in the
realm of economic and cultural values, and which was, at the same time, as
depressing in its impact on economic life as the traditional economic and
social structure. They, therefore, felt it necessary to struggle, even in the
realm of economic ideas, against both the traditional and the new colonial
economic, social and political structures.
We are also, of course, fully aware of the fact that actual policy decisions
were not the result mainly of economic ideas. They were the end-product of
many pulls and pressures. In the case of official policies the determining
influences were the British private interests and the needs of the stability and
perpetuation of the Empire. In the case of Indian, the interests of the rising
industrial capitalist class made a powerful impact. At the same time,
economic ideas had an important role to play not only in the making of
policies, but, like all ideologies, even more in justifying these policies both in
the eyes of the framers of the policies and before the limited public opinion
that existed in Britain as well as in India. Consequently, the conflict in the
realm of economic ideas between the British officials and their Indian critics
was of far greater political importance than as a mere influence in the
making of this or that economic policy. It became the chief form of the
ideological struggle between an entrenched imperialism and an emerging
and resurgent nationalism. After all, the allegedly modernizing role of
British rule in the economic field was the chief justification for the Raj
offered by the imperialist rulers and spokesmen. And the anti-imperialist
writers controverted this very assertion in a fundamental manner. Apart
from its historical interest, this controversy is very relevant even today not
only because economic imperialism is still a reality in large parts of the
globe, but also because notions of its modernizing role still permeate many
of the historical studies belonging to the imperialist school of
historiography. For example, C.H. Philips, the doyen of this school, has
recently asserted that apart from “the fundamental questions whether and
when to transfer political power” the British imperial mind was occupied
during the period 1857–1947 with such other questions as: “Most
fundamental of all, how was Britain’s civilizing mission to be accomplished,
in what ways were Indians’ minds to be opened to new ideas, and how were
the poor, ignorant millions to be raised from the dust?”5

Two aspects of the British view of Indian economy and its future growth
stand out. Throughout the half century, the British writers with remarkable
unanimity denied that India was economically stagnating or backward and
poor. On the contrary, they asserted that India and Indians were at the time
prosperous and the country was in the midst of a process of rapid economic
development. Differences on the question related mostly to the language in
which the existing state of affairs was to be described. Some writers
approached the lyrical. For example, even the sober and scholarly George
Campbell declared in 1882 that:

...in respect of public works and material improvement India has been
well kept up to the level of civilized countries; in the last thirty years a
transformation has been wrought by means of railways and other
developments almost as complete as that which has taken place in
Europe and America, dating from a somewhat earlier period.6
John and Richard Strachey asserted in 1882 that:

...A greater or more admirable work was never conceived in any

country than that which has been undertaken, and in a great degree
accomplished, by Englishmen in India during the last twenty-five years,
and which is still going on....(It has) increased to an extent absolutely
incalculable the wealth and comfort of the people of India....7
Henry Summer Maine wrote as follows regarding India’s progress from 1859
to 1887:

...taking the standards of advance which are employed to test the

progress of Western countries, there is no country in Europe which,
according to those criteria, and regard being had to the point of
departure, had advanced during the same period more rapidly and
farther than British India...(There has occurred) a process of
continuous moral and material improvement which in some
particulars has attained a higher point than has yet been reached in
England.8
W.W. Hunter, who was perhaps the most critical of the imperialist writers
and who expressed grave apprehension regarding the living conditions of
the common people, wrote in 1880 that the figures of growth of foreign
trade and industries “are so great, and the material progress which they
indicate is so enormous, that they elude the grasp of the imagination.”9
Comparing India’s economic growth with that of the United States, he wrote
in 1887: ‘The progress of India during the past fifty years has been not less
wonderful, and considering the lower level from which India started, in
some respects, even more rapid.”10
Even Alfred Marshall said in 1899 that though India had not been able “to
keep pace with the West, or even with Japan...when one complains of the
slow progress of India, one must recollect that there is scarcely any other old
civilization in the same latitude, and with the same difficulties, that has
made progress to be compared with that of India.”11
Secondly, more than in the present the British writers of the period had
confidence in the future. Nearly all of them foresaw a new era of rapid
economic development—development of Indian resources, as it was then
called. The view expressed over the entire range of the years was that firm
foundations for economic growth had been or were being laid in the
immediate past12 and the present and rapid economic growth in the future
was thus assured. In any case, there was a remarkable lack of pessimism. The
degree of optimism, of course, varied and tended to be qualified near the
end of the period. But most of the writers believed that there could be no
limits to India’s economic growth. Thus R.D. Mangles wrote in 1864: “At last
the great driving-wheel of progress has been fairly set in motion, and it
demands but scanty powers of observation to see that society is moving
onward at a pace almost Anglo-Saxon in its rapidity.”13
Most of the British writers used the concept ‘development of resources’
rather vaguely and it is difficult to pinpoint as to what they meant exactly by
it or what constituted economic development in their view. While a few
included a hazy notion of industrialization most of them understood by it
growth of agricultural production, plantations, and foreign trade. It is easier
to identify the factors which they thought would lead to rapid economic
growth.

According to British writers, perhaps the most important prerequisite for

growth that British rule had provided in India was security of life and
property—law and order within the country, security from external
aggression, and an impartial system of justice.14 According to most of them
India’s past was one of perpetual and continuous invasions, plunder and
massacre, internal strife accompanied by administrative anarchy and
lawlessness, and in general a state of society in which property and ‘fruits of
labour’ were not safe, taxation was oppressive, etc., leading to
impoverishment and economic stagnation.15
These writers, however, seldom established any direct economic
correlation between law and order and economic growth. They tended to
assume it as an accepted economic axiom. In fact, quite often they confused
administrative improvement with economic growth. Presumably they drew
their conviction from the classical economists’ general view that once the
government assured conditions in which an individual was guaranteed the
fruits of his industry, private enterprise and competition would assure
economic growth.16 Moreover, John Stuart Mill, the most influential
economic thinker of the period, had also held that “great insecurity of
property, from military and fiscal rapacity” had in the past prevented the
Asian people from accumulating capital (or retaining it when accumulated),
from having any incentive to work hard and improve, and from trade with
the towns.17 The first condition for an ‘increase of industry’ in the East was,

a better government: more complete security of property; moderate

taxes, and freedom from arbitrary exaction under the name of taxes; a
more permanent and more advantageous tenure of land, securing to
the cultivator as far as possible the undivided benefits of the industry,
skill and economy he may exert.18
Henry Fawcett, the only contemporary British economist to take interest
in the general problems of Indian economy, gave the economic rationale of
the British view in his Manual of Political Economy. He blamed anarchy and
insecurity for hoarding19 and high rates of interest20 and claimed that the
British rule would lead to the release of hoarded capital and its effective
employment. He wrote that if in the past Indians

employed labourers, they could not feel certain that they would be able
to retain the results of the labourers’ industry. Hence we can reasonably
anticipate one most beneficent result from England’s rule in India; for
her power, in course of time, may make every class in India feel that the
rights of property are respected. Nothing will more tend to increase the
capital and hence the wealth of the country; for when security is given to
property there is a great inducement to save, and the wealth which is
saved, instead of being hoarded, will be usefully applied as capital to
assist the further production of wealth.21
Security of person and property also promoted growth, it was believed, by
attracting foreign capital.22 And, of course, though not explicitly stated, it
was understood that law and order were essential for the growth, and even
existence, of foreign trade.
It may be pointed out here in parenthesis that this connection between
law and order and foreign trade was made more explicitly by many writers
in order to establish the need for the British to stay in India in the interests
of British trade. The argument here was that while trade with the U.S.A. had
continued and would continue with Australia and Canada even after British
withdrawal, in India British trade would disappear with Britain’s withdrawal
as this step was bound to lead to administrative anarchy, civil war, etc. The
interests of British trade, therefore, required that Britain rule India.23

According to British writers, the second major factor of development in

India was the growth of foreign trade. In fact, among the purely economic
factors, promotion of foreign trade was seen as the chief instrument for
developing India. Here, again, John Stuart Mill had provided the theoretical
approach. He had laid down, in his Principles of Political Economy, that the
Indian peasantry could produce much more than it did but had in the past
lacked the stimulus to do so. It could not dispose off the surplus since, for
various reasons, there did not exist a large town population. ‘The few wants
and unaspiring spirit of the cultivators” in turn prevented them from
consuming town products. Thus the vicious circle was completed. The best
way of breaking this circle and initiating economic development was to
promote the export of India’s agricultural products like cotton, indigo, sugar
and coffee. This would create a market for foodgrains within the villages and
thus also promote their production. This process would create a rural
market for manufactures which would not only increase import of European
goods but also given incentive to manufacturing in India. The process of
growth would have been initiated.24
Once again British writers on India did not give the economic reasoning
behind their statement that foreign trade promoted economic development
but took it as a proven truth. Instead, most often, they offered the increase in
foreign trade as a proof of economic growth, increase of exports to prove
that production was increasing and increase of imports that the purchasing
power of the people was growing.25 But some of them did echo the notion
that the peasant in India did not produce as much as he could because of the
inability to sell the surplus and that, therefore, exports of agricultural
produce promoted production of old as well as new agricultural products.26
A few writers also put forward the theory of comparative costs that foreign
trade promoted growth by enabling India to harness its economic resources
better by exporting goods which it produced best and getting in return
cheaper industrial goods.27
It may be noted that none of the British writers on India reflected the
contemporary questioning, even in Britain, of the value of free trade for an
unindustrialized country like India which wanted to develop modern
industries. Already J.S. Mill had in his Principles of Political Economy
defended the imposition of protective duties if the aim was to enable a new
industry to rise in a country to which it might be quite suited but where the
private entrepreneur might not be willing to bear the initial expenses of free
competition with imports.28 This infant industry-protection principle was
supported by Professor Henry Sidgwick, who extended it to support
protection even where the aim was to prevent an undesirable change in the
existing pattern of production, and Professors Alfred Marshall and F.Y.
Edgeworth.29 Moreover, many British statesmen, e.g., Randolph Churchill,30
were now attacking free trade even in Britain and arguing for ‘fair trade’ or
some forms of retaliatory protection.31
British writers on India also did not at any stage make any distinction
between different patterns of economic development that might be, or were
being, encouraged by different patterns of growth of foreign trade.

In view of the driver’s role assigned to foreign trade in pushing economic

growth, it was inevitable that railways would be looked upon as the second
major economic factor in the process. The British writers repeatedly pointed
out that the growth both of exports and imports and therefore the
development of both agriculture and industry depended on railways. The
discussion of this topic had of course been virtually exhausted in the pre-
1858 period and the role of railways as an active agent of economic
development was by now taken for grated. John and Richard Strachey well
summed up the accepted position:

Improvement in the material conditions of the people of India...is to be

obtained only through an accumulation of wealth accompanying a
steady development of the foreign trade. The means of accomplishing
this are obvious and quite within our reach.... These means lie, as this
volume seeks to establish, in an intelligent extension of the great public
works which the country requires, whereby will be ensured its future
well-being, and the continued prosperity of its finances.32
No writer of the imperialist school expressed any doubt that railways
might fail to generate economic development. At the same time, no one
examined the relation of industrial development to railways in India or to
the strategy of their construction. In fact no other aspect of the impact of
railways on Indian economy except that on foreign trade and agriculture
was examined.
Along with the railways most of the British writers also laid emphasis on
irrigation as a means of improving agriculture.33 We, however, miss any
consciousness of the fact that irrigation was not being developed adequately
in terms of either economic needs and possibilities or total financial
expenditure of the government. Nor were patterns of irrigation, their linkage
with patterns of agricultural growth, and the harmful consequences of
certain patterns of irrigation development examined.

Increasingly, after 1858, British writers placed their hopes for the
development of India on the application of foreign capital. India, it was said,
had plenty of land (and resources) and labour but lacked capital which was
precisely to be found in abundance in Britain. The coming era of the rapid
development of India after 1858 was proclaimed basically on the expectation
that British capital would be invested in India on a large scale.
Once again John Stuart Mill had given the lead. He had written that
among the basic deficiencies in an Asian country was lack of internal capital
and, therefore, one of the basic requirements of growth there was “the
importation of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no
longer exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants
themselves.”34 Professors Fawcett and Marshall reiterated that a major
barrier to India’s economic growth was shortage of internal capital which
could be made up only by foreign capital. In fact, this was to become—and
remains to this day—one of those economic dicta to question which was
tantamount to revealing the bankruptcy of one’s economic thinking if not
one’s ignorance of economics itself. Many other British writers on India
expressed this view in much more exuberant terms. Thus a writer declared
in the Westminster Review of January 1868:

And if English capital, English intelligence, and English enterprise were

applied fully to develop the untold and inexhaustible treasures of this
teeming land which has been given into our hands, the imagination
fails to realize the wonderful results which might be achieved.35
Earlier, in 1864, R.D. Mangles had said:

Happily, all that India needs beyond the essential elements of wise
legislation and general good government, for the prompt and complete
development of her vast natural resources—namely, English capital,
enterprise, and energy—can be supplied with equal benefit to both
countries.36
William Lee-Warner wrote in 1881:

The resources of the country in raw material and labour are enormous,
and nothing is wanted but capital to develop new industries. As soon as
English capitalists can realize the field of profitable investment which
India offers, a turning-point will be reached in Indian history.37
 In 1887, M.E. Grant Duff described British capital investment as “the first
condition necessary for improving a country which is, after all, only half-
civilized.”38 In 1899, Lord Curzon called it “a sine qua non to the national
advancement” of India.39
These writers did not see any disadvantage in the use of foreign capital;
and some of them explicitly denied that the export of profits of foreign
enterprises constituted drain of wealth for, they argued, the profits came out
of the income which foreign capital had generated.40
While emphasising the developmental role of foreign capital for India,
many of the writers pointed out at the same time the advantages to Britain of
the availability of a highly profitable field of investment for its surplus
capital. In his Principles of Political Economy, J.S. Mill had argued that export
of capital to colonies or foreign countries raised the rate of profit inside
Britain by making domestic capital scarce and by enabling the import of
cheaper goods, food, and raw materials which it helped produce abroad.41
At the very beginning of our period, an anonymous writer in the
Westminster Review of July 1862 dealt with the subject at length. In the
article ‘English Rule in India’, he set out to answer the question: apart from
commerce “what is the most widespread national advantage which England
may reap from her governmental connection with India?” England was,
according to him, “emphatically a producer of new capital year by year; she
greatly needs profitable investments”. Low rates of interest and profit were
keeping people from saving. Yet, unlike commerce, foreign investment was
difficult in “any country which is under a foreign country” for there were
numerous impediments and dangers. Especially there was “the dread of
foreign agents and law courts and hostile governments.” There also existed
the difficulty of finding out what investments were safe. The problem of
disposal of surplus capital had hitherto not become acute because of
investments in the U.S.A. But the Civil War was likely to retard flow of
British capital to that country. Here, India could save the situation. Already
the Indian Government had helped by enticing investments into Indian
railways by the guarantee system. But the prospects for British capital in
India were unlimited:
 India is a field almost unlimited, offering prodigious rewards to
judicious enterprise and may for a long time take up for use all that
Englishmen can lend her, as well as all that she can produce herself.
From the density of her population, the profit resulting from great
works is higher than can accrue in new colonies: also the nature of her
climate, if only irrigation be afforded, puts her on a par with the
possessors of a virgin soil.
In fact, believed the author, India was ideally fitted to be England’s
hinterland. The U.S. hinterland had given that country two economic
benefits: “new ‘homesteads’ for their population—and a perpetual spring of
profitable returns from any possible amount of new capital. Of these two
benefits, India can give us the latter.” He took this comparison further and
claimed that once English capital started flowing into India, not only would
India “rise into unprecedented prosperity, but it is possible that the
‘proletarians’ of England will have the means of vying in prosperity with the
workmen of the United States.”42
Others after him often made the same point.43 And towards the end of
our period, Lord Curzon said:

Other channels of investment, outside of India, are gradually being

filled up, not merely by British capital, but by capital of all the wealth-
producing countries of the world; and if this be so, then a time must
soon come when the current of British capital, extruded from the
banks between which it has long been content to meander, will want to
pour over into fresh channels, and will, by the law of economic
gravitation, find its way into India, to which it should be additionally
attracted by the security of British institutions and British laws.44
A corollary of the view discussed above was the belief that British rule
over India must be permanent, and be believed to be permanent, to attract
and secure British capital. Thus, as early as 1868, John Clark Marshman
wrote that “fifty-nine thousand proprietors of stock and debentures have
acquired a direct interest in the prosperity of our Indian administration, and
in the permanence of our rule.”45 Similarly, Richard Temple wrote in 1880
that among the reasons why “England, then, must keep India” was “because
a vast amount of British capital has been sunk in the country, on the
assurance of British rule being, humanly speaking, perpetual.”46 This view
was quite widely expressed.47 It may, in fact, be suggested that it was
responsible for the growth of the imperialist reaction in India after the 1870
s and the exhaustion of the liberal impulse of the mid-Victorian era.
In spite of their emphasis on foreign capital as an instrument of economic
development, none of the British writers of the period noticed that actual
British capital investment in India was rather small and, if guaranteed
investments in railways and public debt were excluded, virtually negligible,
or that even of this capital very little had gone into modern industries.48
There was consequently no discussion of the economic reasons why British
enterprise and capital did not move into India on a larger scale. Such a
discussion might have led to the discovery of some of the real reasons for
India’s underdevelopment in place of the contemporary shibboleths like
shortage of internal capital and lack of indigenous enterprise. After all India
was ruled by Britain and was open to British capitalists who lacked neither
capital nor enterprise.
Similarly, there was no recognition of the fact that even the foreign-
owned capital in India was not imported from Britain but was generated
within India and that India was throughout this period a net exporter of
capital.49
While emphasising the role of foreign capital, the British writers ignored
the problems of the utilization of internal capital. Instead of asking what
happened to internal capital, or examining the pattern of its utilization, or
discussing the reasons why it was not being utilized productively, the notion
—which is current to this day—was popularised that India lacked internal
capital.50 As pointed out earlier, nearly all the writers including J.S. Mill and
Alfred Marshall held this view.

One of the main features of the period under study was the breakdown of
the existing British theories of agricultural development and agrarian
relations and the failure to evolve any alternative theories or ideas. In fact,
not even an attempt in that direction was made, either at the level of ideas or
that of practice. Increasingly, the tendency was to live from hand to mouth.
Often, the old ideas were reiterated at the theoretical level, their incapacity
or inapplicability at the operational level was recognized, and ad hoc
solutions were suggested.
The British administrators had remodelled Indian agrarian relations after
1790 on the theory that the right of land owner-ship or private property in
land, whether in the hands of the zamindars or the ryots, combined with
competition and free transferability of the right would lead to application of
capital to land, i.e., inputs of capital and technology; and this combination of
land, labour, and capital would, along with the incentive to improve which
ownership gives, lead to agricultural growth. At the same time, the land of
improvident, ignorant, and lazy owners would be bought by those who were
thrifty, industrious, and skilful. Thus gradually India would become the land
of ‘the improving landlord’ and ‘the efficient farmer’. The government gain
would come from the security of land revenue which private ownership of
land and its saleability would ensure and from the increase in revenue which
agricultural growth would make possible.
Actual developments did not bear out these expectations. As a combined
result of various factors—disruption of the existing industrial pattern, failure
of modern industrial growth and the consequent pressure on land, lack of
avenues other than landlordism and money-lending for capital investment,
administrative and judicial structure, the weight of traditional agrarian
structure in several areas, the high pitch and rigidity of land revenue
demand, the failure of the government to take positive measures of
agricultural improvement like provision of cheap credit—what came into
existence was a caricature of the earlier designs, backward agriculture,
though with expansion in area under cultivation, and regressive agrarian
relations with rack-rented tenancy and sub-infeudation increasingly coming
to dominate both the zamindari and the ryotwari areas. The government
made several abortive attempts to protect the ryot from oppressive landlords
and extortionate money-lenders. These attempts provided occasions for the
articulation of ideas on development of agriculture. These ideas were,
however, still dominated by the old outlook.
 So far as land revenue was concerned, the tendency was to deny that its
pitch was high. Several writers also claimed that land revenue could not be a
burden since it came out of the rental of land. The rigidity of land revenue
was, however, often recognised as an evil.
In general, the belief prevailed that there was nothing basically wrong
with Indian agriculture. There was satisfaction with the increase in area
under cultivation believed to be from 50 to 100 per cent since 1820.51 No
claims were made for technological improvements and some fears of
exhaustion of the soil were expressed, but even here increase of irrigation
facilities was believed to be a positive factor.52 But the main reason for
optimism was the belief that as a result of growth in exports and the
consequent commercialization of agriculture, Indian agriculture had
abandoned the ‘stationary stage’ to which Mill had assigned it and
traditional Indian economy and entered the modern stage of change,
modernization, and growth.53 In fact, it was believed that some of its
troubles regarding landlord tenant relations and transfer of land to money-
lenders sprang from this modernization and should be seen as the inevitable
temporary dislocation in the transition from a lower to a higher stage.54
Strained zamindar-tenant relations and the spread of rural indebtedness
leading to transfer of land to non-cultivating classes drew government
attention to the agrarian problem throughout the period. But the focus of
discussion was confined to the political and administrative dangers involved
in agrarian unrest and, to some extent, to broad sympathy for the peasant as
the victim of rack-renting landlords and usurious, ‘blood-sucking’ money-
lenders. The implications of the developing pattern of agrarian relations for
economic development in general and for agricultural growth in particular
evaded attention. In fact, as pointed out earlier, the entire discussion around
the remedial measures was carried on within the older framework of
thought. No new theory of land tenures or agrarian relations was evolved.
The system of zamindari and landlordism, and the mechanism of land
transfers, was considered economically and politically essential and
inevitable. Only transition to it, it was believed, might be made less painful.
This view was, of course, consistent with the notion that Indian economy as
well as agriculture were being rapidly modernized and brought into the
mainstream of world economic development.
Typical of the British thinking on tenancy reforms were the ideas of A.C.
Lyall, who was a major confidant of Lord Dufferin during whose viceroyalty
the pattern of tenancy legislation was laid, and who was later a member of
India Council from 1887 to 1902. The genesis of the conflict between
zamindars and tenants, he wrote in the Edinburgh Review of January 1884,
lay in the march of modern economic forces: the progress of trade and
agriculture, transition from customary rents to variable contractual rents,
and changes in the conditions of supply and demand of land due to increase
in population, Moreover, “since peace and security have increased the profits
of land, and have guaranteed the safe investment of capital, the rich and
enterprising classes are striving, as they have always done elsewhere, to
acquire the land in single unfettered ownership.” But “this transition presses
hard on the old-world cultivator” whose rent tends to rise, and leads to
government’s concern for his welfare. In Upper India, the government had
by legislation checked “the efforts of proprietors to get rid of tenant right.”
The result, “like anything that retards the rate and mitigates the effect of
inevitable but unpopular changes, has been very salutary.” The government
now, by its projected legislation, proposes to regulate by law the terms of
contract between the landlord and the tenant. The situation is interesting for
two reasons: “no attempt to define and regulate by state ordinance the
proper relations” between landlords and tenants “has ever yet known to
succeed,” and the situation in India is unique insofar as “the old-fashioned
landlords and ryots, often equally improvident and thriftless...are survivals of a
period suddenly arrested by the political cataclysm of English rule in India: the
modern landlord, the capitalist, the competition for holdings among a rising
set of frugal industrious peasants, are the new elements brought in by the
flood." Thus, the change is inevitable. But the Government of India’s role in
transforming India and its position in the country are such that it has to
interpose to “aid and superintend the inevitable processes of transition.”
Moreover, it is our moral duty “to endeavour to protect the weak”. At the
same time we should be cautious and guard against the tendency “to take
too much upon ourselves, and assume responsibility for economical
symptoms that are probably inseparable from the pains and labour of a
country’s new birth" It should also be remembered that, “legal devices for
preserving landlords do not always fit in very neatly with plans for
protecting tenants; and no restrictive measures of this kind are easily
accommodated with the improvement of agriculture and the periodic
adjustments of our land revenue.” Such regulatory efforts check the influx of
capital as well as hamper the efforts of revenue officers to determine the real
rental of land for purposes of fixing land revenue. At the same time, “the
attempt to reconcile farming classes and to alleviate the hardships of
changing times is justifiable.”55
Lyall realized that his analysis had not succeeded in reconciling the effort
at tenancy legislation with the officially accepted theory of agricultural
growth. And so he ends his analysis by confessing: “But the government
does not appear yet to have disentangled its different lines of policy with
regard to the land, or to have definitely laid out its own course amid the
conflict of different ends and interests.”56
Though no other writer discussed the landlord-tenant relations at this
length, the general tendency was to look upon the existing relations either as
basically satisfactory, though permitting of some improvement,57 or as
incapable of radical change, even if unsatisfactory from the tenant's point of
view.58 Most of the writers merely ignored the question.
One reason why the British writers offered no radical alteration in
landlord-tenant relations was their belief that zamindars and other
landowning classes were an essential political base of British rule as their
very existence depended on its stability.59
The British writers also fully recognized the harmful effects the growing
rural indebtedness and the resulting rapid transfer of land into the hands of
non-cultivating money-lenders were having on peasant’s welfare and the
political stability of the regime. But once again there occurred a clash
between remedial action and the theories of the role of money-lender in the
economy and of the growth of indebtedness and land transfers. The
prevalent British view of the process of rise of indebtedness was something
like the following:
 The government had by limiting and fixing for long periods its demand
for land revenue created a surplus in the hands of the landowners (or,
as sometimes expressed in Ricardian terms, left a part of the economic
rent with them),60 thus giving value to land. This combined with the
right to sell or transfer land had enabled them to borrow on land as
security. At the same time, the untaxed surplus and security of property
had made land ownership attractive to money-lenders and ‘capitalists’.
The economic development of India had increased this unearned
surplus. And since the government had refused to skim it off, the value
of land had increased as also the capacity of the peasant to borrow. The
rapacious, intelligent, unscrupulous and usurious moneylender had
taken advantage of this situation, and, aided by the thriftlessness of the
peasantry, the defective administrative and judicial system, and the
rigidity of the land revenue demand, piled up the heavy burden of debt
and was busy taking possession of the land.61
This view automatically led to two conclusions: either the government
should sweep into its coffers the entire economic rent, including the
unearned income, in order to save the peasant from himself, or take such
strong action against the money-lenders as to virtually make illegal the
practice of money-lending as well as any transfer of rural land. The first
alternative, though theoretically and financially attractive and a good
argument against those who blamed high land revenue demand for
backwardness of agriculture, was never put forward for administrative
action, obviously because of its political impracticability.
Any version of the second choice would tend to leave the peasant
creditless. At this stage, another popular view entered the situation. It was
believed that in spite of his many-sided villainies the village sowcar
performed a necessary and useful function, that he was in fact indispensable
to rural economy. He enabled the ryot to survive during the bad seasons,
thus also saving the government the expense of providing relief, provided
the ryot with capital for necessary agricultural operations, and made it
possible for him to pay the land revenue on time, thus saving the
government from financial embarrassment and the landowner from
summary sale of his land by the government. Non-alienation of land or any
similar step would by restricting credit harm the peasant himself and would
merely force him to borrow under severe conditions. It would also check all
fresh application of capital to land.62
Nor could these writers abandon the notion that on economic grounds
transfer of land was essential for agricultural growth for it would lead to
growth of capitalist agriculture. As W. Lee-Warner put it:

A process of natural and gradual decay, of debt sinking into

bankruptcy, and of bankruptcy bearing the fruit of eviction, may
produce a healthier readjustment of rural society. It cannot be denied
that the transfer of property from ignorance, improvidence, and sloth,
into the hands of thrift, industry, and skill, will be beneficial. Even the
evicted peasantry, who now view the process with discontent and
alarm, will gain by their freedom from the wreck of their encumbered
estates. As free labourers they will at least recommence a new financial
and moral existence and may in process of time recover what they have
lost. In any case a more healthy tone will be infused into the relations
which subsist between land and capital, when the risk and waste, which
attend debts contracted by men who can never repay them, are
eliminated from the loan market.63
It was, however, felt by many that something had to be done, for the
transfer of land from cultivating to non-cultivating, from ‘war-like’ to ‘un-
warlike’ classes, was creating discontent and could prove politically
disastrous leading to active revolt.64 But in view of their economic
understanding, the only steps these writers could suggest were ameliorative
which would let the money-lender function but which would prevent him
from being very oppressive. Such steps were regulation of interest rates,
checks on the unscrupulousness of the sowcar, and reform of the judicial
machinery.65

In view of the basically optimistic view of the current economic

development and of its future prospects, the British writers of the imperialist
school did not pay sufficient attention to the factors which were hampering
or which might hamper growth. However, some discussion of the retarding
factors did take place though it was mixed up with the discussion why
Indians had a low standard of living.
We have already seen that shortage of internal capital was seen as a
particular weakness; but it was seen mure as a past failure than a present
obstacle, since foreign capital was believed to be a ready substitute, and
British rule was said to be increasing national wealth. The only major barrier
to growth and welfare was held to be the rapidly increasing population
which might any time run ahead of land,66 though even here there were
dissidents.67 In view of their optimistic outlook, they did not generally tend
to see Indian social institutions as major obstacles to growth.68 The three
aspects criticized sometimes were: the tendency to marry early and produce
a large number of children intensified population pressure;69 the
thriftlessness and the pressure to spend extravagantly on social occasions led
to low capital formation;70 and their few wants, apathy, and lack of ambition
and aspiring spirit left little incentive to exert and develop or little scope for
growth.71 This lack of attention towards the correlation between social
backwardness and growth is also explained by the widespread view that the
old social values and patterns of living were breaking down and social life
was being rapidly modernized under the impact of railways, modern
education, British administration, etc.72
Apart from population, the only other major obstacle to growth noted by
some of the British writers was India’s incapacity to raise enough revenue to
adequately finance the different agents of growth. This was in turn linked
with the country’s poverty. India just did not produce enough surplus above
subsistence. As many of them put it, India had to maintain a modern
administration out of Asiatic revenues and this hardly left any funds for
other improvement.73
Some of the British writers also held that Indian progress appeared slow
and that the standard of living of its people was by absolute standards low
because of the extremely low economic base from which the British had to
start the hauling up operation.74
 In any case, the general opinion was that British administration was doing
all it could and that nothing was basically wrong with the government policy
or with the institutional structure that had grown in India since 1757. But if
any weaknesses remained, they were on the Indian side.75 If anything, the
British raj had perhaps been guilty of modernizing and improving India too
fast. In fact, gradually a consensus was emerging that Britain should slow
down the process of modernization to suit Indian conditions.76

The dominant British view of the nature of British rule in India in its
economic aspects continued to be characterized by notions of benevolence
and trusteeship. Of course, British gains from India were freely
acknowledged and even stressed in the course of controversy with the anti-
imperialist publicists within Britain. The gains cited most often were: (i)
expanding foreign trade in general with special emphasis on India as a
market for manufactures and a source of raw materials; (ii) a field for British
capital; (iii) a remunerative field of employment for British youngmen
especially of the middle classes; (iv) employment for British shipping; (v)
use of Indian army for imperial purposes; and lastly (vi) the fact that, unlike
in other colonies, all these advantages cost Britain nothing. These gains
were, however, held to be a part of the coincidence and mutuality of interests
between Britain and India, and were not in any way to be seen as the guiding
motives of British economic policies in India.
The model and ideas of economic development discussed above were
tending to break down by the end of the 19th century. The famines during
the years 1896 to 1900 were merely dramatic demonstrations of this
breakdown. By the 20th century it was becoming difficult to hold on to these
ideas the inadequacy of whose explanatory as well as innovating power had
become apparent.77 One could now either recognise that something was
wrong with the existing British model of growth and set out to build a new
one, or reiterate the old model, emphasize positive achievements, discover
and stress the role of such internal social weaknesses as caste, joint family,
character of the people and population, and point out that economic
development is a lengthy process, particularly in Asian societies. British
writers in the 20th century increasingly took up the second approach, gave
up the ‘grand design’ of India becoming a great industrial power, and in
general tended to abandon both optimism and economic rationality. At the
same time, they continued to emphasize that their model of development of
India as a colony was not only viable but that India’s development was
possible only if it remained a colony and followed the model. The Indian
nationalists, on the other hand, joined by many anti-imperialist writers of
the West, adopted the first course; and in the process created a political
economy of 19th century imperialism and put forward new ideas on how to
develop the underdeveloped economies.

978

The Indian nationalist writers too started out with a positive evaluation of
British impact on India. They too hoped that the establishment of a
centralized administration, security of person and property, importation of
Western science, technology, capital and economic organization,
construction of railways and roads, linkage with the world market, and
spread of modern ideas and culture would initiate a new era of economic
modernization and progress. But they soon began to notice that reality was
not conforming to their hopes. They came to believe that not only was
progress in new directions slow and halting but the country was
economically regressing, that is, becoming more underdeveloped. Their
economic ideas developed in the course of their efforts to find an answer to
the question: why was the earlier promise not being realised, and what steps
had to be taken to realise it?
Two basic aspects of the nationalist outlook may be noted at the outset.
The nationalists developed an integrated approach towards the problem of
economic development. They did not accept that advances in isolated
sectors like transport, trade, or area under cultivation could in themselves
constitute development. All these were to be seen in their relationship to the
economy as a whole. Different sectors of the economy must be balanced if
they were to produce a healthy effect.
Secondly, they maintained that the core of economic development lay in
rapid and modern industrialization. Not every increase of wealth was
development, they said. It was the potentiality for future growth or, as they
put it, ‘the power of production’ that counted. They of course denied that
nature had designed India to be in the main an agricultural country. To the
contrary, they said, India had to industrialize or go under since land was
here in short supply. They also favoured industrialization for cultural, social
and political reasons. Regarding the last, the argument was that modern
industry was precisely the force which could help unite the diverse people of
India into a single national entity having common interests.
The nationalists, therefore, insisted on examining official policies
regarding trade, transport, currency and exchange, tariffs, finance, and
foreign capital in their relationship to this paramount aspect of
industrialization. For example, their definition of economic backwardness or
underdevelopment was that it characterized a society in which industry
played a minor role in the total economic life and most of whose labour
force was devoted to agriculture. Hence, they condemned the destruction of
India’s handicraft industries and the failure of new modern industries to rise
in their place. They also believed that in spite of the absence of modern
industry, the balance between industry and agriculture in India at the
beginning of British rule was more favourable than in the second-half of the
nineteenth century. Since this balance was not very different from the one
prevailing in the rest of the world, and if the development of modern
industries in Britain and Europe since then was taken into consideration,
India had in fact regressed and become more underdeveloped or rather had
now become underdeveloped. In a way, the Indian nationalists were,
therefore, perhaps the first to define economic underdevelopment in a
modern scientific sense, for the 19th century British economists still talked
of stationary and changing societies. This approach also led the nationalists
to grasp that India’s underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth century
was of recent origin and was not a mere carry-over of the traditional past.
Furthermore, they recognized that the other aspect of this
underdevelopment was foreign economic domination, whereby partial
modernization of the economy was used to serve colonial purposes. As
Justice Ranade put it, India was looked upon by its rulers as “a plantation,
growing raw produce to be shipped by British agents in British ships, to be
worked into fabrics by British skill and capital, and to be re-exported to the
Dependency by British merchants to their corresponding British firms in
India and elsewhere.”79

10

First of all, the nationalists tried to correlate British economic policies in

India and the factors of growth which British writers believed were leading
to growth with the actual course of economic development. They also
analysed the capacity of these factors to retard or advance growth.
So far as foreign trade was concerned, they denied that its growth in itself
constituted economic progress or could trigger off economic development.
To them, what was important was not the volume of foreign trade but its
pattern—the nature of goods exchanged—and its impact on domestic
income, industry and employment. Once again, they drew attention to the
overwhelming bias of exports towards raw materials and of imports towards
manufactured goods.
Far from being an index of prosperity or an agent of growth, increasing
imports of manufactures, they believed, were injuring domestic industry.
Instead of supplementing and adding to indigenous manufactures and
giving birth to new wants and new industries, imports of manufactures were
displacing indigenous hand-made goods and preventing the rise of modern
industry. As G.S. Iyer put it: “In India international exchange did not
supplement and perfect domestic exchange, it substituted for the latter and,
therefore, annihilated it.”80 Increasing imports were therefore making India,
and keeping it, an agrarian appendage of Britain. At the same time, the
nationalists welcomed the import of machinery, metals and raw materials.
They also rejected the notion that increasing exports of raw materials
were beneficial, for, in their view, they represented the increasing drain of
wealth, or unilateral transfer of capital, and payment for the increasing
imports. They represented ruralization of the country and its economic
exploitation. Moreover, even the direct benefits of the export of agricultural
products did not reach the cultivator; they were skimmed off by the
merchant, money-lender, landlord, and the government. On the other hand,
the resulting rise in prices left the poor peasants and the agricultural
labourers worse off.
The Indians also complained of another abnormal feature of India’s
foreign trade. Its control was in foreign hands and therefore its profits leaked
out.
The Indians were of course not autarkists or opposed to the growth of
foreign trade as such. They, however, demanded that this growth should be
‘natural’, that is, based on the economic needs of the country and on equality
and mutual advantage. They wanted the needs of economic development in
general and of industry in particular to determine the extent, nature, and
direction of foreign trade.
The nationalists also favoured protection on the infant industry principle
and on the ground that industry was superior to agriculture for it
represented increasing returns. They did not deny the validity of the theory
of comparative costs but they opposed the use of this theory and free trade
based on it to freeze the existing pattern of division of labour between India
and Britain. In fact, more than any other single factor, it was the tariff policy
of the Government of India which convinced Indians that British policies in
India were basically guided by the interests of the British capitalist class.

11

Indian nationalists also denied that the railways automatically led to

economic development. While acknowledging the other usual benefits of the
railways, they noted that their construction had not led to industrial growth.
Instead, they had facilitated penetration of the Indian market by foreign
goods and thus tended to perpetuate and extend the economic back-
wardness. The benefits of railway construction both in terms of their impact
on industry and side-effects in terms of finance and encouragement to steel
and machine industry had been reaped by Britain. In terms of recent
terminology, the nationalist view was that railways served as a social
overhead not for Indian but British industry and their external economies
were exported back to Britain. In fact, remarked G.V. Joshi, guaranteed
interest on the railways should be seen as Indian subsidy to British industry.
Or, in the words of Tilak, it was like “decorating another’s wife.”81
As an alternative policy, the Indians held that railways construction
should be coordinated with the economic needs of India. The problem here
was that of the best utilization of scarce financial resources. Clearly, they
said, India was more in need of industries and increase of agricultural
production than transport facilities; and, under Indian conditions, the best
way to encourage the former was to do so directly and not indirectly by
extending railways. Even the railways would become useful only if industries
were rising and growing alongside them. They, therefore, demanded that the
state aid being given to the railways should be diverted to industry and
irrigation and future railway extension should be coordinated with the
growth of Indian trade and industry. The nationalist position was summed
up by G.V. Joshi in 1884: “Simultaneously with these facilities of transport,
the state should have provided proper economic conditions of varied
industrial life in the country, which alone would have enabled it to turn this
advantage to national account.”82
The nationalists also asked the question: why did the government put so
much emphasis on railway construction? Their answer was that it wanted to
open the Indian market to British manufacturers, enable the export of raw
materials and foodstuffs, promote the sale of British steel and machine
products, provide a channel for investment of surplus British capital, and
facilitate the movement of the armed forces.

12

The nationalists were for long confused and divided in their attitude towards
foreign capital. But gradually almost all of them with the exception of M.G.
Ranade came to oppose it rather vehemently. Ranade emphasized the role of
foreign capital as a supplement to scarce internal capital, and as an example
and a stimulant to indigenous enterprise. Other Indians disagreed. They
believed that instead of encouraging indigenous capital, foreign capital
replaced and suppressed it and made its future growth more difficult. It led
to further foreign domination and control of Indian life. Moreover, foreign
enterprises had virtually no positive side or indirect effects for they exported
most of their economic benefits. Not only were the high profits exported but
a large part of the salary bill was paid to the foreign employees who in turn
exported most of their income. Nearly all the technical and managerial posts
were occupied by foreigners who eventually retired and left the country. So
India did not receive even technical know-how as a by-product. In fact, the
nationalists said, there were hardly any positive effects of foreign capital
investment in India so far as economic development was concerned. Their
only contribution was the creation of some additional employment. But then
the unskilled Indians in foreign-owned plantations, mines, etc., were paid at
abysmally low rates of wages. “They simply acted,” said Dadabhai Naoroji,
“as mere slaves, to slave upon their own land, and their own resources in
order to give away the products to the British capitalists.”83 In other words,
foreign capital in Indian conditions was not developing the country but
exploiting it.
Even so the nationalists confined their particular objection to foreign
capital investment in trade, banking, railways, and extractive and plantation
industries; they raised no objection to such investment in jute and cotton
textile industries.
They also noted that foreign capital in India did not represent an addition
to scarce internal capital through the import of foreign funds. It was Indian
capital first drained out through trade, banking, and administrative
mechanism and then returned in part as foreign capital. They noted that
India had a net export surplus after all the foreign loans and investments
had been accounted for in the net imports.
A corollary of their approach towards foreign capital was the refusal to
accept the view that India could not be industrialized without foreign
capital. On the contrary, they said, genuine economic development was
possible only if Indian capitalists initiated and developed the process of
industrialization. Foreign capital was incapable of realizing this task. On this
point Ranade also agreed.
The nationalist writers also warned against the political consequences of
foreign capital investment. Foreign capital, it was said, created vested
interests which gradually wielded an increasing and dominating influence
over administration. In a country which was already under foreign rule, this
danger increased manifold for the investors demanded security and
perpetuation of foreign rule. As G. Subramaniya Iyer’s Hindu pointed out on
23 September 1889:

Where foreign capital has been sunk in a country, the administration of

that country becomes at once the concern of the bond-holders... (if)
the influence of foreign capitalists in the land is allowed to increase,
then adieu to all chances of success of the Indian National Congress,
whose voice will be drowned in the tremendous uproar of ‘the empire
in danger’ that will surely be raised by the foreign capitalists.
But if foreign capital was required, said the nationalists, India should
import only the capital and not the capitalists. They favoured loan capital as
against entrepreneurial capital. While the latter reaped and carried away all
the profits of enterprise and monopolized and appropriated ‘the whole field’,
the former would be entitled only to fixed interest and even the principal
could be gradually repaid.
We might in the end note that the point of view of the comprador was
more or less entirely absent in the nationalist writing of the period.

13

Coming down to positive remedies, the two crucial factors which would,
according to the nationalists, promote industrialization and economic
development were tariff protection and active state support. They were
convinced that the Indian capitalist class being weak found it difficult to
develop unaided, especially as it faced the uncertainties of a narrow market
and an unchartered field. But they were equally convinced that it would
respond positively if state support and protection were extended to it. The
other side of the model, they said, was that the state in an underdeveloped
country had the obligation to actively aid economic development. And the
best way to help industry and agriculture was to do so directly.
Their case for tariff protection was made along the usual lines, as pointed
out earlier. But the role of the state was delineated not only forcefully but
even with some originality.84 Following were some of the ways in which,
they said, the state should help:

1. Make up the lack of internal private capital through low interest loans
to the entrepreneurs directly by the state or through finance
corporations.
2. Make up for the ‘shyness’ of the Indian capitalists by extending
subsidies and by providing security to their enterprises by giving
guarantees of minimum profit similar to those given to railway
companies.
3. Help mobilize scattered indigenous capital through the development of
state-aided, directed, or controlled joint stock banks and other similar
credit institutions.
4. Organisation of state-run and financed agricultural credit banks.
5. Help absorb foreign capital into Indian economy and shield indigenous
capital from domination by it by importing foreign capital on its own
account and then lending it to the local capitalists.
6. Pioneer government-owned industries, when there was no hope of
local capital venturing into a field. Joshi and Naoroji also suggested
government operation of those industries which needed enormous
foreign capital. In such circumstances, the state should borrow money
abroad at low rates of interest on the security of its revenues and
employ it to undertake public works, mining, industries, etc.
7. Provide greater irrigation facilities.
8. Purchase government and railway stores from Indian manufacturers.
9. Collect and disseminate industrial and commercial information.
 10. Promote technical education.
11. End the drain of capital.

14

The agrarian outlook of Indian nationalists was the weakest link in the chain
of their economic thinking. They had, of course, little difficulty in criticizing
the official land revenue policy based on a high rate of assessment, periodic
reassessment, and a rigid system of collection. This policy, they believed,
interfered with the full emergence of private property in land and private
investment in agriculture. The remedy lay in permanently limiting the state
demand so that ‘the magic of property’ could operate freely in agriculture.
The Indian understanding of the emerging agrarian problem did not,
however, go beyond this vague generalization, except for a few outstanding
exceptions to be discussed later. Most of the Indians in fact failed to give
importance to the new, emerging structure of agrarian relations, though
they did express a vague humanitarian solicitude for the tenantry and the
debt-ridden peasantry. At the same time an open espousal of the zamindar
or landlord interests vis-a-vis the tenant was also rare.
A few Indians attacked the system of zamindari. This was true of the
young Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and R.C. Dutt as well as Justice Ranade
and Prithwis Chandra Ray. G.V. Joshi dealt critically with the emergence of
landlordism in the Ryotwari areas. Similarly, the dominant section of the
nationalists in Bengal, including the Indian Association and Surendranath
Banerjea, adopted a radical pro-tenant stand during the controversy on the
Bengal Tenancy Bill during the 1880s. A few Indians, for example the editors
of the Som Prakash (24 July and 27 November 1881) and the Indian
Spectator (2 October 1881), also demanded the abolition of the zamindari
system.
A few of the Indian nationalists, and most of all Ranade, opposed the
existing semi-feudal agrarian relations and advocated their complete
restructuring on a capitalist footing. In this, Ranade was powerfully
influenced by the Prussian land legislation. While favouring tenancy
legislation as a short-term remedy to protect tenant interests, he believed
that such legislation perpetuated the old pattern of agrarian relations, merely
making it more complex, and sapping still further the initiative of both the
zamindars and the tenants. He urged the government to go in for ‘radical
reform’ in place of mere tinkering by evolving clear-cut capitalist relations in
agriculture, or, as he put it, establishing land relations based on ‘individual
and independent property’. His model of capitalist agriculture was two-
pronged: the majority of the cultivators must be independent, small peasant
proprietors, while at the top there should be a large class of capitalist farmers
who would be, unlike the zamindars, complete owners of their land on the
model of British landlords or the German junkers. He, therefore, advocated
that the future development of agrarian relations in India should be based
on the creation of two basic agrarian classes which would live side by side:
(a) a large petty peasantry which would be free of all encumbrances,
whether of the state or the landlords, and which would be bolstered by a
permanent and law land tax and the provision of cheap credit through
agricultural banks; and (b) a large class of capitalist farmers and landlords
who, being unhampered by any tenancy right, etc., would be in complete
possession of their land and in a position to invest capital and utilize the
latest advanced techniques of agriculture. This last class was to be brought
into being by the transformation of the existing zamindars into capitalist
landlords and by enabling the upper strata of the peasantry to acquire land
and rise into the new status.85
G.V. Joshi, on the other hand, favoured small peasant farming which was
to be maintained by vigorous tenancy legislation in both the ryotwari and
the zamindari areas, availability of cheap credit, and a low land tax.86
Some of the prominent Indian nationalists also emphasized the close and
vital link between the development of agriculture and the development of
modern industry. The two must occur simultaneously; otherwise no effort
towards mere agricultural development could succeed. The increasing
pressure of population on agriculture would negate all such efforts. For
example, so long as there was excessive competition for land no amount of
legislation could protect the land-hungry tenants from rack-renting.
Industry alone could syphon off the excess agricultural population and
create conditions for agricultural development.
 15

So far as the question of the internal obstacles to economic development was

concerned, the Indian nationalists once again tended to differ from the
British views. They stoutly denied that the large population of India was one
such obstacle. They denied that India was overpopulated or that its rate of
population growth was high. Rather, what appeared to be overpopulation
was the result of India’s economic underdevelopment under British rule.
Similarly, they summarily dismissed the notion that the Indian people were
thriftless, extravagant, or lazy.
The shortage of internal capital was seen as an obstacle to economic
growth but this was not seen as an inherent characteristic of the Indian
economy. There was, the Indians believed, plenty of potential capital in the
country, The problem was that of its mobilization and utilization. At present
this capital found uneconomic outlets in governmental expenditure, the
‘drain’ to Britain, hoarding, and uneconomic expenditure by the zamindars
and princes. They also stressed the lack of modern credit institutions and the
capitalist institution of joint stock enterprises.
Some of the social reformers among the nationalists emphasized the
negative impact of the traditional social institutions such as the caste system
and joint family, religious ideals, and customs and traditions. In particular,
they bemoaned the absence of the spirit of enterprise in the land. The only
remedy lay in the radical altering of the social institutions and social outlook
of the people. The entire question did not, however, assume much
importance in the nationalist economic thinking, writing, and agitation for
reasons which I have discussed in some other place.87

16

All the time when criticizing British economic policies or ideas and putting
forth their own remedies, issue by issue, the nationalists asked the question:
why did not the administrators recognise all this and follow correct policies?
In every case, they found that one or the other British economic interest
stood in the way, and that, most important of all, the interests of Indian
industrial growth were invariably subordinated to the interests of British
trade, industry and capital. They gradually came to believe that British
economic policies and ideas were closely related to the nature and character
of British rule in India—that this rule’s fundamental purpose was to make
India serve dominant British economic interests, in other words, to enable
economic exploitation of India.88 As the young intellectual, Sachidanand
Sinha, put it in 1903 in the Indian People of 27 February 1903:

Their work of administration in Lord Curzon's testimony is only the

handmaid to the task of exploitation. Trade cannot thrive without
efficient administration, while the latter is not worth attending to in the
absence of profits of the former. So always with the assent and often to
the dictates of the Chamber of Commerce, the Government of India is
carried on, and this is the White Man’s Burden’.
The economic belief that British rule no longer promoted economic growth
but was, in fact, now an obstacle in its path gradually led to the political
conviction that an Indian government alone could create favourable
conditions for economic growth. By 1905 the demand for self-government
came to be raised by all the prominent nationalist economic writers and
thinkers.
To sum up: The main theoretical contribution of the nationalist writers
lay (a) in their analysis of the nature and economic mechanism of an
imperialism which no longer functioned through the crude tools of plunder
and tribute or mercantilism but operated through the more disguised and
complex mechanism of free trade and capital investment: (b) their analytical
conclusion that imperialism in its many guises was the main obstacle to
economic development in India already by the end of the nineteenth
century; and (c) in their grasping of the fact that economic development
required a political system conducive to it. Their failure lay in the fact that
they ignored the importance of the internal socioeconomic structure,
particularly the agrarian structure. Moreover, their entire economic thinking
was done within the framework of a capitalist economic outlook. They never
asked the question whether the Indian economy could develop along
national capitalist lines even with government help in a period when it had
been integrated into the world capitalist economy as a colony of British
imperialism. While the former was to lead to a powerful national movement
and a major economic effort after independence, the long range influence of
the latter and the gradual erosion of the former view under the impact of
narrow class interests was to make the Indian leadership of the post-
nationalist era halt and falter in their effort and perhaps even to abandon it
in the end. A significant role in this erosion has been played by the post-
independence abandonment of the theoretical outlook and method of the
earlier nationalist leadership, by the uncritical acceptance by the post-
independence leadership of some of the high falutin, so-called modern
economic theories which in the name of ‘pure’ and ‘scientific’ outlook drew
attention away from the economic role of imperialism, the semi-feudal
agrarian relations, and the close connection between state power and
economic policy. But this is a line of enquiry which had perhaps be better
left to the economists to pursue.

NOTES

Reprinted from Studies in Modern Indian History. No.1. edited by B.R.

Nanda and V.C. Joshi. New Delhi. 1972 .
1 The only Indian economic problem to get widespread attention from the British economists was that

of currency, but currency discussions seldom touched on wider problems of development

2 It may be noted here that there was an extreme paucity of not only economic but also other writings

on India in British publications of the period, especially after 1880.

3 We have, of course, for analytical convenience excluded the few dissidents on both sides. From the

beginning there were a few British writers like Hyndman, Connell, Osborne and Digby whose stand
was similar to that of the nationalists; and there were Indians who echoed the official writing. But,
then the former were anti-imperialist and the latter merely echoed the imperialist economic outlook.
4 For the Indians, see Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New

Delhi, 1966), pp. 5–7, 24–25, 27. For the British, see John and Richard Strachey, The Finances and
Public Works of India, 1869–1881 (1882), p. 429; M.E. Grant Duff CR (The Contemporary Review),
Feb. 1887, p. 192, and Sept. 1891, p. 328.
5 Foreword to The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947, Select Documents, 1962 (1965

reprint), viii.
6 Ed R. (The Edinburgh Review), July 1882, p. 68. Also see his article in QR (The Quarterly Review),

April 1880, pp. 491–92.

7 The Finances and Public Works of India, pp. 6 and 8. Also see pp. 7, 11, 324–25.

8 H.S. Maine, “India", in The Reign of Queen Victoria, (ed.), Thomas Henry Ward, Vol. I (1887), pp.

486, 494, 518 and 524. R.D. Mangles, Ed. R., Jan. 1864, P. 96; T. Maltby, QR. July 1866, pp. 207–08;
“The Character of British Rule in India", WR (The Westiminster Review), July 1868, p. 22; “The Future
of the British Empire", WR, July 1870, p. 51; W. Lee-Wamer, QR, April 1879, pp. 386–87, and July
1881, pp. 88, 63, 74; L.J. Jennings, QR, April 1885, p. 504; M.E. Grant Duff, CR, Jan. 1887, pp. 12–13;
A. Lyall, Ed. R., Jan. 1884, p. 9, Jan. 1889, p. 421, and Jan. 1895, p. 17: Charles W. Dilke, Problems of
Greater Britain (1890), Vol., II. p. 21; J.A. Baines, QR. April 1889, pp. 313–14, 321; John Strachey,
India, 1894 ed., pp. 301, 303. Also see Bipan Chandra, pp. 28–29.
9 W.W. Hunter, The India of the Queen and other Elssays (London 1903), p. 123. Also see pp. 125–26,

147.
10 Ibid., p. 4. Similarly, Richard Temple, though cautions, basically adopted the optimistic view, India

in 1880 (3rd ed. 1881), iv, pp. 93 ff., 493, 495.

11 Official Papers (1926), p. 289.

12 The general opinion was that the era of progress had begun only in 1850s, the previous period

being one of political and administrative consolidation. See, for example, “English rule in India", WR,
July 1861, p. 123; R.D. Mangles, Ed. R., Jan. 1864, pp. 97–98; “Indian Worthies", WR, Jan. 1868, p. 161;
W.R. Mansfield, Ed.R, April 1876, p. 404; J. and R. Strachey, pp. 1 ff.; G. Campbell, Ed. R., July 1882, p.
68; Maine pp. 484–85.
13 Ed. R., Jan. 1864, pp. 96–97. (He likened “the Sepoy Mutiny" to the French Revolution; “It did for

India, by a shorter and less widely painful process of awakening, what the Revolution of 1793 did for
France...this great thunderstorm...has cleared the atmosphere, and done so much to render progress
and development both easy and safe." pp. 97–98); ‘English Rule in India’, WR, July 1862, pp. 113, 131,
137–38; T. Maltby, QR, July 1866, p. 214 ff; Temple, pp. 5, 501–02; W. Lee-Warner, QR, July 1881, pp.
60–63, 65; J. and R. Strachey, pp.l ff., 185, 325; G. Campbell, Ed. R., July 1882, pp. 67–68; L.J. Jennings,
QR, April 1885, p. 504; Maine, p. 486; Charles Dilke, p. 86; Hunter p. 153.
14 This is a constant theme. See, for example, “The Character of British Rule in India," WR July 1868,

pp. 5–6; Hunter, pp. 99 ff., 113, 124–25; J. and R. Strachey, pp. 11, 101–02; L.J. Jennings, QR, April
1885, p. 504; Maine, p. 501; F.C. Channing, Economic Review, Jan. 1902, p. 121.
15 Hunter, pp. 100 ff.; 106 ff.; J and R. Strachey, p. 11; Maine, p. 520; L.J. Jennings, QR, April 1886, p.

454; J. Strachey, p. 159.

16 For Adam Smith, see J.M. Letiche in Theories of Economic Growth (Illinois 1960), (ed.), Bert F.

Hoselitz; for Ricardo, see Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965), pp. 60, 91.
17 Principles of Political Economy, (ed.) W.J. Ashley, (1926 impression), pp. 18, 113–14, 121.

18 Ibid., pp. 189, 701.

19 Manual of Political Economy (1883 ed.) p. 87.

20 Ibid., p. 453.

21 Ibid., p. 87. Emphasis added.

22 Most of the writers cited in f.n.’s 34–39 made this point.

23 Charles Dilke, Greater Britain (1868), p. 531; Hunter, p. 97; Temple, p. 497; J.E.C. Bodley, QR, April

1890, p. 556; C.P. Lucas, Introduction to G.C. Lewis, An Essay on the Government of Dependencies
(1891 ed.), liv.
24 Mill, pp. 121–22.

25 John and Richard Strachey, pp. 312, 316–17, 324. Also see, R.D. Mangles, Ed.R, Jan. 1864, pp. 100–

01; “The Future of the British Empire,” WR, July 1870, pp. 50–51; T. Maltby, QR, July 1866, p. 207;
Hunter, pp. 122 ff.; Temple, pp. 309, 311, 316; "The Relation of Silver to Gold as Coin," WR, Jan 1880,
p. 136; W. Lee-Wamer, WR, July 1881, p. 61; J. Strachey, pp. 155, 304.
26 Maine, p. 521; J. Strachey, p. 146. Also see Hunter, p. 125; Temple, p. 91; Fawcett, p. 61.

27 Temple, p. 91; M.E. Grant Duff, CR, Jan. 1887, pp. 17–18.

28 Mill, p. 922.

29 H. Sidgwick, The Principles of Political Economy (1883), Book III, Chapter V; A. Marshall, Principles

of Economics (8th ed., London 1925), p. 465; F.Y. Edgeworth, Economic Journal, 1894.
30 Robert Rhodes James, Lord Randolph Churchill (1959), p. 138.
31 it is of interest to note that neither this view nor Fabianism found much of an echo among British

officials of the time, while Utilitarianism had earlier found such ready advocates in India. This clearly
shows that ideas prevailing in Britain could influence British Indian policy makers and officials only
when they subserved in some respects the structure of imperialism in India.
32 J. and R. Strachey, p. 429. Also ibid, ix, pp. 3, 7, 86, 105, 401–02; R.D. Mangles, Ed.R., Jan. 1864, p.

118 ff; John Clark Marshman, QR July 1868, p. 77; Fawcett, p. 61; Maine, pp. 491–92; A. Marshall,
Principles, p. 225.
33 Hunder, pp. 98–99, 159; J. and R. Strachey, p. 105 ff; Maine, p. 491; Temple, p. 263; J. Strachey, p.

171 ff.
34 Mill, pp. 189–90.

35 WR, pp. 222–23.

36 Ed. R., Jan. 1864, p. 98.

37 QR July 1881 pp. 61, 78. Also his article in QR, July 1883, pp. 248, 250.

38 CR, January 1887, p. 15.

39 Speeches, Vol. I (1900), p. 34. Also see ‘English Rule in India.’ WR, July 1862, p. 138: J. and R.

Strachey, pp. 404; Temple, p. 106.

40 J. and R. Strachey, p. 405; Temple, p. 88; J. Strachey, pp. 159–60.

41 Mill, pp. 738–39. For fuller discussion, see pages 724–39. For similar views by Bentham, Wakefield,

and Torrens, see Winch, pp. 33, 77–81, 87.

42 WR, July 1862, pp. 136–38.

43 R.D. Mangles, Ed. R, Jan. 1864, pp. 96 ff; ‘The Future of India.’ WR, July 1870, pp. 63–65; Temple, p.

496; Herbert Taylor, CR, March 1881, p. 476; C.P. Lucas, p. 1.

44 Speeches, Vol. III (1904), p. 134.

45 QR, July 1868, p. 48.

46 Temple, p. 497.

47 “The Future of the British Empire’ WR, July 1870, pp. 64–65; A.H. Haggard, CR. Aug. 1883, p. 267;

Goldwin Smith. CR, April 1884, p. 526; G. Baden Powell, CR, Oct. 1886, p. 499; M.E. Grant Duff, CR,
Jan. 1887, p. 15; Maine, p. 486. Grant Duff is, in fact, quite quotable: "Unless the British Parliament
poohpoohs the suggestions which are made by many well-meaning individuals in favour of moving in
the direction of Indian Home Rule, the many million pounds we have lent to India will not be worth,
in the long run, as many million pence.”
48 According to Sir George Paish, British capital in India and Ceylon amounted to 365 million

pounds in 1909. Of this only 2.5 million were invested in commercial and industrial undertakings.
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Part II, Jan. 1911, p. 180.
49 Cf. L.H. Jenks, The Migration of British Capital to 1875, (London, 1927).

50 Richard Temple, though accepting the notion that Indians did not have enough capital, did try to

answer the question: what happened to indigenous capital? But his analysis contained little economic
reasoning. See pp. 93–97.
51 Hunter, pp. 98, 116; J. and R. Strachey, p. 16; Temple, pp. 82, 105, 230; Fred J. Atkinson, Journal of

the Royal Statistical Society, Part II, June 1902, pp. 215–20, 269.
52 See f.n. 33 above.

53 Hunter, p. 112 ff.; A. Lyall, Ed. R., Jan. 1884, pp. 28–29.

54 A. Lyall, Ed. R, Jan 1884, pp. 28–29,

55 Ibid., pp 28–34. Emphasis added.

56 Ibid., p. 34.

57 Hunter, p. 224 ff.; C.W. McMunn, CR, Jan. 1890, p. 82 ff. Radical steps for the protection of the

actual cultivators rather than the occupancy tenant-cum-middlemen and for the buying out of ‘the
parasitic landlords’ were sometimes made but by writers belonging to categories other than the one
we are discussing here. See Florence Nightingale, CR, Oct. 1883, p. 596; and V. Nash, CR, Nov., 1900,
p. 690.
58 J. Strachey, p. 333. He also adhered basically to the earlier theory of agricultural growth. See p. 262.

59 Temple, p. 115; A. Lyall, Ed R., Jan. 1884, p. 32; Hunter, p. 24; M.E.D. Prothero, QR , Oct. 1895, p.

446.
60 This was contrasted with the actions of previous rulers who, it was said, used to take the entire

surplus, and sometimes even more.

61 For detailed discussion, see W. Lee-Warner, QR , April 1879, pp. 380–92. Different aspects of this

view are brought out in WR, Jan. 1880, p. 196; W. Broadfoot, QR, Oct. 1897, p. 558; Hunter, p. 146;
Temple, pp. 221–22; L. Ashburner, WR, Jan. 1898, p. 65; S.S. Thorburn, Problems of Indian Poverty
(1902), p. 9ff.
62 W. Lee-Wamer, QR , April 1879, pp. 390, 395; WR, Jan. 1880, p. 196; Temple, pp. 116–17; W.

Broadfoot, QR , Oct. 1897, p. 559; F.C. Channing, Economic Review, Oct. 1900, p. 456.
63 QR , April 1879, p. 391. For detailed discussion, also see Ibid., pp. 380, 383–84, 394–96, 401. Also

see A. Lyall, Ed R., Jan. 1884, pp. 32–33; Hunter, p. 162.

64 W. Lee-Warner, QR , April 1879, p. 377ff.; A Lyall, Ed.R., Jan. 1884, p. 33; W. Broadfoot, QR , Oct

1897, pp. 558–59. Also see M.E.D. Prothero, QR , Oct. 1865, p. 446ff; and L. Ashbumer. WR, Jan.
1898, pp. 65–66.
65 W. Lee-Wamer, QR , April 1879, p. 39ff.; A. Lyall, Jan 1884, p. 33; W. Broadfoot, QR , Oct. 1897, pp.

558–59.
66 Hunter, pp. 4, 42, 99, 133–34, 138ff, 146–47, 184–85 R. Giffen, Economic Inquiries and Studies

(1904), Vol. II, pp. 18, 20, 230, 238; Maine, p. 518ff; W. Knighton, CR. Dec. 1880, p. 896; W. Lee-
Wamer, QR , July 1881, p. 55ff; M.E.D. Prothero, QR , Oct. 1895, p. 449; The Development of India’,
WR, March 1888, p. 348; J.D. Anderson, WR, April, p. 456.
67 Temple, p. 80ff; J. Strachey, pp. 304–05.

68 Of course they wrote at length on Indian social evils in other contexts, e.g., social uplift or

thriftlessness, etc., as a cause of indebtedness.

69 Hunter, p. 146; Maine, p. 519; S. Smith, CR, Dec. 1880, pp. 70–71.

70 Marshall, n. 29, p. 225.

71 Temple, p. 100; ‘The Development of India’, WR, March 1888, p. 348.

72 ‘English Rule in India’, WR, July 1862, p. 121; W. Lee-Wamer. QR , July 1881, pp. 62–63; Hunter, p.

32ff; Temple, Chapter VII.

73 Temple, pp. 447, 450; Hunter, pp. 167, 176, 182; A. Marshall, Official Papers, p. 290ff.

74 Most of the British writers on India made this point. See, for example, Hunter, p. 135ff; John Adye,

Ed.R., Jan. 1880, p. 89; The Poverty of India", WR, Nov., 1887, pp. 999–1001, 1004; Curzon, Speeches,
Vol. IV, p. 37.
75 See, for example, Hunter, pp. 184–85, 191; Temple, p. 493.

76 W. Lee-Wamer, QR , July 1881, pp. 74–75; Temple, pp. 447, 450; A. Lyall, QR , April 1893, p. 316,

Ed.R., Jan. 1897, pp. 12–13; M.E.D. Prothero, QR , Oct. 1895, p. 440; H.G. Keene, WR, April 1897, pp.
358–59.
77 It is, of course, true that a great deal of historical writing still holds on to these ideas and this

model. This is mainly because of the total reliance on contemporary official records and writings in
the name of devotion to ‘facts’ and of the desire to avoid ‘biases’ which the use of ‘sociological
imagination’ would involve. The result is a near total surrender before the 19th century official biases.
78 The entire Indian section of the paper is based on the author’s study cited above.

79 Essays, p. 99.

80 Some Economic Aspects of British Rule in India (1903), p. 357.

81 G.V. Joshi, Writings and Speeches (Poona, 1912), pp. 687–88; Tilak, quoted in Ram Gopal,

Lokamanya Tilak (Bombay, 1956), p. 145.

82 Joshi, n. 77, p. 696.

83 Speech at Portsmouth in India, 20 March 1903, p. 140.

84 We may note that the Government of India’s industrial policy after 1948 hardly went beyond the

policy sketched by the early nationalists. Jawaharlal Nehru was no innovator in this respect, except
that a programme which was described by the early nationalists as state-supported capitalism was
described by him first as a mixed economy and later as the ‘socialistic pattern’.
85 Bipan Chandra, n. 4. pp. 486 ff.

86 Ibid., pp. 441–42.

87 Ibid. pp. 84–85.

88 This realization made them take up positions as political economists. That is also why even though

they controverted some of the basic propositions of the classical economists, their economic thinking
was in line with the classical political economy. On the other hand, Alfred Marshall made hardly any
impact on them.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The authorship of anonymous articles in the 19th century British periodicals
is taken from the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1966.
 Elements of Continuity and Change in
Early Nationalist Activity

It has been generally assumed that the Indian national movement

underwent a basic mutation in 1905 and possibly a second one in 1919.
Consequently, it is customary to divide it into three distinct stages or
periods. There is much to favour this division. However, the basic
continuities and changes involved in this periodization are a matter of some
controversy. It is the basic hypothesis of this paper that there has existed a
general tendency to overlook some of the basic continuities from the early
nationalist era, to see discontinuities or changes where none existed, and to
overemphasize or wrongly interpret the changes that did occur.
The basic elements of a movement are: political objectives, programme
and ideology, strategy and methods and techniques of political struggle,
social base, and class or social character. The extent and character of the
continuity and change in the Indian national movement can be and have
been traced under each of these heads, though no Chinese wall exists
between them and they inevitably interpenetrate. The first aspect—the
aspect of political objectives, programme, and ideology—is being left out of
discussion except to point out briefly that the basic political objectives of the
early nationalists were: to help the process of unifying Indian people into a
nation, to introduce modern politics based on the doctrine of the
sovereignty of the people and on the notion that politics is not the preserve
of the ruling classes only, to create among the Indian people the feeling of
self-confidence, to create an all-India national political leadership or
headquarters, to generate, form and crystallize an anti-imperialist ideology,
to promote the growth of modern capitalist economy, and in the end to
create a broad all-India national movement. In the process, they also
undertook an analysis of the basic character of British colonialism in India
and to spread their understanding of its exploitative character among the
Indian people. They created a national political platform and programme on
which all Indians belonging to different regions, religions and social classes
could agree and which could serve as the basis for all-India political activity,
whose basic aim was not good government but democratic self-
government. The later nationalists were in the main to build on their
programme and their concrete exposure of the character of British rule.
Without discussing the point further, I may also state that a difference in
political aim or goal—between self-government as in the colonies and
complete independence—has been wrongly used to define the basic political
difference between the early nationalists or Moderates and the Extremists or
the militant nationalists. After all, the Moderate nationalists were as much
and as basically interested in the question of political power as the militant
nationalists.1 The exact verbalization of the demand for Indian political
power was a function of the emotional needs of the time, tactics, and
relation of political forces. After all, Tilak and Gandhi had no hesitation in
going back again and again from the demand for complete independence to
dominion status or even less.2 This is not to deny that at any particular
moment, as in 1905-08 or 1927-29, basic questions of strategy and tactics
might be involved, but then historical analysis should concentrate on these
substantive questions rather than on the husk of their verbal forms or
emotional coating or symbols.

The overall strategy of the national movement was basically the same in all
the three periods; only one of its aspects under-going a basic change.
 (A) Firstly, the Moderate nationalists laid down that the struggle for
freedom was to be peaceful and bloodless. Political progress was to be
harmonized with and based on order. This continued to be a basic tenet of
the dominant leadership of the national movement up to the end. Only
some of the Extremist leaders deviated from it in theory. But, in practice,
they too operated within its basic framework. This tenet was to serve as a
basic guarantee to the propertied classes that they would at no time be faced
with a situation in which their interests might be put in jeopardy even
temporarily.
(B) Secondly, the Moderates did not assign an important role to the
masses or to mass struggle in their work. They assumed that for the time
being political activity was to be confined to the stratum of the educated or
to the “educated classes”, as they put it. In part, behind this assumption lay
the belief that political action by this narrow social stratum would suffice.
But even more, they believed such a limitation to be objectively inevitable.
Even when they saw in abstract the need for active participation by the
masses, they lacked confidence in the capacity of the Indian masses to take
part in modem politics for a long time to come. When they looked at the
Indian masses they only saw their apathy and ignorance, their very real
social, cultural and political backwardness, and not their energy, tenacity,
and capacity to make sacrifices and to fight heroically.3 Consequently, the
task of politicalizing and mobilizing the masses was seen as an extremely
slow one. They believed that militant mass struggles against imperialism
could be waged only after the heterogeneous elements of Indian society had
been welded into a nation and the inert masses fully politicalized, politically
educated, and organized. In its turn the absence of a mass base led them to
political moderation. Lacking mass support, they walked charily, confined
their political work to agitation and propaganda, and felt that the time was
not ripe for throwing a challenge to the powerful foreign rulers. To do so
would be to invite premature repression and destruction of the existing
political movement.4 It may be noted that the Moderates were not very
wrong in seeing the immensity of the task involved in politicalizing,
mobilizing, and activating the politically inert masses. But instead of
undertaking the task, they tended to be overwhelmed by the prospects of
doing so.
 The most important, and perhaps the only significant, shift in the
nationalist political strategy came on this point. Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal,
and other Extremist leaders had infinite faith in the power of the masses in
action and in the Indian people’s capacity to bear the strain of a prolonged
political struggle against imperialism. They believed that suppression by the
Government would not throttle the mass movement. It would, instead,
educate the people, arouse them further, strengthen their resolve to
overthrow imperialism, and lead to a heightened political struggle. They
therefore advocated the organization of a mass struggle against imperialism
and as a first step the taking of politics to the masses.5 They talked of
bridging the gulf between the educated and the masses. Some of them did
reach out to the masses, for example, Ashwini Kumar Dutt in Barisal.
But while recognizing this break from the Moderate era, we may also
make a distinction between the hope and the fulfillment. For one, even at
the height of the Extremist movement in Bengal, the peasantry was not
mobilized. The alienation between the educated Extremist political workers
and the masses was not lessened to any significant extent, In fact, the
Extremists did not even know how to go about the task. In practice what
they succeeded in doing was to spread the movement deeper among the
lower middle classes who were already brought within the ambit of
nationalism in the Moderate era. Tilak and others did talk of the people but
their people turned out to be the educated and half-educated segments of
the urban and semi-urban petty bourgeoisie and, most of all, the educated
youth among them. It is therefore not correct to say that Tilak ‘identified
himself with the masses’ or that he brought ‘the masses of the people’ into
politics. Tilak himself accepted in 1907 that he was the leader primarily of
the educated Indians.6 Lajpat Rai too frankly acknowledged in 1908 that the
political movement in India had to depend on the educated because of the
backwardness and apathy of the masses.7
Similarly, the Extremists failed to evolve an adequate technique of
political ‘action’. Despite their sharp criticism of the Moderates for confining
the movement to mere agitation, their own practice could not basically
transcend agitation, though their agitation was much more militant and
effective. They undoubtedly evolved a higher concept of the forms of
struggle,8 but they were unable to implement this higher concept. They
remained at the ideological- critical level. This failure of the Extremists
inevitably led to revolutionary terrorism. Since most of the Extremist leaders
had wrongly defined their differences with the Moderates—they had
concentrated on ‘action’ and sacrifice rather than on the need to evolve a
different type of politics—the young men brought up on the ideology of
‘action’ and sacrifice were soon disenchanted with militant agitation,
demanded ‘action’ and took recourse to individual terrorism. Ironically, the
political struggle or ‘action’ of these heroic youth also turned out to be, so far
as it had political impact, a form of agitation, or as they themselves defined
it, “propaganda by deed”.
Gandhi too had an immense faith in the Indian people.9 He based his
entire politics on their militancy and self-sacrificing spirit. He made the
sharpest break with the Moderate tradition by reaching down to the masses,
arousing them to political activity, and bringing them into the forefront of
the struggle. This was the revolutionary aspect of the Gandhian period of
the nationalist struggle. Moreover, Gandhi alone discovered a new and
viable method of political struggle and mass action, thus enabling him to
immediately capture the leadership of the movement and to retain it till the
end. But even in these respects, four serious limitations need to be carefully
noted:
(1) The extent to which the Gandhian movement politicalized and
involved the masses has not yet been carefully researched and is often
exaggerated. I may hazard the opinion that the agricultural labourers and
poor peasants in most parts of the country and the masses in general in
several parts were not brought into the political process or even touched by
nationalist politics, so that the social base of the national movement was still
not very strong in 1947.
(2) While the masses were moved into action, they were never politically
organized in spite of the four-anna membership. They remained outside the
Congress organizational structure—always waiting in the wings to act.
(3) The gulf between the intelligentsia, which still provided the leadership
of the movement, and the masses still lay largely unbridged in spite of some
aspects of Gandhian mass work. Even the left wing was to fail in the task.
 (4) Above all, the political activity of the masses was rigidly controlled
from the top. The masses never became an independent political force. The
question of their participation in the decision-making process was never
even raised. The masses were always to remain—to coin a phrase—‘passive
actors’ or ‘extras’ whose political activity remained under the rigid control of
middle class leaders and within the confines of the needs of bourgeois social
development. Herein also lay the crucial role of the way non-violence was
defined and practiced by Gandhi. I may also point out here that the crucial
weakness of the Gandhian movement and its essential continuity with the
earlier tradition of keeping the movement within the bourgeois framework
did not lie in the refusal to take recourse to militant forms of struggle or in
the predominance of nonviolent forms, as left-wing critics from M.N. Roy
onwards have so often maintained. The question of the forms of struggle is
after all an aspect of time and space, of the concrete historical situation. This
weakness lay in the utterly restricted and subordinated role of the masses in
the political struggle, in the complete absence of any mechanism or channel
through which they could influence the course of the struggle or its
outcome. This question did not arise in the first phase of the movement
because political activity was manifestly confined to the intelligentsia. But
later, when the masses were mobilized for the movement, the pattern of
leadership and control remained the same as before 1905.10
(C) Thirdly, crucial to the Moderate strategy of political advance was
another feature which also became the basic feature of the later nationalist
strategy, thus establishing a basic continuity in all the three phases of the
movement. The Moderates assumed that political rights and self-
government should grow slowly but steadily, ‘from precedent to precedent’,
and by progressive stages. Thus the progress of national liberation was not to
be that of a prolonged revolution but that of a prolonged stage-by-stage
evolution. The growth was moreover to occur through the tactics of pressure
—negotiations, compromise, and concessions—pressure or P-C-P and not
through the seizure of power or expulsion of the foreign rulers. Four basic
assumptions were involved in this strategy: (1) The function of political
work and agitation, whether in India or Britain, was to put pressure on the
colonial authorities to concede the immediate demands. (2) Given enough
pressure, the authorities could be persuaded to give concessions. This was a
crucial assumption. The British must cooperate in the process since the
changes were to be brought through their actions. (3) Every concession must
be utilized and worked. This would necessarily involve cooperating with the
colonial regime ‘as best as they could’. (4) Every compromise must be seen as
a jumping ground for the next one and, therefore, agitation or pressure
should be quickly renewed. This spiralling movement would continue till
the goal of Indian political power was reached. This entire strategy was
summarised with great clarity and brilliance by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in
1907:

Constitutional agitation was agitation by methods which they were

entitled to adopt to bring about the changes they desired through the
action of constituted authorities...The changes desired must be obtained
only through the action of constituted authorities by bringing to bear on
them the pressure of public opinion... Three things were excluded—
rebellion, aiding or abetting a foreign invasion, and resort to crime.
Roughly speaking, barring these three things, all else was
constitutional...As regards the second condition, namely, that redress
must be obtained through the constituted authorities, it was clear that
that implied constant pressure being brought to bear on the authorities,
and the idea that they should have nothing to do with the authorities
was not one to be entertained. The pressure exeried undoubtedly
depended upon the strength and determination of the public opinion
behind it, and the necessity of building up that strength and hardening
that determination was obviously paramount. But the idea that they
should leave the authorities severely alone and seek to attain their goal
independently of them was inadmissible and absurd.11
Similarly, in his Presidential Address to the National Congress of 1905, he
had said:

The goal of the Congress is that India should be governed in the

interests of the Indians themselves, and that, in course of time, a form of
government should be attained in this country similar to what exists in
the Self-Governing colonies of the British Empire...That advance,
moreover, can only be gradual, as at each stage of the progress it may be
 necessary for us to pass through a brief course of apprenticeship before
we are enabled to go to the next one.12
The Moderates assumed that the force of the public opinion of the
educated Indians and of the British democratic opinion would suffice to
provide the pressure that was to set the entire mechanism in operation.
These assumptions were ridiculed by the later nationalists as in fact also by
the contemporary colonial administrators and statesmen. It should,
however, be clearly seen that what changed after 1905 was the nature of the
political pressure that was to be brought to bear upon the rulers and not the
basic strategy of pressure- compromise- pressure leading to political
advance that would be brought about through the actions of ‘the duly
constituted authorities.’ Tilak and Gandhi too were not working for the
direct overthrow of British rule. They too emphasized ‘the technique of
negotiations backed by controlled mass action.’ The aim of every one of their
movements was to compel the British to negotiate and give concessions; and
nearly every one of these movements ended with concessions and
negotiations, overt or covert, direct or by proxy.
Because the later nationalists gave several calls for immediate
independence, it is easy to be misled into thinking that their strategic
approach was different. In fact, such calls were a part of the same main
design. It is, for example, interesting that after every such call, Gandhi came
out with a set of immediate demands, e.g., the famous eleven demands of
1930, which had little direct relation to the demand for immediate and
complete independence made by the Lahore Congress a few days earlier.
The later nationalists did of course change—and this was historically very
significant—the mode of persuasion or putting pressure. They put greater
and mass pressure behind their demands. They shifted from intellectuals to
the masses, from memorials, petitions, and resolutions to processions,
demonstrations and vast mass movements. The sanctions behind their
demands were different and far stronger. But the political advance was still
to occur by stages and through compromise, that is, ultimately through
British consent and action.13
The very forms of struggle adopted were suited only to this strategic
design. The Gandhian mass movement contained no mechanism for the
seizure of power. In this respect the question of violence or non-violence
was a red herring in the path, whether thrown by the right or the left. The
fact was that the Gandhian forms of struggle could only exert pressure on
the authorities up to a point. They could not lead to positive revolutionary
action such as the peaceful occupation of schools and colleges (in place of
their boycott), police thanas, Kutcheries (courts) (creation of alternative
courts of justice rather than their mere boycott), and other government
offices, and even foreign firms, banks, and factories, or the peaceful
disarming of the army.14 They could not and did not create alternative
organs of social management or power or even elementary appurtenances of
an alternative regime which, and not violence, are the essence of a
revolution. Even a nonviolent movement could have posed a challenge to
the sovereignty of the foreigner and become the starting point of the seizure
of power remaining non-violent in the beginning, just as a phase of violence
could be used as pressure in the P-C-P strategy. But the very essence of the
Gandhian strategy was to compel the enemy to negotiate and concede
demands. This is the major reason why an important aspect of the Gandhian
programme, the non-payment of taxes, which would pose a challenge to the
sovereignty of the state was never put into practice on a significant scale. It
could have put massive pressure on the Government to come to the
negotiating table and offer concessions, but it could also have escalated into
a total confrontation.
Therefore, the crucial significance in Gandhian political philosophy of the
notion of bringing about a change in the enemy’s heart, of keeping the door
open to negotiations, of the very definition of non-violence as not wanting
to hurt the enemy in thought, word, or deed, but of converting him, and of
the sharp distinction between civil disobedience and ‘civil licence’. Hence,
after having initiated a movement, Gandhi could but wait either to be
arrested or to be called to the negotiating table. The former produced a
temporary deadlock that was soon broken by a new round of negotiations
conducted directly or through intermediaries. In either case, the result was
new political concessions. Sometimes the concessions were the result of
negotiations and an officially arrived at compromise. At other times, no
negotiations took place on the surface. But concessions, in such cases often
highly unsatisfactory ones, came all the same. Gandhi would then cut the
losses and quietly agree to work the resulting reforms. He would not sign an
agreement since that would be highly demoralizing and even unmanly but,
while keeping himself aloof, he would sanction participation in the official
political process by his co-leaders as he did in 1924 and 1935–36, or even in
1947 when, though unhappy with the manner of the transfer of power, he
used his personal prestige to persuade the All India Congress Committee to
accept the negotiated compromise. In fact, this strategy of pressure and
compromise can be studied in all its complexity and intricacy in the pre-
1942 and the post-1945 political activities and tactics of Gandhi and other
Congress leaders.

The changing social base of the national movement was one of the elements
of change in its three phases. In the early Moderate phase it was extremely
narrow, being limited to the urban educated Indians. Having noted this, it
must be pointed out that even in this phase the movement continuously
widened its social base to include fresh social strata, especially sections of
the lower middle classes. This is clearly revealed by the steady growth and
spread of vernacular newspapers. Nor was this growth fortuitous. Most of
the early nationalist leaders, for example, Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath
Banerjee, K.T. Telang, Ranade, V.V. Agarkar, Tilak, Gokhale, G.
Subramaniya Iyer, K.K. Mitra, Ganga Prasad Varma, Madan Mohan
Malaviya, and Rampal Singh, were connected with Indian language
newspapers.
It is at the same time important to remember that this social base did not,
as is often assumed, include the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie or
the zamindars and landlords. In fact, it was with the help of the landed
magnates, the urban rich merchants and capitalists, and the elderly old-style
politicians that the British officials hoped during the 1880s to counteract the
‘radical’, ‘extremist’, and ‘disloyal and seditionist’ political elements
represented by the Congress. The upper class Indians — the merchants,
industrialists, zamindars, as also the successful lawyers, doctors, and civil
servants—did not yet give any meaningful financial support to the
movement15 with the result that most of the early political workers had to
earn their own livelihood16 and their political organizations such as the
National Congress were virtually starved of funds, functioned on shoe-
string budgets, and were consequently severely inhibited in their political
work. There was a reverse side to this phenomenon. Political activity without
the massive financial support of the rich was possible precisely because of its
modest scale. Vast mass movements, large scale election campaigns, wide-
ranging agitations, and large political machineries based on an army of
cadres, which were the dominant feature of the Gandhian era from 1919 to
1947, could not be organized without equally large financial resources. This
made the movement dependent on the generosity of the rich. The early
nationalists escaped this dependence on the bourgeoisie by the very
character of their political activity!
As is well known, the social base of the Extremists lay primarily in the
urban lower middle classes whom they succeeded in politicalizing in some
parts of the country. Interestingly, the capitalists withheld their support from
the Extremists in spite of their vigorous campaign of Swadeshi and Boycott.
Later, during the days of the Home Rule Leagues, only a few stray capitalists
gave financial help to the two Leagues. Also, while the Extremists talked
glowingly of the masses in general, they too like the Moderates tended to
revert to a middle class self-consciousness whenever faced with the masses
in flesh and blood—the peasantry or the working class.
The masses—the peasants and workers—came into the national
movement primarily in the Gandhian era. This is perhaps the most
important aspect of the growth of the national movement. But it is no less
important—and this is often ignored—that the capitalists as a class also
came into the movement, and came to support it actively, though primarily
financially, only during this era. Neither the Moderates nor the Extremists
had been able to get the active support of this class since both the class and
its contradiction with imperialism matured fully only during and after the
First World War. Moreover, the Moderate and Extremist movements were
not socially or politically significant enough for the capitalist class to make a
determined attempt to dominate them. But once the national movement
became a powerful mass movement, the bourgeoisie could not afford to have
it turn against itself by continuing to pursue the earlier policy of apathy and
neglect towards it. Thus, to repeat, the extension of the social base of the
movement to the capitalist class was as important and new a feature of the
movement in its Gandhian phase as its extension to the workers and
peasants.
Another aspect of the mass character of the movement and the militant
character of its nationalism after 1918 was the general sucking in for the first
time, except for a short period in Bengal from 1905 to 1907, of the large
strata of small zamindars and landlords and merchants and money-lenders.
It was also only now that the urban and semi-urban lower middle classes
were fully drawn into the movement on a national scale.
Moreover, despite its activity encompassing different social classes and
strata, its basic thrust throughout its three stages came primarily from the
activity and commitment of the petty bourgeoisie or the motley and diverse
social strata often covered by the blanket term ‘the middle classes’. The petty
bourgeoisie was the chief source of the movement’s cadre and activists as
also of its psychology and ethos.

Assertions of changes in the class or social character of the Indian national

movement have come from two different quarters. One school of nationalist
writers asserts that the early nationalists represented the upper classes or at
the most the educated elite, that the Extremists represented either the people
or at least the lower, non-upper class segments of society, and that Gandhi
represented the hungry, naked and oppressed peasant thus making the
national movement a people’s movement. The other school, consisting of
many Marxist and semi-Marxist writers, suggests that the early nationalists
represented the upper or big bourgeoisie or the big commercial bourgeoisie
which was often collaborationist, that the Extremists represented the petty
bourgeoisie, and that under Gandhi the national movement became a full-
scale bourgeois movement, representing the overall interests of the
bourgeoisie in general and the industrial capitalist class in particular.
 In my opinion both these schools are wrong in their class characterization
of the different phases of the national movement. In fact, we have here
another basic, perhaps the most important, continuity, for the class
character of the national movement was the same throughout from its
inception to 1947. It was a bourgeois democratic movement, that is, it
represented the interests of all classes and segments of Indian society vis-a-
vis imperialism but under the hegemony of the industrial bourgeoisie. In
this respect. Tilak and Gandhi were no different from the Moderates; they
were no less bourgeois.
Involved in this discussion are both the historiographic principles that
enable one to determine the class character of a movement or to answer the
questions whom does the movement represent and how does it do so, and
the application of these principles to the reality of the Indian national
movement. Historians of different hues have in general used three distinct
criteria to determine and establish the class or social character of a
movement.
(1) Social base of the movement or the participation in it of different
social strata and classes.
(2) Class or social origins and characteristics of the men and women who
exercise the actual leadership function and who may, therefore, be described
as its leaders in the narrow, functional sense.
(3) The character of its political and economic programme, policies and
ideology.
I would suggest (i) that the first two criteria are historiographically or
sociologically the wrong way to go about the task; (ii) that even their
application does not prove the two commonly found assertions regarding
the social or class character of the Indian national movement during its
different phases; and (iii) that the application of the third, correct criterion
does not show any significant change or discontinuity in this character.
(A) The social base of a movement does introduce many types of
constraints on a movement and is, therefore, in itself one of its significant
aspects, but it cannot determine its class content. Another way of saying the
same thing is that the nature of social participation in a movement and its
class content or social character are two different aspects. A movement does
not necessarily represent the interests of the majority of its participants any
more than an army fights for the interests of its soldiers or a party for those
of its voters.
A movement can bear the same class character whether its social base is
narrow or wide. Similarly, the extent of mass action and the militancy of the
forms of struggle are also not the decisive determinants in this regard. These
are matters of historical conjuncture. The capitalists too may want struggle,
promote it, or at least tolerate it under specific historical conditions. In
history the bourgeoisie has often aroused the masses, brought them into
motion and even promoted armed struggle. The real question is not that of
the social base or the forms of political struggle but of the social hegemony
over the movement. Thus in India the bourgeoisie did not see a mass
movement as a threat to its interests so long as it was confined within limits
that did not threaten its hegemony over social development. And here it
may be suggested that while the Moderates established bourgeois ideological
hegemony over the small social segment of the intelligentsia, the political
leadership of the Gandhian era established bourgeois ideological, political
and organizational hegemony over the vast mass of peasants, workers, and
lower middle classes.17 Thus, even though the mass base of the Moderates,
Extremists, and Gandhi were so very different, the movements led by them
were equally bourgeois nationalist in character.
Lastly, if the social base of a movement determined its social character,
the Moderate and the Extremist phases could not be described as bourgeois
at all, since we have already seen that the capitalist and their money came
into the movement effectively only after 1918!
(B) It can also be asserted as a general principle that though the social
origins of a leadership have undoubtedly powerful though indirect effects on
the programme, policies, ideology, and forms of action of a movement, they
do not determine its social character. Witness, for example, the social
origins of the founders and leaders of the socialist movement in the modern
era. What is of equal significance in the present case is the fact that the social
origins and modes of existence of the national leadership were virtually the
same throughout the three stages. The national leadership from 1880 to 1947
can be best characterized as nationalist intelligentsia. The direct leadership
of the movement was never in the hands of the capitalists or the masses or
even the lower middle classes, but was monopolized by the middle class
nationalist intellectuals. This was frankly recognized by the Moderates,
Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru and others. Thus, the lawyers, doctors, journalists, and
the self-maintained whole-time political workers of middle class origin
continued to dominate the leadership from the beginning to the end.
It is generally recognized that during the Extremist and the Gandhian
periods the leaders represented social groups other than those to which they
themselves belonged. But the earlier nationalist leaders are often supposed
to constitute a class in itself, namely, the class of educated Indians. But in
fact as a ‘class’ they were so few in numbers at the time that they could have
been readily accommodated within the colonial structure, as Ripon and
others desired. Dufferin made a serious attempt to do so by advocating the
active association of the educated Indians with the administration and ‘the
conduct of affairs of their country by widening the membership of the
legislative councils as well as the scope for their employment in the public
services. He would placate the early political workers so long as they
behaved as a narrow class, but not when they put forward demands, which
transcended their own class demands when they claimed to be the
spokesman of the people against foreign rule, when their political
programme and activities could not be accommodated within the colonial
structure. The Montford Report was still to advocate 30 years later a similar
policy towards the nationalists as spokesman of the educated Indians. In
fact, the continuous tradition of liberal-labour regret at the failure of the
conservative British ruling elite to settle with the Moderates by giving them
a role to play in British India has been based on this false premise. But since
the Moderates’ basic terms were anti-imperialist, such an accommodation
was not possible except as temporary truce. Dufferin and other
conservatives has the insight to see this. They rightly viewed the early
nationalists not as a ‘class’ but as the advance-guard intellectuals of
nationalism whose political activity would invariably lead to confrontation
with the authorities and to anti-imperialism. The early nationalists can,
therefore, be best characterised as nationalist intellectuals who were
bourgeois in their thought and life style. They were anti-imperialist from a
bourgeois point of view rather than any so-called middle-class point of view.
(C) In their programme and ideology, the early nationalists worked for
the creation of a modern bourgeois state, economy and society in the image
of the most advanced bourgeois state, economy, and society of the day. Their
programme represented the interests of all classes insofar as they came into
conflict with imperialism. At the same time, they kept out all issues and
demands which would bring one section of the Indian society into conflict
with another. There was little in their programme to arouse the uneducated
peasants, workers, or the urban poor. Their entire programme was bourgeois
insofaras it was confined within the broad parameters of bourgeois social
development. As intellectuals, they militantly propagated the cause of the
industrial bourgeoisie even though it failed to give them its support.
Once the issue is posed in this way, it becomes obvious that the national
leadership of the Extremist and Gandhian era also represented a similar
bourgeois social order. Neither Tilak nor Gandhi transcended the Moderate
economic and political programme or social vision. Tilak or the Bengal
Extremists did not make any advance over the Moderates so far as advocacy
of the interests of the masses was concerned. Nor did Gandhi in this respect
go beyond the Moderates in thought, word, or deed, at least till the 1940s. In
spite of his ‘passionate se ise of identity with the lowly and the oppressed’, he
did not take up in any of his major political campaigns and movements the
peasant demands for the reduction of rent, lessening of the debt burden, and
protection from oppression by the police and other lower officials, not to
speak of land redistribution. For example, in the famous Eleven Demands
presented to the Government in 1930 as representing the minimum national
terms for a settlement and constituting, in his own words, “the substance of
independence”, Gandhi included the capitalist demands for the restoration
of the exchange rate to Is. 4d., a protective tariff against foreign cloth, and
the reservation of coastal trade for Indian shipping. But the only peasant
demand to be included was for the reduction of land revenue. This last
demand was one of the main items of agitation in the Moderate armoury
also.
 Thus Gandhi and Tilak were as much the ideological and political
representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie as the Moderates in the sense
that they viewed national interest from the point of view of the industrial
bourgeoisie, and that once they had broken the hold of imperialist
ideological hegemony over the minds of the Indian people, they all helped
structure bourgeois hegemony over Indian civil society. They led and
educated the people to accept that the bourgeois path of social development
was the only available alternative to colonial development. It may, however,
be noted that while the Moderates and the Extremists made this choice
when no other model of social development was available to the Indian
people and intelligentsia in theory or reality, the Gandhian era nationalists
did so when the socialist alternative was not only readily available both in
ideology and real life but was in fact a keen competitor nationally and
internationally. Moreover, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie over the national
movement was, if anything, even more firmly clamped down in the
Gandhian era than before. On the other hand, one may venture to suggest
that subjectively Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Baneijee, or Gopal
Krishna Gokhale were no less inspired by noble ideals and the love of the
people than Tilak or Gandhi.

NOTES

This paper was first presented at a symposium at the Indian History

Congress, Muzaffarpur, 1972 and is being published in the Studies in History,
Vikas Publishing House, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1979, New Delhi.
1 Tilak repeatedly pointed out that there were no real differences between him and the Moderates on

the goals of the national movement. Thus, in 1907 at the height of the political struggle with the
Moderates, he said in his important speech on “The Tenets of the New Party”: “... the government of
one country by another can never be a successful, and therefore a permanent government. There is no
difference of opinion about this fundamental proposition between the Old and New Schools”. Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, His Writings and Speeches, enlarged edition, 1919, p. 56.
2 Tilak told H.W. Nevinson in 1907: “Certainly there is a very small party which talks about

abolishing the British rule at once and completely. That does not concern us: it is much too far in the
future. Unorganized, disarmed, and still disunited, we should not have a chance of shaking the British
suzerainty. We may leave all that sort of thing to a distant time.” Quoted in H.W. Nevinson, New Spirit
in India, 1908, p. 72, For 1916, see his famous Home Rule Speech at Belgaum, op. cit., pp. 108-18.
Gandhi went back to Dominion Status after having given a call for Puma Swaraj in 1920-22. Similarly,
he was willing to negotiate for far less during 1931, even though the Civil Disobedience Movement
had been launched in 1930 around the Complete Independence Resolution of the 1929 Congress
Session.
3 Describing the difficulties in the way of the organization of active political struggle, Gokhale

referred in 1907 to “The vast masses of the people of the country lying inert and apathetic...
deplorably divided and sub-divided ... plunged in abject poverty and ignorance, and wedded to usages
and institutions which ... were not exactly calculated to promote vigorous, sustained or combined
action for purposes of progress.” Speeches, second ed., Natesan & Co. edition, n.d., p. 1103.
4 At the Surat Congress in 1907, Gokhale told the militants: “You do not realize the enormous reserve

of power behind the Government. If the Congress were to do anything such as you suggest, the
Government would have no difficulty in throttling it in 5 minutes.” Quoted in Andrews and Mukeiji,
The Rise and Growth of the Congress in India, 1938, p. 215.
5 Thus, Bipin Chandra Pal said in his famous Madras lectures in 1907: There is another attitude that—

with the decadence of the faith in the foreign people and in the foreign Government, with the
decadence of our faith in the foreign administration which has come to us, we have learnt to look
nearer home. Our eyes have been turned away from the Government House, away from the Houses of
Parliament, from Simla and Calcutta, and our faces have turned now to the starving, the naked, the
patient and long-suffering 300 millions of our people, and in it we see a new potency, because we view
them now with an eye of love which we never had felt before, and in the teeming, toiling, starving and
naked populations of India, we find possibilities, potentialities, germs that have given rise to this New
Movement That is the corner-stone of this Movement namely. Faith in the People, Faith in the genius of
the Nation, Faith in God, who has been guiding the genius of this nation through ages by historic
evolution, Faith in the eternal destiny of the Indian People. With the decadence of our faith in the
foreign Government and in the foreign nation, has grown up this higher, this dearer, this deeper, this
more vital and more divine faith in Indian humanity (cheers). And to understand the New Movement
properly, you must look upon it through the prism of this new faith in the Indian people.” Swadeshi
and Swaraj, 1954, pp. 137–38. Emphasis added.
6 Tilak, op.cit., pp. 69–73, 374 and 382.

7 Lajpat Rai, Young India, 1965 Indian edition, pp. 91–92.

8 See Tilak, op. cit., p. 65; Bipin Chandra Pal, op. cit, pp. 216–20, and 241–49: Lajpat Rai, op. cit., p.

141; Aurobindo Ghosh, Doctrine of Passive Resistance, 1948.

9 Referring to the common people, who had participated in the South African struggle, in the course

of his reply to an address of welcome in Madras in 1915, he said: “You have said that I inspired those
great men and women, but I cannot accept that proposition. It was they, the simple-minded folk, who
worked away in faith, never expecting the slightest reward, who inspired me, who kept me to the
proper level, and who compelled me by their great sacrifice, by their great faith, by their great trust in
the great God to do the work that I was able to do”. Collected Works, Vol. XIII, 1964. pp. 52–53.
10 Already by the end of the nineteenth century some leaders were complaining that all real decision

making powers were being exercised by the established leadership at the top with the rank and file
being left in the cold. This was to become a perpetual complaint of the Congress rank and file in the
later years.
11 Gokhale, op.cit., pp. 1105–06. Emphasis added. Justice Ranade had explained one aspect of this

strategy as follows: “Moderation implies the conditions of never vainly aspiring after the impossible or
after too remote ideals, but striving each day to take the next step in the order of natural growth that
lies nearest to our hands in a spirit of compromise and fairness.” Quoted in T.V. Paravate, Gopal
Krishna Gokhale, 1959, p. 463.
12 Gokhale, op. cit., pp. 829–30. Emphasis added. It is to be noted that going to the next stage is as

important as passing through a brief course of apprenticeship or a halt at each stage.

13 The following extracts from one of Tilak’s speeches in 1907 are quite revealing in this respect: “...the

Proclamation (of 1858) remained a dead letter, because you could not get it enforced .... A promise
was made but you proved too weak to have it enforced .... Is Mr. Morley going to fulfil it? The
explanation of the Proclamation is not the question. The question is what will compell him to fulfil it.
(Nationalists must compel but it is he who will fulfil. B.C.) ... I admit that we must ask; but we must
ask with the consciousness that the demand cannot be refused .... We say prepare your forces, organize
your power, and then go to work so that they cannot refuse you what you demand .... I want the whole
bread and that immediately. But if I cannot get the whole, don’t think that I have no patience. I will
take the half they give me and then try for the remainder.” Op. cit., pp. 62, 64, 66. Also see p. 45.
Emphasis added. H.W. Nevinson reported Tilak as having told him in 1907: lhe immediate question
for us is how we are to bring pressure on bureaucracy .... It is only in our answer to that question that
we differ from the so-called Moderates. They still hope to influence public opinion in England by
sending deputations (etc.) .... We Extremists have determined on other methods.” Quoted in
Nevinson, op. cit. 73–74. Similarly Gandhi summed up his basic political approach in the following
advice he gave to the leaders of the states’ people’s struggles in 1939: “I am convinced that direct
negotiations should be opened with the authorities. Hitherto, the State Congress people have talked at
the authorities and the latter at them. The result has been a widening of the gulf between them. It
would not do for a satyagrahi to argue that the approach must be mutual ... The first and the last work
of a satyagrahi is ever to seek an opportunity for an honourable approach.... If the leaders have active
ahimsa in them, they must cultivate a belief in the perfect possibility and necessity of such approach.
And if they have that belief, the way will surely be open to them. In my own person, it is well known, I
have always acted on that principle ... Our aim must remain what it is, but be prepared to negotiate for
less than the whole, so long as it is unmistakably of the same kind and has in it inherent possibility of
expansion.” Collected Works, Vol. LXIX, 1977, p. 323.
14 Interestingly, this is precisely what the peaceful crowds sometimes did spontaneously during the

non-cooperation movements. In 1930, the people of Sholapur virtually replaced the police and
organized volunteers to maintain order and to even regulate the traffic in the streets till the police
provoked a clash. Punjab-style martial law and mass butchery were needed to control the situation.
The case of the Garhwali soldiers refusing to fire on a Pathan crowd and handing over their rifles, all
very peacefully, is quite well known.
15 The generosity of J.N. Tata to the National Congress is nothing but a canard. He contributed to the

Congress only 1000 rupees spread over two years and that too in the heat of anger against the
imposition of cotton excise duties in 1896. It was only a few patriotic zamindars and princes who
contributed in a significant manner to the nationalist causes; but they did so entirely in their personal
capacity and not as spokesmen or even members of their class.
16 This lack of funds partially explains the predominance of lawyers and journalists — the two

independent professionals — among the early nationalist leaders. They were independent in a dual
sense: they were independent of government control and they were not dependent upon rich men’s
contributions for their capacity to cany' on in politics. On the other hand, Gokhale and Surendranath
Baneijee had to divert a large part of their time to teaching undergraduates. Tilak had to run coaching
classes for the law students for several years till his newspapers came out of the red. G. Sub- ramaniya
Iyer and Bipin Chandra Pal were working journalists.
 The Indian Capitalist Class and
Imperialism before 1947

The relations between the Indian capitalist class and imperialism evolved
during the era of the development of a powerful struggle against
imperialism in India. This struggle in its different phases should not be seen
in the main as a mere reflection of the contradiction between imperialism
and the Indian bourgeoisie. This struggle was basically a reflection of the
contradiction between imperialism and all the Indian people, of whom the
bourgeoisie constituted merely one important segment. Moreover at no
stage from its institution to its later development was the capitalist class the
driving element behind this struggle or its militancy.1
Thus the choice before the bourgeoisie was not whether to create or not to
create an anti-imperialist movement or whether to push or not to push it
forward. Rather, this class had to continuously, from stage to stage,
determine its attitude towards an autonomously arising and developing
movement which was at no stage waged under its own direct leadership. It
could let the movement turn against itself by opposing it, by collaborating
with imperialism, or by remaining passive towards it, or it could harness it
to its own interests by supporting it and thereby controlling its direction,
methods, socio-economic programme, and organization, or, in other words,
confine the movement within the political and economic parameters of its
own class interests. The choice that it made was, of course, not fortuitous.
The possibility, indeed the necessity, of supporting the movement arose out
of the class's objective relationship to imperialism and its capacity to evolve
a correct relationship with the national movement so as to bring it under its
own class hegemony.
It is against this historical background that the relationship of the Indian
capitalist class with imperialism has to be discussed.
Another assumption may also be made explicit at this stage. The Indian
capitalist class was not completely homogenous. Consequently, there were
certainly differences in the degree of development of contradictions between
its different parts or segments and imperialism and also, therefore, in the
attitudes of these segments. Such, for example, were differences based on
commerce and industry, finance and industry, region and size. There were
also purely individual differences. However, for the purpose in hand, I have
taken the class as a whole, for it revealed a basic homogeneity in its
economic and political relationship with imperialism. This homogeneity is
revealed after 1927 in the pre-eminent position accorded by the class, as also
the Government, to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry and to certain individuals such as Purshotamdas Thakurdas and
G.D. Birla.

The basic hypothesis of this paper is that the Indian capitalist class had
developed a long-term contradiction with imperialism while retaining a
relationship of short-term dependence on and accommodation with it.2

From the middle of the nineteenth century and especially after 1914 an
independent capitalist class developed in India. From the beginning it
possessed one important characteristic: In the main, it did not develop an
organic link with British capitalism; it was not integrated with foreign capital
in India This point may be spelled out further. Indian capitalists during the
twentieth century were not in the main middlemen between the British
capitalists in Britain or India and the Indian market. Even when some of
their progenitors started out from about the middle of the nineteenth
century as traders between Britain and India or between India and the Far
East, they traded on their own account, under their own financial steam,
often in competition with British trading firms, and seldom as their
compradors. Nor did the overwhelming majority of the Indian industrialists
develop as junior partners of British entrepreneurs in India.3 At no stage was
the main body of the Indian capitalist class subordinated to foreign capital,
industrial or financial.4 Nor did the Indian industrialists depend for finance
on British finance capital. In fact, Indian industrial and finance capital
developed in keen competition with British capital; and one of the major
Indian complaints was the failure of British-controlled banks to finance
Indian industry. This lack of collaboration was, of course, also due to the fact
that the British capitalists, having their own direct and well-established
administration in India, did not need an indigenous mediating class as was
the case in eighteenth century India and in China in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
The family histories of some of the leading Indian industrialists of the
twentieth century are quite revealing in this respect. The houses of the Tatas,
the Birlas, Shri Ram, the Dalmia Jains, Vithaldas Thackersey, Walchand
Hirachand, Narottam Morarjee, the Singhanias, Kasturbhai Lalbhai,
Ambalal Sarabhai, Jamnalal Bajal, Lallubhai Samaldas, Lalji Naranji,
Kirloskar, the Modis, Kilachand Devichand and Harkishan Lai show few
signs of any major contact with, not to speak of subordination to, foreign
capital.5
Thus the Indian capitalist class did not for its economic existence depend
on foreign capital. And not being so “tied up”, it did not become an ally of
British rule in India. In fact, quite the reverse, as will be shown in the next
section.
This does not imply that the Indian capitalist class played the same role
economically and politically as the capitalist class did in Britain or France or
even Germany or Japan during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries respectively. But the difference did not lie in the former being
“comprador”, as is widely assumed. The difference lay in the Indian
bourgeoisie being the capitalist class of an under-developed country which
was structurally integrated into world capitalism as a colony. In other words,
while the Indian capitalist class was not as a class integrated with British
capital in a subordinate position, the economy of which it was a part was so,
i.e., colonially, integrated with and subordinated to world capitalism. The
weaknesses and constraints, both economic and political, under which this
class functioned sprang from this fact and not from compradorism.6 This
fact is important for three reasons:
(1) For understanding the economic and political capacities and frailties
of this class, we should look to the structure of the colonial economy and
not to the alleged subordinate class position of the capitalist class. Similarly,
the failure of colonialism to develop the Indian economy should not in itself
lead to the conclusion that the Indian bourgeoisie too had deserted the task.
This would be so only if this class was integrated with colonial capital and
colonialism itself.
(2) Since it is the economy that is colonially subordinated and structured
and not the capitalist class, the latter, on the one hand, struggles against
imperialism and for independent capitalist development, and, on the other,
is compelled to compromise with imperialism because the structural links
with the world capitalist economy weaken the position of capitalism in a
colonial or ex-colonial society.
(3) This is a fate which is not peculiarly that of the Indian capitalist class.
Since world capitalism as a structure exists as imperialism whose one part is
developed at the cost of the underdevelopment of the other, those states
within its orbit which do not become developed and metropolis tend to
become underdeveloped and colonies unless they manage to walk out of the
structure itself.

3
(Long Term Conflict)

The Indian capitalist class came into sharp conflict with imperialism on
almost every basic economic issue.7 In nearly every field of industry Indian
capital entered into competition with either British home capital or British
capital in India. Imperialism would not yield on these basic issues. On the
other hand, the Indian capitalists stood up firmly to defend their
independent growth. Here I have space for only a bare enumeration of the
major areas of conflict.
(A) First came the conflict with British home industry. The Indian
capitalists saw clearly that they must limit and then bring to an end the
domination of their internal market by British and other foreign industries.
Consequently, they constantly agitated for effective tariff protection to their
industries. Later, when Imperial Preferences, or the policy of tariff
concessions to British industry, were introduced, they mounted a powerful
campaign against them because of the harmful effect on Indian industries
and the deterioration in the conditions of trade with non-Empire countries.
They also fought for high export duties on certain raw materials needed by
Indian industries. Throughout the 1930s they campaigned for tariff
autonomy for the Government of India.
(B) The large scale foreign capital investment in Indian industry after
1918 led to a strong attack on foreign capital. The Indian capitalists
repudiated the widely propagated theory that India’s economic development
would not take place without foreign capital. Foreign capital investment in
India was itself, they maintained, the result of the country’s economic
exploitation and led not to its development but further exploitation. In
particular, they reacted strongly to the attempt of the giant British industrial
corporations to defend and extend their markets in India by forming Indian
subsidiaries (India Limiteds as they came to be known) to take advantage of
the tariff protection granted during the 1920s and 1930s, the cheaper Indian
labour, and the nearness of the market. The Indian capitalists immediately
saw the danger that these ‘leviathan’ corporations posed to the much smaller
Indian enterprises in the field as also to the long-term growth interests of
Indian capital in general. They demanded from the Government
administrative steps against such “unfair” internal competition. They raised
the slogan of “Indian domination of Indian industries”. Interestingly hardly
any Indian capitalist entered into partnership with British capital in these
India Limiteds.
 The right to discriminate against and if necessary to exclude “non-
national interests”, that is, British capital, was taken up as a major issue for
agitation by the Indian capitalists during the 1930s and 1940s. In the
constitutional discussions during 1931–35, they fought hard against any
constitutional safeguards being provided to foreign capital and demanded,
instead, unfettered powers to discriminate against British and foreign
capital.
During the World War II the threat of the much stronger American
capital entering India and resulting in “American economic domination over
India” in the post-war period and the creation of “new foreign vested
interests” was immediately countered by the Indian capitalists through
vehement agitations.
It is to be noted that the Indian capitalists did not fight for the expulsion
of the existing foreign capital. Given the relatively small size of the existing
foreign capital and the fact that only a small part of it was linked directly
with British monopoly capital at home, and given the projected withdrawal
of patronage by the state, they felt strong enough to compete with it on equal
terms. But under no circumstances should foreign capital be permitted to
strengthen its position in the Indian economy. And as seen earlier, they
objected to the entry of the giant industrial corporations of the metropolitan
countries, such as the Imperial Chemical Company, the Lever Brothers, the
Burmah Oil Company, and the American corporations.
In particular, they constantly agitated against the entry of foreign capital
into key or heavy industries such as machinery and machine tools,
automobiles, aircraft, shipping, heavy chemicals, fertilizers, and the entire
field of minerals and petroleum. They wanted complete reservation of these
industries for Indian private or state capital and “statutory prohibition
against the foreign or non-Indian ownership, management and control” of
any of them.
(C) The Indian capitalists objected to the domination of the Indian
banking structure by British finance capital and demanded, from about
1913, that a controlling central bank should be formed and placed under the
control either of Indian share-holders or of the Indian legislature, which was
to some extent amenable to Indian influence. In no case should the ‘City of
London’ be given much of a say in it. Throughout the twentieth century an
intense economic struggle was waged by Indian capital to oust British capital
from and acquire a dominant position in banking and insurance in India.
Once again the Government was urged to put legislative and other
restrictions on the existing operations as also on fresh entry of foreign
insurance companies. The Indian capitalists agitated throughout the 1920s
and 1930s against the linkage of the rupee to the pound sterling and against
its overvaluation as these measures encouraged imports of foreign
manufactures and foreign capital and thus hampered Indian capital.
(D) Foreign trade and shipping were an important source of surplus
appropriation and the entire Indian capitalist class rallied behind individual
Indian efforts to appropriate a larger share of these and other invisible items
of the balance of payments. Indian struggle against the British shipping
monopoly had started in 1890s and was pressed on unrelentingly since then
despite repeated failures. The capitalists also made a determined effort
during the 1920s and 1930s to get a law passed reserving Indian coastal
shipping for Indians.
(E) The Indian capitalist class was fully aware of the need for active and
direct state aid to its operations and it carried on a prolonged and all-sided
struggle on the issue. State aid was sought for almost every field of economic
activity— industry, banking, insurance, sea and air transport, inland
transport and agriculture.
The state alone, of course, could provide tariff protection against British
home industries.
Recognizing its own weakness in a straightforward competition with
foreign capital, the Indian capitalist class saw state action as the major
instrument for keeping foreign capital out also under check through direct
administrative action as well as through public sector enterprises where the
alternative would be the use not of Indian, but of foreign capital, because of
the large scale of the needed capital investment. Such was, for example, the
case with heavy industries, essential minerals, and the broad spectrum of the
infrastructure.
 The state was also urged to give direct help in the form of guarantees and
subsidies to industries with a long gestation period or involving a large risk
element, such as heavy machine and chemical industries and shipping.
The Indian capitalists realized that no real and long-term industrial
development could occur without self-sufficiency in heavy machine and
chemical industries and other similar industries, such as automobile,
aeroplane, and shipbuilding. But precisely in these fields the colonial
administration was not willing to help rival industries arise in the colony.
Yet without state help in the form of guarantees, subsidies, state- purchase
guarantees, reservation of markets, and in all other conceivable ways, it was
not possible for the Indian capitalists to develop these industries because of
the large capital requirements, the long gestation period, and the large risk
element. Repeated attempts by the Indian capitalists to move into these
fields in the 1930s and 1940s foundered on the rock of official indifference
and hostility. Consequently, they carried on a constant agitation for active
and massive state aid to their efforts in these fields. Simultaneously, as noted
earlier, they opposed any attempt to introduce foreign capital in these fields.
The Indian capitalists also expected the state to help overcome one of
their major weaknesses—the shortage of technical personnel and the low
level of indigenous technology. One of the constraints that the Government
was urged to place on the foreign enterprises in India related to the
compulsory training of Indian technical personnel.
The crucial role of bureaucracy in aiding foreign enterprise and hindering
Indian enterprise was also clearly seen and the demand for the Indianization
of the key administrative posts dealing with the economy was vigorously
pushed.
To satisfy all these demands, the state would have to make heavy financial
commitments. At the same time, the Indian capitalists noted that state
revenues, or the social surplus appropriated by the colonial government,
were being utilized to subserve imperial interests and in a manner inimical
to internal capitalist growth Consequently, the Indian capitalist class made
Indian control of the state finances one of its major political demands. Even
in its most compromising periods, it was not willing to compromise on this
demand. For example, during the Round Table Conference discussions, its
representative stood firm on the question of financial safeguards in the
proposed constitution. The question of state aid to industries also led them
to attack the high military expenditure due to the maintenance of a large
army for purposes of imperial expansion and defence, the bloated
administrative expenditure and the large public debt, for these heads hardly
left any funds with the Government with which to aid industry.
The Indian capitalists also took note of the drain or export of Indian
social surplus, so sorely needed by them for internal investment, and they
urged the Government to take preventive measures.
(F) Thus we find that the Indian capitalist class fully realized that the
imperialist economic exploitation of India blocked their long-term growth,
and it opposed all the three major channels through which the metropolis
extracted India’s social surplus: domination of the Indian market,
investment of foreign capital, both industrial and finance, and direct surplus
expropriation through control over public finance and in particular through
high military expenditure for imperial purposes.
The metropolitan power could not and would not yield on any of the
major focal points of conflict on which the Indian capitalist class formulated
a clear-cut national policy. Hence this class felt the clear and urgent need for
a nation state of its own. It articulated this political demand in an
unequivocal manner ever since 1929 on the ground that no real economic
development of the country was possible without the realization of this
demand.8 For certain political and short-term economic reasons, this class
was willing to temporize with this and other demands, but the long-term
and basic issues of conflict with imperialism placed limits on the extent of
the compromise that it could enter into with imperialism.

4
(Short-term Dependence and Collaboration)

The Indian capitalists’ hostility to British rule was muted by several factors.
(A) For one, they did get a chance to grow continuously; and however
oppressed they might feel at times, they were never directly or nakedly
suppressed. The two world wars in particular provided them opportunities
for windfall profits and rapid growth, putting breaks on the development of
anti- imperialist sentiments among them in the short run.
(B) Secondly, the Indian capitalist class began its upward climb during the
second half of the nineteenth century from extremely modest beginnings.
The traditional banking and commercial capital of India was destroyed or
diverted during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth
century. There was thus hardly any primitive or original capital with which
to start.9 Moreover, the existing capital was very thinly spread among a host
of merchants, bankers, and money- lenders. The process of normal
accumulation had thus to start from a very low floor. Denied the
opportunity of making windfall profits through colonial plunder or unequal
trade, denied any state assistance, and denied even the normal opportunities
of growth by imperialism in the spheres of foreign trade, banking and their
own domestic market, the rate of capital accumulation by the Indian
commercial and industrial bourgeoisie was extremely slow. This had several
consequences which explain the late entry of the class into active nationalist
politics and the mildness of their political stance.
(1) The Indian capitalist class remained weak for years and therefore
lacking in the self-confidence needed to challenge the mightiest imperialism
of the day.
(2) The slow rate and the petty absolute amount of accumulation of
Indian capital could be accommodated by imperialism. Because of its very
small size, Indian capital was not seen by imperialism as a strong challenger;
and so long as the Indian capital’s share of the social surplus remained small,
it was possible to give it enough scope to grow without
affecting the overall imperialist channels of surplus extraction, nor was it
difficult to find avenues for its reinvestment. Indian capital was thus seldom
faced with the total stoppage of growth or with extinction.
(3) Consequently, even though the conflict between the two capitalisms
emerged early, it took decades to mature and become sharp. This conflict
was always expected by the two sides to occur in the future—it was a long-
term conflict. The Indian bourgeoisie sought to resolve the long-term
conflict in its own favour through political and ideological struggle, while
itself entering into short-term compromises, accommodation and
cooperation with the colonial administration. The state of acute tension
could have been expected to come after the Second World War when the
Indian capitalist class reached respectable proportions. But precisely at this
time political freedom came as a result of popular political pressure and
changes in the world balance of forces and the Indian capitalist class now
entered a new period of rapid growth without having passed through a
period of total antagonism to the imperial power.
(4) The consistent and continuous opportunity to grow combined with
the fact that the Indian industry invariably developed, at least till 1918,
through Marx’s second path, that is, from above, also made the Indian
bourgeoisie quite conservative in politics.
(5) Nearly all the major capitalist families of modem India developed
during the nineteenth century from rather humble beginnings. None of
them belonged to the earlier ruined families. Instead, their rather fresh
memories of British rule were quite positive. This too created a psychology
of overall satisfaction with British rule for at least the first or second
generation entrepreneurs.
(C) Thirdly, while the Indian capitalist class did not depend on British
capital, it did, in the short run, depend on the colonial administration. This
aspect has been often ignored. The British Indian Government was of course
an instrument of British colonialism. But it was also the day-to-day
administrative authority in the country to which the capitalist class could
not be totally hostile and on which it depended for innumerable purposes.
The government alone could give some measure of tariff protection, at least
against the non-British competitors. It was in full control of the major
internal transport system and the entire port organization; both gave it
major leverage vis-a-vis trade and industry. It alone could give mining
concessions (so crucial to coal, iron and steel, and other industries), land
leaseholds, and land and other facilities for generation of electric power.10 It
was in control of a major field of capital accumulation, that is, government
contracts. Its industries department could extend or withhold numerous
facilities, including the creation of syndicates, cartels and monopolies. It was
a major buyer of industrial products. It had the power to give or withhold
permission to start factories at particular sites. Through the central bank it
could help or squeeze a hard-pressed industrialist who had over-extended
his credit. Its taxation policy had a decisive impact on the rate of
accumulation. Its labour policy was another important instrument of
leverage.
Above all, the capitalist class depended on the Government for
guaranteeing law and order and social peace in the period of intense social
turmoil and political and labour unrest that followed the First World War. It
was also aware of the fact that if the Government remained intransigent and
refused to compromise with and give concessions to the national movement
in its phases of struggle, the latter could pass over to a very radical phase.
Thus during every such phase, the Indian bourgeoisie was partially
dependent on the Government for keeping the national movement confined
within a safe mould.11 Thus during every nationalist upsurge, the capitalists
had to appeal to the Government to make a compromise. This political
dependence on the foreign government was, however, the dependence not
of a comprador class but of a capitalist class in an era of mass movements
and socialist revolutions.
This multifarious dependence on the Government compelled the Indian
capitalist class to adopt a moderate political approach and to function in the
economic realm in a close relationship with the Government. Its periodic
political hostility to the Government could not be prolonged for any length
of time and had in fact to be quite spasmodic. At the same time, to repeat
myself, this close economic relationship was that of an independent
capitalist class with the government of the day and not that of a comprador
or a junior partner of the British ruling class that controlled the British
Indian administration.
(D) Another source of the short-term compromise situation was the
imperialist policy, as distinct from the colonial structure, towards the Indian
capitalist class. While opposing or neglecting the basic, overall, and long-
term growth interests of this class, the British rulers followed the policy of
giving it timely concessions in order to preserve the colonial system. Two
factors were crucial in this respect. Throughout the twentieth century,
British rule was endangered by and had to reckon with two basic
phenomena: one was the crisis of the colonial economy which found
reflection in agricultural stagnation and large-scale urban unemployment;
the other was the rising tempo of a popular national movement which was
getting increasingly mass-based. The necessity of containing economic and
political discontent compelled the colonial authorities to give concessions to
the Indian capitalist class, especially in fields where no major British
interests were involved.
Some growth of Indian industry was essential if the economic crisis of
colonial under-development and the resulting discontent were to be kept
within bounds. In other words, Indian trade and industry were to serve as
an economic safety valve, especially as British capital showed no inclination
to make large-scale productive investments in India.
Politically, it was essential to prevent the Indian capitalist class from
giving large-scale and active help to the national movement and to persuade
it to use its leverage on the movement to keep it confined to ‘reasonable’ and
moderate proportions.
Consequently, the colonial administration extended concessions and
opportunities to the Indian capitalist class to enable it to grow. It also gave
representation to the spokesmen and associations of the class on all
government committees and commissions dealing with economic affairs. In
other words, it entered into a bargaining situation with this class in order to
preserve the basic imperial interests. This policy was in particular vigorously
followed whenever the nationalist struggle reached a militant crescendo or
when the Indian capitalist class was economically so imperilled that it could
go over the brink. The capitalists had now to be detached from the struggle
or, at least, their commitment to it watered down. This was a part of the
policy of divide and rule and of the carrot and the stick. Precisely at such
moments the Indian capitalists too were willing to be conciliated since they
too, on the one hand, would be getting frightened of the militancy of the
national movement, and, on the other, would be keen to get out of the
threatening economic crisis. In this case, it may be said, they followed the
reverse policy of the stick and the carrot.
 Thus, for example, in 1905 the Industries Department was opened; in
1916 the Industrial Commission was appointed; in 1922 the policy of tariff
protection was announced; tariff on textile imports was raised to 25 per cent
in 1930 and 75 percent in 1933, and simultaneously in 1932 sugar industry
was given protection;12 also in 1932 the formation of the Reserve Bank was
taken in hand; in 1932–33 the Scindia Steam Navigation Company was
enabled to expand its business; during the Second World War, strikes were
banned, contracts for the gigantic war effort were shared with the Indian
capitalist class, and promises were made to undertake centra planning and
give large-scale state aid to Indian industry. And in each one of the cases
cited above the Indian capitalists reciprocated by adopting a conciliatory
political approach. While in 1930 they had boycotted the Round Table
Conference and the legislative councils, in 1932 they agreed to cooperate
with the Round Table Conference Sub-Committee and from 1932 to 1935
bent their energies to bring about a compromise between the National
Congress and the Government. During the entire period of the Second
World War, their politics remained in a low key. They failed to give to the
Quit India Movement of 1942 the type of strong backing they had given to
the Civil Disobedience Campaigns of 1920 and 1930.
(E) It may once again be repeated that the factors discussed above merely
muted the conflict between the Indian capitalist class and imperialism, and
led to short-term concessions, compromises and accommodation. The long-
term antagonism between the two continued as imperialism would not yield
on any of the basic policy issues, namely, metropolitan domination of the
Indian market, British capital investment in particular through the
subsidiaries of the giant corporations, high military expenditure, and the
question of state aid in initiating heavy industry, developing indigenous
technology, and extending general financial support to Indian industry.

5
(Capitalist Class and the Anti-Imperialist Struggle)

The Indian capitalists gave broad support to the national movement against
imperialism. On the one hand, this movement enabled them to get
concessions from imperialism; and, on the other, it coincided with their
long-term conflict with British capital and colonialism. As pointed out
earlier, they did not eschew the nationalist struggle for another reason also.
They recognized that the Indian people were politically restive and bent on
anti-imperialist struggle because of their conditions of life and because of
their own contradiction with imperialism, that their nationalist political
activity would continue and grow irrespective of capitalist participation, and
that, therefore, the task before the capitalist class was to remain relevant to
such a basic and powerful social force as nationalism and to try to establish
their hegemony over its programme, organization, and strategy and pattern
of struggle.
The twofold relationship of the capitalist class to imperialism, i.e., long-
term antagonism and short-term accommodation and dependence, led it to
work for a non-revolutionary pattern of anti-imperialist struggle. The
struggle was, however, to be always kept within safe and acceptable limits.
Its aim was at no stage to lead to permanent hostility and total confrontation
but the exertion of enough pressure to force a compromise leading to
concessions and a period of peace in which to digest the concessions and
prepare for the next round of struggle. Thus the struggle was to be based on
the strategy of Pressure (struggle)—Compromise— Pressure (struggle) or P-
C-P and stage by stage (or step by step) advance towards a bourgeois nation
state and independent economic development. The political aim was to be
achieved not through the sudden expulsion of imperialism or the seizure of
power but through a negotiated settlement.
(A) The capitalist political strategy required that whenever a mass
national struggle broke out it should remain limited and never get ‘out of
control’, the hostility to the Government must not be total and should be
rigidly controlled so that the overall atmosphere did not become so
unfriendly as to prevent the emergence of cordiality in the following period;
and the struggle should be of short duration and quickly resolvable leading
to a reasonable advance. Thus compromise must quickly follow a short
period of struggle. In fact, the capitalist class had a certain aversion to any
direct political action by the masses (usually described, for example by G.D.
Birla, as the method of ‘disorder’). But recognizing the necessity as also the
inevitability of some such action, it tried to keep such action confined
within a narrow political and ideological framework and tried to bring it to
an end as soon as possible by arriving at a compromise. In no case would the
capitalist class encourage prolonged mass political activity, even of the
nonviolent variety. There were several reasons for this:
(1) As pointed out earlier, the possibility of an immediate compromise
leading to limited and short-term growth existed in the objective economic
and political situations of the capitalist class and imperialism. A prolonged
struggle and mass unrest would also dampen the current economic growth
and opportunities.
(2) Dependence on the administration meant that the capitalist class
could not afford total and long-term official antagonism which would follow
a prolonged and resolute struggle and unmitigated hostility to imperialism.
Therefore its emphasis on the proposition that the gulf between the ‘people’
and the administration must never become too wide. Moreover, as a
propertied class, it was particularly vulnerable to suppression by a still
rigorous administration.
(3) Above all there was the desire to check the growth of the left wing or
the radical political forces. It was felt that any resolute and prolonged and,
therefore, bitter struggle against imperialism, even if it was non-violent,
would impart to the people ‘destructive political education’ in place of the
training: in a ‘constructive approach’ and lead in the end to the growth of
revolutionary feelings which would in turn encourage the notion of class
hatred. Moreover, people would carry over such ‘destructive’ radical and
class feelings to the post-independence period. The feelings of distrust
aroused against the foreign regime would then be transferred to the Indian
Government. Even before that, revolution might become inevitable. That
would be not only Britain’s ‘funeral’ but also India’s. In the more immediate
politics, the mentality of struggle, it was felt, strengthened the left wing of
the Congress at the cost of the right wing.
It should, however, be noted that the fear of the left only made the Indian
capitalists chary of a prolonged and continuous struggle and the ‘struggle-
mentality’; it did not drive them into the arms of imperialism (though it did
establish another point of contact and mutual help between the capitalists
and the Government). The Indian capitalists contained the left wing by
helping the right wing of the Congress, i.e., right wing nationalists, and not
by surrendering before imperialism. They thus carried on a two-front
political struggle by strengthening the right-wing nationalists not only in
their struggle against the left wing but also in their struggle against
imperialism.13 In other words, the Indian capitalists supported the right
wing of the nationalist movement. It is idle to speculate at this time as to
what they would have done if the left in India had been very strong or
whether they would still have stayed in the camp of nationalism.
(B) While refusing to encourage a prolonged mass political struggle and
using its influence to bring every struggle to a quick end, the Indian
capitalist class also exercised all the political pressure at its command to see
that it ended not through a nationalist surrender but through concessions
and compromise by both sides.
The compromise had to be a ‘reasonable’ one. It must never aim too high.
The demands should never be pitched so high that imperialism would find it
difficult to compromise. At the same time, the compromise should never
mean surrender it must always make positive gains in economic and political
rights. The compromise must always take the capitalist class to a higher
stage. Every new compromise must mean an extension of bourgeois power
so that gradually the balance underwent a basic shift but without an all out
struggle, without revolution, and even without radical forces getting an
opportunity to make a breakthrough. Thus in the 1920s the capitalist class
agitated for constitutional advance and responsible government and tariff
and currency autonomy; in the 1930s for Dominion Status with safeguards
but with full Indian control over finance and tariffs and the right to restrict
the entry of foreign capital; from 1939–45 for effective transfer of power to a
‘national government’ with complete control over the economy, including
the power to plan for the post-war period; and after the war for full political
independence.
The compromise and concessions also performed another political
function. They enabled the bourgeoisie to keep a tight control over mass
political activity and to constantly reduce the political temperature of the
masses. This could not be done without the compromise being made
palatable to the broad nationalist sentiment. In the absence of a
compromise, not only did the left wing grow stronger but even the right
wing of the national movement was compelled to adopt a militant
programme.
Compromises and concessions do not, however, at any stage lead the
capitalist class to keep out of sight the longterm objective which is
constantly striven for. Each compromise is used as jumping ground for the
next one. After each compromise pressure for the next round begins to be
built up and that too at a quickened pace and within a reasonable time. Thus
continuous pressure on imperialism is maintained though not a continuous
state of confrontation or struggle. An example may be cited. G.D. Birla
worked hard throughout 1935–36 to bring about a compromise on the
constitution. He used for this purpose all his persuasive powers on Mahatma
Gandhi and the British leaders and authorities.
Yet, as soon as success was achieved, he wrote to Mahadev Desai (and
therefore to Gandhi) from London on 30 July 1937 that “after working the
Constitution for two or three years successfully” the Indians should tell the
British that “they had come to a dead stop because no further progress was
possible without a new Act....that India could not be satisfied with her
present position. And unless there was a permanent agreement there was
likelihood of direct action”. Once again specifying the limited duration of
the compromise, he pointed out to Lord Lothian “that in case there was no
advance after two or three years, then India would be compelled to take
direct action.”14
(C) This entire strategy of step by step political progress in an ascending
order through a series of struggles and compromises sprang from the
capitalist character of the Indian capitalist class, from the fact that it was a
propertied class struggling against imperialism in an era when the exploited
classes were simultaneously struggling for their rights and even challenging
the very basic concept of class society, and from the fact that the individual
capitalists whom the class accepted as their spokesmen and leaders in the
economic and political fields and in its relationship with the colonial
authorities and the national movement were extremely farsighted, shrewd,
and sagacious. This strategy did not therefore represent the politics of a
comprador class or a junior partner of British capital bearing a
collaborationist relationship with British capital and imperialism.
Undoubtedly, the Indian capitalist class carried on its struggle against
imperialism in a compromising and non-revolutionary way. But the aim as
also the net result of its entire strategy was not to betray the national
movement but to create conditions of growth even under imperialism and at
the same time to establish its hegemony over the national movement, to
keep under right-wing influence the urban and rural petty bourgeois
democrats and radicals, and thus to keep the revolutionary left in check.
This strategy was eminently successful insofar as a bourgeois nation state
was brought into existence in 1947 and the forces of left were kept weak and
divided throughout the period of the anti-imperialist struggle so that the
challenge to bougeois power after independence would remain feeble.
(D) The Indian capitalists were associated with the nationalist movement
both as a segment of Indian society and as a separate and distinct political
force; but they did not do so primarily through direct participation. In their
personal politics most of them were liberals; they seldom went beyond
constitutional agitation. Most of them welcomed official titles (though this
did not prevent Gandhi, Sardar Patel, etc., from describing some of the title-
holding capitalists as patriots). The overwhelming majority of the capitalists
could not therefore be described as active antiimperialists. Some of them did
of course give financial support to the Congress but perhaps the extent of
such support has been exaggerated.
What is of far greater significance, the class as a whole, including some of
its conservative members, never opposed the National Congress politically
and always remained within the mainstream of the national movement.
Even while keeping their individual or class political position autonomous,
showing scant regard for the Congress programme of non-cooperation, civil
disobedience and boycott, the capitalist spokesmen supported the Congress
political stand, particularly after 1928. Even when enjoying periods of
economic honeymoon with the colonial authorities, they did not urge or
encourage the political movement to surrender or to compromise on
essentials. As a class, the Indian capitalists refused in spite of blandishments
to enter into a separate political agreement with the colonial authorities behind
the Congress back. The question of joining the imperialist camp did not even
arise. Invariably, following an implicit division of labour, they referred the
colonial authorities to the Congress as the organization and Gandhi as the
leader with whom they should carry on political negotiations and arrive at a
compromise. In the economic field, however, the capitalists negotiated the
compromises directly. Though, within the Congress, the right wing was
preferred and supported against the left wing, for political purposes the
Congress as a whole was seen as the national spokesman. Even the left wing
was not attacked openly, and an attempt to do so by a small segment in 1936
was firmly put down by the overwhelming majority. On the other hand, the
National Liberals and the Hindu Mahasabha were never taken seriously and
were extended little political support.

6
(The Question of Political Roads)

In discussing the question of the roles that the bourgeoisie may play in a
national liberation struggle, which is the form that the bourgeois democratic
revolution takes in a colonial or semi-colonial country, the tendency among
the recent Marxist writers has been to posit broadly two historical models
which are then held to apply in all essentials to all the extent or possible
cases.
The first is the French model in which the bourgeoisie playing the leading
role and undeterred by the rise of a left wing on its flank boldly overthrew
the absolutist monarchy and the feudal nobility and thus under its own
leadership accomplished the bourgeois democratic revolution.
In the second or the Chinese (and the Russian) model, the bourgeoisie
starts on the road to democratic revolution (for democracy, nationalism,
and agrarian reform) but, because of its class links with the semi-feudal
landed class and colonialism and the consequent lack of independence in
politics and because of its fear of the simultaneously developing radical
forces of the politically aroused working class and peasantry, this class
vacillates and ultimately abandons or betrays its historical task of making
the bourgesis democratic revolution, fails to fight imperialism, and in fact
goes over to imperialism and semi-feudalism. It thus betrays nationalism to
defend its narrowly conceived class interests. Two subcases now follow: (1)
This betrayal leads to a certain period of counter-revolutionary
predominance or the restoration of imperialism and semi-feudalism. (2)
Alternatively, following the period of counter-revolution, the working class
develops its political force, allies with the peasantry and the urban petty
bourgeoisie, and brings the bourgeois democratic revolution to fruition
under its leadership, leading to a quick transition to socialism. Crucial to
this model is the notion of the bourgeoisie betraying the national liberation
struggle by allying itself with imperialism. And the determining role in this
outcome is played by two factors: (i) The lack of a significant stratum of
industrial capitalists which is independent, or not basically dependent on
foreign capital and colonialism (or is not comprador in character); and (ii)
the existence of a powerful revolutionary movement of workers and
peasants whose fear drives the bourgeoisie into the arms of imperialism.
A study of the political role of the Indian bourgeoisie during the twentieth
century shows that the Indian pattern of development did not follow either
of these two models.15 Certainly, it did not lead or support a resolute
revolutionary mass struggle against imperialism. At the same time, as we
have seen earlier, it did not betray the national, anti-imperialist movement;
it did not go over to imperialism; it always stayed in the camp of anti-
imperialism; it was willing to participate in the task of national liberation: it
even showed a certain capacity to fight imperialism, though its pattern of
struggle was never revolutionary; and lastly it consistently backed the petty
bourgeois leadership of the national movement. In other words, it revealed
the capacity to fulfil the bourgeois democratic tasks but in a non-
revolutionary way and without completing the economic and the political
tasks simultaneously. This result was of course not accidental.
Firstly, the Indian bourgeoisie had grown as an independent capitalist
class which was not subordinated to the metropolitan capitalist class.
Secondly, the working class and the revolutionary left failed to organize
the other dominated classes around the tasks of national liberation and
agrarian revolution and remained so weak as not to pose a challenge to
bourgeois hegemony over the national movement and social development.
In both Russia and China, the revolutionary working class parties had taken
up the struggle for bourgeois democratic tasks on their own, i.e.,
independently. In India, this was not done. Neither the proletariat was
prepared for the task, nor were the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie
brought under its political influence. Consequently, the Indian bourgeoisie
was never faced with the type of challenge from the left that its counterparts
faced in Russia or China. Thus the political ideological and organizational
weakness of the working class and its political leadership played a crucial role
in the ability of the Indian bourgeoisie to follow a third road.
Thirdly, the Indian bourgeoisie succeeded in keeping the vast petty
bourgeois masses, both rural and urban, under its political and ideological
influence with the result that these masses confined their political and
ideological activity within the broad parameters of a bourgeois
developmental programme in both economic and political fields. But this it
succeeded in doing precisely because of its refusal to desert and betray
bourgeois nationalism and because of the political weakness of the left. Also
crucial in this respect was the role of Gandhi who perfected a political
technique which simultaneously mobilised the masses politically and
prevented them from acting on their own or becoming their own political
masters or even functioning politically in a continuous manner, i.e., non-
spasmodically. The result was that the Indian capitalists, on the one hand,
gave all out support to Gandhi, and, on the other, learnt not to be mortally
afraid of the masses so long as they could be kept under rigid political
tutelage and their political awareness remained at a low level; and they, thus,
evolved a different relationship with the masses than that evolved by the
capitalists in Russia or China.
Sometimes the theory that the Indian bourgeoisie did in the end betray
nationalism is put forth on the ground that the Indian road only led to the
transfer of political power and not to the expulsion of all imperialist
economic interests. While this fact is certainly important for any study of
India’s social development and is also a crucial constituent of the Indian way,
it does not take away from the central aspect of the change that came in
1947. Nor is it very relevant to the present question. In a bourgeois
democratic revolution, the crucial question is that of state power which is
then used to promote capitalist development and not to hinder it as before.
And here a decisive change did occur.16 Similarly, the question of the success
of bourgeois democratic revolution should not be confused with the
capacity to generate self-sustained economic development or with the
immediate completion of the bourgeois democratic tasks. The basic
confusion here lies in that many Marxists want to encompass the question of
the entire future (post-colonial) social development of the excolonies under
the broad category of bourgeois democratic revolution. This I suggest is
incorrect. The main function of the bourgeois democratic revolution is to
settle the question of state power and to open the way to the capitalist
development of society so that feudalism and/or imperialism no longer
determine the main direction of its political and economic life. Whether
self-sustaining economic development occurs or not is quite another matter
which is linked to the wider question of the capacity of underdeveloped
capitalism to grow in the era of world capitalism-imperialism and socialism
and not merely to compradorism. When such development fails to occur or
when certain other tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution are not
completed, certainly other social revolutionary forces emerge. But they do
not make then a bourgeois democratic revolution but merely complete the
tasks left over by it as part of the new social revolutionary process. It may be
noted that no bourgeois democratic revolution since the French Revolution,
if even that, has completed all its tasks immediately or even in the few
suceeding decades. If success of the bourgeois democratic revolution is
defined as widely as many at present tend to do. then all such revolutions
can be successful or completed only when a society turns socialist.17 For
example, when the bourgeois democratic revolution occurred in Britain in
1648, its essence lay in the transfer of state power to the bourgeoisie which
could now set out to organize the society and economy in its own interests,
i.e., along capitalist lines. No rigid time table for self-sustained economic
development was guaranteed (it could have been upset by so many
intervening factors) nor were feudal economic and social relations suddenly,
dramatically, or immediately overthrown. Even more so was this the case in
Germany, Italy, and Japan. I have also the feeling that to argue back from
state power to the lack of sudden economic shift when the sudden shift in
state power itself is in part and basically the result of changes in the
economic field is to indulge in circular reasoning.
Sometimes, perhaps, the confusion arises because of the emphasis on the
word revolution in the phrase bourgeois revolution. But this refers to a
radical shift in state power and economic relations. This shift need not occur
through a mass revolution and by a revolutionary democratic bourgeoisie. It
can be brought about in quite non-revolutionary or even reactionary ways.
There is again the example of Germany and Japan.
The crux of the economic question after 1947 was not that of completing
the bourgeois democratic revolution but that of breaking the Indian
economy’s structural links with world capitalism. This task would remain
basically un-performed even if the penetration of the ex-metropolitan
country’s capital was weakened. The basic weakness of the Indian economy
and of its capitalist class lay in its integration with the world capitalist
economy in a subordinate or dependent position and not in the comprador
character of its capitalist class. So long as this structural link lasted, one or
the other national or international capitalist group would continue to
penetrate it and threaten its autonomous development. This structural link
would also stand in the way of self-sustained growth. The degree of social,
political, ideological and economic transformation and mobilization of the
people and the intensity of the struggle against world capitalism that the task
of breaking this structural link requires is revealed by the example of Cuba
where it took a socialist revolution to accomplish it.
Moreover, this structural link is not the result of the prevalence of semi-
colonialism or neo-colonialism; it is part of the process of capitalist
development in the modem era. Consequently, after 1947, the task in India
was not to organize a national liberation struggle of which the struggle
against capitalism would form an integral part, but to organize a struggle
against capitalism of which the struggle against imperialism would form an
integral part. This issue was and is of great theoretical and political
significance since the former understanding could lead to a political struggle
that was divorced from reality or to collaboration with the underdeveloped
capitalism in the name of fighting imperialism or neo-colonialism. Today,
self-sustained economic growth and the defence of democracy require not a
national liberation struggle against imperialism but a struggle against capital
itself. And the very possibility of neo-colonialism arises because of the
incapacity of underdeveloped capitalism to develop on its own, to solve
national problems, and to resolve the deep-rooted social crisis, even when it
is aided by socialist countries. This aspect, however, needs detailed
treatment in a separate paper.

NOTES

Read at the International Seminar on ‘Imperialism, Independence and

Social Transformation in the Contemporary World’ held in New Delhi in
March 1972.
1 The idea that the Indian national movement originated with the bourgeoisie is the result of the

mechanical application of European history. Moreover, since at no stage did the bourgeoisie provide
the main thrust of the movement, at no stage can its development be primarily explained with
reference to the role of the bourgeoisie only. I certainly do not want to contribute through this paper
to this tendency that warped so much of the political discussion among the Marxists from 1920 to
1948.
2 Many of the Marxist writers on the subject have described the relationship of the Indian capitalist

class with imperialism as dual before 1947. But this does not answer the basic question: which of the
dual aspects of the relationship was primary both in the long run and at specific moments? Mere
recognition of the dual character of the relationship is an advance, but it does not take the analysis
very far.
3 There were a few compradors and junior partners of British capital. But they were neither in the

mainstream of Indian business nor important in the business and class organization of the Indian
capitalist class. They also demarcated themselves from the main body of the class by supporting
imperialism in the field of politics as also of economic policies.
4 This was also true of the big (in Indian terms) bourgeoise. But, certainly, the wide prevalence of

small and middle capitalists in India reinforced this result.

5 Nor did these capitalist houses have significant semi-feudal land holdings. Several of them did, of

course, have large scale capitalist farms. This question is not of direct relevance here except insofar as
their semi-feudal interests might have subordinated them to imperialism as in China.
6 In fact, these did not in the main spring even from direct administrative suppression. British

colonial policies in India were geared primarily to the colonial integration of Indian economy with
British economy and not to the direct suppression of the Indian capitalist class.
7 In his paper I have studied the stand taken directly by the class itself through its class organizations

and spokesmen and not through its ideological or political spokesmen. The latter can be the subject of
a separate study.
8 In this presidential reply to the third annual general meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers

of Commerce and Industry on 16th February 1930, G.D. Birla said: “I am very sorry that we have not
been able to influence the Government or to convert them to our views, but we never anticipated that.
It is impossible in the present circumstances and in the present political condition of our country to
convert the Government to our views; but I think the only solution of our present difficulties lies in
every Indian businessman strengthening the hands of those who are fighting for the freedom of our
country. ... Swaraj (freedom) is not a question of sentiment. It is a question of bread. The prosperity of
the country depends entirely on the amount of political freedom which we get and I think that not
only in the interests of the country but in the interests of the capitalists, the employers, and the
industrialists we should try to fight and strengthen the hands of those who are fighting for Swaraj”.
(Emphasis added). Report of the Proceedings of the Annual General Meeting of the FICCI, VoL III, Third
Annual Meeting (1930), pp. 264–65.
9 The leftover pickings of the China opium trade and the yam trade with Britain, petty government

contracts, the cotton boom of the American Civil War, the fall out from bureaucratic corruption in
British India or the princely states, and the normal profits arising in the sphere of internal circulation
formed the narrow base of the original capital of the Indian bourgeoisie.
10 This put the sector of industrialists whose major interest lay in mining, iron and steel, and electric

power under strong pressure to remain loyalists. This factor, alongwith the fact that the Government
was the largest consumer of its steel products, seems to have had this effect on the House of Tatas,
among others.
11 In a memorandum, a copy of which he sent to Lord Halifax, summarizing what he had been telling

British leaders in England during his visit, G.D. Birla wrote in 1935: “The right-wing Congressmen are
thus fighting against two forces—the Government and the Socialists. The latter are making a direct
attack by discrediting the leaders for having ‘achieved nothing’. The Government is helping the
Socialists by ignoring the rightwing; between the two the rightwing is being crushed ... Sensible
Indian men and women realize their need of British help; they want British friendship”, G.D. Birla, In
the Shadow of the Mahatma: a Personal Memoir, Calcutta, 1953, pp. 193–95, Again, in March 1937, in
a letter to the Viceroy, Birla after having referred to the Working Committee Resolution on office
acceptance wrote: “I think this is a great triumph for the right wing of the Congress and a counter-
response would very much strengthen their hands. I hope his Excellency appreciates the position”.
(Emphasis added). Ibid., p. 214.
12 This meant a major opening for the Indian capitalists at a time when normal channels of

investment and accumulation were drying up. 30 sugar factories immediately came up and by 1934
their number had gone up to 130 from 32 in 1931. Almost every major industrialist of the country
took part in the sugar boom. Moreover, many a capitalist found that profits of his sugar factory alone
enabled him to keep up the old rate of dividends.
13 This is in complete contrast with the political behaviour of the comprador bourgeoisie of China

which thrice, in 1911, in 1926–27 and in 1945–49, not only attacked the left but also surrendered
before imperialism.
14 In the Shadow of the Mahatma, pp. 255–56.

15 Sometimes there is a tendency to suggest that the deviation from the Chinese model is only

temporary or for the time being and that in the long run the Chinese (or the Russian) model will
apply. This has in fact been said since the 1920s when the famous Colonial Thesis of the Comintern
codified this view in 1928. But with the transfer of political sovereignty to India in 1947 and the
consequent passage of nearly 25 years one long run at least should be seen to have come to an end.
Not to see this is to mystify and indulge in mere logic-chopping. After all, any long run to be a useful
concept of analysis must have some sort of limited time-span.
16 Though even in the economic field crucial changes occurred. Imperialist domination of the Indian

market was severely curbed and the direct appropriation of Indian social surplus virtually ended.
Even the position of the existing foreign capital was weakened, while the entry of fresh foreign capital
was restricted.
17 This was seen by Karl Marx as early as 1849 in the context of bourgeois democratic revolutions in

Europe: “Every revolutionary upheaval, however remote from the class struggle (between bourgeoisie
and working class) its goal may appear to be, must fail until the revolutionary working class is
victorious, ...every social reform remains a utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic
counter-revolution measure swords in a world war”. Wage, Labour and Capital Moscow, 1970
printing, pp. 17–18.
 Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist
Class, 1936

Jawaharlal Nehru grew more and more radical during 1933- 361 for various
reasons—ranging from the impact of the world depression on India and the
world and the resulting crisis and collapse of the capitalist system
portending intense social change everywhere, the culmination of his own
intellectual development since 1926-27 fed by the voracious reading he did
in jail over 1932-35, to the defeat suffered by the nationalist movement
during 1932-34 and his constant incarceration in these years. Not only does
he lay claim to being a revolutionary,2 but his leftism becomes less and less
vague and woolly. He begins to see almost every aspect of Indian politics in
a clearer light at the plane of thought; and, of course, he does so with his
usual passion. Not only questions of theory, but even questions of the
perspective, social content, social base, and political strategy of the national
movement are seen in a more radical, well-formed way. This is his most
‘Marxist’ phase; the Indian summer of his leftism. His most recent
biographer has described the Nehru of 1927-28 as a “self-conscious
revolutionary radical”;3 he was during 1933-36 on the verge of becoming a
Marxist revolutionary anti-imperialist.4
The transition was long in the making, and it was never completed. But its
near-last phase can be said to begin, systematically and publicly,5 with his
articles “Whither India” published in October 1933; and it came to a
brilliant fruition in his Presidential Address to the Lucknow Congress in
April 1936. In between, there were a number of speeches, articles, letters,
prison-diaries, and the Autobiography.
The radical Nehru produced consternation among the Indian capitalists
and the right-wing in the Congress. They took certain steps to counter and
contain him—thereby revealing a long-term strategy to deal with him and
others like him. This paper examines the radicalism of Nehru which
frightened the capitalists and the counter-strategy which they therefore
used.

Nehru’s commitment to socialism finds a clearer and sharper expression

during 1933-36. Already he had declared himself a socialist in 1929 in his
Presidential Address to the Lahore Congress, but the conception of
socialism had been rather vague.6 He was veering round to Marxism but
there was as yet no ‘deep absorption’ of Marxism.7
Now, he repeatedly justified socialism and communism, and he used the
two terms synonymously; and declared that they had “science and logic on
their side”,8 and, in October 1933, confidently answered the question
“Whether India?” thus: “Surely to the great human goal of social and
economic equality, to the ending of all exploitation of nation by nation and
class by class, to national freedom within the framework of an international
cooperative socialist world federation”.9 And, in December 1933, he wrote:
“The true civic ideal is the socialist ideal, the communist ideal”.10 He had
some reservation regarding the communists; he was also critical of the
Comintern’s tactics.11 But in the end, he gave his commitment squarely to
communism: “...fundamentally the choice before the world today is one
between some form of Communism and some form of Fascism...There is no
middle road between Fascism and Communism. One has to choose between
the two and I choose the Communist ideal.”12 This commitment he put in
unequivocal and passionate words at Lucknow on April 20, 1936: “I am
convinced that the only key to the solution of the world’s problems and of
India’s problems lies in socialism... I see no way of ending the poverty, the
vast unemployment, the degradation, and the subjection of the Indian
people except through socialism”.13
Nehru also defined the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ more clearly and
scientifically. The word ‘capitalism’, he said in October 1933, could “mean
only one thing: the economic system that has developed since the industrial
revolution...capitalism means the developed system of production for profit
based on private ownership of the means of production”. Similarly, socialism
was seen as a radically different social system. It was not to be defined “in a
vague humanitarian way, but in the scientific, economic sense”. It involved
“vast and revolutionary changes in our political and social structure, the
ending of vested interests in land and industry.14 In particular he pin-
pointed the attack on the private ownership of the means of production.15
Socialism meant, he told his Lucknow audience, ”the ending of private
property, except in a restricted sense, and the replacement of the present
profit system by a higher ideal of cooperative system.”16 Moreover, one could
not be both for socialism and for capitalism—i.e., for “the nationalization of
the instruments of production and distribution” as well as for their private
ownership. Of course, there could be ‘half-way houses’ on the road, “but one
can hardly have two contradictory and conflicting processes going on side
by side. The choice must be made and for one who aims at socialism there
can be only one choice.”17
Nehru also emphasized the role of class analysis and class struggle. In a
press interview on September 17, 1933, he said that every person should be
enabled to “realize exactly where he and his class and group stand”. So far as
class struggle was concerned, he pointed out that it was a fact of life and of
history all over the world. “Class struggles have always existed and exist
today,” only “people interested in maintaining the status quo try to hide this
fact” and then accuse others of “fomenting class struggle.” Class struggle,
said Nehru, was not “created but recognized”. The political task was to
remove the cloak used to hide the reality. Then it would be disclosed that
“some classes dominate the social order, and exploit other classes”, and the
remedy would only lie “in the ending of that exploitation.”18
Going beyond economics, Nehru began to criticize even the political
institutions of the bourgeois social order—thus undermining the hegemony
of the bourgeois political ideology structured by the national movement
since 1880s and continuing through the Gandhian era. Though committed
to political democracy and civil liberties, he was clear in his mind that “if
political or social institutions stand in the way of such a change
[‘establishment of a socialist order’], they have to be removed.”19 Moreover,
he wrote in 1936, even political democracy was acceptable “only in the hope
that this will lead to social democracy”, for “political democracy is only the
way to the goal and is not the final objective”.20 So far as the establishment of
socialism by democratic means was concerned, that too was not likely in
practice—though it remained a possibility in theory—because “the
opponents of socialism will reject the democratic method when they see
their power threatened”. The democratic method had not succeeded
anywhere so far “in resolving a conflict about the very basic structure of the
State or of society. When this question arises, the group or class which
controls the State-power does not voluntarily give it up because the majority
demands it.” In fact, “ruling powers and ruling classes have not been known
in history to abdicate willingly.”21
It was also to be noted, he wrote in October 1933, that the West European
political doctrines of democracy and liberty served only the capitalist
classes. In the absence of economic equality, “the vote...was of little use” and
in practice “exploitation of man by man and group by group increased”. The
result was that the liberal doctrine of “government of the people, by the
people and for the people” was translated in practice as “a government by
the possessing classes for their own benefit”. Consequently, concluded
Nehru, even this liberal doctrine could be established only “when the masses
held power, that is under socialism”.22
Nehru also began to escape from the Gandhian dichotomy of conversion
versus coercion. Making a beginning in jail in March 1933, he told Gandhi
that his weekly Harijan was not likely “to convert a single bigoted
Sanatanist,” for, as John Stuart Mill had pointed out, “ ‘the convictions of the
mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or class feelings’ .”23
In an interview to the Pioneer on 31 August 1933, he asserted that “a
complete reconstruction of society on a new basis” meant the diversion of
profits and property from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have-nots’, and it could not be
supposed “that vested interests will ever voluntarily agree to that”. 24
Taking up the theme for systematic treatment in October 1933, in his
articles “Whither India”, Nehru pointed out that the whole principle of the
state was based on coercion as was also the present social system. “Is not
coercion and enforced conformity the very basis of both?” he asked. In fact.
“Army, police, laws, prisons, taxes are all methods of coercion. The zamindar
who realizes rent and often many illegal cesses relies on coercion, not on
conversion of the tenants. The factory owner who gives starvation wages
does not rely on conversion. Hunger and the organized forces of the State
are the coercive processes employed by both.” It did not, therefore, lie in the
mouths of the possessing classes “to talk of conversion”. The real problem
was to end the vested interests, to bring the ruling classes and their
exploitation to an end. Even Gandhi accepted the principle of divesting the
vested interests. But how was this to be done? History did not show any
“instance of a privileged class or group or nation giving up its special
privileges or interests willingly”. This had always required “a measure of
coercion”. India was not going to be an exception. Here, too, “coercion or
pressure is necessary to bring about political and social change”. In fact, the
non-violent mass movements of India since 1919 had been precisely such
processes of coercion or pressure; they were meant “to coerce the other
party”. Even non-violent non-cooperation was to be viewed not “as a
negative and passive method”, but “as an active, dynamic, and forceful
method of enforcing the mass will”.25
Nehru took up the theme again in his Autobiography. There, he devoted a
whole chapter to gently combating this basic aspect of Gandhi’s ideology.
“Economic interests”, he pointed out, “shape the political views of groups
and classes. Neither reason nor moral considerations override these
interests.” It was, therefore, “an illusion to imagine that a dominant
imperialist power will give up its domination over a country, or that a class
will give up its superior position and privileges, unless effective pressure,
amounting to coercion, is exercised.”26 At the end of the chapter, he took up
a clear- cut position: If the aim of “a classless society with equal economic
justice and opportunity for all” was to be realized, “everything that comes in
the way will have to be removed, gently if possible, forcibly if necessary. And
there seems to be little doubt that coercion will often be necessary.”27
Throughout these years, he pointed to the inadequacy of the existing
nationalist ideology and stressed the need to inculcate a new ideology,
which would enable the people to study their condition scientifically.28 One
reason for his favouring the continuation of the civil disobedience
movement, even after its virtual defeat, lay in the belief that the continuation
of the political crisis favoured the spread of new ideas among the masses and
the intelligentsia.29
The words ‘new ideology’—found so often in his letters, essays, and
speeches of the period—stood in reality for Marxism, for he explicitly
accepted the general validity of Marxism as “the scientific interpretation of
history and politics and economics” and as representing “scientific
socialism” in contrast to “a vague and idealistic socialism.”30 On May 15,
1936, he told the Indian Progressive Group of Bombay that “scientific
socialism, or Marxism, was the only remedy for the ills of the world.”31 On
May 17, he told a meeting of Congress Socialists that history as well as the
contemporary state of affairs “could not be explained except by socialism
and Marxism.”32 Nehru accepted the entire Marxist analysis of the economic
crisis of monopoly capitalism and of imperialism and the need for its
overthrow. The crisis of capitalism, he wrote in 1933, was essentially “due to
the ill distribution of the world’s wealth; to its concentration in a few hands”.
Moreover, “the disease seems to be of the essence of capitalism and grows
with it.” The heart of the matter was that the capitalist system was no longer
suited to the present methods of production”. The answer, therefore, lay in “a
new system in keeping with the new technique” in other words, “the way of
socialism”.33
Nehru also made his own the contemporary Marxist analysis of Fascism
—and this, at a time when many ‘general’ radicals were being attracted by
the superficially ‘leftist’ programme and stance, popular base, discipline, and
organizational success of Fascism in Europe and Asia. Fascism arose, wrote
Nehru, because the failure of the capitalist order had led to a powerful
challenge by the working class. “This challenge, when it has become
dangerous, has induced the possessing classes to sink their petty differences
and band themselves together to fight the common foe. This had led to
Fascism.”34 At Lucknow, Nehru concluded his analysis of world affairs by
contrasting the failure of capitalism with the success of the socialist
experiment in the Soviet Union and openly held up Soviet socialism as the
social alternative to capitalism.35 Nehru was not all praise for the new state.
There were “defects and mistakes and ruthlessness”.36 There was much there
that had “pained” him.37 Yet the “new era” was no longer “a dream of the
future”, for it was “taking visible, vital shape” in the USSR, “stumbling
occasionally but ever marching forward.”38 This “new order and a new
civilization” was “the most promising feature of our dismal age.”39
Having made a radical critique of world capitalism-imperialism, Nehru
began to argue for the integration of India’s anti-imperialist struggle against
colonialism and with the world struggle against with Asia’s struggle
capitalism “for the emancipation of the oppressed.”40 In his Lucknow
Address, Nehru developed the linkage further. India’s problem was “but a
part of the world problem of capitalism-imperialism.” Moreover, socialism
in Europe and America and the nationalist movements in Africa and Asia
formed a single camp against that of Fascism and imperialism.41 Thus
Nehru’s internationalism of the period was politically significant, and quite
radical; he hoped to use it to radicalise Indian politics, and to spread
socialist consciousness and ideology among the Indian people.

During the years 1933-36, Nehru increasingly extended his new ideological
grasp to the Indian national movement and demanded a change in its basic
strategy and organizational structure.
First of all, he challenged the basic nationalist political strategy followed
by the Congress leadership since the 1880s, that is, the strategy of advancing
towards political power and independence by stages arrived at through a
series of compromises to be forced on the colonial power through the
application of ever-increasing political pressure. In previous articles, I have
described this strategy as that of Pressure-Compromise-Pressure or P-C-P.42
Under this strategy, political pressure, usually through a mass movement, is
applied, political concessions are secured, there is a period of ‘peaceful
cooperation’, however disguised, with the colonial political structure; while
such ‘goodwill’ prevails on both sides, preparations are made for another
round of pressure or mass movements, till the cycle is repeated—the
repetition being an upward spiralling one. The political advance came,
according to the strategy, through the political or constitutional actions of
the constituted authority, that is, the British Government. Seizure of political
power was thus ruled out by the inherent logic of this strategy.
In the concrete Indian political situation of 1934-36, the dominant
Congress leadership and the leadership of the Indian capitalist class felt that
the stage of pressure or active struggle was over and the stage of
compromise, cooperation, and ‘goodwill’ had to be ushered in. They had
been quietly working towards a political compromise, in fact, since the end
of 1933, for the civil disobedience movement had definitely petered out by
that time.
In the circumstances existing at the time, this involved the working of
constitutional reforms, which were finally promulgated in 1935. Gandhi
appeared to be against working the reforms, but his policy—of leaving the
legislative councils to those Congressmen who wanted to work in them
while others devoted themselves to the ‘constructive programme’—virtually
amounted to unofficial acceptance of the phase of compromise and
cooperation. Moreover, Gandhi and the dominant right- wing leadership of
the Congress strained all their nerves to prevent the Congress from adopting
a policy of office rejection in the provinces under the Act of 1935 even
though they were vehemently denouncing the Act at that time.43 This is very
clearly brought out by the encouragement that Gandhi gave to G.D. Birla to
bring about a spirit of mutual trust and ‘personal touch’ between the rulers
and the Congress leadership in general and Gandhi in particular. Again and
again Birla, and through him, though virtually silently, Gandhi assured
British statesmen and officials that even the otherwise condemned reforms
could be worked if the ‘personal touch’ between the two sides was
established.44
 Nehru, on the other hand, argued that if the aim was ‘a new state’ and not
merely ‘a new administration’, power could not be gained through stages and
with the cooperation of the ruling power,45 that the Indian national
movement had reached a stage where there should be an uncompromising
opposition to and permanent confrontation and conflict with imperialism
until it was overthrown.46 Temporary setbacks should lead not to
cooperation or compromise—even a short- term one—with imperialism,
but to continued hostility to it though necessarily such hostility would be on
a low key till the upswing came once again.47
First, said Nehru, the contradiction between imperialism and the Indian
people was fundamental and could not, therefore, be resolved half-way.
“...between British imperialism and Indian freedom there is no meeting
ground and there can be no peace.”48 This meant that even if there was no
mass movement there could be no reversion to a constitutional phase when
the reforms were worked.
Secondly, every movement—national or social—reached sooner or later a
stage when it endangered the existing order. The struggle, then, became
perpetual and immediate, unconstitutional and illegal. No scope was left for
further compromises. This also happened when “the masses enter politics”.
Nor was there a middle stage or middle path out of the impasse, “The only
alternative to a continuation” of the struggle was “some measure of
cooperation with imperialism”. But. at this stage in Indian and world history,
any form of compromise with imperialism “would be a betrayal of the
cause”. And the answer: “the only way out is to struggle through to the other
side” and to “carry on the struggle for freedom without compromise or
going back or faltering.”49 Nehru was also trying to impart the notion of the
strategy of seizure of power—though through a non-violent mass
movement. Real power could not be won gradually, through stages, “bit by
bit” or by “two annas or four annas”. Either imperialism would retain power
or the Indians would take possession “of the citadel”.50 Here he was directly
posing the strategy of P-V (‘V’ for victory) against that of P-C-P. He
continued to accept, in full, the non-violent mass movement as the only
possible method of struggle in India. But, for him, this method constituted
the path of struggle and not of compromise and cooperation with
imperialism. He again and again emphasized the strategy of struggle—the
question of seizure of power— rather than the methods of struggle which, he
said, were conditioned by the existing political circumstances.51
More concretely, he clearly saw, during 1935-36, that acceptance of office
in the provinces under the Act of 1935 would amount to the reversing of the
national movement to the compromise phase. And he campaigned so
vehemently against acceptance of office, because it was a question of struggle
between two strategic lines. The struggle became bitter precisely because
Nehru was here challenging the basic strategy of Gandhi and the national
movement. This is also why he was so completely defeated that he was never
again to pose a challenge to Gandhi or to the dominant Congress leadership.
In his Lucknow Address, he took a firm stand on this question which, he
said, was of great significance since “behind that issue lay deep questions of
principle”. “Behind it lies,” he said, “some-what hidden, the question of
independence itself and whether we seek revolutionary changes in India or
are working for petty reforms under the aegis of British imperialism.” Office-
acceptance “would inevitably mean our cooperation in some measure with
the repressive apparatus of imperialism, and we would become partners in
this repression and in the exploitation of our people”. It would mean, in
practice, a surrender before imperialism. For Congressmen it would amount
to giving up “the very basis and background of our existence.” The Congress
not only should not accept office, it could not afford even “to hesitate and
waver about it.” Acceptance of office by the Congress “will be a pit from
which it would be difficult for us to come out.” And, lastly, such a step would
be fatal to the effort “to cultivate a revolutionary mentality among our
people,”52 which was one of his major concerns at this time.
On a wider plane, Nehru was opposed to giving undue importance to
parliamentary activity in general. He wanted to assign to the work in the
legislatures a purely subsidiary role in politics. It was useful only to the
extent that it could be used to mobilize the masses for direct mass political
action.53 He also warned Congressmen against the ‘real danger’ that they
might ,be tempted to tone down their programme and policy “in order to
win over” for electoral purposes “the hesitating and compromising groups
and individuals.”54 One step, whereby the work in the legislatures could be
prevented from becoming “a hindrance to our other work,” was for the
Congress and its Working Committee to control that work directly and to
abolish the semi-autonomous parliamentary boards.55
He recognized, however, that some form of parliamentary activity was
bound to exist and that it must, therefore, be given a focus around which to
rally without compromising with imperialism. Moreover, the mechanism
through which power would be grasped and wielded by successful
nationalism had also to be laid before the people. Both purposes could be
served by the realistic and brilliant slogan of the Constituent Assembly
(CA). It was in 1933 that Nehru had first publicly raised the demand that the
future constitution of India should be framed by a popularly elected
Constituent Assembly. The slogan of the CA was a direct challenge to the
theory of the working of the existing legislative councils—and hence also to
the strategy of achieving freedom through stages and through political
action by the rulers, for the CA could meet only after British domination
had ended. It was, therefore, a slogan which would mobilise the people for
the overthrow of imperialism.56 Nehru reiterated the demand for a
Constituent Assembly at Lucknow, and for the same reasons. CA would not
come, he pointed out, through negotiations with imperialism or as the result
of a new act of the British Parliament. It would be an expression of the
seizure of power by the Indian people, of “at least a semi-revolutionary
situation”, that is, of the new strategy of national struggle.57
Nehru increasingly pointed to another weakness of the national
movement—its essentially middle class and bourgeois character.58 Even
when the political struggle was based on the masses, “the backbone and
leadership were always supplied by the middle classes.”59 This produced
weakness in several directions. It produced a vague nationalist feeling and
ideology of freedom, which did not even realize “what form that freedom
would take”. It also produced a certain idealism, a mysticism, and a sort of
religious revivalism.60 Moreover, the middle classes looked in “two
directions at the same time.” Their members hoped to go up in the world
even as most of them were being crushed by the colonial economy.
Consequently this leadership looked in “two directions at the same time”,
and vacillated during periods of struggle. As a propertied group, it was open
to threats to its property by the Government which, therefore, found it easy
“to bring pressure on it and to exhaust its stamina.” Middle class domination
of the national movement also meant that its policies and ideas, and the
problems it raised, were governed far more by “this middle-class outlook
than by a consideration of the needs of the great majority of the
population.”61
The answer lay in a shift in the social base and the social character of the
movement and of its leadership. The middle classes could no longer “claim
to represent the masses.” The movement must establish “a new link and a
new connection.” This could only mean the incorporation of the masses,
“the active participation of the peasantry and workers.”62 The basic step
through which these changes in the class character of the leadership of the
national movement, as also in its strategy of struggle and social content,
would be brought about was the collective affiliation of the basic
organizations of workers and peasants, trade unions and kisan sabhas, to the
Congress.63
In addition, the Congress should encourage the formation of such kisan
sabhas and trade unions and help them carry on day-to-day struggle around
their economic demands.64
It seemed that Nehru was beginning to grope towards assigning the
masses a role different from the one assigned by Gandhi. While Gandhi
brought the masses into the political movement, he never encouraged or
permitted the masses to discuss and develop political activity on their own,
leave alone encourage them to have their own leadership. Nehru suggested
both. Moreover, Nehru was beginning to come down from the realm of
ideas and ideologies to the realm of methods of political struggle and
questions of organization, and hence was beginning to meet Gandhi’s mild
taunt in his letter of 14 September 1933 that “you have emphasized the
necessity of a clear statement of the goal” but the fact is “that the clearest
possible definition of the goal and its appreciation would fail to take us there
if we do not know and utilise the means of achieving it.”65
Nehru paid a great deal of attention to the question of the integration of
social struggle with political struggle—thus redefining the very goals of the
national movement. Of course, he identified himself fully with the
mainstream of nationalism and its chief leader and spokesman, the Indian
National Congress.66 He recognized that nationalism was the strongest force
in the country.67 He also accepted the multi-class character of the Congress
as the leader of a national—as apart from a class—movement.68 At the same
time, he criticised the existing dominant tendency to totally subordinate the
social struggle to the political struggle, or, much worse, to postpone the
social struggle to a later period in the name of national unity and national
struggle. This wrong tendency, he believed, was the result of the middle-
class, bourgeois character of Indian nationalism. Middle-class nationalism
had tended to ignore the “inherent and fundamental” internal class conflicts
and tried “to avoid disturbing the class divisions or the social status quo.”
The reason usually offered was that “the national issue must be settled
first.”69 But there could be no genuine struggle which did not incorporate
the social struggle of the masses.70
In fact, predicted Nehru in October 1933, “political and social
emancipation will come together to some at least of the countries of Asia.”71
Freedom of India was necessary, he said, precisely because the masses were
having to bear the burden of vested interests of certain classes in India and
abroad. “The achievement of freedom thus becomes a question...of divesting
vested interests.” On the other hand, “If an indigenous government took the
place of the foreign government and kept all the vested interests intact this
would not even be the shadow of freedom.”72 Therefore, the immediate
objective or goal of the freedom struggle had to be the ending of the
exploitation of the Indian people. Politically, this meant independence from
foreign rule; socially and economically it had to mean “the ending of all
special class privileges and vested interests.”73
In a message to the Indian Labour Journal in November 1933, Nehru
again emphasized that both social and national struggles were basic and that
in neither should a compromise be made.74 Simultaneously, he urged the
working class to play its due role in the anti-imperialist struggle. The
workers should unite and organize, acquire and develop “the correct
ideology” leading to a socialist programme, and act politically in alliance
with the national movement with a view to “orient it in favour of the
workers”.75 In December 1933, in a speech delivered at the All-India Trade
Union Congress, he assured the workers that, if they participated fully in the
national struggle as well as in their own social struggle, they would help
bring about not only “political freedom in India but social freedom also.”76
The years 1934-35 also witnessed a certain alienation of Nehru from the
right-wing leaders of the Congress, which could perhaps have served as a
preliminary step towards a political struggle against them within the
Congress. In his letter of 13 August 1934 to Gandhi, Nehru spoke in an
angry tone of the triumph of opportunism in the Congress and put part of
the blame on the Working Committee which had “deliberately encouraged
vagueness in the definition of our ideals and objectives.”77 He was angry
with the Working Committee particularly because it had passed a resolution
on 18 June 1934, indirectly condemning socialism and socialists for
practising “the necessity of class war” and “confiscation of private property”.
On reading the resolution in jail, he had written in his diary on 20 June
1934: “to hell with the Working Committee—passing pious and fatuous
resolutions on subjects it does not understand—or perhaps understands too
well!”78 To Gandhi he complained in August that “whether the Working
Committee knows anything about the subject or not, it is perfectly willing to
denounce and excommunicate the supporters of socialism.”79 The resolution
showed “an astounding ignorance of the elements of socialism.” “It seemed”,
he wrote harshly, “that the over-mastering desire of the Committee was
somehow to assure various vested interests even at the risk of talking
nonsense.” And then, he turned the knife with exquisite irony: “...it is oft
preferred to break some people’s hearts rather than touch others’ pockets.
Pockets are indeed more valuable and more cherished than hearts and
brains and bodies and human justice and dignity!”80 In a note written at
about the same time as the letter, he even suggested that the resolution was
aimed at keeping him and other socialists out of the Congress. Moreover,
while “nobody called the Congress socialist”, it had now “ceased to be
neutral on the subject. It is aggressively anti-socialist and politically it is
more backward than it has been for 15 years”. Nor were the members of the
Working Committee innocent reactionaries. They had passed the resolution
“at the instigation of the Parliamentary Board or its leaders who want to
keep on the safe side of the people who have money.”81
 There was a certain growing alienation even from Gandhi. The process
had started in jail in 1933. On June 4, he wrote in his diary: “I am afraid I
am drifting further and further away from him mentally, in spite of my
strong emotional attachment to him.” He contrasted Gandhi with “Lenin
and Co” to Gandhi’s disadvantage and then wrote: “More and more I feel
drawn to their dialectics, more and more I realize the gulf between Bapu and
me...” Gandhi had accepted “the present social order.” What was worse, he
“surrounds himself with men who are the pillars and the beneficiaries of this
order” and who would, without doubt, wrote Nehru with a touch of
bitterness, “profit and take advantage of both our movement and of any
constitutional changes that may come.” On his part, Nehru was quite clear:
“I want to break from this lot completely.” But he also knew that this was not
going to be easy. There is trouble ahead so far as I am personally concerned.
I shall have to fight a stiff battle between rival loyalties.” He knew that the
choice was not going to be easy to make, and so he wrote: “Perhaps the
happiest place for me is the gaol! I have another three months here before I
go out, and one can always return.”82
A few weeks later, Gandhi’s efforts at negotiations with the Viceroy
exasperated him further. He wrote in his diary on 24th July: “I am getting
more and more certain that there can be no further political cooperation
between Bapu and me. At least not of the kind that has existed. We had
better go our different ways.”83
Nehru reacted with violent emotion to the withdrawal of the Civil
Disobedience Movement in April 1934, and even more to the reasons
advanced by Gandhi for the withdrawal. He wrote in his diary on 12 May
1934: “How can one work with Bapu if he functions in this way and leaves
people in the lurch?”84 Earlier, on 13th April he had written: “It marks an
epoch not only in our freedom struggle but in my personal life. After 15
years I go my way, perhaps a solitary way leading not far.”85 To Gandhi, he
wrote in half-anguish, half-anger: “I had a sudden and intense feeling, that
something broke inside me, a bond that I had valued very greatly had
snapped ...I have always felt a little lonely almost from childhood up... But
now I felt absolutely alone, left high and dry on a desert island.”86 In an
unpublished note he gave freer reign to his disillusionment and the feeling
of a near-break with Gandhi. There is hardly any common ground between
me and Bapu and the others who lead the Congress today. Our objectives
are different, our spiritual outlook is different, and our methods are likely to
be different...I felt with a stab of pain that the chords of allegiance that had
bound me to him for many years had snapped.” He complained of Gandhi’s
“concentration on issues other than the political,” of his “personal and self-
created entanglements,” and of his desertion (whatever the reasons) of his
comrades in the middle of the struggle.” After all, there was “such a thing as
loyalty to a job undertaken and to one’s colleagues in it, and it was painful to
find that Bapu attached little value to it.”87
It should also be noted that several chapters of the “Auto-biography”,
written during 1934-35 and published in 1936, were an ideological polemic
against Gandhi, even though they were couched in a mild, friendly, even
reverential tone. Perhaps they constituted an effort to give Indian
nationalism a new ideological orientation.
Thus it seemed by the middle of 1936 that Nehru was setting out to evolve
a left political alternative to the Gandhian leadership—an alternative that
would challenge the latter in all basic aspects: programme and ideology,
social character of the movement and of its leadership, and the strategy of its
struggle. He was, moreover, beginning to emerge as the leader of a broad
socialist bloc, which was as yet loose and even incoherent, but which was
getting formed around his personality. Nor did Nehru confine his new
approach to his diary or to discussions in the Working Committee. He wrote
extensively for journals and newspapers, both in English and Hindi. His
articles were widely translated in other Indian languages and were often
published in book or pamphlet form. He issued press statements almost
daily. After coming back from Europe in the beginning of 1936, he was busy
stumping the country from one end to the other addressing vast audiences
and everywhere attracting students and youth to himself. After his election
to the Presidentship of the Congress in April 1936, he got further immense
opportunities to form the popular mind and to influence political
developments.

3
The new ideological and political approach of Nehru—in particular, its
distinct articulation in the Presidential Address at the Lucknow session of
the Congress—frightened the Indian capitalist class. While the dominant
and far-sighted pro-Congress leadership of the class set out to take
protective measures to contain and confine Nehru, the more conservative
and anti-Congress sections decided to launch a frontal attack.
The first shot was fired by A.D. Shroff, Vice-President of the Indian
Merchants Chamber of Bombay, on 28th April 1934.88 Three weeks later, on
18th May, 21 leading Bombay businessmen issued what was described by
the newspapers as the “Bombay Manifesto against Jawaharlal Nehru.”89 A
series of individual statements by some of the signatories followed—by A.D.
Shroff, again, in the Times of India of 20th May, by Chimanlal Setalvad in the
Times of India of 23rd May, by Cowasjee Jehangir in the Times of India of
May 29th and by Homi Mody in the Times of India of 11 June 1936. All these
statements received full publicity in the Press, and they were often
reproduced extensively or in full. The main burden of the critique of the 21
leading businessmen was as follows:
Nehru was spreading the idea that private property was immoral and it
did not, therefore, deserve protection by the State. He was thus advocating
the “destructive and subversive programme” of doing away with private
property and thereby jeopardising “not only the institution of private
property but peaceful observance of religion and even personal safety.” This
charge was clearly borne out by his speech at Lucknow, in which he had
advocated socialism which had been defined as the ending of private
property and the profit system. He had, moreover, illustrated his conception
of socialism by describing what was happening in the Soviet Union as the
inauguration of “the new civilization”. He had thus argued for “the total
destruction of the existing social and economic structure.” Such ideas were
particularly dangerous because “in the present conditions and widespread
economic misery of the country, they are likely to find ready, though
unthinking reception”. The masses were likely to be misled by doctrines
leading to “disorder in course of time.” The capitalists had hitherto played a
considerable part in the development of the national movement, but Nehru’s
activities were likely to divide the country and so to impede the achievement
of self-government.90
The individual critics were worried by Nehru’s abandonment of the
contemporary Fabian, Labour-Party, and Social Democratic definitions of
‘socialism’ in favour of the clear-cut Marxist definition. As Chimanlal
Setalvad put it: “though he calls his creed socialism, it is really Communism
and Bolshevism of the Russian type”. Certainly, most people in India, said
Chimanlal, would “welcome socialism, as it is understood and practised in
some of the countries in Western Europe.” In fact, many of the critics of
Nehru’s propaganda claimed to be supporters of socialism if it meant “the
more equitable distribution of profits between labour and capital, the
securing of a reasonable minimum standard of living for all, and even in
certain circumstances and conditions the nationalization of some key
industries.”91 Similarly, Cowasjee Jehangir asserted that Nehru was “a
wholehearted communist” and was throwing “a smokescreen over his
propaganda by calling it Socialism”. He was, in fact, “the leader of the
Communistic school of thought of India”. The real issue in the debate, he
said, was “whether the Soviet form of government is the best for India”.92
And Homi Mody warned: “His meaning is clear and the programme is fairly
definite. First, political independence, and then a Socialist State, in which
vested interests, property rights and the motives of profit will have no place
at all. Let those who minds are running in the direction of intermediate
stages and pleasant halting places not forget that they are really buying a
through ticket to Moscow.”93 A.D. Shroff criticised him for promoting ‘class
hatred’ and ‘class war’ and asked the Congress to remember that the primary
political task of the movement being to “obtain our political freedom”, it
should not disturb “that complete unity” which was needed to win
concessions from the British. The type of pronouncements made by Nehru
at Lucknow could also harm the country’s interests in another manner. They
might result “in checking industrial enterprise and in encouraging flight of
capital from India.”94 Homi Mody held up the mirror of reality to Nehru in
one other aspect. There existed, he pointed out, a big contradiction between
Nehru’s ideology and definition of socialism and his abhorence of violence
and commitment to peaceful, non-violent methods. Nehru was being
‘credulous’ when he suggested that his ideas could be implemented “without
a violent and catastrophic upheaval”. “In what age and in which country”, he
asked, “such a fundamental change in the basis of society had been brought
about by a peaceful and bloodless revolution?”95
Nehru’s ideas had, of course, been known for some time, and had been
generally ignored. But that even the high office of the Presidentship of the
Congress would fail to tone him down was rather unexpected.96 Much
worse, they were no longer the opinions of a mere individual but of the
President of the most powerful organization in the country. There was every
likelihood that he would use his position and the prestige of his high office
to propagate his ideas on a much larger scale to “push the Congress to the
Left”, to undermine the long-established dominance of the bourgeois
ideology over the the national movement, and in general to strengthen the
left alternative to Gandhi.97 The only solace so far was that the majority in
the Congress did not support him; but this situation might not last long.
“The socialist section of the Congress was gaining ground,” warned
Chimanlal Setalvad, “and it may be that with the powerful advocacy of the
Pandit, they will capture the Congress much sooner than people believe.”98
These open and stringent critics were, however, confined to Bombay and
represented mostly the traditionally pro-Liberal or loyalist and anti-
Congress sections of the capitalist class. Some of them objected not only to
Nehru’s radicalism but also to nationalist militancy in the form of the non-
cooperation and civil disobedience movements.99 Nehru got a biographical
analysis of the 21 signatories to be made and found that most of them were
either liberals or loyalists, linked with the House of Tatas or with foreign
capital, or were nonentities.100 Moreover, they were hardly given any
support by the other capitalists in the rest of the country or even in Bombay.
Many, on the other hand, opposed them, as is brought out in Section 4
below. Nehru made full use of both these facts in his running polemic
against the ‘Bombay 21’.
The odd man out among the 21 was Purshotamdas Thakurdas whose
growing anxiety had made him sign the manifesto but who was, as we shall
see in the next section, in wider agreement with the larger and more sober
section of the capitalist class.
 4

The more far-sighted and pro-Congress of the Indian capitalists were

perhaps no less worried by Nehru. But they did not approach the task of
setting him right or reducing his influence in anger. Their approach is very
clearly brought out in letters exchanged during April to June 1936 between
G.D. Birla, Purshotamdas Thakurdas, and Walchand Hirachand.101 This
approach was laid down in the main by G.D. Birla, the brilliant political
leader and mentor of the capitalist class, whose political acumen often
bordered on that of a genius; but it is to be kept in view that the rest of the
class tended to follow his lead. Birla’s and Purshotamdas Thakurdas’s
approach to the problem of Nehru was a multi-pronged one.
First, they were not immediately worried much by the general ideological
bent of Nehru or by his propaganda in favour of socialism. Their chief
anxiety was the challenge that Nehru posed to the working of the 1935 Act
by his intransigent stance against acceptance of office. The capitalists, on the
other hand, were keen to digest the fruits of the Civil Disobedience
Movement of 1930-34 and the resulting constitutional negotiations and.
hence, to cooperate with the Government. For the last two years Birla had
been working hard behind the scenes both in India and England to bring
about amity between the British officials and the Congress leadership.102 As
President of the Congress, Nehru was in a position to bring all this effort to
naught and to frustrate the full working of the P-C-P strategy.103 Refusal to
accept office would lead to a continuous state of confrontation with
imperialism and would thus tend to shift the basic strategy of nationalism
from the non-revolutionary strategy of P-C-P to the revolutionary one of P-
V. This was, therefore, the crucial issue, the fulcrum-point of the Indian
politics of the period, on which Nehru must be held. All else was just then
peripheral and could wait to be tackled later.104
Internal evidence of Purshotamdas’s letter of 18th April and Birla’s of 20th
April indicates that Gandhi had assured Birla that he would prevent Nehru
from committing the Congress to rejection of office at Lucknow. Thus,
referring to the proceedings of the Lucknow session, Purshotamdas asked
Birla “whether you think that Mahatma’s and your expectations have been
fulfilled”; and Birla replied that he was “perfectly satisfied with what has
taken place”. “Mahatmaji kept his promise”, he assert, “and without his
uttering a word, he saw that no new commitments were made”105 The last
obviously referred to office acceptance or rejection and perhaps to the
question of direct affiliation of the trade unions and kisan sabhas to the
Congress. Birla’s satisfaction was fully justified; for, once the Congress
postponed the decision on acceptance of office and refused to commit itself
to office rejection, the battle was half-won by the ministerialists.106 The
crucial question in the situation was to avoid any further confrontation with
imperialism, and even Nehru had conceded the point. He had “confessed in
his speech...that there was no chance of any direct action in the near
future.”107
An allied problem was that of the control of the Congress organization
and the party machine. The Presidentship was, after all, only one position in
the hierarchy. Here also there was ground for satisfaction. Out of the 14
members of the new Working Committee 10 were right wingers. Or, as Birla
put it, Nehru’s Working Committee contained “an overwhelming majority of
‘Mahatmaji’s group’ “. Particularly gratifying to Birla was the inclusion of
Rajaji in the new Working Committee. The control of the new legislatures
would also be crucial. With the right type of men there, acceptance of office
would not be far off. In this respect too the picture was bright: “the election
which will take place will be controlled by Vallabhabhai group’”.108
Birla was, therefore, convinced that political developments were “moving
in the right direction”. If only Lord Linlithgow handled the situation
properly, he concluded, “there is every likelihood of the Congressmen
coming into office”.109 Purshotamdas Thakurdas agreed with this cheerful
analysis.110
Secondly, Birla was quite clear that the battle against the socialist
tendency could not be joined frontally—and certainly not by the capitalists
themselves. To do so was to fight on the wrong ground and thus to invite
defeat; and those who did so were not friends but enemies of their class.
Consequently, he was very angry with the approach of the signatories to the
Bombay Manifesto against Nehru. In a letter to Walchand Hirachand, dated
26th May 1936,111 he questioned the wisdom of his signing the manifesto
and asserted that this act had been “instrumental in creating further
opposition to capitalism.” He upbraided Walchand Hirachand: “You have
rendered no service to your castemen.”112 In fact, “your manifesto has done
positive harm to the capitalist system”. Birla’s strong feelings on the subject
were expressed in a more restrained but equally firm manner when he wrote
to Purshotamdas Thakurdas, his senior in age and standing. He had been
“painfully surprised to see your name in the crowd”. The manifesto was
“liable to be seriously misinterpreted”. “Evidently, you did not consider its
contents carefully,” he gently chided his capitalist elder, “a thing which is
against your habit. The manifesto has given impetus to the forces working
against capitalism—another result which you did not intend.”113 In other
words, Purshotamdas Thakurdas had strayed from the path of a far-sighted
leader.
Birla believed that, to wage a successful struggle against the left in the
Congress, the correct course was to fight through others. This meant
strengthening the right-wing leaders in the Congress. “We all are against
socialism”, he told Walchand Hirachand, but the question was who had
credentials to say so in public. Certainly, the men of property did not. “It
looks very crude for a man with property to say that he is opposed to
expropriation in the wider interests of the country.” After all, any man of
property was bound to oppose expropriation. True, expropriation was
against the higher interests of society; “but the question is, ‘Are you or
myself a fit person to talk?’ ” Who were then ‘fit persons to talk’? “Let those
who have given up property,” said Birla, “say what you want to say.” The task
of the capitalists was “to strengthen” the hands of such persons. By doing so,
“we can help everyone”. But precisely in this respect, “we businessmen are so
short- sighted,” for “even people like Vallabhbhai and Bhulabhai, who are
fighting against socialism, are not being helped.”114 Obviously, though Birla
named only Sardar Patel and Bhulabhai Desai, he had Gandhi, Rajaji,
Rajendra Prasad, whom he had named in his letter of 20th April, and other
right-wing leaders of the Congress in mind as men to be helped to fight
against expropriation of private property. Once again, Purshotamdas
Thakurdas expressed agreement with Birla’s advice.115 Nor did the advice fall
on unwilling ears. Walchand Hirachand promptly gave Rs. one lakh to meet
the cost of the Faizpur session of the Congress, presided over by Jawaharlal.
And, or course, Birla practised what he preached. For years, he had been
financing the Congress and Gandhi’s innumerable organizations and giving
financial help to Rajendra Prasad and other leaders.116
Birla also noted that the ‘Mahatma’s men’ had delivered the goods at
Lucknow. “Rajendra Babu spoke very strongly and some people attacked
Jawaharlal’s ideology openly.” Nehru had been throughout in a small
minority, and, what is more, “Jawaharlal’s speech in a way was thrown into
the waste paper basket because all the resolutions that were passed were
against the spirit of his speech.”117 Birla was referring to the fact that both of
Nehru’s crucial proposals—for office rejection and for collective affiliation of
the workers’ and peasants’ organizations with the Congress—were defeated.
Birla’s strategy also bore rich fruits in the coming months. Through a series
of carefully managed organizational crises, the Congress right wing—known
popularly as the ‘High Command’— aided by Gandhi, curbed, disciplined,
and tamed the fire-eating Nehru of the Lucknow Session. Unfortunately, we
cannot trace this process here, which Nehru indirectly helped by fighting,
bowing down and sulking in turn, and by fighting the right wing on
questions of manners and styles of functioning rather than on policies.118
The third prong of Birla’s approach to Nehru lay in establishing a correct
understanding of the man. Nehru was not to be treated as an inveterate
enemy. He was to be properly understood and moulded. Answering
Purshotamdas Thakurdas’s query in his letter of 18th April—whether
Gandhi would be able to keep the extremist Nehru under his control —
Birla praised Jawaharlal for fully realizing his position of minority in the
party and not taking advantage of his powers as the President.119 Similarly,
he complained later that the wording of the Bombay manifesto had not done
“full justice to Jawaharlal.”120 While the short-sighted had only heard the
ringing tones, of Nehru’s address at Lucknow, Birla shrewdly noted that he
had not been willing to fight the right wing at Lucknow. “Jawaharlalji seems
to be like a typical English democrat who takes defeat in a sporting spirit.”
Nor had he, noted Birla appreciatively, caused a split by resigning. Birla also
recognized Nehru’s basic weakness, that his political actions were much
more sober and ‘realistic’ than his ideological flights; that, in other words,
there was a wide gap between his theory and practice. “He seems to be out
for giving expression to his ideology, but he realizes that action is impossible
and so does not press for it.”121 This understanding and appreciation of
Nehru Birla seemed to have imbibed from Gandhi, for the latter wrote to
Agatha Harrison in Britain in the same vein on 30 April 1936:

His address is a confession of his faith. You see from the formation of
his ‘cabinet’ that he has chosen a majority of those who represent the
traditional view, i.e., from 1920...But though Jawaharlal is extreme in
his presentation of his methods, he is sober in action. So far as I know
him, he will not precipitate a conflict. Nor will he shirk it, if it is forced
on him...My own feeling is that Jawaharlal will accept the decisions of
the majority of his colleagues.122
Once again, Purshotamdas Thakurdas agreed with Birla’s overall estimate
of Nehru. “I never had any doubt about the bona fide of J,” he wrote. “In fact,
I put them very high indeed.” He, however, felt, extending the line of Birla’s
reasoning further, “that a good deal of nursing will have to be done to keep J
on the right rails all through.”123
Other sections of the Indian capitalist class agreed with this third prong of
the Birla-Thakurdas approach, and they immediately set out to ‘nurse’
Nehru. Immediately after the attack of ‘the 21’ was published, a host of
capitalist associations of Bombay rose up to greet him, to present him
addresses, to express their solidarity with him, and thus to dissociate the
class as a whole from the manifesto against him. Many of them even
defended his preoccupation with the cause of the workers and peasants.
On 18 May 1936, the merchants and brokers of the Bombay Bullion
Exchange presented Nehru a purse of Rs 1,501, eulogised his services to the
country, and expressed joy at the fact that “he had been devoting a good deal
of his time to work in connection with uplift of the peasants and workers of
India.”124 On 19th May an address was presented to Nehru by five
merchants’ associations of Bombay—the Marwari Chamber of Commerce,
the Hindustan Native Merchants’ Association, the Bombay Cotton Brokers’
Association, and the Bombay Grain and Seeds Brokers’ Association.125 On
20th May a meeting was convened by 13 mercantile bodies at Mandavi,
Bombay, including the Grain Merchants’ Association, the Sugar Merchants’
Association, and the Bombay Grain Dealers’ Association. Presiding over the
meeting, Velji Lukhamsay Nappoo said: “The merchants might not agree
with all the socialistic views of Pandit Nehru, but whatever views he would
like to place before them, the merchants would like to place before them, the
merchants would respectfully consider them.”126 On the same day, the
Country-Made Fancy and Grey Cotton Piecegoods Merchants’ Association
presented Nehru an address eulogising his unceasing efforts for the
betterment of the conditions of the “teeming millions of workers, labourers,
and peasants of the country”. In his speech of welcome, the President of the
Association, Gordhandas Goculdas Morarji said:

...even though your theories of socialism might have stirred a section of

the commercial community, we are of the opinion that our
advancement is inter-dependent upon the advancement of the
masses...It is true that certain extreme views regarding Marxism or
Communism may not be acceptable to the mercantile community, but
looking to the present condition of India and her teeming millions ...it
cannot be denied that the reconstruction of the present form of society
is needed.127
The brokers of the Shri Mahajan Sabha also presented Nehru with an
address on 20th May.128 On 22nd May, 15 leading businessmen of Bombay,
who were all members of the Committee of the Indian Merchants Chamber,
met Nehru to affirm their continued support to the Congress and to
convince him that the mercantile community as a whole did not support the
manifesto. They also asked him “to explain what he meant by socialism,
when it would be achieved, and whether the merchants with their
limitations could give their quota in the movement of socialism.”129
It has also to be noted that Purshotamdas Thakurdas probably believed
that giving a sharp blow to a person to bring him to his senses was part of
the tactic of nursing him, for nursing includes the administration of a bitter
dose when necessary. Thus, while agreeing with Birla’s sharp critique of the
manifesto, he ascribed his own signatures on it to a desire to warn
Jawaharlal against “the somewhat aggressive manner” in which he “was
preaching socialism verging on communism.”130
 5

And what of Nehru’s response? The Lucknow Address was both the high
watermark and the swan song of his radicalism.131 Increasingly, his time was
taken up by the management of Congress affairs, and imperceptibly he went
back to the role of a radical nationalist. He retained some of his fire.
Immediately after 18 May 1936, he hit back hard at his critics. Some of the
later articles remind one of the Nehru of 1933-36. He always maintained his
courage and manliness. But the gradual abandonment of all the ground
gained in the early 1930s continued. He gave up the fight to change the basic
strategy of the Indian struggle for freedom and was absorbed by the P-C-P
pattern. He was no longer to try to arouse the self-activity of the masses; he
began to operate within the ambit of the Gandhian notion of mass
participation under strict control of the middle- class leadership.
From now on, the chief role of the masses was to listen to his speeches. In
ideology, not Marxism but a mild form of Fabianism became the norm,
though once in a while there came flashes of his old Marxism. He also
abandoned the strategy of unifying the two struggles, the political and the
social. The second remained formally joined to the first but increasingly
receded to the horizon. Earlier, he had repeatedly upbraided the Indian
socialists and communists for talking tall and doing nothing. Now, he
openly accepted that the social struggle would remain a verbal ideal and that
the national struggle alone belonged to the realm of political practice.
Why did all this happen? It is always difficult to explain changes in the life
history of an individual. Many factors, forces, and events went into the
making of the post-Lucknow Nehru. There were inherent weaknesses in
Nehru’s Marxism and socialist commitment and in his conception of the
revolutionary road to independence, which we have not examined in the
first two sections of this paper because our object was not to evaluate him as
a socialist thinker or a revolutionary nationalist but to bring out those facets
of his politics and ideology which worried and frightened the capitalist class.
Some of these weaknesses come readily to mind: His failure to build a
political base of his own and lack of active work among or even contact with
workers and peasants after 1936; his attachment and subservience to Gandhi
which was strengthened by his fear of being ‘lonely’ or isolated politically;
his refusal to form a socialist group or join hands with existing ones or
organize in any form radical activity outside the Congress framework; the
weakness of the left outside the congress;132 his utter neglect of organization,
even within the Congress. Psychologically, his leftism of 1933-36 was in part
the product of political frustration arising out of the defeat and
demoralization of the Civil Disobedience Movement. The excitement of
elections, the whirlwind country-wide campaigns, the guidance of the party
and Congress ministries, the involvement with China and Spain and the
coming war all gave him a psychological boost and lifted him from the
slough of depression and ‘desolation’ as also leftist preoccupations. In other
words, G.D. Birla and other capitalists had perhaps evaluated him as well as
he himself had been able to do in his Autobiography.
At the same time, there is no doubt that the capitalist strategy of nursing
him, opposing him, and, above all, of supporting the right wing in the
Congress also played an important role in first containing him and then
moulding him so that, by 1947, the capitalist class was ready to accept him
as the Prime Minister of independent India and to cooperate with him in
the task of building up its economy along the capitalist path.

Abbreviations Used in the Text

Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru:

BOL. Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay, 1958
IW: India and the World, London, 1936
REW: Recent Essays and Writings, Allahabad, 1934
Glimpses: Glimpses of World History, Allahabad, 1934, Vols. I & II
Autobiography: An Autobiography, Allied Publishers, 1962 edition
SW: S. Gopal (editor), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
NMML: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
PT PAPERS: Purshotamdas Thakurdas Papers
 NOTES

Reprinted from Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. X, Nos. 33-35, Special
Number, August 1975
1 His public statements from late 1933 to early 1936 have to be seen in continuation since he was in

jail for most of 1934-35.

2 He wrote to Gandhi on 13 August 1934: “But whether I function inside or outside the legislature I

function as a revolutionary, meaning thereby a person working for the fundamental and revolutionary
changes, political and social, for I am convinced that no other changes can bring peace or satisfaction
to India and the world.” BOL, p. 114.
3 S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru—a Biography, Volume I, chapter 7, 1975.

4 A certain looseness and mildness in expression which appeared to his left-wing critics as an effort to

“avoid the implications” of his statements was ascribed by Nehru in a letter to a young Marxist (10
November 1933) as due to the effort to reach “an audience which is not used to these ideas and to
technical terms”, to the desire “to carry the audience and not merely to make a brave show,” and to
avoid isolation from the Congress thus “leaving the organization which has so much influence over
people’s minds in India to other people with a reactionary outlook”. SW, VI, pp. 117-18.
5 His new ideas and politics were given first public expression in an interview to the Pioneer on

August 31, 1933. See SW, V, pp. 506 ff.

6 IW, pp. 27-28.

7 See S. Gopal, Chapter 8.

8 REW. p. 16.

9 Ibid., p. 24. For an earlier declaration on the same lines, see interview to the Pioneer, 31 August

1933, SW, V, p. 508. Also see Autobiography, p. 523.

10 REW, p. 139. Also see p. 136.

11 Ibid., pp. 40, 126.

12 Ibid., p. 126. Also see p. 124.

13 IW, pp. 82-83.

14 Lucknow Address, IW, pp. 82-83.

15 REW, p. 31.

16 IW, p. 83. Also see Autobiography, p. 543; Glimpses, I, p. 575, n, p. 852.

17 “Letter to Lord Lothian’, January 17, 1936, in BOL, p. 141. Also published in May 1936 in IW as “A

Letter to an Englishman”. Emphasis added.

18 SW. V, p. 538. Also see ibid., p. 541; Glimpses, II, p. 857.

19 Autobiography, p. 523.

20 Letter to Lord Lothian, BOL, p. 143.

21 Ibid., pp. 141-43.

22 REW, pp. 30-31. Earlier, on October 10, 1932, he had written in a letter to Indira: “It took a long

time for people to discover that mere equality before the law and the possession of a vote do not
ensure real equality or liberty or happiness, and that those in power have other ways of exploiting
them still.” Glimpses, I, p. 575.
23 SW, V, p. 460.

24 Ibid., p. 508.

25 REW, pp. 33-35.

26 Autobiography, p. 544.

27 Ibid., pp. 551-52.

28 For example, SW, V, pp. 479, 489, 521; REW, pp. 18, 40; SW, VI, pp. 110-11; Lucknow Address. IW,

p. 79.
29 Autobiography, p. 504.

30 REW, p. 135. Also see ibid., pp. 30, 123; Letter to Lord Lothian, BOL, p. 140; SW, V, p. 541;

Glimpses, II. p. 853.

31 Report in Times of India, 18 May 1936, p. 11.

32 Report in Times of India, 19 May 1936, p. 14. Also see his entirely friendly and almost a disciple-

like treatment of Marxism in his letter Number 134 to Indira, 16 February 1933, though he does not
explicitly affirm himself as a Marxist. Glimpses, II, pp. 851 ff.
33 REW, pp. 10-16.

34 Ibid., p. 14. Also see Lucknow Address, IW, p. 69.

35 Lucknow Address, IW, pp. 67, 69, 83, 101; and Foreword to M.R. Masani’s book on the Soviet

Union, 25 February 1936, NEHRU PAPERS, NMML; REW, p. 123.

36 Foreword to Masani’s book, op.cit.

37 IW, p. 83.

38 Foreword to Masani’s book, op.cit.

39 IW, p. 83.

40 REW, pp. 18-19.

41 IW, pp. 70, 81. Earlier, in September 1933, he had written to Gandhi: “Both on the narrower

ground of our own interests and the wider ground of international welfare and human progress, we
must, I feel, range ourselves with the progressive forces of the world.” Letter dated 13 September 1936,
in D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma, New Delhi, 1969 Reprint, Volume III, p. 306.
42 The Indian Capitalist Class and Imperialism before 1947’ and ‘Elements of Continuity and Change

in the Early Nationalist Activity’ given above.

43 See below.

44 G.D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma, Calcutta, 1953, Chapters XI-XVIII.

45 Autobiography

46 SW, VI, pp. 21, 79, 94, 102-03. He was moving towards this approach since 1932. See SW, V, p. 386.

47 Ibid., pp. 67, 74.

48 REW, p. 22.

49 REW, pp. 21, 38-40; 141-42; SW, V, pp. 532-36; SW, VI, pp. 87-88. Nehru gave a wider sweep to this

statement in a speech at Calcutta on 18 January 1934, for which he was jailed for two more years.
Repeating the arguments given above, he asserted that hunger being the propeller of Indian
nationalism, “even if leaders and organizations weaken, compromise and betray, this economic urge
remains and will continue to push the masses on...” See SW, VI, pp. 101-05.
50 SW, VI, p. 104.

51 See, for example, SW, V, pp. 532-37, 544.

52 IW, pp. 90-95. Replying to those who argued that popularly elected ministries would provide some

relief to the people and protect them from repression, Nehru pointed out that, while they had little
power and their capacity to give relief was marginal, the Congress ministries, “would have to share
responsibility for the administration with the apparatus of imperialism, for the deficit budgets, for the
suppression of labour and the peasantry.” “It is always dangerous,” he pointed out, “to assume
responsibility without power.” Ibid., p. 91. To those who said that more voters would vote for the
Congress if they knew that it would form ministries, he replied: “That might happen if we deluded
them with false promises of what we might do for them within the Act, but a quick nemesis would
follow our failure to give effect to these promises, and failure would be inevitable if the promises were
worthwhile.” Ibid., p. 93.
53 IW, p. 89.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., p. 95.

56 REW, pp. 70-72.

57 IW, pp. 89-89.

58 REW, pp. 3-4; BOL, p. 148.

59 Lucknow Address, IW, p. 77.

60 REW, p. 3.

61 Lucknow Address, IW, pp. 77-78.

62 Ibid., pp. 79-81. Also see ibid., p. 95; and SW, VI, p. 101.

63 Lucknow Address, IW, pp. 101-04.

64 Ibid., p. 103.

65 Tendulkar, Vol. Ill, p. 309.

66 REW, p. 42; SW, VI, pp. 17-18, 118, 126.

67 REW, pp. 128-29

68 Ibid., pp. 129, 131; Lucknow Address, IW, p. 84.

69 REW, pp. 4-6.

70 Ibid, p. 17.

71 Ibid., Also see Letter to Lord Lothian, BOL, p. 144.

72 REW, p. 19.

73 Ibid., p. 21. Similarly, Nehru told Gandhi in 1933 that ‘the problem of achieving freedom becomes

one of revising vested interests in favour of the masses. To the extent this is done, to that extent only
will freedom come.” Letter dated 13 September 1933, Tendulkar, Vol. III. p. 305.
74 REW, p. 127.

75 SW, V, pp. 546-47.

76 REW, pp. 131-32.

77 BOL, p. 115.

78 SW, VI, p. 259. Emphasis added.

79 BOL, p. 115. In his Autobiography, Nehru again commented on the subject and pointed out that

“Confiscation, persistent and continual, is the basis of the existing system, and it is to put an end to
this that social changes are proposed. There is the daily confiscation of part of the labour product of
the workers; a peasant’s holding is ultimately confiscated by raising his rent or revenue to such an
extent that he cannot pay it.” p. 587.
80 BOL, p. 116. Nehru did not at the time know that Gandhi had drafted the Working Committee

resolution.
81 Note on “Congress Leaders and their Policy”, August 1934, NEHRU PAPERS. Also in SW, VI, pp.

270-73.
82 SW, V, pp. 478-79. The unconscious drift of his mind is revealed by a sudden reference to M.N. Roy

in the same entry in the Diary: “I think often of M.N. Roy. The poor chap is so lonely in the world
with hardly anyone to give a thought to him.” Ibid., p. 479.
83 Ibid., p. 489.

84 SW, VI, p. 251.

85 Ibid., p. 248.

86 BOL, p. 113.

87 Note of August 1934, NEHRU PAPERS. Also SW, VI, pp. 271-73. Also see Autobiography, pp. 505-

08. Alienation from Gandhi was, of course, a mere tendency which had its ups and downs (for ups,
see SW, V, pp. 532, 537-38) and in the end loyalty to Gandhi won out after 1936—till 1946-47.
88 File Number 130, NEHRU PAPERS, Part II.

89 The entire manifesto is published in the Tribune of 20 May 1936. The signatories included Naoroji

Sakalatwala, Purshotamdas Thakurdas, Chimanlal Setalvad, Pheroz Sethna, Cowasjee Jehangir,

Shapurji Billimoria, Homi Mody, Walchand Hirachand, V.N. Chandavarkar, Mathuradas Vissanji,
Chunilal B. Mehta and K.R.P. Shroff.
90 Ibid.

91 Times of India, 23 May 1936.

92 Times of India, 29 May 1936.

93 Times of India, 11 June 1936.

94 File Number 130, NEHRU PAPERS, Part II.

95 Times of India, 11 June 1936. Also see Tribune, 13 June 1936.

96 See, for example, Cowasjee Jehangir’s statement, Times of India, 29 May 1936.

97 See the statements of Chimanlal Setalvad, Cowasjee Jehangir, Homi Mody, and A.D. Shroff cited

above.
98 Times of India, 23 May 1936. Also see A.D. Shroff, File Number 130, NEHRU PAPERS, Part II.

99 See, for example, A.D. Shroffs and Cowasjee Jehangir’s statements cited above.

100 File Number 130, NEHRU PAPERS, Part II. The analysis showed that only two of the signatories

represented the Indian capitalist class—Purshotamdas Thakurdas and Walchand Hirachand. The note
pointed out that the latter was notorious for changing opinions and politics while the former had been
repudiated by the Indian mercantile community when he had agreed to attend the Third Round Table
Conference.
101 File Number 177/1936-43, PT PAPERS, NMML.
102 G.D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma, pp. 142-215.

103 For details of the capitalists’ political strategy during this period, see Bipan Chandra, “The Indian

Capitalist Class and British Imperialism before 1947”.

104 It was on this ground that Birla appealed to the British statesmen to give concessions to the

Congress right wing. See ibid., p. 401; and G.D. Birla,In the Shadow of the Mahatma, pp. 193-95, 214.
Referring to Birla’s negotiations in Britain and India, Purshotamdas wrote to Birla on 23 April 1936: “I
can’t help feeling that the time is now on when you can crystallize your splendid work in London last
year”. File Number 177/1936-43, PT PAPERS.
105 Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

106 Sec S. Gopal, chapter 13.

107 Birla to PT, 20 April, 1936. File Number 177/1936-43, PT PAPERS.

108 Ibid. The candidates were to be selected by the Parliamentary Board presided over by Sardar Patel.

Moreover Sardar Patel took upon himself the task of collecting election funds. See Rajendra Prasad,
Autobiography, pp. 427, 430.
109 Birla to PT, 20 April 1936, op.cit.

110 PT to Birla, 23 April 1936, op.cit.

111 File Number 177/1936-37, PT PAPERS.

112 This passage reveals a remarkable sense of class-consciousness. Birla sees fellow capitalists as

fellow castemen, thus emphasizing the extent of class cohesion and solidarity.
113 Birla to PT, 1 June 1936, File Number 177/1936-43, PT PAPERS. Birla also wrote: “You are such a

cautious man that you never take any step without careful consideration and therefore I was rather
surprised that you should have put your name to a document...”
114 PT to Birla, 29 May 1936, File Number 177/1936-43, PT PAPERS.

115 G.D. Khanolkar, Walchand Hirachand, Bombay, 1969, p. 342.

116 See G.D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma

117 Birla to PT, 20 April 1936, op.cit The mjority against Nehru’s views was contributed largely by

delegates from Gujarat, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, that is, mostly by provinces
controlled by Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, and Rajaji. Indian Annual Register, Vol. I, 1936, p. 284.
118 But see S. Gopal, Chapter 13.

119 Birla to PT, 20 April 1936, op.cit

120 Birla to PT, 1 June 1936, op.cit

121 Birla to PT, 20 April 1936, op.cit

122 Gandhi to Agatha Harrison, 30 April 1936, BOL, pp. 175-76.

123 PT to Birla, 23 April 1936, op.cit

124 Times of India, 20 May 1936.

125 Tribune, 20 May 1936.

126 Times of India, 22 May 1936.

127 File Number 130, NEHRU PAPERS, Part II.

128 Times of India, 22 May 1936.

129 Tribune, 23 May 1936; Times of India, 23 May 1936.

130 PT to Birla, 29 May 1936, op.cit

131 See S. Gopal, Chapter 13.

132 This is a very important aspect, though we cannot go into it here, Nehru was incapable of building

a socialist or communist party on his own, but he might have been able to serve as the popular head
of a left front led by a revolutionary Marxist Party. But the Communist Party of India was too weak to
play such an independent political role, and Nehru was incapable of doing so acting on his own.
 Modern India and Imperialism

1
The Historical Background

India was fully integrated into the world capitalist economy in a

subordinate, colonial position during the nineteenth century. It emerged as
classic colony playing a crucial role in the development of British capitalism.
It was not accidental that the British plunder of India began in the 1750s
simultaneously with the initiation of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
For example, the drain of wealth or the unilateral transfer of capital from
India after 1765 amounted to 2 to 3 per cent of the British national income
at a time when only about 5 per cent of the British national income was
being invested. During the years after 1760 when Britain was developing
into the leading developed capitalist country of the world, India was being
underdeveloped into becoming the ‘leading’ backward, colonial country of
the world.
During the nineteenth century, India served as a major market for British
manufactures, especially cotton textiles and later iron and steel products and
other railway stores. India was also an important supplier of food stuffs and
raw materials to Britain. Indian opium played a crucial role in developing
the triangular trade which enabled the full economic exploitation of the
Chinese people. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Indian
railways constructed at a cost of 3,500 million rupees (nearly 350 million
pounds sterling) provided the largest outlet for the export of British capital.
The bulk of India’s transport system, modern mines and industries, foreign
trade, coastal and international shipping, and banks and insurance
companies were under British control. For nearly a hundred years after
1858, Indian exports enabled Britain to acquire the foreign exchange needed
to meet its own international balance of payments deficit. Control over
India’s coastal and international carrying trade was a major factor in the
growth of British shipping.
India absorbed a large section of the unemployed youth of the British
middle and upper classes (one third of the Indian budget in 1892 was spent
on Englishmen in India!). This not only provided a basic cushion to these
classes but also thereby enabled the British political process to flow
smoothly without the tensions and disturbances, both from the right and the
left, that the unemployed educated youth of these classes have a tendency to
promote because of their economic condition in conjunction with their
idealism and intellectual discontent. Instead, their humanitarian and
idealistic proclivities could now find expression in missionary activity on the
right and Fabianism on the left.
India as ‘the brightest jewel in the British Empire’ also played an
important role in the ideology of imperialism which enabled the British
ruling classes to keep their political power intact even after adult franchise
was introduced and also to cement their society around capitalism when it
was being riven with class conflict. Thus the pride and glory underlying the
slogan of ‘the Sun never sets on the British Empire’ were used to keep
workers contented on whose slum dwellings the Sun seldom shone in real
life.
India also played a crucial role in one other, often ignored, aspect. All this
did not cost Britain a penny.1 India bore the entire cost of its own conquest,
including the reconquest after the Revolt of 1857. Secondly, when it became
necessary in the interests of colonialism to partially modernise India
through railways, education, a modern legal system, development of
irrigation, and detailed penetration of administration into the countryside,
India paid the entire cost.
Lastly, once the struggle for the division and then the redivision of the
world became intense after 1870, India acted as the chief gendarme of
British imperialism and furnished both the material and the human
resources for its expansion and maintenance. Afghanistan, Central Asia,
Tibet, the Persian gulf area, Eastern Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Burma, China,
and to some extent even South Africa were brought or kept within the
British sphere of influence through the instrumentality of the Indian army
and the Indian finances. The same was true of west Asia during the First
World War.2
Throughout this period, except for the duration of the world wars, the
British Indian army was the only large scale army contingent available to
Britain. This is one of the major reasons why the British Empire in Asia and
Africa collapsed like a house of cards once Britain lost control over the
Indian army and finances.
It may also be noted that it was precisely in the period after 1870 when
British economic supremacy was challenged by rival capitalist powers, when
the hunt for markets, raw materials, and fields for investment was
intensified, and when adult franchise made it necessary to find new
ideological appeals to the working class that British rule in India was more
stringently and consciously clamped down and the earlier talk of training
Indians for Free Trade and Self-government was abandoned in favour of the
doctrine of ‘benevolent despotism’. Furthermore, through administrative
and other measures and the rigidly British character of the higher
bureaucracy, India was kept a close preserve of British capitalism. An
interesting result was that American capitalism had to begin its penetration
of Indian economy after 1947 virtually from scratch and had to spend many
valuable years in building contacts and creating a base for itself in the
economic, political, scientific, cultural and intellectual life of the country.
Sometimes it is said that British imperialism did not derive, especially in
the twentieth century, as great an economic advantage from its domination
of India as was claimed both by the vigorous imperialists and by the Indian
and other anti-imperialists. And this is then supposed to prove that modern
imperialism did not have an economic motivation. It is true that in the
twentieth century India was no longer as big a market for British goods as
had been hoped, nor as big an absorber of British capital as desired. Between
the hope and the fulfilment there was a big gap. But this does not disprove
anything. It is only a manifestation of the internal contradictions in which
British imperialism had become involved as a result of its prolonged
exploitation of India. It was necessary that India and its people transform
their economy and in general develop economically if imperialism was to
exploit them fully, but this very exploitation made it impossible for India to
develop. Thus, once the existing internal market of India had been captured,
the impoverished Indian peasant could neither develop further as a buyer of
British manufactures nor provide the consumer base of foreign owned
industries in India. Similarly, once the peasant had been taxed to the point
of endurance, the Indian state revenues could not be further plundered by
British finance capital or by the British upper and middle classes. On the
other hand, in the limited Indian market, Indian capital was venture-some
enough to outcompete British capital in many fields. Faced with a
burgeoning anti-imperialist movement, the imperialist authorities could
neither antagonise the Indian bourgeoisie beyond a point nor tax the
peasant beyond endurance. Imperialist exploitation could not therefore fulfil
the dreams that had so long inspired imperialist policies in India.
In time, a powerful anti-imperialist movement developed in India. Some
of its facets resulted in a forceful impact on the development of India’s
relations with the great powers after 1947.
(A) The Indian nationalist movement was based on a brilliant and
detailed investigation and an all-sided analysis of the economic roots and
motive forces of colonialism. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the
founding fathers of the anti-imperialist movement had worked out a clear
understanding not only of the role of colonialism as an extractor of Indian
economic surplus directly via taxation and indirectly by making India its
agrarian hinterland for the sale of its manufactures and purchase of India’s
raw materials, but also of its new phase of the exploitation of Indian labour
and the suppression of Indian capital through the investment of the
metropolitan capital. They also saw clearly that the essence of British
imperialism lay in the subordination of the Indian economy as a whole to
that of Britain. Moreover, they had come to see and propagate that
colonialism was not a fortuitous phenomenon or a matter of the political
policy of the ruling parties in Britain but sprang from the very nature and
character of the British society and economy, the needs of its ruling classes,
and Britain’s economic relationship with India. This understanding of the
complex economic mechanism of modern imperialism was further
strengthened and advanced after 1918 under the impact of the mass
struggles against imperialism, the Russian Revolution, and the spread of
Marxist and Leninist ideas. The result has been a heightened awareness of
the dangers of foreign economic penetration even after 1947. This has been
particularly so in the field of private foreign capital investment. The Indian
national leadership started attacking foreign capital from the 1870s, clearly
bringing out both its economic and political consequences. Foreign capital
was seen not as developing India but as ‘despoiling’ India and exploiting its
resources and impoverishing it. For example, the Bengalee of 1 June 1901
wrote that the expansion of foreign investments would hasten the country’s
ruin and “surely reduce our nation to a state of eternal economic
dependence upon British capital”. This nationalist attitude towards foreign
capital was summed up by Bipin Chandra Pal in his weekly, the New India,
of 12 August 1901, in the following manner:

The introduction of foreign, and mostly British, capital for working out
the natural resources of the country, instead of being a help, is, in fact,
the greatest of hindrances to all real improvements in the economic
condition of the people. This exploitation of the land by foreign
capitalists threatens to involve both Government and people in a
common ruin...It is as much a political, as it is an economic danger.
And the future of New India absolutely depends upon an early and
radical remedy of this two-edged evil.
The political danger was also clearly recognized. G.V. Joshi wrote in 1885:

Politically speaking, if we do not misread history, power must gravitate

towards property and wealth, and a strong foreign mercantile interest
in the country would not fail to be a very troublesome active factor in
the State; it would always be disposed to use the power and influence it
could command for its own selfish aims, and dominate the action of
Government in its own favour.

The Hindu of 23 September 1889 remarked:

 Where foreign capital has been sunk in a country, the administration of
that country becomes at once the concern of the bondholders.
The nationalists had very early projected the notion of using foreign funds
without letting the foreign entrepreneur enter. This was to be done by
building up a powerful state (public) sector which would keep out the
foreign capitalists in two ways. Firstly, the state sector would build industries
which were too large for private Indian capital to build and which would
otherwise have to be built by foreign capitalists. Secondly, the state sector
would act as an intermediary and a protective wall between foreign capital
and Indian enterprise. It would borrow foreign capital and either use it on its
own account or lend it to the Indian capitalists through its own financial
institutions.
The nationalist movement built up a powerful commitment to rapid
industrialization on the basis of its own heavy, capital goods sector. This was
also true at the level of popular consciousness. Imperialist pressure to bend
Indian economic planning to its interests after 1947 was to find this
consciousness a powerful barrier.
The nationalist movement widely popularised the notion of imperialist
exploitation through the drain mechanism (export of profits by foreign
enterprise, etc.) and unequal trade. This resulted in the people becoming
very sensitive after 1947 both to large scale investment of foreign capital and
the pattern of trade between the developed capitalist countries and India.3
(B) The nationalist movement gradually involved a large scale
politicalisation of the people and their participation in the movement.
Moreover, from the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885,
most of the nationalist and other mass organizations were organized along
democratic lines. This led to two results after 1947: on the one hand,
parliamentary democracy along with civil liberties and adult franchise had
to be promised as well as brought into being as the price of popular
participation in the anti-imperialist struggle; on the other hand, the
Government of India after 1947 had to pay constant heed to popular
opinion and to carry it behind its policies. Undoubtedly, the Government
has had a great capacity to manipulate this opinion. But in conditions of
comparatively open competition from the left-wing parties and the pressure
of its own nationalist wing, this manipulation has occured within certain
limits. It has not been possible for the Government and the ruling classes to
ignore the anti-imperialist consciousness, even if they had the desire to do
so, as openly and completely as could the undemocratic regimes of Pakistan,
China before 1949, South Korea, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, West
Asia, etc.
(C) An effective left wing came into being in the 1930s and 1940s. It
acquired a strong base among the intelligentsia, youths working class, and in
some parts of the country among the peasantry. Though organizationally
too weak and politically too confused to offer a serious challenge to the
politically mature bourgeois leadership before or after independence, it has
always had, at every stage, vast potentialities of growth. It has constantly
waited in the wings, so to speak. Its potential appeal to the masses could not
be ignored. The bourgeois leadership has, in fact, kept it confused, divided,
and without any real capacity to strike after 1947 by stealing its thunder at
the programmatic plane precisely on two issues, one of anti-imperialism,
and the other of social development on the basis of social equality and social
justice, as signified by the vague goal of socialism. The fear of the left has
been a powerful factor in keeping the Government from aligning too closely
with imperialist powers or making basic concessions to imperialism.
(D) In the course of their own struggle, the Indian nationalists evolved a
foreign policy of opposition to imperialism and of solidarity with the anti-
imperialist movements in other parts of the world. From the 1870s, they
opposed the use of the Indian army to extend British imperialism in Africa
and Asia. Sentiments of solidarity with the Burmese patriots, the Afghans,
the tribal people of the North-West Frontier, the Chinese people at the time
of the I Ho-Tuan (Boxer) Uprising, the Tibetan people, the people of Egypt
and Sudan and other African people were vigorously expressed and
popularised from 1878 to 1914. In the 1920s, this policy of anti-imperialism
was developed further. Expressing the solidarity of the Indian people with
the colonial people and also the awareness of India’s role as the gendarme of
British imperialism the world over, Dr. M.A. Ansari said in his Presidential
Address to the National Congress session of 1927:
 The history of the philanthropic burglary on the part of Europe is
written in blood and suffering from Congo to Canton. Once India is
free the whole edifice of imperialism will collapse as this is the keystone
of the arch of imperialism.
In the 1930s the National Congress took a firm stand against imperialism
in any part of the world and supported anti-imperialist movements in Asia
and Africa. In spite of Japan’s Pan-Asian propaganda, the National Congress
condemned the Japanese attack on China in 1937 and urged the Indian
people to boycott “the use of Japanese goods as a mark of their sympathy
with the people of China”. The anti-imperialist consciousness of the Indian
people and their increasing understanding of the character of the world-
wide struggle between imperialism on one side and the forces of socialism
and national liberation on the other found clear-cut enunciation in
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Presidential Address to the Lucknow session of the
National Congress in 1936:

Our struggle was but part of a far wider struggle for freedom, and the
forces that moved us were moving millions of people all over the world
and driving them into action. Capitalism, in its difficulties, took to
fascism...It became, even in some of its homelands, what its imperialist
counterpart had long been in the subject colonial countries. Fascism
and imperialism thus stood out as the two faces of the new decaying
capitalism... Socialism in the west and the rising nationalism in the
Eastern and dependent countries opposed this combination of fascism
and imperialism.
Even though this understanding of imperialism as capitalism was rapidly
abandoned by Jawaharlal Nehru and the dominant political leadership
during the 1940s and 1950s, they have had to pay close attention to this
widespread consciousness in developing their relations with the capitalist
powers.
(E) Even though India was economically underdeveloped in 1947, it had
developed quite a strong capitalist class. Indian capital was moreover highly
concentrated. And, what is more important, this class developed as an
independent class and not as a comprador class or as a junior partner of
foreign capital. Its dominant sections had no noticeable alliances or
partnerships with British or international finance capital or the emerging
giant corporations. Its own monopoly structure developed on the basis of its
own financial and industrial structure. Instead of allying with British capital
in India or abroad through cartels and trusts, Indian monopoly capital
developed on the basis of a multi-sided conglomerate character spread over
vast regions and a variety of industrial, trading and financial activities.
Consequently, the Indian capitalist class was on the whole anti-imperialist
and anti-foreign capital. While wanting to develop, this class was very chary
of being dominated by the larger foreign capital. It was willing to let a
powerful state sector develop as a protective wall rather than being gobbled
up by international big capital. It was helped in the task by its monopoly and
concentrated character because of which, and aided by powerful
administrative measures, it could hope to stand up against the outside
giants. Though there are no detailed studies on the subject, it may be
suggested that when the era of collaboration agreements came in the 1950s
it was the small and medium capitalists who were found most willing to
collaborate and that foreign capital also preferred to deal with them rather
than with the giants since the former were easy to dominate and control.

2
Relationship with Imperialism and the Danger of ‘Neo-
Colonialism’ after 1947

India became politically independent on 15th August, 1947, and the Indian
capitalist class acquired control over its social development. In the colonial
period, the Indian economy had been integrated with the world capitalist
economy in a subordinate position and this constituted the essence of the
colonialization of the Indian economy. The end of the political domination
by colonialism did not, and could not, mean the automatic decolonialization
of the Indian economy. In fact, the colonial economy could absorb and had
absorbed a degree of independent development of the capitalist class and
capitalist economy in the colony.
 It is the hypothesis of this paper that the aim and thrust of the
Government of India and the Indian capitalist class since 1947 has been
towards the development of an independent and balanced national capitalist
economy and the avoidance of further imperialist economic control and
domination. The Indian capitalist class neither before 1947 nor since 1947
has been either a basically comprador class or a junior partner of the
imperialist monopolies. Its evolution under colonialism as an independent
capitalist class and its opposition to and struggle against colonialism already
indicated that it would not readily fall into the clutches of imperialism and
welcome ‘neo-colonialism’. The big monopoly corporations and
international conglomerates of the imperialist world in general and the
U.S.A. in particular have not acquired a major hold inside India. By and
large, the import bans and restrictions and high tariff walls have been used
to promote Indian capitalist owned and controlled industries and not to
facilitate the setting up of the subsidiaries of the international corporations.
In spite of the increase in technical collaboration agreements and growth in
foreign investment, it cannot be said that the national bourgeoisie of India,
big or small, is entering into partnership with the giant foreign corporations.
In fact, investment of foreign capital in the Indian economy has been
carefully controlled, though given a great deal of encouragement within
prescribed limits. The result is that foreign capital has hitherto remained
quite ‘shy’ or hesitant in entering India. Moreover, there is not a single major
or economically strategic sector of the Indian economy which is under the
domination of foreign capital. Lastly, foreign finance capital hardly occupies
today an important, not to speak of dominating, position in the Indian
economy.
Thus India has not been and is not likely in the immediate future to be
further colonialized or made into a ‘neo-colony’. Rather the underdeveloped
Indian capitalism has been striving to follow, and will continue to strive to
follow, the path of independent capitalist development.
At the same time, it cannot be said that Indian capitalism is not
dependent on imperialism or that its independent development is not
seriously hampered by imperialism. While India’s dependence on
imperialism is not the result of the domination of the Indian capitalist class
by the imperialist capitalist class, it is still very much there because of the
dependence of the Indian economy on imperialism which in turn is due to
its being an integral part of the world capitalist economy in a subordinate
position. Thus the ‘external’ restrictions on the Indian economy and its
development are ‘structural’ i.e., the products of it being a well-structured
part of world capitalism which inevitably produces development in one of its
parts while producing underdevelopment in the other. The underdeveloped
Indian capitalism has therefore found itself in a dilemma. It tries to develop
independently but does so without breaking structural links with world
capitalism with the result that development is hampered and economic
dependence on the imperialist economic structure remains. On the other
hand, in today’s condition, any effort, even within the bounds of capitalism,
to break out of the world capitalist structure invariably takes on
revolutionary dimensions if it is to be successful, as the initial experience of
Cuba after the revolution indicates. Indian capitalism has therefore not even
been willing to make a radical effort in the direction. Just as the Indian
capitalist class and the Indian nationalist leadership developed a non-
revolutionary or ‘muddling through’ strategy of mass mobilization and anti-
imperialist struggle before 1947, they have since then followed a similar
strategy of independent capitalist development, hoping that economic
development within carefully controlled political limits and without
revolutionizing the internal social structure will gradually erode dependence
on imperialism. In the bargain, India remains an independent country with
a developing but still underdeveloped capitalist economy which is still
dependent on imperialism.
What are the elements of this strategy which have enabled the system to
exist successfully so far, and what are the possible reasons which may lead to
its failure?
(A) Firstly, the state in India has been gradually trying, though in a non-
revolutionary way and in the interests of the propertied classes, to
implement internally a bourgeois democratic programme of social and
economic reforms of the sort that is usually associated with the completion
of bourgeois democratic revolution. To put it negatively, although not
radically restructuring the internal social, economic, and political order,
India has not been following internally, a la Chiang Kia-shek, a neo-colonial
or semi-feudal programme either. Socially, education is spread on a wide
scale, women are educated on a massive scale, oppression of women
increasingly takes on a bourgeois colouring in place of a feudal colouring
especially in towns, the caste system is eroded at least to the extent that it
does not remain an obstacle to the growth of capitalism (increasingly,
oppression of the lower castes in the countryside becomes an instrument for
keeping agricultural wages down and rents high), and family relations
increasingly become bourgeois. The cultural and moral ethos is virtually
dominated by the cash nexus. The structure of agrarian relations is
gradually, stage by stage, transformed in the capitalist direction though, as in
the case of Britain, Germany and Japan, at the cost of the cultivator and the
agricultural worker. Politically, parliamentary democracy and adult
franchise prevail from village to national planes. Even the infringements of
and attacks upon civil liberty and parliamentary democracy occur in a
modern, capitalist way! Indian administration, however corrupt, is modern
by any standards, bent fully to the will of the small and big bourgeoisie.
(B) Secondly, state power has been used by an extremely mature and
foresighted bourgeois political leadership to counter imperialist penetration
through economic administrative measures and the assignment of a very
active and large role to the public or state sector in modern industry. There
has been a concentration of economic power in the hands of the state to face
the giant imperialist monopoly corporations and international finance on
less unequal terms. The state sector has been used to build industries and
elements of infrastructure which would not have been built by domestic
capital and would have invariably necessitated the use of foreign capital. The
state industrial and financial institutions have been used to absorb foreign
capital into the economy without permitting the latter to acquire direct
power. The giant foreign corporations’ immense advantage of greater
financial power, technological capacity, and monopoly have been largely
neutralized by the use of state power to shut out their products through
exchange controls, high tariffs, and absolute prohibitions, thus enabling the
weaker domestic capital to burgeon forth under hothouse conditions. The
resources of the state have been used to train a large army of engineers,
scientists and technical workers. Even the economic integration with world
capitalism is sought to be loosened through administrative means.
 (C) Thirdly, economic aid and technical assistance from the socialist
countries and the development of trade with them has played a crucial role
in the effort to complete the bourgeois democratic tasks in a non-
revolutionary manner and to develop and strengthen independent
capitalism. They have not only been used as bargaining counters to prevent
the imperialist countries from presenting a monopolistic front towards
India, but have also helped strengthen the public sector, to lay the
foundation of heavy capital goods sector, to develop strategic industries such
as the aeroplane industry, and to break the stranglehold of foreign oil
monopolies on India’s industry, transport system and military structure. It is
of interest to note that the Indian capitalist class has both actively supported
the development of economic relations with the socialist countries as well as
utilised this link to the hilt and to a far greater extent than any other
capitalist country.
(D) Fourthly, the Indian bourgeois order has been based from its
inception in 1947 on the most advanced system of political legitimization,
i.e., bourgeois democracy. Just as in the struggle against British imperialism,
the Indian nationalist leadership evolved a style of mass mobilization and
mass action which on the one hand involved the people in politics and on
the other hand left them without any political initiative or autonomy,
similarly Indian political leadership has used parliamentary democracy both
to give people the satisfaction of participation in the government and to
deny them any effective voice in it. Yet, every successive election has
politicalised or ‘politically socialised’ an increasingly larger number of
people. Consequently, at no stage have any significant number of people
questioned the legitimacy of the political system. Even the most radical
critics of the system have had to function within its rules of the game.
Political democracy has thus enabled the political leadership to throw the
entire cost of capitalist development on the shoulders of the common
people. Even more, the failure to generate self-sustaining growth and the
failure of living standards to rise have not generated the type of internal
political crisis which would enable the imperialist forces to intervene in
internal politics on a decisive scale.
(E) India’s foreign policy has played a major role, particularly after
political unrest began to develop, in cementing the diverse social forces
around the dominant political leadership. Foreign policy and its cementing
role have been consciously used to follow the path of independent capitalist
development, to counter overt imperialist blackmail, and to weaken the elan
of the left-wing opposition.
(F) A major factor that has enabled capitalism to develop in India has
been the failure of the anti-capitalist left wing to seriously challenge the
existing social order even when the objective conditions favoured such a
challenge.4 Just as before 1947, the bourgeois nationalist leadership was at
no stage faced with a serious left-wing challenge based on an independent
mobilization of the people against imperialism under left-wing leadership,
so also after 1947 there has been no such left-wing mass, nation-wide
political mobilization either on the agrarian question or against imperialist
economic penetration or on the question, and the consequences, of the
capitalist path of development. A ready postulate of many on the left has
been that because of the fear of revolutionary forces and of ‘expropriation',
bourgeoisie would rapidly become reactionary, abandon internal bourgeois
reforms including economic development and political democracy, and join
up with imperialism in an anti-Communist and anti-people crusade. The
‘only’ thing wrong with this postulate has been that it assumed the presence
of such a threatening revolutionary force!
It hasn’t happened that way. Thus the reformist bourgeoisie has
increasingly succeeded in weakening semi-feudalism and imperialism and
in building capitalism both in agriculture and industry precisely because the
left was strong enough to keep it on its toes but not strong enough to
endanger it to such an extent that it was compelled to take shelter in the lap
of imperialism and feudalism. In other words, there has been a dialectical,
mutually reinforcing development here. Bourgeois liberalism and reforms,
independent capitalist development, and the policy of keeping out of the
imperialist alliances and political system have enabled the bourgeois
leadership to maintain its political influence over the people and to keep the
left weak. At the same time, the weakness of the left has enabled the
bourgeoise to remain liberal and outside the imperialistic camp and to
develop capitalism.
 The strategy of independent capitalist development suffers, however, from
two basic constraints. An underdeveloped capitalist country finds it
impossible to develop today without those basic internal social, economic
and political changes which would invariably tend to take the economy out
of the capitalist path. Secondly, so long as it is a well-structured part of the
world capitalist economy in a dependent position, it suffers from basic
constraints on its development. Consequently, India has found it impossible
to solve its national problems while following the capitalist path.5 But it
should be carefully noted that both at the external and the internal planes
the restrictions are structural or those of the system, being built or
structured into it. The dependence of India on imperialism is a system’s
dependence arising out of the very position of Indian capitalism in the world
capitalist economy. This dependence does not arise out of the stranglehold of
foreign capital on Indian economy, the comprador character of Indian
capitalist class or the latter being a junior partner of foreign capital or the
Indian State being politically dominated by imperialism directly or through
foreign aid or through finance capital in general As pointed out earlier,
neither foreign capital nor international corporations nor finance capital
play a dominating or even an increasing role in the Indian economy. Nor is
there one metropolitan centre vis-a-vis India. American private foreign
capital in India plays second fiddle to British foreign capital, both in terms of
finance and collaboration agreements. In trade, aid, foreign capital and
technological collaboration, India has been ‘playing the field’. Here again
India’s relationship is a dependent one not vis-a-vis dominant American
imperialism but vis-a-vis entire world capitalist system. Undoubtedly, India,
as other underdeveloped countries, suffers today from technological
dependence which in specific industries may lead to some forms of control.6
It should, however, be noted that this is once again a case of the system’s
dependence.
All this does not, of course, mean that India in following the strategy of
independent capitalism does not constantly face the danger of neo-
colonialism. But such a danger would arise primarily from the structural
and social inability of its under-developed capitalism to develop itself and
the country to the extent that social needs are met at a minimum desired
plane. When the social failure becomes more and more glaring and also
more and more unacceptable to the mass of people and a correct leadership
begins to be provided to this discontent, the capitalist class and the
dominant leadership would be compelled to seek economic and political
support from imperialist powers. They would be compelled to strengthen
their links with world capitalism to solve the very economic and political
problems which are in part created by these links. In case of a genuine threat
of mass revolt, dependent political and military links may also be forged in
order to defend the system. Hypothetically, this may also increase the
dependence on the socialist countries. A few years back, one might have
rejected out of hand the possibility of socialist countries aiding a capitalist
regime to suppress popular revolt. But today such a possibility does not
appear so preposterous. It could happen under the slogans of keeping neo-
colonialism out and helping to strengthen the independence of the
developing capitalism. It may also be noted that this type of economic and
political threat of neo-colonialism is not faced only by an ex-colony like
India. And Lenin noted much earlier, even other developing or developed
capitalist countries could be subjected to it. The position of India today is
similar to that of Portugal, Spain, Italy, or even Russia at different times
during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.
Moreover, in the highly integrated system of the international capitalist
economy, this threat is constantly faced by countries such as Canada, Spain,
Greece and Yugoslavia or even Japan and the Scandinavian countries. Only
the degree of the threat and its immediacy are greater in the case of India.
The struggle against imperialism, semi-colonialism, or ‘neo-colonialism’
in India has therefore to take the form of a struggle against the development
of capitalism. India is at present not a neo-colony or semi-colony dominated
by foreign capital. Imperialist penetration occurs and the danger of
‘neocolonialism’ arises because India follows the path of independent
capitalism. Similarly, imperialist pressure is also exercised primarily not
through ambassadors, World Bank officials, foreign capital control, etc., but
through economic realities. This is why the entire U.S. effort and pressure in
India have been exercised primarily to promote the development of the
capitalist system or private enterprise and its enmeshing with international
capitalism and only secondarily to promote American investments.7 This is
also the reason why the U.S.A. stopped objecting in a serious vein to the
Soviet economic assistance to India once it was obvious that the object and
consequences of this assistance were not to build socialism but independent
capitalism, not to strengthen the forces of social revolution but of capitalism.
Such assistance was now even praised as sharing the international burden
for the development of India.
It may be acknowledged at this stage that the integration of the Indian
economy, as also of the other similar underdeveloped capitalist economies,
into the world capitalist-imperialist economy in a dependent position has
yet to be explored in a serious way. What is obvious is that what is involved
here is not merely the use of these countries as markets for manufactures, or
sources of raw materials, or fields of investment, but their integration into a
world-wide structure through aid, trade, finance, investment, technology,
science, brain-drain, military defence against internal revolt and external
enemies, and culture and ideology (for example, the integrated development
of economics, political science, and sociology all over the capitalist world
including its underdeveloped part).

NOTES

This paper was read at the Bertrand Russell Centenary Symposium on

“Spheres of Influence in the Age of Imperalism", Linz, Austria, 11-16
September, 1972, and published in the Spokesman, Summer 1973.
1 This explains the virtual absence of any popular protest in Britain against the British conquest of

India as well as the brutal suppression of all anti-British protests. For example, many thousands of
tribal people fighting with swords, bows and arrows were cut down by the well-armed, disciplined
British army in India. Or, to give another instance, the massacre of 25,000 people by the British army
in Delhi alone after it was reoccupied in 1857 was regarded as an appropriate reprisal for the ‘Mutiny’.
Similarly, the manpower used for conquest and suppression in India consisted either of Indians or of
European ‘Volunteers’ recruited from the lower depths of British, Irish, and European societies. Once
again the respectable British citizens did not have to lose their sons. The Indian Empire had therefore
hardly any ‘sordid’ or painful aspects. One could start off the day well by reading about the power and
glory and the humanitarian deeds in the morning paper along with one’s tea.
2 In fact, the Indian army could not be used in Latin America, and that might to some extent explain

the gradual loss of the informal empire there to the U.S.A.!

3 Since this consciousness and ‘fear’ of imperialist exploitation have played an important role in the

struggle against fresh imperialist penetration, the social sciences—history, economics, political
science, and sociology—have been pressed into service in the imperialist countries to remove such
fears by proving that the entire notion is misconceived or exaggerated as a result of ‘nationalist phobia’.
The legitimacy of nationalist movements is, for example, recognized on the grounds of national
psychology, and an abstract desire for freedom or as the expression of new ‘elite’ interests. But their
basic character as a response to the imperialist exploitation of all classes and strata of the colonial
societies is strenuously denied and branded as mere ‘ideology’.
4 A major error on the part of the left, both in India and abroad has been to assume that since the left

has failed to overthrow the system, the system or the social order has basically remained stationary
since 1947 and would remain so so long as it is not overthrown. But history does not stand still and
changes occur constantly. Capitalism develops, among other reasons, precisely because it is not
overthrown.
5 To repeat, this is the basic weakness of the Indian social system since 1947 and not any tendency to

become a ‘neo-colony’. Not ‘neo-colonialism’ but capitalist path is the basic issue in Indian politics and
social development.
6 The increasing role that technological domination plays in the imperialist scheme of things today

and, therefore, the crucial role that the struggle for the development of independent technology
should play in the struggle against imperialist economic domination have not yet been adequately
analysed even in the anti-imperialist literature. It may be suggested that technology should be
assigned the same role that was assigned in the 1920s and 1930s to heavy, capital goods industry.
7 To make India join the U.S. camp politically or militarily has hardly been a major aim of U.S. policy

towards India in the last 25 years.

 The Ideological Development of the
Revolutionary Terrorists in Northern
India in the 1920s

The revolutionary terrorists* of northern India during the 1920s became

popular heroes in their own life time and have remained so since then. But
their popular image was and is that of heroic youths, saturated with the
emotions of abstract or “pure” nationalism and burning with the desire to
sacrifice themselves “at the altar of the motherland”. Their critics had, of
course, harsher things to say about them. But both the admirers and the
critics continue to believe that these daring young men had no social
ideology, no thought to guide their actions, or that, in other words, they
were ‘mindless patriots’. The revolutionary terrorists were fully aware of this
widely prevalent view. As one of their many public declarations noted:
“There are few to question the magnanimity of the noble ideals they cherish
and the grand sacrifices they have offered, but their normal activities being
mostly secret, the country is in the dark as to their present policy and
intentions.”1 To remove this lacunae they published and distributed, over the
years, many statements and pamphlets, some of which were carried in the
national press. Many of them are now available, though many more have yet
to be traced. In addition, several excellent auto-biographies have been
published more recently by several of the participants in the revolutionary
movement. There is now hardly any excuse for the persistence of the old
belief.

The Revolutionary Terrorist Movement of the 1920s in northern India was

the product of several new factors in the situation. Of course, it arose on the
shoulders of the previous revolutionary movements such as the attempts of
Rash Behari Bose and Shachindranath Sanyal during the First World War,
the Hardinge Bomb Case, the Ghadar Movement, the Mainpuri Conspiracy
and the First Lahore Conspiracy Case. There was also the background of the
terrorist movements in Bengal, Maharashtra and Europe.
More immediately, it was the product of the Non-Cooperation Movement
and its abiding impact on Indian politics. Nearly all of the important
members of the new revolutionary movement had taken active part in the
Non-Cooperation Movement, and had shared in the heady enthusiasm
generated by the unprecedented popular upsurge and the hopes raised by
Gandhi’s promise of winning freedom within a year. Among the participants
in the non-violent satyagraha were, for example, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee,
Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Jatin Das, Bhagwati Charan
Vohra, Yashpal, Shiv Varma, Dr. Gaya Prasad and Jaidev Kapur. But the
failure of the Non-Cooperation Movement shattered the high hopes raised
earlier. Among the youth who had followed the call of Gandhi and
abandoned their schools and colleges and even their homes, there was deep
dissatisfaction with the manner in which the movement had been
withdrawn. Their sense of gloom was heightened by the replacement of
Hindu-Muslim unity forged in common struggle by an orgy of communal
riots and an atmosphere poisoned by mutual communal hatred. These
idealist youth could not see anything wrong with Chauri Chaura. Nor could
they appreciate a conception of politics and morality which would fell a
powerful popular movement with a single blow. Nor were they satisfied with
the two substitutes that the national leadership offered them: parliamentary
politics of the Swarajists or the so-called constructive programme of the
Nochangers. The more these young people pondered over the prevailing
pessimism and frustration, the more they found fault with the basic strategy
of the dominant nationalist leadership and the Gandhian political ideology
underpinning it. Their rejection of Gandhism made them search for
alternatives. This search led them to socialism on the one hand and
revolutionary terrorism on the other. They embraced both, as had been done
half a century earlier by the revolutionary Russian youth.
The third event to influence them, though very vaguely in the beginning,
was the upsurge of the working class after the First World War. This new
social force was watched carefully by many of the older as well as the
emerging leaders of the Revolutionary Terrorist movement. They could see
the revolutionary potentialities of the new class and desired to harness it to
the nationalist revolution.2 The influence of the working class was strongly
felt in 1928 when a strike wave spread over the country.3
A major influence on the young revolutionaries was the Russian
Revolution and the success of the young socialist state in consolidating itself
against heavy internal odds and powerful external enemies. This also led
them to study Marxist literature and other books on socialism. The older
generation revolutionary terrorists had started discussing the Soviet
Revolution and Communism as early as 1924.4 Gradually more information
regarding the Soviet Union trickled down to India. Literature on the Soviet
Union was easily accessible at Lahore and was eagerly devoured at the
Dwarkadas Library, founded by Lala Lajpat Rai.5 It had an immediate
impact. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev began to look upon the Soviet Union as
the state nearest to their ideal.6 Soviet Union’s growing impact was also
revealed by the attention paid by the public (as opposed to the secret) wing
of the revolutionary movement in popularizing the Soviet Union. This
public wing, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, celebrated, along with radical
Congressmen, “Friends of Russia Week” in August 1928. In the same month,
the Sabha organized a meeting to eulogize the Russian Revolution.7 The
revolutionaries behind bars also carried on similar propaganda. On 24
January 1930, the Lahore Conspiracy Case prisoners celebrated the “Lenin
Day” in the court and sent greetings to Moscow.8 Similarly, in November
1930, they sent greetings to the Soviet Union on the anniversary of the
Revolution.9
 An important aspect of the Soviet influence was the eagerness of the
terrorist revolutionaries to take monetary and other help from the Soviet
Union and to send Indians there to get training in the arts, methods, and
organization of the revolutionary process. In 1926, Ashfaqullah of the
Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) was planning to go to Russia
when he was arrested in the Kakori Conspiracy Case.10 In 1928, Bejoy
Kumar Sinha was deputed by the newly founded Hindustan Socialist
Republican (Army) Association (HSRA) to go to the Soviet Union.11 Later
Chandrashekhar Azad made vain attempts to send Yashpal and Surendra
Pandey to the Soviet Union.12 The influence of the Russian Revolution was a
major factor not only in spreading socialist ideas among the revolutionaries
but also in weaning many of them away from purely terrorist ideals.13
The young terrorist revolutionaries also established contact with the small
communist groups which were sprouting up all over the country.
Particularly in the Punjab, but also at Kanpur and Allahabad, they
maintained close contact with the communists.14 During the years 1928-
1930, the communist groups and the terrorist revolutionaries worked
together in the Naujawan Bharat Sabha.
Gradually, the revolutionary groups and individuals began to emerge out
of the mood of frustration and stagnation. Their attempt to create an all-
inclusive organization led to the formation of the Hindustan Republican
Army in 1924 under the leadership of the “old-timers”, i.e., Shachindranath
Sanyal, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, and Ramprasad Bismil.15 The
programme and ideology of the HRA, of which youngsters such as Bhagat
Singh, Shiv Varma, Sukhdev and Azad were members, were an amalgam of
the old and the new. The HRA helped the young revolutionaries make a
transition to an advanced programme. It also enabled them to maintain
continuity with the older tradition.16 The result was a revolutionary
programme with an advanced revolutionary socialist outlook which still
tried to incorporate within it individual or group armed actions of a terrorist
nature. The new programme emerged fully when the group of young
revolutionaries met at Ferozeshah Kotla grounds on 9 and 10 September
1928, created a new leadership, and gave their party a new name with a
difference—The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (Army).17
 3

The new generation terrorist revolutionaries were men of ideas and

ideologies.18 Their ideas were, of course, rapidly developing and cannot be
studied except in motion, so to speak. Moreover, as is true of any other
movement with a distinct set of ideas, these ideas were not equally
coherently articulated by all the participants. Some naturally assumed the
role of ideologues. Such was, for example, clearly the role of Bhagat Singh
and Bhagwati Charan Vohra—two men of exceptionally powerful intellect
and capacity to translate their ideas into the written word. Other ideologues
of the movement were Shiv Varma, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Sukhdev, and later
Yashpal. These men (except Yashpal who came into the movement later)
were also responsible for adding the socialist objective to the aims of the
movement. But what is equally important is that others discussed these
ideas, grasped them, and accepted them with a full sense of responsibility.
Chandrashekhar Azad, for example, was not merely a military leader. He
made others read and explain to him books in English till in the end he was
able to grapple with their ideas himself. He followed every major turn in the
field of ideas and endorsed them only after full discussion and self-
conviction.19 The draft of The Philosophy of the Bomb was written by
Bhagwati Charan at the instance of Azad and after a full discussion with
him.20
At the level of the ideologues, the revolutionary ideas were clearly
articulated and brilliantly expounded, as even a cursory reading of the
documents cited below would show. The young revolutionaries took
particular care to be clear and distinct in their exposition for they were fully
aware that the revolutionaries had “all along been, either deliberately or due
to sheer ignorance, misrepresented and misunderstood.” They wanted to let
the people “know the revolutionaries as they are.”21 Of course, their ideas
became much less clear as they came to be expressed by the less educated
and less articulate members of the party, as is evident from a perusal of the
Atshi Chakkar leaflets written by Inderpal’s group.

4
The greatest advance that the revolutionary terrorists made was in the
definition and development of their aims and objectives. The questions they
sought to answer at the ideological plane were: What were the aims of their
struggle against the foreigners? What sort of changes in society and polity
were they aiming at? What sort of social order and state structure would
replace the present ones? And, at the purely intellectual level, they succeeded
in postulating the development and organization of a mass movement of the
exploited and suppressed sections of society led by the revolutionary
intelligentsia for the reconstruction of society on the basis of a new social
order—the socialist system based on the abolition of class distinctions and
class domination.
The following sections would trace this development in their thought in
greater detail. But, at the outset, it is necessary to contradict the impression
that all the major shifts in revolutionary thinking occurred during the
period of their imprisonment and mainly as a result of the opportunities for
serious study that they got while in prison. In fact, the basic ideological
formulations of Bhagat Singh were made in the early period of his
incarceration on the basis of his earlier reading and thinking—and he had
made a great deal of progress in this respect in the pre-1929 period.
Moreover, he had read Karl Marx’s Capital in addition to other Marxist,
socialist, and revolutionary literature. This is not to deny that continuous
development occurred in the thinking of the revolutionaries due to fresh
experiences, study or discussion. But while those who were in jail
accomplished all this inside the jail, others who escaped arrest did so
outside. For instance this was the case with Bhagawati Charan,
Chandrashekhar Azad, and Yashpal. The most mature work of the
revolutionary terrorists in terms of theory, The Philosophy of the Bomb, was
produced by those who had managed to evade arrest.

The first major commitment of the revolutionary terrorists was to liberate

India from foreign rule and to transform Indian society through a
revolution. This commitment found a capsuled expression in the slogan,
“Long Live Revolution” or “Inquilab Zindabad.”
Their commitment to revolution was moreover total. To them, revolution
was not a mere historical accident or curiosity. It was not merely the
demand of a particular historical situation in India. It was “the inalienable
right of mankind.”22 More, it was the eternal principle of human progress. A
perpetual process of revolution was needed if human society was not to
stagnate and if it was to be overpowered by the dark forces of decay. It was,
therefore, the very embodiment of humanist principles. According to the
Manifesto of the HSRA (1929):

Upheavals have always been a terror to holders of power and privilege.

(But) Revolution is a phenomenon which nature loves and without
which there can be no progress either in nature or in human affairs.
Revolution is not a philosophy of despair or a creed of desperadoes.
Revolution may be anti-God but is certainly not anti-man. It is a vital,
living force which is indicative of eternal conflict between the Old and
the New, between Life and Living Death, between Light and Darkness.
There is no concord, no symphony, no rhythm without Revolution.
‘The music of the spheres’ of which poets have sung, would remain an
unreality if a ceaseless Revolution were to be eliminated from the space.
Revolution is law, Revolution is Order and Revolution is the Truth.
The revolutionaries were not afraid of chaos or anarchy which so
frightened the middle class intelligentsia of the time. The task of destruction
was essential before regeneration could occur. The revolutionary published
by the HRA in January 1925 had proclaimed: “Chaos is necessary to the
birth of a new star and the birth of life is accompanied by agony and pain.”
The Manifesto of the HSRA (1929) fully endorsed this anarchistic streak.
Revolution also implied a total struggle—a struggle without
compromises, a struggle in which the victory had to be total. The Philosophy
of the Bomb ended with the declaration: “We ask not for mercy and we give
no quarter. Ours is a war to the end—to Victory or Death.”
Such glorification of revolution and willingness to make great sacrifices at
its altar were, of course, not peculiar to the period under discussion. These
were, in fact, inherited from their predecessors. Where first the leaders of
the HRA and then Bhagat Singh and his comrades took a giant step forward
was in broadening the scope, the definition of revolution.
Bhagat Singh and others repeatedly disclaimed that revolution was to be
identified with violence or with “the cult of the pistol and the bomb.” These
were, when found necessary in some cases, the mere means of bringing
about revolution.23 Revolution was no longer to be seen as a mere political
act. That is why a rebellion was not a revolution though it might lead to it.24
Revolution had a deeper, wider social content. Its aim now was to regenerate
society, to change the social order based on “manifest injustice.”25
Revolution was “the spirit, the longing for a change for the better.”26 It was
the people’s desire to change their political and economic condition.27
Bhagwati Charan defined revolution further as “Independence, social,
political, and economic.”28 A fuller statement of their position was made in
Bhagat Singh’s and Dutt’s statement of 6 June 1929:

By revolution we mean the ultimate establishment of an order of

society which may not be threatened by such (social) breakdowns and
in which the sovereignty of the proletariat shall be recognized and as a
result of which a world federation should redeem humanity from the
bondage of capitalism and misery of imperial wars.
Starting with this view of the revolutionary process, the revolutionary
terrorists were no longer satisfied with the mere prospects of the
achievement of complete national independence. Even national freedom had
to be seen as a means to a new social order. Initially this yearning found
expression in the HRA’s proclamation in 1925 that it stood for “the abolition
of all systems which make the exploitation of man by man possible.”29 Later
revolutionaries also railed against exploitation. The poster put up at Lahore
after the assassination of Saunders in December 1928 declared that the
revolutionaries were working “for a revolution which would end
exploitation of man by man.”30 The goal was reiterated in the Red Leaflet
thrown in the Central Assembly on 7 April 1929.31 With slightly greater
sophistication, The Philosophy of the Bomb invited the readers to help
establish “a new order of society in which political and economic
exploitation will be an impossibility.”
From this egalitarian demand, the next step—the demand for a socialist
society—was quickly taken. Socialism became the official goal of the
revolutionary terrorists of northern India when they met at Delhi on 9 and
10 September 1928 for reorganizing their party, the HRA. Here, Bhagat
Singh proposed that the name of the party be changed to the Hindustan
Socialist Republican Association (Army). He was given powerful backing by
Sukhdev, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, and Shiv Varma. His proposal was carried in
the end.
The change in name was not just a gesture. It was taken after full debate
and discussion. Several participants had objected on the ground that the
older name had acquired a great deal of prestige due to its association with
leaders like Ramprasad Bismil, Shachindranath Sanyal and Jogesh Chandra
Chatterjee. But they were convinced in the end that the change was essential
to denote the changed social, economic and political character of the
struggle they were about to initiate.32
Nor was the injection of socialism as a goal into the revolutionary
movement really sudden. The HRA had already taken some vague steps in
the direction. At the HRA Council meeting, held at Kanpur on 3 October
1924, it been decided “to preach social revolutionary and communistic
principles.”33 The HRA’s publication, The Revolutionary, had proposed the
nationalization of the railways and other means of transport and
communication and the large-scale industries such as steel and ship-
building. For other private and small scale business enterprises it had
suggested the organization of cooperative unions.
Gradually, more and more revolutionaries had come under the influence
of socialist ideas. In 1924, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee had become a
proponent of socialism.34 Young revolutionaries both in the Punjab and U.P.
were taking keen interest in socialism.35 Many of them were in touch with
“Communist” groups.36
The goal of socialism was not based on vague and woolly notions or
youthful impetuosity. A great deal of intensive reading and discussion had
gone into the making of their ideology. At Lahore, Bhagat Singh had helped
the Dwarkadas Library acquire a unique collection of literature on
revolutions, particularly those of Russia, Ireland, and Italy. He himself had
devoured books on revolutions during the years 1924-27. He had organized
several study circles with the help of Sukhdev and others and carried on
intensive political discussions.37 J.N. Sanyal, his co-prisoner in the Lahore
Conspiracy Case, made in 1931 the following evaluation of Bhagat Singh as
an intellectual:

Bhagat Singh was an extremely well-read man and his special sphere of
study was socialism...Though socialism was his special subject, he had
deeply studied the history of the Russian revolutionary movement from
its beginning in the early 19th century to the October Revolution of
1917. It is generally believed that very few in India could be compared
to him in the knowledge of this special subject. The economic
experiments in Russia under the Bolshevik regime also greatly
interested him.38
The socialist intellect of Bhagat Singh got a chance to grow and develop in
prison. The story of his intellectual endeavours—his transformation of the
jail into a veritable university—has been narrated at length by his niece
Virendra Sandhu.39 In Jail, Bhagat Singh wrote several books of which the
four prominent ones were Autobiography, The Door to Death, The Ideal of
Socialism, and The Revolutionary Movement of India. Unfortunately all the
manuscripts have been lost.40 Similarly, Bhagwati Charan and Sukhdev had
made extensive study of socialist ideas. Later, Yashpal emerged as a serious
student of the subject. He had not only read R. Palme Dutt’s Modem India
but also translated it into Hindi.41
What is equally important, Bhagat Singh and others actively promoted the
education of party members in the theories of socialism. They were fully
aware of the great role that scientific ideology could play in the revolution.
Before the Lahore High Court, Bhagat Singh had pointed out that “the
sword of revolution is sharpened at the whetstone of thought.”42 In jail, he
had described Gandhi as “a kind-hearted philanthropist” and pointed out
that “it is not philanthropy that is needed, but a dynamic scientific social
force.”43 Consequently, when, after the Delhi Conference, the Party office
was shifted to Agra, Bhagat Singh immediately built up a small library with
economics as the core subject. Here the members were constantly urged to
read and discuss socialism and other revolutionary ideas.44 Bhagwandas
Mahour, a virtual teenage member at the time, had narrated how Bhagat
Singh urged him to read Marx’s Capital and other books.45
It may, however, be stated that Bhagat Singh and his friends were not
great scholars of socialism or Marxism but they were no mere novices either.
They had travelled some way and were gradually feeling, studying and
thinking their way towards a scientific socialist understanding of the
problems of the Indian Revolution.46 For instance, Bhagat Singh grasped
that socialism as a system is not the product of a mere subjective longing for
a desirable system but far more the objective product of the necessity of the
social circumstances.47 Writing to Sukhdev, who was tormented by doubts,
and who along with Bhagat Singh was awaiting the execution of the death
sentence, Bhagat Singh remarked:

If we had not entered the field, would it have meant that no

revolutionary action would have occurred? You are wrong if you think
so. It is true that we helped to a large extent change the (political)
atmosphere. At the same time, we are mere products of the necessity of
our times. I would even say that the creator of Communism, Marx, was
in fact not the creator of this ideology. It was the Industrial Revolution
in Europe which produced many persons of a particular way of
thinking. Marx was just one of these men. In his situation Marx
undoubtedly helped impart a particular motion to the movement of his
times. I and you have not created the socialist or communist ideas in
this country. On the other hand, they are the result of the impact on us
of our time and circumstances. Undoubtedly, we have contributed in a
simple and humble manner to the propagation of these ideas.48
Furthermore, the extent of their socialist understanding is clearly brought
out by their concrete understanding of what constituted a socialist society
and its points of departure. After all it was on his question that the HRA had
been transformed into the HSRA. While the HRA had held up as its
immediate object the establishment of a Federal Republic of the United
States whose basic principle would be adult suffrage,49 the HSRA had by its
very name proclaimed the goal of establishing a Socialist Republic.

The leadership of the HSRA clearly grasped that socialism was a product of
the historical process and that, therefore, as a system it was the antithesis of
capitalism. The first achievement of the socialist system would, therefore, be
the ending of capitalism. This was made clear by Bhagat Singh and Dutt in
their statement of 6 June 1929 as well as in their statement before the High
Court. The Philosophy of the Bomb was equally definitive. It had proclaimed:
“The revolution will ring the death knell of capitalism.”
It was recognized that socialism would represent a new correlation of
class forces in society. The entire socialist ideology was based on class
analysis of society. Socialism would be based on the emancipation of the
hitherto exploited classes of society, the workers and peasants, and the
domination of their interests in the economy, society, and polity.50 The 6
June statement of Bhagat Singh and Dutt gives even a clearer exposition of
this view. After pointing out that the revolution of heir conception would
change the “present order of things which is based on manifest injustice,”
their statement goes on to explain:

Producers or labourers, in spite of being the most necessary element of

society, are robbed by their exploiters of the fruits of their labour and
deprived of their elementary rights. On the one hand, the peasant who
grows com for all starves with his family. The weaver who supplies the
world market with his textile fabrics cannot find enough to cover his
own and his children’s bodies. Masons, smiths, and carpenters, who
rear magnificent palaces, live and perish in slums, and on the other
hand, capitalist exploiters, parasites of society, squander millions on
their whims...Radical change, therefore, is necessary, and it is the duty
of those who realize this to reorganize society on a socialistic basis.51
 The leaders of the HSRA also raised the concrete question as to who
controls the state power as distinct from the question of exploitation and
class interests. Socialism, they said, also represented a new state structure in
which power rests in the hands of the workers and peasants.52 At the same
time, socialism could not be established till the existing state apparatus,
under the control of the exploiting classes, was captured by the socialist
revolutionary forces. In a message from prison in October 1930, Bhagat
Singh said:

We mean by revolution the uprooting of the present social order. For

this, capture of state power is necessary. The state apparatus is now in
the hands of the privileged class. The protection of the interests of the
masses, the translation of our ideal into reality, that is the laying of the
foundation of society in accordance with the principles of Karl Marx,
demand our seizure of this apparatus.
What was to be the state form under socialism? Here the revolutionaries
accepted the notion of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. The revolution
will “establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” declared the Philosophy of
the Bomb, “and will for ever banish social parasites from the seat of political
power.”53 In the course of the court hearings, Bhagat Singh and his co-
prisoners made every effort to popularize the notion that the revolution of
their conception was closely linked with the fortunes of the working class
and its leadership function. On 13 June 1929, Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt
met the court judgement in the Assembly Bomb Case with the twin cries of
“Long Live Revolution” and “Long Live the Proletariat.”54 During the Lahore
Conspiracy Case trial, all the prisoners used to shout three slogans on their
arrival in the court: “Long Live Revolution”, “Long Live Proletariat”, and
“Down, Down with Imperialism”.55

The growing socialist consciousness also enabled the revolutionary terrorists

to constantly link capitalism and imperialism. Their understanding of
imperialism and foreign rule went far beyond emotional nationalism. They
began to see the close link between capitalism and modern imperialism,
between capitalist economic exploitation and the enslavement of nations.56
Within India, foreign rule was seen as a form of class rule or as the rule of
foreign capitalists.57 Socialism was then seen as a specific remedy that
would, by putting an end to class rule and economic exploitation, bring
about true independence.58 This understanding pervades all revolutionary
terrorist documents of the period and was, of course, inherent in the slogans
where freedom was linked with the ending of exploitation of man by man.
For example, The Manifesto of the HSRA said: “The hope of the proletariat is,
therefore, now centred on Socialism which alone can lead to the
establishment of complete Independence and the removal of all social
distinctions and privileges.”
Once the socialistic outlook enabled them to see the class- based
character of all society including Indian society, the revolutionary terrorists
ranged themselves squarely against the domestic exploiting classes also.
They denounced the domination of Indian capitalists and landlords as
strongly as the rule of foreign capital and declared that the abolition of the
former was as basic to the revolution as the abolition of the latter. According
to The Manifesto of the HSRA:

The position of the Indian proletariat is, today, extremely critical. It has
a double danger to face. It has to bear the onslaught of Foreign
Capitalism on the one hand and the treacherous attack of Indian
Capital on the other: the latter is showing a progressive tendency to
join forces with the former.
Bhagat Singh wrote in a message from the prison: “The peasants have to
liberate themselves not only from foreign yoke but also from the yoke of
landlords and capitalists.”59 His message of 3 March 1931 was even more
explicit: the struggle in India would continue so long as “a handful of
exploiters go on exploiting the labour of the common people for their own
ends. It matters little whether these exploiters are purely British capitalists,
or British and Indians in alliance, or even purely Indians60
It may be noted that the revolutionary terrorists did not make a detailed
class analysis of Indian society. There was no concrete analysis of the rural
society; no discussion of the structure of Indian capitalism or its complex
relationship with imperialism. They even failed to draw a clear distinction
between the landlords, zamindars, and money-lenders and the industrial
capitalists. It seems that to them capitalism was the epitome as well as the
symbol of economic exploitation. What stands out, however, is their firm
grasp of the class approach to society, their commitment to socialism, their
anti-imperialism, and their recognition of the leading role of the working
class. It was therefore not fortuitous that the overwhelming majority of the
revolutionary terrorists turned to Marxism and Communism once their
own movement reached a dead end.61

As practical revolutionaries, the leaders of the HSRA also dealt with the
question: who would fight for the revolution or who would bring it about,
or, in other words, what was to be the social base of their movement? On the
question of the social base of the revolution, the leadership of the HSRA was
very clear at the programmatic or theoretical plane. Their movement was to
be based on the common people, the workers and peasants, the youth, and
the radical intelligentsia. The Philosophy of the Bomb was explicit on the
question. The appeal was addressed to “the youth, to the workers and the
peasants, to the revolutionary intelligentsia.” The manifesto of the Naujawan
Bharat Sabha (1928) was also clear on the point: “The future programme of
preparing the country will begin with the motto ‘Revolution by the masses
and for the masses’.”62 One of the major objectives of the Sabha, as laid down
in its Rules and Regulations, was the organization of workers and peasants.63
The Sabha also decided to open branches in villages in order to emphasize
the importance of work in the rural areas.64 The Kanpur meeting of the
HSRA’s Central Council in January 1930, in which, among others,
Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Yashpal, and Kailashpati
participated, decided to intensify the work among the students, peasants,
and workers, and to form for the purpose a separate section of the party
organization to be headed by Seth Damodraswarup as President and
Bhagwati Charan as Secretary.65 Similarly Bhagat Singh declared in 1931
that “our main task should be the organization of peasants and workers.”66
The role of the common people in the struggle was emphasized from
another angle also. The HSRA’s leaders were convinced that the capitalists
and upper classes were showing a tendency to join the foreign power and
were likely to abandon the freedom struggle half-way through.67 Only the
common people could then be relied on, and had the strength, to carry
forward the struggle for freedom. As Bhagat Singh put it: “The nation can
wage a successful struggle only on the strength of organized workers, kisans,
and the common people.”68 This emphasis on revolutionary work among the
peasants and workers, and recognition of their revolutionary potentialities,
was not new in the revolutionary terrorist movement, though the emphasis
on their being the social base of the revolution was. Earlier, in 1924, the
HRA had also decided that “to start labour and peasant organizations
suitable men must be engaged on behalf of the Association to organize and
control labourers in the different factories, the railways, and the coal-
fields.”69
This was, however, all in theory or at the programmatic level. In practice,
little effort was made to organize the common people or to do even
elementary political work among them. The Naujawan Bharat Sabha did
take part in one or two agrarian agitations in 1928 and issued a few
exhortations to the peasants to organize themselves.70 The Sabha had only
one village branch in Morinda in Ambala and two tehsil branches at
Jaranwala and Talagong, and these were all inactive.71 The activities of the
Sabha were, for all practical purposes, confined to the cities and their middle
and lower middle class sectors.72 Similarly, Ajoy Ghosh and a few others
worked with labour at Kanpur, perhaps under the impact of communist
workers.73 Kailashpati, the approver in the Delhi Conspiracy Case and
earlier a member of the Central Council of the HSRA, noted in his evidence
that while the Council decided in January 1930 to intensify work among the
workers, peasants, and students, no one was assigned to work among the
peasants.74
 In reality, the HSRA failed to do any political work among the common
people; it had hardly any link or contact with them, not to speak of its
organizing their class power and leading them in class struggles. It was
virtually cut off from the classes which it had accepted in its programme as
the social base of the revolutionary movement. This was one of the most
important weaknesses of the HSRA.
The fact of the matter was that the main appeal of the HSRA was to the
radical nationalist youth. In theory, the youth had a double role to play. They
were to act as the conveyors of the revolutionary socialist message to the
workers and peasants,75 and they were also to be the direct fighters for
revolution. In practice, the leadership of the HSRA placed almost its entire
reliance for political work on the youth: the youth was to be the vanguard of
the revolution. The wide participation and even leadership of the workers
and peasants remained the goal, but it could not yet be so in practice
because it was believed the workers and peasants were yet “passive”, “dumb”,
and “voiceless”.76 The youth must, therefore, be the real builders of the
revolution, they must act on behalf of die people and arouse them through
their work and sacrifices.”77
The political appeal of the revolutionary terrorists was at its emotive best
when made to their real and immediate audience. According to The
Philosophy of the Bomb, “the revolutionaries already see the advent of the
revolution in the restlessness of youth, in its desire to break free from the
mental bondage and religious superstitions that hold them.” In 1929 The
Manifesto of the HSRA made an appeal to the youth delineating before them
their historical mission which in its passion, lyricism, and emphasis on the
idealism of youth, reminds one of the appeals of the founders of the May 4th
Movement in China. The following extract from the appeal indicates the
type of emotion that the revolutionary terrorists tried to generate and on
which they themselves relied in making their immense sacrifices:

The future of India rests with the youths. They are the salt of the earth.
Their promptness to suffer, their daring courage and their radiant
sacrifice prove that India’s future in their hands is perfectly safe...Youths
—Ye soldiers of the Indian Republic, fall in. Do not stand easy, do not
let your knees tremble...Yours is a noble Mission. Go out in every nook
 and corner of the country and prepare the ground for future
Revolution which is sure to come...Do not vegetate. Grow!...Sow the
seeds of disgust and hatred against British Imperialism in the fertile
minds of your fellow youths. And the seeds shall sprout and their shall
grow a jungle of sturdy trees, because you shall water the seeds with
your warm blood.78
In practice also, all the revolutionary terrorist public activities, all their
propaganda, including the “propaganda by death”, were directed towards the
youth. The youth from the lower middle class constituted the real social base
of the movement. Almost the entire membership of the HSRA was recruited
from this section of society.79
One reason for this emphasis on youth was the understanding that the
task of the present generation of revolutionaries was not to make the
revolution but to prepare for it. Bhagat Singh looked upon himself as the
precursor of the revolution. Revolution would be started only when the
ideas of socialism and revolution had gained popularity. Then the masses
would make the revolution. Only the youth had the intelligence, the
sensibility, the freedom from domestic worries, and the sense of sacrifice
and heroism to perform the former task. Hence the primacy of youth in the
preparatory phase of the revolution.
Yet another factor made the revolutionary terrorists rely on the youth. The
most important form of propaganda, they believed, was “propaganda by
deed”, or through terrorist and other heroic actions. Their actions did not
constitute the revolution but such actions were immediately necessary to
prepare for the revolution. Thus they faced a dialectical contradiction. Even
before the revolution, which the masses would make, men were needed to
perform revolutionary actions. In other words, to arouse the revolutionary
tendencies of the masses, people with revolutionary consciousness and with
capacity to sacrifice their lives were needed. As it were the lower middle
class youth alone filled the bill.80 But the revolutionary consciousness was,
to start with, purely nationalist. And these youth could, therefore, be used
mainly for nationalist actions. This was another contradiction that the
leaders of the HSRA faced. In theory they had become totally committed to
socialism; in practice they could not go beyond nationalism.
 9

The revolutionary terrorists never succeeded in “taking off ” politically. They

got stuck at what they themselves saw as the first, preliminary step. They
failed to get the support of the masses for their party as distinct from getting
popularity as hero-figures devoid of distinct ideology and political
personality. This is amply testified by the perpetual and extreme poverty
which engulfed them all the time. Nor did they succeed in organizing a
single mass revolutionary action or even a minor armed group action
against the Government. Thus their few successful individual political or
terrorist actions remained suspended in the air as it were, and, in terms of
their own programme, were more or less failures. After all, they themselves
viewed such actions as a means of moving the people on to the
revolutionary path and of getting wider support and membership for mass
revolt and armed struggle. In fact, they could not even find the ways and
means of establishing contact with the masses. Consequently governmental
action decimated their ranks and they failed to replenish them. Throughout
1930 not a single dramatic “action” could be organized. All the carefully
prepared plans of Chandrashekhar Azad came to nothing. Internal
squabbles began to divide the heroic band, squabbles which still find their
echo in fierce controversy in the Hindi press. The party had to be dissolved
and soon scattered into small, rapidly diminishing groups. Even the lion-
hearted Chandrashekhar Azad, who had borne repeated blows of fortune
with fortitude, began to lose hope, though he went on planning “actions” up
to the end. The revolutionary terrorist movement in north India virtually
came to an end with his death in February 1931.
The HSRA had failed in its other political aims also. It had come into
existence primarily as a reaction to, and in opposition to, the dominant
Gandhian leadership of the national movement. In the short period of its
existence, it had frontally confronted this leadership and its ideology. One of
the aims of their programme of “propaganda by deed” was to wean the
masses and youth away from Gandhism. They claimed to be revolutionaries
precisely in opposition to the non-revolutionary, compromising leadership
of Gandhi. Yet, with all their great popularity in 1929, 1930 and 1931, they
failed to provide an alternative leadership to Gandhi. Of course, they failed
to achieve their aim of establishing revolutionary socialist hegemony over
the national movement or to give it a revolutionary turn. By and large, the
national movement remained stuck in the Gandhian grooves.
One of the aims of the HSRA. was to popularize the idea of socialism and
to spread socialist consciousness in the ranks of the nationalist youth. It
does not seem the HSRA achieved much success. The vast majority of their
admirers remained unaware of the depth of their commitment to socialist
ideology. This was, of course, partially due to the suppression by the
Government of all their writings. Nor was there any other source except the
Naujawan Bharat Sabha at Lahore, their own underground distribution of
the Philosophy of the Bomb (though only once on 26 January 1930), and
occasional publication of their messages in the Tribune and other papers
through which their views could be spread. It was only in the Punjab that
the HSRA and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha became, to some extent, carriers
of socialist ideas. Their ideas, and the prestige of their sacrifices behind
those ideas, could perhaps have become powerful instruments in the spread
of a revolutionary socialist consciousness in the later years if the communist
and socialist parties had so utilized them. But for some strange reasons,
these parties failed to do so.
The immediate objective of the revolutionary terrorists was to spread
revolutionary consciousness in the country. Bhagat Singh said to Shiv Varma
just before facing the gallows. “At the time of my joining the revolutionary
party I thought that if I could spread the slogan ‘Long Live Revolution’ to
every corner of the country, I would have received the full value for my
life...I think no one’s life can be worth more.”81 And, undoubtedly, Bhagat
Singh achieved this ambition. But the universal acceptance of this slogan
and the great admiration that the self-sacrifices and struggles of the
revolutionary terrorists aroused in the country cannot be said to have given
the nationalist consciousness a revolutionary turn. Undoubtedly, the left
movement in the country as well as the peasants’ and workers’ organizations
and movements were to make this slogan a battle cry. But as commonly
understood, this slogan soon came to symbolize merely the nationalist
desire to achieve independence.
 The great success of the revolutionary terrorists was in arousing the anti-
imperialist consciousness. They succeeded in arousing the country and in
winning the love and respect of their countrymen, but for the cause of
nationalism. This was no mean success. But the fruits of their success were
gathered by the traditional Congress leadership which they had denounced
as bourgeois and middle class and which they had hoped to replace, but
which was actually and actively heading the anti-imperialist struggle. In
other words, their great and real success came in a field and bore
consequences which were very different from those they had desired. This
led to an interesting historical paradox. While nearly ninety per cent of the
revolutionary terrorists later gave their allegiance to Marxism or
communism, their own youthful deeds and slogans became the inheritance
of left Congressmen wedded to Gandhian leadership.
Basically their failure can be expressed in a series of contradictions
between their ideology and their work. While in theory they were
committed to socialism, in practice they could not go beyond nationalism.
While in theory they desired mass action and armed struggle, in practice
they could not rise above terrorist or individual action. While in theory they
wanted to base their movement on the masses—the peasants and workers—
in practice they could only appeal to the urban lower middle class or petty
bourgeois youth. While in theory they wanted to create and lead a mass
movement, in practice they remained a small band of heroic youth. While in
theory their small organization was to serve as a “foco”, a cell around which
would gather the rising revolutionary forces of the country, in practice they
found it difficult and in the end impossible even to maintain the integrity of
the original group itself.
Two other aspects of their failure may, however, be kept in view. Their
failure was not merely that of not linking their practice with their theory; it
was also that of not integrating nationalism and socialism at the theoretical
and programmatic plane. In their programme, they hoped to accomplish at
one stroke the nationalist as well as the socialist revolutions. Since the
historical conditions were clearly not favourable to such a conjunction, in
practice this meant keeping the socialist consciousness and the nationalist
consciousness in two separate compartments with the result that either
former was subordinated to the latter or it got separated from the latter. This
contradiction also took another form. While the leadership of the HSRA
was rapidly advancing in its acceptance as well as grasp of socialist ideas, its
rank and file remained disinterested in theory and functioned almost
entirely at the level of revolutionary nationalist consciousness.82
Reliance on the radical youth of the middle and lower middle classes
while talking of a revolution of the masses seems to be the historical
dilemma of all political situations, programmes, and parties, where a
revolutionary situation exists, where the starting of a revolution on
howsoever tiny a scale appears to be the only way out of political stagnation,
where the time and facilities (legal conditions, etc.) for propaganda and
organization do not exist, and where, at the same time, revolutionary
consciousness and personnel do not yet exist among the common people
either due to political backwardness, official suppression, or prolonged
subjection to non-revolutionary political influence. The leadership of the
HSRA went wrong in not trying to rapidly change the situation and combine
their activity with mass organization and mass revolt or armed action. They
failed to develop organized armed action, on howsoever small a scale,
against the Government, as distinct from its officials. And this was in spite of
the fact that at the theoretical plane the revolutionary terrorists’ approach
towards revolution was more correct, and from the beginning they planned
to start an armed struggle which would rapidly lead to mass revolt, the
overthrow of imperialism and establishment of a socialist republic. But they
hardly got the time to put their ideas into practice. Nearly all of them were
arrested or killed within a matter of two or three years and even within that
period they were constantly hounded by a most stable and efficient
administration. One of their major mistakes perhaps lay in thinking that
revolution could be initiated by a handful of young men in a period when
the bourgeois nationalist leadership yet retained vigour enough to fight
against imperialism though by non-revolutionary means.
Another mistake of the revolutionary terrorists lay in the belief that
propaganda by deed or by death by daring young men could lead to the
creation of a revolutionary socialist movement. This was believing blindly in
the spontaneous generation of political forces and even revolution. Only this
belief could have made them send their most outstanding leader to take part
in a “propaganda by death” deed. But where were the political forces—
parties, groups, individuals—in the country which could take advantage of
the sentiments released and aroused by their immense sacrifices? In fact,
there did not exist even the political mechanism to explain to the people
what they were dying for. On the other hand, they seemed to believe that
their sacrifices, accompanied by their death-defying statements, would affect
people's minds, educate them, and lead them to organize themselves.
Consequently, their revolutionary thought hardly reached the people. To the
people they appeared as simple heroic figures who defied death for their
country. They merely generated a nationalist consciousness. The very
bourgeois nationalist leadership which they had desired to replace through
exposure of its ! pro-capitalist character harnessed their names and sacrifices
to make popular their own brand of nationalism.
This is not to deny that propaganda by deed could be a powerful weapon
of political education. But that would be so only when it became a part of an
organized movement, peaceful or violent. It was not that the brilliant
leadership of the HSRA was not to some extent aware of this elementary
political fact. That was why Bhagat Singh, Bhagwati Charan, Ram Krishan,
Dhanwantri and Ehsan Ilahi devoted, at one stage or the other, the major
part of their energies to the work of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha. The only
city where the great sacrifice of Bhagat Singh and his comrades created a
political movement among the left was Lahore, and this mainly because the
Sabha was there to build upon their struggle inside the jails. Similarly, Azad
and Yashpal made desperate efforts in 1930 to create a political organization
which could take their political message to the people. But such efforts were
puny and often abortive and in no case matched the immense propaganda
by deed.
In a way a profound personal and political tragedy was being enacted at
that time. As the socialist ideological horizons of the leadership of the HSRA
were being broadened, they could see the correct road ahead.83 But they
were too close to their terrorist past. In fact, that past formed a part of their
present for these young men had traversed decades in a few months. When
they wanted to make a break, as in the case of the Assembly Bomb Case,
they made it within the shell of the old way. Their very commitment to
heroism prevented them from making a total break with terrorism. In the
last stages, in the latter part of 1930 and 1931, they were mainly fighting to
keep the glory of the heroic sacrifice of their comrades under sentence
shining as before. The vision of the coming revolution had receded in the
face of the hard knock that the political reality had given them. In the end,
one finds Bhagat Singh grappling with the problem of how to convey the
correct understanding of politics to the young men outside, without
appearing to have reconsidered his politics under the penalty of death. The
socialist within him had finally overcome the terrorist. He now desperately
tried to convey this change without abandoning the sense of heroic sacrifice
which he had imbibed from terrorism.84 Outside, Chandrashekhar Azad
waited stoically for a martyr’s death while he made desperate efforts,
including virtually begging for the intervention of the non-revolutionary
leaders, to save the lives of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. By then he
had realized what their lives were worth. For this exchange, he was even
willing to suspend revolutionary action for the time being. At the same time,
he sought to send two of the few remaining intellectual members, Yashpal
and Surendra Pandey, to the Soviet Union to learn the art of mass
organization and revolution-making. For he had realized, as others had
done, that the way of the revolutionary terrorists had failed and that broad-
based mass movements alone could pave the way to revolution.85 This
realization was, of course, becoming a part of their consciousness for quite
some time now.

10

In conclusion it can be said that the revolutionary terrorists succeeded in

arriving at basic elements of a socialist understanding; of society, the state,
nationalism, imperialism, and revolution. Further and deeper
understanding could only come out of the development of revolutionary
theory in practice. On the other hand, the total mechanism of revolutionary
political action, organization and the role of a revolutionary party escaped
them. All the time, however, they kept intact their revolutionary
consciousness.
 NOTES

Read at the Seminar on ‘Socialism in India, 1919-39’, held in November

1968. Published in Socialism in India, ed. B.R. Nanda, New Delhi, 1972.
* The words “revolutionary terrorists” have been used in the absence of a
better term. No criticism or value judgement is implied in the use of the
term. The alternative was to describe them as “armed revolutionaries”, as
some of the Hindi writers do.
1 The Manifesto of the Hindustan Socialist Republic Association, dis-tributed at the Lahore Session of

the Indian National Congress, December 1929 (hereafter referred to as the Manifesto). Source: History
of the Freedom Movement, Phase III, B 38/3.
2 Shachindranath Sanyal, BandiJiwan, in Hindi (Delhi, 1963), pp. 237 if; Virendra Sandhu, Yugdrastha

Bhagat Singh, in Hindi (Delhi 1968, p. 138; Yashpal. Sinhavalocan, in Hindi (Lucknow, 1951), Vol. I, p.
138; Ajoy Ghosh, Articles and Speeches (Moscow, 1962), p. 15.
3 Yashpal, n. 2, p. 138.

4 Jogesh Chandra Chatteijee, In Search of Freedom (Calcutta, 1967); Sanyal, n. 2, pp. 314 ff.

5 Yashpal, n. 2, p. 96.

6 J.N. Sanyal, Sardar Bhagat Singh (Lahore, 1931), p. 26; H.R. Vohra’s evidence, Tribune, 30 November

1929. Also see Ajoy Ghosh, n. 2, p. 15.

7 Note on the N.B. Sabha by Rai Bahadur Bhagwan Dass of C.I.D. dated 27 May 1929. Home

(Political) Proceedings, F. 130 and K.W., 1930, pp. 40-41.

8 See Tribune, 26 January 1930.

9 Ajoy Ghosh, n. 2, p. 25.

10 J.C. Chatteijee, n. 4, pp. 247 and 391.

11 Interview with B.K. Sinha.

12 Yashpal. n. 2, Vol. III, pp. 49 and 59.

13 J.N. Sanyal, n. 6, p. 26.

14 Interview with Sohan Singh Josh and P.C. Joshi.

15 J.C. Chatteijee, n. 4, pp. 20, 208-09; J.N. Sanyal, n. 6, p. 12.

16 The continuity with the older generation of revolutionaries was always stressed by the younger

revolutionaries. See, for example, Sukhdev’s letter in Young India, 23 April 1923, p. 82. Similarly
Bhagat Singh constantly held up the image of Kartar Singh Sarabha before himself. Shachindranath
Sanyal’s BandiJiwan, Part I, was a virtual textbook in their ideological and propaganda work. Similarly,
the Lahore Conspiracy Case prisoners made it a point to send a condolence message on the death of
Shyamji Krishna Varma, Tribune, 8 April 1930.
17 According to Yashpal, Prof. Jai Chandra Vidyalankar and J.N. Sanyal were deliberately kept out as

representing the older spirit and the participants in the meeting were determined to have a new aim
for their movement and a new path for their organization. See Yashpal, n. 4, p. 145.
18 The important role of ideas in the movement was recognized early in 1925 by the leaders of the

HRA. One of the qualifications laid down for a district organizer was: “He must have the capacity to
grasp political, social, and economic problems of the present day with special reference to this
motherland.” The Constitution of the HRA, in J.C. Chatteijee, n. 4, p. 341.
19 Yashpal, n.2, pp. 148-49. Ajoy Ghosh is wrong in stating that Azad did not care much for new

ideas. He makes this mistake mainly because he was behind bars in the crucial years of Azad’s growth
as a leader. What is true is that Azad accepted the superiority of some other comrades as ideologues
and was fully conscious of his limitations in this respect.
20 Yashpal, n. 2, Vol. III, pp. 66-67.

21 The Philosophy of the Bomb.

22 Bhagat Singh’s and Dutt’s statement of 6 June, 1929.

23 Bhagat Singh’s and Dutt’s letter to the Modem Review, Tribune, 24

December 1929; Manifesto; Bhagat Singh, etc., n. 22.

24 Bhagat Singh’s and Dutt’s letter, n. 23.

25 Bhagat Singh, etc., n. 22.

26 Bhagat Singh’s and Dutt’s letter, n. 23.

27 Bhagat Singh, quoted in N.K. Nigam, Balidan in Hindi (Delhi, n.d.), p. 41.

28 The Philosophy of the Bomb, n. 21.

29 J.C. Chatterjee, n. 4, p. 338.

30 Quoted in Gopal Thakur, Bhagat Singh: The Man and His Ideas (New Delhi, 1952), p. 9.

31 Tribune, 10 April 1929.

32 J.N. Sanyal, n. 6, pp. 28-29.

33 Proceedings of the HRA Council meeting, 1924.

34 J.C. Chatterjee, n. 4, p. 242.

35 Yashpal, n. 2, p. 96; Ajoy Ghosh, n. 2, p. 36. As early as 1924, Lala Lajpat Rai publicly described

Bhagat Singh as a Russian agent and complained that Bhagat Singh wanted to “make me into a Lenin.”
V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 316.
36 Many of them, including Bhagat Singh, might also have been influenced by the Kanpur Bolshevik

Conspiracy Case since they were present in Kanpur at the time.

37 J.N. Sanyal, n. 6, p. 15.

38 Ibid., p. 103.

39 V. Sandhu, n. 2, pp. 234-35, 237, 262, 285 and 306.

40 Ibid., pp. 237 and 306.

41 Yashpal, n. 2, Vol. II, p. 11.

42 V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 196.

43 J.N. Sanyal, n. 6, p. 106.

44 Ibid., pp. 32-33; Yeshpal, n. 2, Vol. I, p. 170.

45 Bhagwandas Mahour in Banarsi Das Chaturvedi, ed., Yash Ki Dharohar in Hindi (Delhi, 1968),

2nd edition, pp. 27-28.

46 Yashpal, n. 2, p. 145; Mahour, n. 45, p. 26.

47 Last message of Bhagat Singh, see Appendix 5, to Vishwanath Vaishampayan, Amar Shahid

Chandrashekhar Azad, in Hindi, Parts 2-3 (Banaras, 1967), p. 306.

48 Quoted in V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 241. It is interesting that Bhagat Singh looks upon himself mainly as a

propagator of the ideas of socialism rather than as a great freedom fighter.

49 The Revolutionary, published by HRA, 1925.

50 The Philosophy of the Bomb.

51 Bhagat Singh, etc., n. 22.

52 Rules and Regulations of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Punjab, 1 May 1928, Meerut Conspiracy Case,

1929, English translations of Urdu exhibits, Exhibit no. P. 205 (T); Reports on the Naujawan Bharat
Sabha, Home (Political) Proceedings, F. 130 K.W. (1930), p. 40 and p. 10 K.W.; The Philosophy of the
Bomb.
53 Also see Bhagat Singh, etc., n. 22.

54 Tribune, 14 June 1929.

55 See the Tribune report of the case during 1929-30. See, for example, the Tribune of 6 October 1929.

56 See Bhagat Singh, etc., n. 22; The Philosophy of the Bomb; and the Last Message of Bhagat Singh in

Vaishampayan, no. 47.

57 Furthermore, in their 6 June statement, Bhagat Singh and Dutt referred to the “economic structure

of exploiters of whom the Government happens to be the biggest in the country.”

58 The Philosophy of the Bomb.

59 Quoted in Gopal Thakur, n. 30, p. 39.

60 See Vaishampayan, n. 47, part 2-3, p. 304. Also see The Philosophy of the Bomb.

61 See Mahour, n. 45, p. 10; Yashpal, n. 2, Vol. II. pp. 263-64.

62 Quoted in Gopal Thakur, n. 30, p. 39.

63 Rules, etc. of Naujawan Bharat Sabha, n. 52. p. 35. Also see J.N. Sanyal, n. 6, p. 25.

64 Home (Political) Proceedings, F. 130 and K.W. (1930), p. 10 of K.W.

65 Kailashpati’s evidence, Proceeding of Delhi Conspiracy Case, Vol. 1, p. 229; Yashpal, n. 2, Vol. II, pp.

153-54.
66 Quoted in Gopal Thakur, n. 30, p. 39.

67 The Manifesto; Bhagat Singh, quoted in Gopal Thakur, n. 30, p. 39.

68 Quoted in Gopal Thakur, n. 30, p. 39.

69 Constitution of the HRA, in J.C. Chatterjee, n. 4, p. 342. This seems to have been the result of

Shachin Sanyal’s first hand experience of the effectiveness of labour as a political force. See S. Sanyal,
n. 2. p. 237.
70 Home (Political) Proceedings, F. 130 and K.W. (1930), pp. 38ff. And these may be ascribed to the

Kirti-Kisan component of the Sabha.

71 Ibid., K.W., p. 13.

72 Ibid., pp. 36ff.

73 Lalit Kumar Mukherjee’s Evidence in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, Tribune, 7 December 1929.

74 Kailashpati’s evidence, n. 65, p. 299.

75 Bhagat Singh’s and Dutt’s Message to the Students’ Conference at Lahore, Tribune, 22 October

1929; Kailashpati’s Evidence, n. 65, p. 299.

76 Peaceful and Legitimate, an HSRA pamphlet. Copies of the Exhibits in Lahore Conspiracy Case (II),

History of the Freedom Movement, Phase II, Region III, 6/3, Exhibit P.N. Also see Bhagat Singh, etc., n.
22.
77 Peaceful and Legitimate: Bhagat Singh, etc.. n. 22; Bhagat Singh, quoted in V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 323;

Yashpal, n.4. Vol. II, p. 12.

78 Also see an eulogy to youth by Bhagat Singh, quoted in V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 323.

79 Yashpal, n. 2, p. 139, Vol. II, p. 232; K.N. Nigam, n. 27, p. 11.

80 Yashpal, n. 2, Vol. II, p. 238.

81 Quoted in V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 262.

82 See Mahour, n. 45, pp. 27-28; Yashpal, n. 2, Vol. II, p. 262; Inderpal’s and Madan Gopal’s Evidence

in the Second Lahore Conspiracy Case; and Vaishampayan, n. 47.

83 The present writer would agree with Bhagat Singh when he wrote in February 1931 that already

before his arrest in 1929 he had abandoned terrorism. See V. Sandhu, n. 2, p. 244.
84 Ibid.

85 Mahour, n. 45, p. 117; Nigam, n. 27, p. 104; A. Ghosh, n. 2, p. 31. Frank recognition of their failure

and their willingness to choose the alternative path is, of course, a rare example of intellectual and
political integrity in the history of revolutionary movements.
The Indian National Movement and the
Communal Problem

The colonialization of the Indian economy, society and polity produced

many-sided consequences. One was the initiation of the prolonged historical
process of welding the Indian people into a nation. Another was the rise of a
national, anti-imperialist movement as the central contradiction between
imperialism and the interests of the Indian people developed.
The national movement was based on the phenomenon of the nation-in-
the-making while it was itself a powerful factor contributing to this
phenomenon. Its growing strength depended in part on the extent to which
the people became conscious of their being part of a nation whose essential
interests required a struggle for the overthrow of imperialism. This
consciousness of nationhood—of being a people—did not, however, flow
automatically from the objective reality. It had to be a hard, painstaking
process in self-discovery in which the anti-imperialist struggle itself would
play a crucial role.
But by its very nature, the process of the nation-in-the-making was, and
is, a highly differential process. Moreover, the formation of new social
classes and strata and the impact of imperialism on the people also occurred
in a differential nature leading to the emergence of a varied relationship
between imperialism and the different sections of the Indian society. This
resulted in the extremely uneven development, both in time and space, of
national and anti-imperialist consciousness among different social classes
and strata as well as people belonging to different religions, castes, linguistic
areas. etc. One of the major tasks facing the leadership of the national
movement was to impart a common national consciousness to the Indian
people and to unite them in the common struggle against imperialism.
A major hurdle in this respect was the emergence almost simultaneously
with nationalism of communalism. From the 1880s efforts were made to
keep the Muslims from joining the broad national movement. The national
movement on the other hand set out to unite people professing different
religions and, in order to be able to do so, to fight against the divisive
communal forces. Its basic strategy in this respect was to have momentous
consequences.

The central element of this strategy may be described as trying to bring

about unity from the top. The primary thrust was the effort to win over the
middle and upper class Muslim leaders who were accepted as the leaders of
Muslims. Once these leaders were won over, they were to bring the Muslim
masses and middle classes into the national movement, thus to produce
Hindu-Muslim unity, and to help exert pressure on imperialism to grant
political concessions.
A central feature of this strategy was the notion of giving ‘protection’ and
providing ‘safeguards’ to the interests of the middle and upper class
Muslims. Though in theory this protection was to be given to the rights of
the religious minority, in the negotiations among leaders it seldom referred
to the religious, cultural, or social rights of the minority. Instead, it
constantly hovered around the question of providing guarantees of jobs to
the middle class Muslims and a share in the political and administrative
power to the Muslim middle and upper classes. For example, the demand
was for reserving majority of seats in the Muslim majority provinces for the
Muslims and not for adult franchise which would automatically guarantee a
larger number of Muslim legislators in these provinces. The question of
protecting the economic rights of the Muslim peasants and workers did not
arise at any stage, for even the communalists realized that these rights were
not separate from the rights of the Hindu peasants and workers.
The efforts to bring about national unity from the top began almost with
the founding of the Indian National Congress. At its fourth session at
Allahabad in 1888, the Congress passed a resolution stating “no subject shall
be passed for discussion by the Subjects Committee or allowed to be
discussed at any Congress by the President thereof, to the introduction of
which the Hindu or Mohammedan delegates as a body object, unanimously
or nearly unanimously.” At its next session at Poona in 1889, the Congress
framed its demands for the reform of the Legislative Councils, including the
demand for the reservation of seats for the religious minorities in
proportion to their share in the total population. The positive aspect of the
early moderate nationalist leaders’ approach lay in their simultaneous,
scientific effort in the political and ideological fields to make the people
aware of their emerging unity, of their common interests in the
confrontation with imperialism, and of the need for unity in this
confrontation.
Lokmanya Tilak, once he awoke to the need for Hindu-Muslim unity, also
followed a similar strategy. He became a major architect of the Lucknow
Pact which represented an effort to unite the leaders of the Congress and the
Muslim League in order to be able to put pressure on the colonial authorities
to grant constitutional reforms. The agreement as well as the joint political
initiative that followed were not seen as part of the preparation for a mass
struggle against imperialism, for neither the leaders of the Muslim League
nor the ‘Moderate’ Congressmen could be expected to participate in, or even
desire, such a struggle.
Mahatma Gandhi’s unity with the leaders of the Khilafat was the most
successful effort at Hindu-Muslim unity in the course of the national
struggle. It was moreover not devoid of the mass element. It was inspired by
the motive of bringing the Muslim masses and lower middle classes into the
mass non-cooperation movement; and to a certain extent it actually
succeeded in doing so. In this respect it was qualitatively different from the
premises as well as the consequences of the later effort at Hindu-Muslim
unity.
 At the same time, the basic aspect of the Gandhian strategy also lay in the
promotion of an agreement with the middle and upper class Muslim leaders.
It was also found useful and necessary to bring the Muslim Ulemas
(traditional scholars and divines) into politics to provide religious sanction
for the anti-imperialist movement. Above all, for bringing about Hindu-
Muslim unity an issue, i.e., the Khilafat, was chosen which had nothing to
do with the life of the common people or with the impact of imperialism on
their lives. The Khilafat was a popular movement, because of its religious
connotation, without being a people’s movement.
Moreover, since the Muslim masses and lower middle classes were
brought into the anti-imperialist movement through an agreement with the
top leaders and on a religious question, they came into it with their existing
consciousness impact. They joined the movement as a matter of religiosity
and not for the protection and advancement of their democratic and
economic rights. What is even more important, the very terms of this
agreement prevented Gandhi and the nationalist leadership from using this
opportunity to impart a modern, secular, democratic, and anti-imperialist
political consciousness or understanding of social forces to the Muslim
masses who participated in the Non-Cooperation-cum-Khilafat Movement.
The movement did not even bring before them the aspect of the clash of
their economic and social interests with imperialism as had been done
earlier by the moderate and extremist nationalists or was being done by
Mahatma Gandhi in his non-cooperation agitation. The result was that the
mass of Muslims who took active part in the Khilafat Movement remained
unacquainted with modern anti-imperialist ideology or the modern
principles of political organization such as secularism and democracy.
Instead, the intrusion of religious outlook into politics or political problems
was legitimized and perpetuated. When the Khilafat Movement was
withdrawn, hardly any nationalist residue was left. At the most a handful of
sturdy secular nationalists like Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad emerged.
Apart from the Khilafat issue, the Congress adopted some other steps to
win over the Muslim leaders. It incorporated in its constitution, adopted at
its Nagpur session, 1920, the Resolution of 1888 quoted above. The Working
Committee of the Congress went further in 1921 and recommended the
principle of reservation of seats for Muslims on the pattern of the Lucknow
Pact in all its bodies up to the All-India Congress Committee. Later it
advised the Punjab Provincial Congress Committee to extend the principle
to the Sikhs also.
Faced with a recrudescence of communalism and communal riots in
1922, the Congress remedy was to form a high level committee first of two
leaders, the Congress President V.J. Patel, and Hakim Ajmal Khan and later
of four leaders, including these two and Madan Mohan Malaviya and a
Muslim leader to be nominated by Hakim Ajmal Khan, to formulate “a
scheme for the settlement of Hindu-Muslim differences”. In 1923, the AICC,
meeting at Gaya, asked Dr. Ansari to get a scheme for a National Pact
prepared to be circulated for assessing opinion “among leading
representatives and influential persons of different communities...” Thus, the
communal problem was to be settled through a scheme or pact between the
leaders without bringing in or even educating the people at all. The latter
were seen as unfit to discuss or decide such an important matter.
The efforts of C.R. Das in 1923 were equally directed at arriving at a Pact
at the top level to provide ‘safeguards’ to the ‘Muslim interests,’ i.e., the
interests of the upper and middle class Muslims. Similarly, Motilal Nehru
tried to solve the communal problem by negotiating with leaders like the
Raja of Mahmudabad.
In fact all the serious Congress efforts at bringing about Hindu-Muslim
unity were in the nature of negotiations among the top leaders of the Hindu,
Muslim and Sikh communalism and the Congress. Quite often, the
Congress assumed the role of an intermediary between the different
communal leaders instead of acting as the advance-guard and active
organizer of the forces of secular nationalism.
Even the communal riots were met with a similar strategy. Hardly any
effort was made to organize a mass political and ideological struggle against
the organizers of the riots and the outlook which enabled them to flourish.
Even the limited mass mobilization technique of the Non-Cooperation
Movement was not attempted. Instead, the political effort was almost
entirely confined to settling the immediate communal dispute which might
have been used to create a riot in the particular locality. Even this was to be
done by bringing the ‘Hindu’ and the ‘Muslim’ leaders together in the liberal
style for the signing of a local or national pact. Gandhi’s momentous fast in
1924 on the communal question could produce nothing more than a surface
agreement at the top between the leaders of different ‘communities’.
The ridiculousness, inefficacy, and even viciousness of this approach were
revealed when unity at the top was sought to be promoted by encouraging
the attendance of the ‘Hindu’ leaders at the Muslim League sessions and the
‘Muslim’ leaders at the Hindu Mahasabha sessions. In practice, this meant
that they were compelled to listen politely to communal speeches and even
abuses from the opposite communalists, letting the iron enter their souls.

This unity-from-the-top approach towards the communal issue had certain

inherent weaknesses.
Since the top communal or national leaders were accepted as the
spokesmen of the Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs, their entire politics and
ideology came to be accepted as ‘representing’ the Hindus or Muslims or
Sikhs and their interests and behaviour. This willy-nilly led to the
recognition and even indirect acceptance of the concept of religious
communities in India. It began to be widely assumed that religious
communities. such as Muslim community, Hindu community, and Sikh
community, existed in real life, that such a community had common history,
that its ‘members’ possessed common economic, political, social and
cultural, as apart from religious, interests and could therefore have, as
Muslims or Hindus, a ‘common cause’, and that they in fact constituted a
distinct ‘society’. The only major difference between the nationalists and the
communalists was that the former wanted these communities to unite and
fight together as communities against imperialism and the latter to shun and
fight each other.1 Both sides accepted the logic of communalism. The
nationalists would then fight for the unity of the communities while the
communalists would carry the logic further. The early Jinnah could do
both.2 Thus the basic communal way of looking at politics, that is, of seeing
the basic task of Indian politics not as that of uniting and integrating the
diverse Indian people but of uniting the distinctly formed communities and
their leaders, was permitted to enter the heart of the Indian political process.
This also produced a few side effects. For example, the communalists were
able to freely flit in and out of the National Congress simply by emphasising
the Hindu interests at one time and national unity at another. And very
secular Congressmen could be transformed into rank communalists in the
twinkling of ah eye.
This unity-from-the-top strategy contained another built-in mechanism
to promote community-wise thinking among the political leaders involved
in the Hindu-Muslim unity talks. The entire political position of many of
these leaders was due to their being Muslim or Hindu leaders. It is this
which made others recognize them as leaders. It is this which enabled them
to play in the senior league along with the giants. Consequently, even the
best of them found it difficult to rise from the position of a Nationalist
Muslim or Nationalist Hindu to that of a simple nationalist. The latter
position would suddenly reduce their political importance.
This constant negotiation with communal leaders also weakened the
position of the anti-imperialist Muslims who were increasingly forced to
think and act as Nationalist Muslims. Men like Abul Kalam Azad and Asaf
Ali, i.e., simple nationalists, increasingly became a rarity.
The unity-from-the-top approach could have had one political or
historical justification. It could be used as the entry point to the minds of the
non-political masses for beginning a campaign for the clarification of the
political, including the communal, issues. Or if the general atmosphere of
communal amity among communal leaders was immediately utilized to
launch a powerful attack on the communal outlook and ideology. But
nothing like this was done. The unity at the top was seen as the acme of
political achievement as well as the end of political action in respect of
national unity. An agreement between Malaviya and Jinnah or between Lala
Lajpat Rai, Dr. Ansari, and Sardar Mahtab Singh or at an all-parties
conference including all the communal leaders and parties was seen as the
maximum programme.
 4

A basic weakness of the traditional national leadership’s approach to the

communal problem arose from the nature of the anti-imperialist struggle
which was neither continuous, nor consistently opposed to compromise
with imperialism, nor did it involve the common people in continuous
political activity. In fact its tendency to compromise with imperialism and to
pull back the masses from struggle was a major factor in the repeated
recrudescence and growth of communalism. After all, the basic common
interests of the Indian people and, in fact, their very homogeneity arose
largely from the needs of the anti-colonial struggle and economic and social
development and from the common class interests. Their consciousness of
common interests, consciousness that would override religious, caste, and
linguistic divisions, could be developed and strengthened only through their
common struggle against imperialism and for their class interests. The
nationalist forces had precisely in this respect a distinct advantage over the
communalists. The nationalist forces, whether represented by the Congress
or by the left groups and parties inside or outside it, were objectively anti-
imperialist and could therefore draw to themselves all anti-imperialist
sentiments, movements. and people. On the other hand, precisely in their
link with imperialism and their refusal to fight it militantly lay the weakness
of the communal forces, especially after 1937 when the colonial authorities
extended all-out support to the communalists. By continuous mass
confrontation with imperialism, it was certainly possible either to expose the
communal forces or to draw them into the main anti-imperialist stream and
thus to corrode their communalism as well as their influence over the
masses.
A look at recent history provides interesting data in this respect. It is then
seen that communalism receded whenever the anti-imperialist struggle was
at high tide, while it surged forth when this struggle was at an ebb.
As the anti-imperialist movement picked up during the First World War
with the rise of the Home Rule Leagues on the one hand and the armed
struggle of the Ghadarites on the other, the pro-imperialist communal forces
suffered a relative decline. The years from 1918 to 1922 were the halcyon
days of both the anti-imperialist struggle and Hindu-Muslim unity. The
influence of Muslim League and other communal groups was minimal. In
fact, none of them possessed a mass base at the time even among the lower
or middle classes. The communalists became active only after the anti-
imperialist movement was called off. It was the frustration and discontent
born out of the sudden petering out of the movement that created
favourable ground for the rise of communal bitterness. The Government and
the propertied classes could now succeed in giving a communal colour to
the incipient and incoherent struggles of the masses to improve their lot.
Moreover, it was the acceptance of parliamentary politics after 1922 that
produced a horde of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ leaders both from within and
without the Congress ranks. Even so, the afterglow of the Non-Cooperation
Movement was strong enough to keep communalism confined to a handful
of leaders with their social base narrowly confined to sections of middle and
upper strata of society. The possibility of making a breakthrough on the
communal front continued to exist through the 1920s in spite of the
communal riots.
The rise of the left after 1926, the growth of trade unions and the youth
movement, and the anti-Simon Commission protest movement once again
enthused the masses and reduced communal tensions. The Second Civil
Disobedience Movement swept the entire country. Unlike the earlier
movement from 1920 to 1922, the people took part in it as Indians and not
as Hindus or Muslims with their separate grievances.3 The communal
parties and leaders were made to look for cover. In fact many of them either
joined the movement or at least supported it or went into virtual political
retirement. Till 1931–32, the Muslims participated actively in the
movement. In fact the national movement engulfed for the first time two
new major areas with a Muslim majority—the North-Western Frontier
Province and Kashmir. Similarly, the Mewatis (Muslims) began to struggle
against the Maharaja of Alwar. Moreover, increasingly the Muslim as well as
Hindu youths and workers, and in many places peasants, looked up to the
Communists, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha of Bhagat Singh, and Nehru and
Subhash Bose for a political lead.
The suspension of the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1931 and the
policy of negotiating with the colonial authorities once again enabled the
communal leaders to appear on the scene. It was now that the colonial
authorities declared communalism to be the major political issue which
must be settled before constitutional advance could be made. They gave
hand-picked communal political leaders free run of the First Round Table
Conference. Unfortunately, the Congress leadership looking for political
advance via a compromise with imperialism readily, though unwillingly, fell
into the trap.
The Civil Disobedience Movement was, however, soon resumed, and the
communalists did not get an opportunity to grow till its defeat and
withdrawal in 1933–34. Even so, the Muslim League and the Hindu
Mahasabha, the most openly communal organizations, remained quite weak
till 1936. Within the League, the feudal, unashamedly communal, and pro-
imperialist elements remained in a small minority till 1932; and a large
number of Muslim League leaders were friendly to the Congress. Even in the
period 1934–37, when the Congress fought elections to the central and
provincial legislatures with the commitment to fight the official reforms and
the Government of India Act of 1935 and the perspective of the resumption
of the militant mass anti-imperialist struggle, the communal forces
remained weak and could not grow. They were also afraid during this period
of appearing to be anti-Congress lest they should be branded as pro-
imperialist. No Congress-League or Hindu-Muslim bitterness marked the
elections of 1937. Nor did the League do well in the 1937 elections either in
seats or in votes or in territorial spread. It failed to get much support in the
Muslim majority provinces. It won only 108 of the total of 482 seats reserved
for Muslims in the provincial assemblies. Of the 7,319,445 Muslim voters,
only 321,722 voted for the League candidates. It thus failed to gain the
support even of the Muslim lower and middle classes. In other words, the
communal division did not yet play an important part in Indian politics.
It was only during and after 1937 when on the one hand, the Congress
accepted office under the new Government of India Act of 1935, got reduced
to a parliamentary party, gave up the perspective of mass anti-imperialist
struggle except in the distant future, and even inside the legislatures pursued
bourgeois-landlord politics rather than anti-imperialist, pro-worker, pro-
peasant, and, in general, pro-people politics and, on the other, the growing
left failed in practice—as distinct from theory—to pose an alternative to the
strategy of the Congress right wing, that the communal forces were able to
come into their own and to get ready for a leap forward.
However, the actual leap forward of the Muslim League as also of the
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the North occurred only after 1942 when
the Quite India upsurge, during which, it is to be noted, there was no
communal trouble in spite of the League’s strong opposition to the
movement, had been suppressed, the Congress leadership lay quiescent
inside jails, the Communists had failed to become the spearhead of anti-
imperialism and popular movements under a mistaken notion of how to
support the international anti-Faseist War, and the Indian upper, middle,
and lower middle classes had abandoned all politics in order to reap the
war-time harvest of jobs, contracts, and high profits.

Another basic weakness in the nationalist approach to the communal

problem was the failure to organize a consistent and principled fight against
communalism in general and Hindu communalism in particular. This aspect
had several dimensions.
The Muslims were a religious minority in India. The Muslim masses,
middle classes, and intellectuals were constantly kept aware of this fact by
the imperialist writers, administrators and statesmen and the active
communal leaders, both Hindu and Muslim. They lived in a situation where
a small but vocal Hindu communal element was constantly preaching
Hinduisation of the country and equating national liberation with this and
other similar objectives. Consequently, they were afraid not only of being
oppressed and suppressed but also of being gradually submerged.
In this situation, a secular and united nationalist movement could be built
only on the basis of an active struggle against the communalism of the
religious majority. On the other hand, any softness towards it was bound to
arouse misgivings, however unreal, among the minority, thus enabling the
Muslim communal leaders to find an opening among the Muslim masses
and intellectuals.
 The dominant Congress leadership of the national movement was
undoubtedly secular and free of religious narrowmindedness. It carried on
active propaganda and even movements in favour of Hindu-Muslim unity.
At many crucial moments, it refused to appease the Hindu communalists. At
no stage, however, did it launch a frontal political and ideological attack on
Hindu communalism.
The starting point of this attack had to be the recognition of the fact that
communalism of the majority and the minority would not assume the same
shape or ideology; they were bound to be different in form even while being
the same in content. Because of its very minority character, the minority
communalism assumes an openly sectional, narrow, undemocratic and
divisive approach and it has to talk of ‘minority safeguards’ and the like. The
majority communalists, on the other hand, know that the democratic
principle of majority rule can give them the opportunity to implement their
programme of cultural, religious, and social domination and the capacity to
corner jobs and other economic opportunities for their middle and upper
classes. This is all the more so if those classes are relatively more advanced.
The majority communalists can, therefore, safely assume the nationalist garb
and talk of the high principles of democracy, equality of opportunity,
competition of merit, etc. While the Muslim communal nationalist had
perforce to take up the position that he was a good nationalist but that at the
same time he wanted to safeguard ‘Muslim rights’, the Hindu communal
nationalist need not take up openly communal positions for he could
assume that ‘Hindu rights’ would be inevitably protected by the majority
principle.4
The nationalist movement had therefore to refuse to accept such a simple
point of demarcation between a nationalist and a communalist as adherence
to national or sectional demands. Not all those who accepted nationalism
were secular; many were harbouring to a lesser or greater degree communal
thoughts and loyalties and were sometimes as much penetrated by
communal loyalty as an openly communal Muslim. In other words, a Hindu
communalist would not look like a Muslim separatist. He was more likely to
be talking of national unity and mutual trust.5 But he might be as viciously
communal. The nationalist leadership had therefore to probe deep into the
ideology, psychology and the political approach of the Hindu communalists.
It had to see the Hindu equivalent of the Muslim League not in the Hindu
Mahasabha and thus preen itself on having kept Hindu communalism weak,
but inside its own ranks where a large number of Hindu communalists of
various hues and degrees were to be found. Without a struggle against this
brand of Hindu communalism, masquerading as nationalism, it was not
possible to fight against Muslim communalism, which, by the very nature of
the case, would be outside the ranks of nationalism.
Instead of doing this, the Congress leadership permitted openly
communal elements or those whose ideological and political make-up
contained a large dose of communalism to join the Congress and even
occupy positions of leadership in it from the local to the All-India plane, or
otherwise to acquire and retain the reputation of being nationalists without
any repudiation by the Congress or other nationalist leaders. Such
communal nationalists, to coin a new phrase, often left the Congress and
even opposed it politically. But soon after they would be re-admitted into
the Congress leadership without any self criticism or disavowal of their
recent politics or recent or even current communal ideology. A few
instances may be cited.
Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya freely sailed between the Hindu
Mahasabha and the Congress. As late as 1931 he could represent Hindu
communalism at the Second Round Table Conference, and yet come back in
1932 to become the President-elect of the annual Congress session; and in
May 1934, the AICC could ask him and Dr. Ansari to form a Congress
Swarajist Parliamentary Board to fight the elections for the Central
Legislature. In the Punjab. Gopi Chand Bhargava was one day a Hindu
communal representative in the provincial assembly and the next day a
Congress and Gandhian leader. Both in the Punjab and Bengal, many a
Congress leader had no difficulty in simultaneously championing the ‘Hindu
cause’ in respect of jobs or constitutional discussions or communal riots.
After 1922 many of the nationalists openly took up communal causes and
joined their respective communal organizations; yet they were soon
adorning the Swarajist benches in the legislatures. In 1926, Motilal Nehru
complained at the Gauhati Session of the Congress against his communal
nationalist critics:
 There has been a veritable rout of the Swarajists...But this was not
because they were Swarajists, but because they were Nationalists...It was
a fight between the forces of Nationalism and those of low order of
communalism reinforced by wealth, wholesale corruption, terrorism,
and falsehood, ‘Religion in danger’ was the cry of the opponents of the
Congress, both Hindu and Muslim. I have been freely denounced as a
beef-eater and destroyer of cows, the supporter of the prohibition of
music before mosques, and the one man responsible for the stoppage of
Ramlila processions in Allahabad...Staying in Dak and Inspection
bungalows, and eating food cooked in European style, was taken to
confirm the lying propaganda.
Yet, very soon after, he and his communal critics were marching in step in
the freedom struggle!
It is also important to note that the lead in organizing the Shuddhi and
Sangthan movements was taken by leading Congressmen and other
nationalists. Other Congressmen followed suit by taking active part in the
organization of the Tabligh and Tanzim movements. The Congress
leadership condemned neither. After a great deal of debate, it came out only
against the use of coercion in their activities.
Similarly, many nationalist newspapers functioned as wholetime
nationalist and part-time communal organs. For example, the Tribune of
Lahore had the widely accepted reputation of being a nationalist organ. But
it also constantly agitated for greater Hindu share in Government jobs,
assembly seats, etc., and openly adopted a 'pro-Hindu', that is, Hindu
communal, attitude on communal riots, etc. This was also true of the Leader
of Allahabad and the Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta. Even the Hindustan
Times was not willing to disown the Hindu Mahasabha in spite of its
association with Mahatma Gandhi and G.D. Birla.
It was very difficult for the Muslims to distinguish between the two
different roles of such newspapers and individuals or between the constantly
interchangeable nationalist and communal phases in their lives. A rich crop
of bitterness and the widespread belief in the hypocrisy of the nationalists
were the inevitable results.
 Many a Congress leader also combined in himself the roles of a
nationalist leader and the propagator of his religion or at least of its reform.
While in theory it could be maintained that there was nothing wrong in a
person being a good Indian and a good Hindu or a good Muslim, in practice
this could apply only to their personal lives. It was not possible nor therefore
desirable to have such dual public roles in a multireligious country where
communal elements were active with the full backing of the Government.
This invariably spread confusion among the people which was freely utilized
by the communal leaders.
It should also be noted that even apart from communal nationalists like
Madan Mohan Malaviya, N.C. Kelkar, Aney, and the post-1922 Lajpat Rai,
communal thinking had penetrated deep into the Congress ranks. Many
among the front rank Congress leaders were suffering from communalism
to a certain extent. This was to prove quite a disaster when some of them, for
example K.M. Munshi, became Ministers in the provinces in 1937. Nor was
the political behaviour of Sardar Patel in 1947 a sudden and momentary
aberration. It had deep historical roots; and not only in his personal history.
One peculiar example of the penetration of communal ideology into the
nationalist ranks was the wide prevalence of the communal view of Indian
history, particularly in its subtler forms. Many of the Congress leaders
openly spoke and wrote of India having suffered under foreign rule for a
thousand years, and of the sharp decline of Indian society and culture under
‘Muslim rule’. A panegyric view of ancient Indian society, polity, economy
and culture was virtually considered a basic element of nationalist ideology.
Nearly all the Congress leaders joined in the glorification of Shivaji,
Maharana Pratap, and Guru Gobind Singh as national heroes who had
‘fought for freedom’ against ‘foreign rule’. Leaders and writers like Seth
Govind Dass made into heroes every little Rajput or Bundela zamindar who
had fought a battle against a Muslim Faujdar, Subedar or Chieftain.
Similarly, many Congress leaders took up the cause of Hindi not so much
against English as against Urdu and propagated it not on grounds of
democracy and democratic culture but on openly communal grounds. Urdu
was branded as a foreign language and as the language of the Muslims, while
Hindi was praised as the language of Hindus.
 The Congress and the national leadership also failed to organize a
campaign against the social and cultural taboos, exclusiveness and narrow
mindedness practised by the Hindus in their relations with the Muslims.
True, this was not a causative factor in the rise of communalism because for
centuries these had not been seen by the Muslims as forms of
discrimination. There was no racial or superiority complex involved in them
on either side. They were just a matter of religion. But it should not be
forgotten that their form was entirely social. The result was that once
communalism started burgeoning forth, though for other reasons, these
taboos, etc., were used by the Muslim communalists to spread anti-Hindu
feelings among the Muslim lower middle classes and to stoke the fires of
communal hatred. It was essential at this stage to fight and overcome these
social taboos, particularly their discriminatory aspects. The failure of such a
struggle was particularly surprising because very similar struggles were
being waged in the case of similar taboos and discriminations against the
Harijans and women. In part at least, it may be suggested, this failure was
due to the wide prevalence of socially reactionary ideologies in the
nationalist ranks.
This soft policy towards the communal nationalists and the communal
ideology became a major barrier in the national leadership’s efforts to solve
the communal problem through negotiations at the top. There were perhaps
many objective factors which would in any case have in the end led to the
failure of this entire approach. The active support of the colonial authorities
to the communal leaders and parties was one such factor. Another was the
close link between the communalists and the vested social and economic
interests. But whatever chances of success the approach had and, even more,
whatever chances existed of using these negotiations to expose the Muslim
communal leadership before the Muslims were marred by the failure of the
Congress leadership to stand up firmly against the pressures from the Hindu
communalists within and outside its own ranks. After all, the entire logic of
negotiating on ‘communal safeguards’ lay in the recognition of the fact that a
minority, however constituted, was bound to have some fears, however
irrational and lacking in objective basis, of being oppressed and suppressed
by the majority. Furthermore, the entire efficacy of this approach of
negotiating at the top would lie in the adoption of a generous approach by
the majority so that gradually the irrational fears may disappear in the light
of real life experience. A leadership should not even try to negotiate on
‘communal safeguards’ if this generosity was not to be shown. It should then
adopt a different approach. It was suicidal to follow this game and then not
obey its rules. But this is precisely what the Congress leadership did under
the pressure of Hindu communalism.
The entire history of Hindu-Muslim and Congress-League negotiations
illustrates this criticism. For example, the nationalist leadership fully
recognized that the separate electorate was playing havoc with the middle-
class-voter-based politics of India, and that its replacement by joint
electorate was absolutely essential for the healthy development of Indian
politics. In fact, in the political conditions of the 1920s and 1930s no
political sacrifice was too big to make to arrive at such a consummation. Yet
several times when the Muslim communalists accepted joint electorate in
return for other concessions, the Congress leaders failed to clinch the issue
because they were not willing to override the Hindu communal opinion.
Thus at least three such chances—in 1927 in the course of discussions on the
Nehru Committee Report, in 1931 at the Second Round Table Conference,
and in 1932 at the All Parties Unity Conference—were missed. In fact, in
1932, the British Government was so perturbed by the likelihood of an
agreement on the question of joint electorates that it announced its own
Communal Award, accepting virtually all the demands of the Muslim
communalists while retaining separate electorates. The only other safeguard
that the Muslim communalists could now ask for was a separate polity; and
they now started on that road through the intermediate stage of asking for a
weak Centre.
Both the national leadership and the Hindu communalists now revealed
another interesting characteristic: what they would not concede to the
Muslim communalists, they would accept willy-nilly and without any
struggle when decreed by the colonial authorities, thus letting the Muslim
communalists stay and prosper in the lap of imperialism.
One more consequence of this failure of the national leadership to fight
against Hindu communalism and Hindu communal nationalists within its
own ranks may be pointed out. It was compelled to show similar ‘liberalism’
towards the Muslim and Sikh communalism. Moreover, instead of
promoting a sturdy, secular nationalism among its Muslim followers, it was
compelled to rely on, and in fact even promote, nationalist Muslims who
gradually acquired a vested interest in this brand of nationalism. They were
undoubtedly nationalists but their political importance also depended on
the fact of their being Muslims and Muslim ‘representatives’. Sturdy
nationalists like Abul Kalam Azad rapidly became an anachronism in this
situation. A permanent hostage was given to communalism in the country;
and the Congress leadership dared not wage even a friendly struggle against
communal nationalists, whether Hindu or Muslim. The secular principle
was observed by letting the nationalist Muslims work freely in the Muslim
League as the Hindu nationalists had been permitted to do in the Hindu
Mahasabha.
Apart from the ideological factor, the failure of the Congress leadership to
actively struggle against Hindu communalism was closely linked to its
policy of parliamentarianism and its middle class social base. The colonial
economy created, especially in the 1930s, a situation of extremely poor
economic opportunities and increasing unemployment for the middle and
lower middle class Indians who were compelled to compete with each other
for the scarce opportunities and resources. Even those whose political views
extended to the overthrow of imperialism in the long run had to look to
their own maintenance in the short run. In the absence of a powerful anti-
imperialist movement to inspire them, the middle classes found that
communal and other sectional considerations could play an important role
in their getting a share of the shrinking national cake. Consequently, not
only the Muslim but also the Hindu middle classes were inclined towards
communalism.
The Congress leadership could to a certain extent ignore the middle
classes in the course of its anti-imperialist campaigns by relying on the
masses and the momentary enthusiasm of all the people. But when it came
to elections to the legislatures or the local bodies, the masses had no votes
and reliance had to be placed on the communal minded lower middle and
middle classes among whom the communal leaders, especially those who
had the reputation of being simultaneously nationalists and the guardians
of ‘Hindu interests’, had a great deal of prestige. The separate electorates
made this dependence doubly binding on both the Hindu and the Muslim
candidates. The penalty for opposing communal nationalists was paid by the
Swarajists through their crushing defeat in the election of 1926 in the
Punjab and U.P. and the general loss of ground in the country as a whole.
It was therefore not fortuitous that even sturdy nationalists were afraid of
having a frontal confrontation with leaders like Madan Mohan Malaviya or
of overriding the Hindu communal opinion in the Hindu-Muslims unity
conferences and constitutional discussions even when in private they totally
disagreed with this opinion. Adult franchise and joint electorate alone were
to free those who seek elections from this constraint. But the habits acquired
over decades still persist. Moreover, the lower middle, middle, and upper
classes, still living in the midst of economic backwardness, are even today
prone to communal and other divisive appeals and ideologies, except in a
few areas like Bengal where the left is strong.

Jawaharlal Nehru was one Congress leader who was able to see with great
clarity the basic weaknesses of the Moderate-Tilakite-Gandhian strategy of
solving the communal problem through an agreement at the top. His
writings on the subject from 1934 to 1939 have a freshness of approach and
contain deep insights. His was also one of the first efforts to apply the
Marxist approach to the problem. He was able to clearly see that national
unity should be a unity between the masses and not an artificially arranged
marriage of convenience between the leaders.
During 1936–37, he used his recently acquired strategic position inside
the Congress to block the efforts to arrive at a patchwork unity with the
leaders of the Muslim League. To such efforts he counterposed the
alternative political line of militant anti-imperialism, refusal to fall into the
constitutional trap, politics based on the masses, and the direct winning over
of the Muslim peasants and workers through direct political work among
them on the basis of their class demands, thus not only bypassing the middle
and upper class communal leaders but also exposing their pro-feudal and
pro-capitalist bias. This was especially important because the colonial
authorities and the communal leaders gave a communal colouring to most
of the class and social contradictions in the country. To implement his
political line, Nehru proposed the boycott of the Government of India Act,
1935, and refusal to form provincial ministries under it, direct affiliation of
the workers’ and peasants’ organizations to the Congress, close cooperation
with the Congress Socialists and the Communists, and a Muslim Mass
Contact Programme.
But this programme never took off. It crashed before it got off the ground.
The only thing he could save from the debris was his pilot’s uniform and the
badge of captaincy. The Congress assumed office in the provinces during his
presidentship of the Congress. The direct affliation of peasants’ and workers’
organizations to the Congress was rejected out of hand by the Congress
right. The Congress Ministries failed to follow distinctly pro-peasant and
pro-worker policies. On the other hand, in many provinces, for example, the
Punjab and Bengal, the local Congress leadership adopted a pro-landlord
and-moneylender stance. The Muslim Mass Contact Programme was never
seriously undertaken, for it could not be undertaken without a radical
agrarian programme and pro-labour and pro-artisan policies in the towns
and cities.
Given the bourgeois outlook of the dominant Congress leadership, all this
was inevitable. On the other hand, Nehru’s approach to the communal
problem proved to be a complete failure because of its very impracticability.
His radicalism blocked the path of negotiations and compromise at the top
which was in the end adopted with disastrous results in 1947, but which
might conceivably have done less damage in 1937–39.6 At the same time, he
and the left were either too weak inside the Congress or outside it to
implement a mass line on the question or unwilling to go into the political
wilderness in trying to do so. For example, Nehru rightly opposed the
acceptance of the Muslim League claim that it was the sole representative of
the Muslims but he failed to take active political and organizational steps to
prevent such a claim from becoming a reality. He rightly said that the
Congress should deal directly with the Muslim masses. But he failed to
establish such direct contact. The Congress lost flexibility at the top without
gaining any new ground among the Muslim masses. And this happened at a
time when the Muslim League and the colonial authorities, having been
thoroughly frightened by the Congress victory in the 1937 elections, by
Nehru’s radical thunder and, the rapid growth of the left, were
manoeuvering furiously and brilliantly both at the top, by incorporating the
nationalist Muslims of U.P., the Unionists of Punjab and the Krishak Praja
Samiti of Bengal into the League, and at the lower levels by giving the
League a radical and even anti-imperialist image. The result was that Nehru
wounded the upper class Muslim communal tiger without pulling out its
teeth. The price had to be paid within the period of a decade. The fact is that
a political line which is not backed by concrete political action is at best
irrelevant and at worst a disaster.

The reality of Indian politics was that there could be no solution, whether
radical or conservative, to the communal problem within the framework of
the existing nationalist politics. Only strong left-wing and mass-based
politics could have provided this. Such politics did not, however, exist; and a
short cut could not meet the situation.
Not all historical situations have an instant solution. To look for such
instant solutions while ignoring the past and the present interconnections is
to indulge in futile romanticism. Conditions and forces for a solution have
to be got ready over a number of years and even decades. Moreover, nations
and societies are sometimes placed in a situation in which their problems
cannot be solved piecemeal, however hard may men of good-will desire to
do so.
In India, the colonial economy and polity had created a situation in the
1930s where its social, economic, and political problems cried out for a
simultaneous and radical change—a veritable revolution. Nehru had
glimpses of the reality. Unfortunately, he and the left failed to grapple with
the total situation.
The situation is, however, still with us, as the spate of communal, regional,
linguistic and caste riots shows. The price of the failure to tackle the politics
of colonial rule and underdevelopment at their roots was paid by the
partition of the land into two in 1947. The unity of the Indian people in the
phase of the failure of underdeveloped capitalism can be now maintained
only by making a socialist revolution. In a rather profound sense, it can be
said that the partition of 1947 was due to the failure of the Indian people in
having failed to develop peasants’ and workers’ organizations and a powerful
socialist movement. Let history not repeat itself!

NOTES

Published in Secular Democracy, Annual Number, 1973

1 The impact of this approach has been all pervasive. Today even some of the most secular persons

readily talk of the Hindu or Sikh or Muslim community existing, thinking, feeling, etc. In fact the very
use of the term is unscientific and means partial, though unconscious, acceptance of the communal
approach.
2 Thus Jinnah could claim in 1924 that his aim was “to organize the Muslim community, not with a

view to quarrel with the Hindu community, but with a view to unite and cooperate with it for their
motherland.” He was sure that “once they had organized themselves they would join hands with the
Hindu Mahasabha and declare to the world that Hindus and Mohammedans are brothers.”
3 As W.C. Smith has pointed out in his modern Islam in India: “The Movement was a mighty effort of

a people struggling to be free; and it showed that, when engaged in that struggle, the people, without
being united in religion, were quite capable of being united in political ideals and in action. They
worked, fought, and suffered together; with gladness.”
4 In fact, one of the most surprising aspects of Indian political development was, and still is, that the

Hindu communalists were not satisfied with this position but tried to create a minority-type
psychology of fear among the Hindus, holding up before them the nightmare of Muslim domination
unless they united separately as Hindus. To make the nightmare look plausible the prospects of Indian
Muslims being aided by Afghanistan, Iran, and Arabia were seriously discussed.
5 This aspect was clearly visible to some of the political leaders of the 1920s and 1930s. For example,

Chaudhaiy Khaliquzzaman, who was a Nationalist Muslim at the time, wrote in September 1934 to
Dr. Ansari “If Malviyaji and Aney can claim to be nationalists, I think every communalist Muslim
who honestly fights for the rights of his community without making it a cloak for official favours and
personal gain from the Government is a nationalist.”
6 Gandhi’s strategy had at its best brought in millions of Muslims as active participants in the Non-

Cooperation Movement; Nehru’s strategy, because of his inability to work out its implementation,
achieved nothing. Under the Gandhian leadership, furious and continuous attempts were made to
solve the communal problem through negotiations at the top; Nehru set the tradition, which was also
followed after 1947, that if only we ignored communalism, abusing and ridiculing it occasionally, the
spectre would somehow get exorcised.
 Lord Dufferin and the Character of the
Indian Nationalist Leadership

In his private correspondence, in the famous minute dated 6 November

1888, and in the St. Andrews Day Speech on 30 November 1888, Lord
Dufferin repeatedly characterised the emerging Indian national leadership
as representing “only an infinitesimal section of the people” and being “a
microscopic minority”.1 He also asserted that this leadership was indifferent
and even hostile to the true interests of the masses.2 As proof of the first
assertion, Dufferin took recourse to a bit of sociology. He declared that the
Indian society was divided into classes and in fact sharply antagonistic
classes. But he did not take recourse to such orthodox categories as
zamindars, merchants, industrialists, British capitalists, bureaucrats, or even
the castes, not to speak of Indians and foreigners. Instead, he discovered that
the Indian society was horizontally divided between the educated ‘Babus’
and the uneducated masses.3
As proof of the second assertion that the nationalist leaders, who were
usually referred to as the Babu class or Babu agitators, were opposed to the
interests of the masses, Dufferin referred to the anti-popular attitude
adopted by the Indian National Congress and other leading bodies of the
nationalists, the Indian members of the Supreme Legislative Council, and
the ‘Babu agitators’ in general towards recent tenancy legislation in Bengal,
the imposition of the income tax, and the enhancement of the salt tax.4 He
asserted that “the important Native Associations” had offered “strenuous
resitance...to our recent land legislation.”5 Regarding the income tax and the
salt tax, he wrote:

The larger proportion of the product of taxation poured into our

Exchequer is contributed by the masses, whereas the income tax falls
on only some four hundred thousand individuals. If the voice of the
‘people’ of India was to determine the question, there is no doubt they
would vote decupling the income tax rather than a pie should be added
to the price of salt; but all the Native Members of the Supreme Council,
while accepting an increase of the salt duty, showed a strong dislike to
the income tax...6
In addition, “the Congress itself has passed a resolution in favour of
curtailing its incidence.”7
Dufferin claimed that, if the nationalist demand for larger representation
of Indians on the Legislative Councils was accepted, the Government would
find it increasingly difficult to enact measures, of popular welfare since the
educated Indians would oppose such efforts8. The reality was, he said, that
while the Government was “always working in the interests of the great body
of people” the educated ‘classes’ instinctively promoted “their own interests
at the expense of those of the bulk of our subjects”.9 “For instance,” wrote
Dufferin to Northbrook, “all our recent land legislation would have been
carried with infinitely more difficulty, and against a heavier dead weight of
opposition, if more natives had been present in Council.”10
Dufferin’s views were often echoed by later officials and official writers.
What is more surprising, there has been a tendency in recent times to
uncritically accept them.11 I will try to examine the validity of Dufferin’s
assertions in a two-fold manner: firstly in the light of contemporaneous
nationalist political activities and attitudes; and secondly in the light of
Dufferin’s own attitudes and policies. I have attempted the former at length
in my study The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India. The
latter field is yet unexplored; the present attempt may be taken as a paltry
introductory effort in the direction.
 1

The strictures passed by Dufferin on the Indian nationalist leadership

regarding its stand on agrarian legislation have hardly any basis in reality.
We are not here concerned with the general attitude of the nationalists
towards landlord-tenant. question, though it may be pointed out that the
advanced sections of the national leadership strongly protested against the
rack-renting, evictions, and the general oppression of the tenant by the
zamindars.12
Dufferin generally refers to the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. This piece of
legislation was first mooted in 1879 and a Bill on the subject was introduced
in 1883. The Bill was strongly criticised by the zamindars. It was subjected to
drastic revision by a Select Committee before being enacted in 1885. Let us
see what happened to the important pro-tenant provisions of the original
Bill. (1) According to the Bill the right of occupancy was to be conferred on
all settled ryots who had held land in the same village or estate; the Act
limited this to land held in the same village. (2) The Bill made the right of
occupancy heritable and freely transferable; the Act left the right to transfer
to be regulated by local custom. (3) In regard to enhancement, the Bill
provided that the rent paid by an occupancy ryot should not exceed l/5th of
the gross produce and that no enhancement could at once double the rent or
take place except at the interval of 10 years. The rent of a non-occupancy
ryot was not to exceed 5/16th of the gross produce. The Act removed all
such restrictions on enhancement of rent. (4) The Bill laid down that in case
of ejectment the non-occupancy ryot was to receive compensation. The Act
deleted this provision.13 Thus the final Act of 1885 was very much an
emasculated version of the original Bill. Moreover it failed to give any
protection to the under-tenant of the occupancy ryot.
Now let us see what attitude was adopted by the Nationalists and Dufferin
towards these provisions. Contrary to Dufferin repeated assertions, most of
the nationalists in Bengal and outside supported the pro-tenant features of
the different measures the Government put forward from 1880 to 1884. I
have brought this out at length in my work cited above.14 Here I will merely
summarise. The Indian Association, Surendranath Banerjea, and a large
majority of the nationalist papers of Bengal actively championed the tenants’
cause, often criticised the Government for not going far enough in
protecting the tenants, demanded further strengthening of tenants’ rights
and condemned the zamindars’ agitation against the official efforts too
protect the tenant. For example, many of them felt that the restrictions on
the landlord’s right to enhance rent were not adequate and that the
maximum limit of enhancement had been fixed to high. Some went to the
extent of demanding a permanent settlement of rent between the zamindar
and the ryot. Many of the nationalists demanded steps for the protection of
the under-tenants of the occupancy ryots and for checking the spread of
sub-infeudation. One such step suggested by them was that the right of
occupancy should be conferred on the actual cultivator of the soil and not
on the nominal owner of the right of occupancy.
As the pro-tenant features of the Bill of 1883 were gradually whittled
down by the Select Committee and the Government of India, most of the
nationalists of Bengal strongly censured the Government for making the
changes.
The advanced party among the Bengal nationalists also organized at this
time a mass campaign in favour of the ryots. The Indian Association and
others organized during 1880, 1881 and 1885 a large number of mass
meetings of the ryots, some of them attended by 10 to 20 thousand ryots.
These meetings were addressed by Surendranath Banerjea, Anand Mohan
Bose, Dwarkanath Ganguli and others.
Many prominent nationalist leaders and newspapers from other parts of
the country—the Mahratta, the Indian Spectator, the Native Opinion, the
Tribube, and the Kesari, to name some—also supported the Bill of 1883.
Justice Ranade did not support the Bill as he believed that it would not solve
the agrarian problem of Bengal—his opposition was not at all due to pro-
zamindar leanings. He fully recognized the need to extend legislative
protection to the weaker tenant against oppression by the stronger zamindar
and justified the Government’s right to undertake such legislation.
As opposed to such widespread support for the Bill of 1883 in the ranks of
the nationalists, only a small number of unimportant nationalist newspapers
supported the zamindars’ cause; and only one prominent nationalist paper,
the Amrita Bazar Patrika, supported the demands of the intermediate
tenants.
We thus discover that the evidence on the nationalist attitude towards
Bengal tenancy legislation does not at all justify Dufferin’s assertions; rather,
it points to an opposite conclusion.
On the other hand, when we examine Dufferin’s attitude towards the Bill
of 1883, we suddenly discover that all that he said later about the nationalist
approach was perhaps true of his own actions. It was Dufferin who
protected the interests of the Bengal zamindars and actively opposed the
mild protenant features of the Bill which had been framed before his arrival
in India. From the beginning he developed an acute antipathy to the Bill and
its framers. In his letter, dated 23 December 1884, to the Secretary of State he
condemned the Bill of 1883 as “unnecessarily violent and one-sided” and,
speaking as an Irish landlord, put the blame squarely on “two Irishmen, who
seem to have manipulated the Lieutenant- Governor unreservedly—a Mr.
McDonnell and a Mr O’Kinealy, the one Secretary to the Government of
Bengal, and the other a Judge; both of them clever men, and both of them
animated by the bitter anti-landlord spirit with which we are familiar.” “My
own Council,” he added, “are disposed to be much more moderate, and are
by no means moved by the acrid spirit which inspires Rivers Thompson’s
advisers.”15 In fact, Dufferin was quite convinced that it was hardly
necessary to “legislate for Bengal at once.” “In Eastern Bengal,” he wrote to
the Secretary of State on 23 December 1884, “the tenants seem to be
completely masters of the situation, and even the most violent anti-zamindar
controversialists admit that in Bengal generally the tenants are by no means
rack-rented.”16 A week later he expressed the opinion that he would have
liked to postpone a decision in the matter.17 Since that was found
inexpedient, he began to put pressure on the Bengal Government to modify
those provisions of the Bill “as seemed to me to be unreasonably severe on
the land-owners.”18
Dufferin opposed, and pressed for the amendment of, nearly every
important pro-tenant provision of the Bill of 1885. Thus (1) he opposed the
extension of the right of occupancy to settled ryots who had held land in the
same estate on the ground that this provision “would unduly extend the
operation of the occupation clauses of the Act.”19 (2) He objected to the
right of occupancy being made transferable.20 (3) Regarding enhancement
of rent, Dufferin first criticised those who believed that l/5th of the gross
produce as maximum limit of rent was too high.21 Later he denounced this
limit as “completely discredited”22 Regarding the new provision proposed in
this respect by the Government of Bengal, viz., that the enhancement could
not exceed two annas in the rupee in 15 years, Dufferin wrote: “I would bow
to their decision, though I did not myself like the principle, which regulated
the enhancement, nor was satisfied that either the money or the terms were
just to the zamindars.”23 (4) As regards the payment of compensation to
non-occupancy ryots in case of ejectment, Dufferin informed the Secretary
of State on 6 January 1885: “We have kept compensation for disturbance out
of the Bill in accordance with your recommendation.”24 (5) He also
criticised the Bill for proposing to break all existing contracts by which the
accrual qf the occupancy right had been barred. In view of the fact that the
occupancy ryots were “in many ways antagonistic to the interests of the
landlords.” he wrote, “the zamindars who introduced these clauses into their
leases appear to me to have taken a very justifiable and prudent
precaution...”.25 In addition, there were, according to Dufferin, many other
aspects of the Bill which “seem to me to bear with undue harshness on the
landlord.” But, promised the Viceroy, “there will be no difficulty in
alleviating their severity when the Government of India comes officially to
deal with the measure.”26
It is to be noted that at no time did Dufferin press for a single pro-tenant
change in the Bill, which was by no means a model one. In fact, Dufferin
himself informed the Secretary of State on 17 March 1885 that “the
alterations made in the Bill since it was last published in
Vernacular...consisted almost entirely of concessions to the zamindars..”27
Nor did Dufferin fail to take credit for these changes. On 16 February 1885,
he informed Queen Victoria:

Eventually the Bill fell into the hands of the Government of Bengal, in
other words, of a weak Lt. Governor, who was manipulated by three or
four violent Irishmen. As a consequence the Bill assumed a very
unsatisfactory character, and if passed in its original state, would have
 done great wrong to the zamindars. On his arrival, Lord Dufferin
employed himself in excising from the draft its most objectionable
features, and it may now be considered a sufficiently moderate
measure.28
To his colleague, James Fergusson, the Governor of Bombay, he wrote, on 23
March 1885, even more frankly:

A good many (zamindars) have told me that it is not the present Bill
that they mind, but the fear of what the Bengal Government may do
hereafter, but I intend to keep a very strict watch on the Bengal
Government, as long as Rivers Thompson represents it... It was very
lucky for the zamindars that I took up the Bill for otherwise, they would
have had a very hard measure 29
One other curious aspect of Dufferin’s accusation that the Indian national
leadership was anti-peasant and pro-zamindar might be examined. Almost
in the same breath in which this accusation is made, Dufferin also declares
that the British regime was a friend of the zamindars and the aristocracy and
should identify itself with them, that the zamindars and the aristocracy were
the friends of the British regime, that the ‘Babus’ were driving out the
zamindars and the aristocracy, and that the zamindars and the aristocracy
were opposed to the National Congress.30 All of a sudden we seem to be
floating in the sociological world of Alice in the Wonderland.

Dufferin also misrepresented the nationalist stand on the income tax and
the salt tax. The nationalist did not by and large oppose the imposition of
the income tax; on the contrary a vast majority of them actively supported
it.31 In fact, even before the imposition of the income tax in 1886, many of
the nationalists were agitating for the extension of the existing licence tax to
the salaried officials, European as well as Indian, and to the professional
men, in other words precisely to the successful ones among “the educated
babus”.32 Similarly they supported John Strachey’s effort in 1880 to extend
the licence tax to salaried and professional incomes.33 Two of the leading
nationalist newspapers of the day. the Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindu,
actively agitated for the income tax.34 At the very first session of the Indian
National Congress a resolution was passed urging the Government to
extend “the licence tax to those classes of the community, official and non-
official, at present exempted from it.”35 The mover and the supporters of this
resolution went further and asked for the imposition of an income tax.36
When the income tax was finally imposed in 1886 it was supported by most
of the powerful organs of nationalist opinion.37 Some leaders did of course
oppose it, but a majority of these did so not on the ground of the nature of
the tax but because (a) they were opposed to any increase in taxation as
such, since they believed that money so raised would be misused in military
adventures or administrative extravagance, and (b) they felt that cotton
duties which had been removed recently would provide a better source of
revenue. But even these critics of the income tax supported its extension to
the salaried and professional groups.38 The income tax gained greater
popularity after 1886. No important nationalist leader asked for its repeal or
even criticised the economic reasoning behind it. This was brought out
dramatically at the 1887 session of the National Congress. A delegate, V.R.
Chakravarti Aiyangar, moved an amendment to Resolution VI asking for
the abolition of the income tax. Immediately the delegates set upon him
with cries of “No, No, withdraw,” “It is the only tax that reaches the rich,”
“We don’t want to relieve ourselves of taxation,” “We won’t have it,” “Sit
down,” and “Shut up.” Chakravarti Aiyangar was compelled to withdraw his
amendment.39
Dufferin tried to make capital out of the fact that the Indian National
Congress as well as other nationalist spokesmen objected to the low limit of
exemption under the Income Tax Act of 1886. They wanted it raised from
Rs. 500 a year to Rs. 1000. But this demand, made on the ground that the tax
fell on petty incomes and led to the harrassment of the poor by the officials,
does not obviously amount to favouring the rich or “the middle classes”.40 It
only reveals the nationalists’ desire to protect the interests of the petty
bourgeoisie, i.e., petty shop-keepers, artisans, and the clerical employees.
 So far as the salt tax is concerned, the nationalists were opposed to it in an
overwhelming majority. Up to 1882 they pressed for its reduction. Between
1882 any 1886 they asked for further reduction in it and warned against any
attempt to raise it. When it was finally raised in 1888, the leading nationalist
papers loudly protested against the step. They were soon joined in this
protest by the Indian National Congress.
In fact, the attitude adopted by the vast majority of the nationalists
towards the income tax and the salt tax was the very opposite of the one
adopted by the British officials and businessmen, the supposed guardians of
the Indian masses, and the Indian zamindars, aristocracy, and the upper
classes in general, the supposed national leaders of the people. As has been
pointed out earlier, the field of British economic and administrative policy
and the pressures which led to its evolution is almost totally unexplored. But
a few interesting points may be noted in this respect.
In 1879–80, John Strachey had proposed extension of the licence tax to
the professional and salaried persons. As brought out above, the proposal
had won the enthusiastic support of a majority of nationalist commentators.
It was however withdrawn by the Finance Member himself as a result of
opposition from the Englishmen in India.41
When financial exigency compelled the Government of India to think in
terms of imposing an income tax in 1885, Dufferin informed the Secretary
of State, Randolph Churchill, that he regarded the rate of 31/8th per cent as
excessive.42 And this after he had himself informed the Secretary of State
only a week earlier that when income tax was imposed upon Europeans in
India “it will be the sole exaction demanded from the classes affected.”43 The
Secretary of State fully endorsed this opinion: “...a 31/8th per cent income
tax would surely have raised a great outcry from classes who can command
powerful support at home.”44 In a letter to Northbrook, dated 7 September
1885, Dufferin claimed credit for having persuaded his colleagues in the
Council “after a battle royal” to “agree to a far more moderate rate...”45
Dufferin also opposed the extension of income tax to the Bengal Zamindars
with the purpose of appeasing them.46 On the other hand, quite a few of the
nationalists criticised this exemption.47 When the Income Tax Bill was
brought forth in January 1886, Dufferin gladly informed Northbrook that
there had been no opposition to it except from the members of the Civil
Service.48
Interestingly enough, Dufferin himself ‘discovered’ Indian nationalist
opposition to the income tax rather late. At the time of its imposition in
1886, he freely acknowledged Indian support to the measure. In a letter,
dated 10 January 1886, he informed Northbrook that the Indian press had
supported the Income Tax Bill.49 In another letter to Northbrook, dated 10
October 1886, he said: “I am bound to admit, however, that the native
Members behaved very well in regard to the imposition of the income-
tax.”50 And in his speech in the Legislative Council on the Income Tax Bill,
Dufferin cited Resolution VI of the first session of the Indian National
Congress as an endorsement of the Bill by the advanced section of the
Indian public opinion.51
As regards the salt tax, we have already seen that Dufferin’s statement that
the Indian nationalists or the educated Indians supported the salt tax has
hardly any basis in reality. But that apart, one can legitimately question the
legitimacy of a ruler branding a group as anti-people just because it
supported a measure of taxation which he himself had originally imposed!
In fact, the tendency on the part of the educated Indians to oppose “every
class of expenditure which is likely to increase taxation” was held up by
Dufferin as one of the proofs of their unfitness to be represented on the
Legislative Councils.52 Thus the educated Indians were offered the Hobson’s
choice: if they supported the salt tax they were anti-people; if they opposed
it, they were irresponsible and lacking in ‘governmental faculty.’
A brief history of the official approach towards the salt tax may not be out
of place here. From the very beginning British- Indian financial
administrators looked upon the salt tax as the great financial reserve of the
Indian fiscal system.53 The guiding lines of the official policy were succinctly
stated by the Duke of Argyll in a despatch, dated 21 January 1869, from
which the following has been extracted:

On all grounds of general principles, salt is a perfectly legitimate

subject of taxation. It is impossible, in any country, to reach the masses
of the population by direct taxes. If they are to contribute at all to the
 expenditure of the State, it must be through taxes levied upon some
articles of universal consumption. If such taxes are fairly adjusted, a
large revenue can be thus raised, not only with less consciousness on
the part of the people, but with less real hardship upon them than in
any other way whatever. There is no other article in India answering
this description upon which any tax is levied...I am of opinion,
therefore, that the salt tax in India must continue to be regarded as a
legitimate and important branch of the public revenue...it is one of the
great advantages of indirect taxation that it is so mixed up with the
other elements of price that it is paid without observation of the
consumers.54
This opinion was forcefully reiterated by Lytton in his Budget speech of 9
February 1878. Lytton approvingly quoted William Muir who had, while
comparing the disadvantages of any attempt to impose direct taxes on the
rich with the advantage of the collection of the salt tax from both the rich
and the poor, said: “In the one case we stir up feelings in every class
throughout the country; in the other case we peaceably realize what we
require without affecting the contentment and tranquility of any class.”55
Even E. Baring had declared the salt tax to be a financial reserve while
reducing it in 1882 by 8 annas a maund.56 Dufferin himself told the
Secretary of State on 24 January 1888 that the increase in the salt tax would
not mean “any perceptible hardship” to the masses, “for, though we shall get
a crore and a half the money will be contributed by so many millions of
persons that no single individual will be sensible to the inconvenience.”57
Nor did Dufferin forget to pat himself on the back for having secured the
unanimous support of the Indian and other “independent” members of the
Council for the enhancement of the salt tax. Thus he wrote to the Secretary
of State on 6 February 1888: “I flatter myself it is not every Viceroy who
could have put on an Income Tax, and after two years again increased the
taxation of the country to the amount of a million and a half with so small
fuss being made about it” 58
It may also be pointed out in this context that Dufferin’s Government
could very well have raised the income tax in place of increasing the salt
duty. In fact this is what many of the Indian nationalists wanted.59 Some of
them expressed themselves with vigour on this point. For example, the
Mahratta, of 22 January 1888 wrote: “There was the income tax; it could
have been increased. But no! The Government would not do it, because the
Anglo-Indian community would have raised a howl against it. The poor
Hindu does not grumble and may therefore be taxed to any extent.” The
Kesari of 24 January 1888 wrote: “If the income tax be increased its burden
will mostly fall upon the high European officers and traders, and the rates of
exchange being already high, they will And it very crushing and will rise in
rebellion...Will a wise man like Lord Dufferin ever venture to have his fair
reputation sullied by rousing such opposition?”60 Nor is it that the choice
was not discussed and debated by the officials in India and London. We find
Dufferin thanking A. Lyall, member of the India Council, for supporting
increase in the salt duty in preference to raise in the income tax.61

One evidence that Dufferin offered to prove his charges against the
nationalist leadership was the voting behaviour of the Indian members of
the Imperial Legislative Council on the Bengal Rent Bill and salt tax.62 But
here very clearly a sleight of hand is involved. The attention of the audience
or the reader is directed towards the word ‘native member’ so that it may not
turn to the word ‘nominated’. But therein precisely lies the truth of the
matter. At the time of the enactment of the Bengal Tenancy Act, Kristodas
Paul, Peary Mohan Mukerjea, Maharaja of Darbhanga, and Syed Amir Ali
were all the nominees of the Government of India. In fact, the first three
were deliberately nominated to represent the interests of the zamindars!
Similarly, Peary Mohan Mukerjea and Dinshaw Petit, who voted in favour
of the official measure to enhance the salt tax, were officially nominated to
represent the ‘responsible classes’. In fact, at this time Dufferin went out of
his way to praise Peary Mohan Mukeijea. “I am glad to say,” he wrote to the
Secretary of State on 30 January 1888, “that Peary Mohan Mukerjea, who is a
very considerable leader of Native public opinion, pronounced himself
strongly in favour of the enhancement of the Salt Tax. This will have a good
effect and will probably give a tone to the newspapers.”63 Many of the
nationalists, on the other hand, condemned Peary Mohan Mukerjea and
Dinshaw Petit for supporting the enhancement of the salt tax. They held up
their behaviour as another proof of the nationalist assertion that the
Legislative Councils were defective and should be reformed through the
introduction of the popular element.64

But if their anti-people attitude was not the actual motive for the official cold
shouldering of the nationalists, for denial of their demand for a larger
popular element in the legislative councils, and for the adoption of a hostile
attitude towards them, what were the real motives behind official attitude at
least insofar as Dufferin was concerned? This is perhaps not the place to
examine the causation of Dufferin’s attitude towards the rising nationalist
movement. But a few tentative suggestions might be offered.
Firstly, Dufferin clearly grasped that the growth of nationalism was
inimical to the basic imperial interests of the ruling power in India. Thus,
writing to the Secretary of State on 26 April 1886, he expressed the
apprehension that the introduction of a larger Indian element in the
legislative councils might “prove an embarrassment rather than an
assistance.” “Upon all questions affecting Imperial interests they would
instinctively oppose us,” he asserted.65 Similarly, in a letter to Northbrook,
dated 16 October 1886, he said: “...but if we take native opinion as it now
exists, we should find it hostile to the annexation of Burmah, to the increase
of the army, to the railways and fortifications on our North-West frontier, to
our subsidies to the Ameer, and indeed to every class of expenditure which
is likely to increase taxation without bringing in an obvious and immediate
return.”66 To the acclaimed mission of civilization Dufferin also added the
care of foreign capital. British rule must continue unadulterated lest the
interests of the large number of British investors in India are put in jeopardy.
Perhaps a long quotation from Dufferin’s Minute of 6 November 1888 won’t
be out of order:
 To these obligations must also be added the duty of watching over the
enormous commercial interests of the mother country, represented by a
guaranteed capital of over two hundred and twenty millions of pounds
sterling which, to the great benefit of India, has been either lent to the State
or sunk in Indian railways and similar enterprise; for, however freely we may
admit that India should be primarily governed in the interests of the Indian
people, it would be criminal to ignore the responsibility of the Government
towards those who have sunk large sums of money in the development of
Indian resources on the faith of official guarantees, or who have invested
their capital in the Indian funds at the invitation of the Imperial Indian
authorities. The same considerations apply in almost equal force to that
further vast amount of capital which is employed by private British
enterprise in manufactures, in tea-planting, and in the indigo, jute, and
similar industries, on the assumption that English Rule and English Justice
will remain dominant in India.67
Furthermore, Dufferin believed that the very despotic character of British
rule in India prevented its giving constitutional concessions to the National
Congress and ‘educated classes’. “Now, though all my instincts are essentially
liberal,” he observed in a letter to the Secretary of State in 1988, “it is quite
evident that the Government of India cannot be conducted on constitutional
principles. It is and must be a benevolent despotism for many a long years to
come.” Organizations like the National Congress which “occupied
themselves with political questions” could not be countenanced by the
British Indian administration for “their existence must always be out of
harmony with so autocratic an administration as ours.”68 Even earlier still,
Dufferin had suggested that, whatever the nationalist leaders might say
publicly and in their programmes, they were in fact Britain’s rivals for
political power.69
According to Dufferin, the real threat from the nationalists to British rule
came from their tendency and capacity to organize a mass agitational
movement. While he was ostensibly opposing the enlargement of the Councils
on the ground of the “babus” not properly representing the masses and was
consequently sneering at the ineffective minority, what really chilled his heart
was the spectre that they might any moment go to the masses and start
organizing and leading them. On 21 March 1886, he informed the Secretary
of State that a new development was taking place in nationalist politics,
“namely, the organization of mass meetings of the ryots in various districts
of Bengal.” This development, he warned, was ominous: “I cannot help
asking myself how long an autocratic Government like that of India...will be
able to stand the strain implied by the importation en bloc from England, or
rather Ireland, of the perfected machinery of modem democratic
agitation.”70 Further, “Day after day, hundreds of sharp-witted babus pour
forth their indignation against their English oppressors in very pungent and
effective diatribes.” Thus the “babus” were an evil, it would seem, not
because they opposed the interests of the people but because they agitated
against the “English oppressors”, for “the time must come when their
increasing and uncontradicted denunciation of British administration will
not fail to engender a widespread feeling of hostility to our rule.”71 Dufferin
pursued the theme in another letter to the Secretary of State, dated 26 April
1886. The organized system of popular agitation was assuming, he
complained, “more distinct and definite proportion”. Surendranth Banerjea
and others were possessed by “the instinctive desire...to ape the tactics and
organization of the Irish Revolutionists.” They were attempting to organize
“monster meetings” of the ryots. One of these meetings was attended by
10,000 persons “who listened all day long with most earnest attention to a
number of speeches delivered by Mr. Banerjea and his friends.” The danger,
warned Dufferin, was even more serious than this. The Bengali babu was
perhaps not so very dangerous on his home ground, but he was beginning to
extend his activities to Central and Northern India. Dufferin repeated at this
stage his recurring warning that “India is not a country in which the
machinery of European democratic agitation can be applied with impunity.”
He suggested to the Home authorities “to give and with a good grace
whatever it may be possible or desirable to accord.” At the same time he
advised them “to forbid mass meetings and incendiary speechifying.. ”72
Interesting light on the official attitude towards the nationalist movement
is shed by a letter, dated 10 June 1888, from A. Colvin, Lieutenant-Governor
of N.W.P. and Oudh, to the Viceroy which the latter sent to the Secretary of
State as an enclosure to his letter, dated 29 June 1888.73 Colvin suggested
that a clear distinction should be drawn between what the leaders of the
Congress said about their aims in their public addresses and what these aims
were understood to be by the masses. He would oppose the Congress if
enquiries revealed that the masses regarded the Congress movement “as
hostile to English authority in India,” that Congress missionaries preached
“contempt of local authorities, holding them up as oppressive and
unsympathetic,” and that as a result of the spread of discontent and
disaffection “the masses became a source of increased anxiety to Indian
authorities.” Colvin was at pains to drive home this point. The Congress as a
3-day wonder, as it was later called, was not to be frowned upon. “It is not,
you will understand...the periodical meetings of the Congress which gives
me concern.” Nor were the publicly expressed demands of the Congress a
cause of worry.
Danger lay in the activities of “those who are admittedly engaged in daily
educating the people in their grievances and their wrongs, with a view to
securing their support, and who, to that end, are holding up to their
contempt all local authorities as the source and origin and instruments of
the abuses which they try to explain to them...”. Colvin would not therefore
interfere with the annual meetings of the Congress but would “forbid the
further circulation among the people of pamphlets or publications” which
produced discontent.
The same letter to the Secretary of State contained as another enclosure a
circular by the Government of N.W.P. and Oudh to selected officers asking
them to answer several queries regarding the Congress movement in the
province. Two of the questions were: (a) “Is the movement used as a centre
in which discontent and disaffection are actively engendered or mainly as a
machinery for the promotion of academic debate?” and (b) “Is attention
attracted to it, mainly among the upper classes, whether in towns or villages,
or is it occupying also the minds of the middle and lower classes, urban or
agricultural?”
Lastly, Dufferin was inclined to accommodate the very moderate elements
among the nationalists, in other words, precisely those who rigidly confined
their demands within a narrow constitutional and socio-economic
framework, especially as they could help strengthen the weakened internal
political base of British rule in India.74 But he was afraid that these moderate
elements were not a viable political force. They would not be able to stand
straight in the face of the ‘extremist’ onslaught and might therefore merely
serve as an opening wedge for the nationalists.75 In fact, the chief motive
behind Dufferin’s St. Andrews Day Speech of 30 November 1888 was to
enable these moderate men to stand up to the extremist pressure. Writing to
the Secretary of State on 3 December 1888, Dufferin explained that between
the “‘bastard’ disloyalty” of the Bengali extremists and the zamindars,
talukdars and ‘responsible’ persons, stood the third group of “a considerable
mass of irresolute opinion.” By strongly condemning “such of the Congress
demands and proceedings as are extravagant and reprehensible,” he hoped
to be able to influence this third force.76

It can therefore be said in conclusion that Dufferin’s assertions regarding the

character of the early Indian national leadership are not justified when
examined either in the light of early nationalist political activities and
attitudes or in the context of his own attitudes and policies. His views in the
matter seem to have been formed more out of prejudice and exigencies of an
imperialistic administration which was faced with a growing challenge to its
oft proclaimed paternalism and to the myth of its beneficent character. In
fact, Dufferin had enough public facts at hand to have known better than to
assert what he did.

NOTES

Read at the 1964 Ranchi Session of the Indian History Congress and
published in Enquiry, No. 10. 1965, N.S. Vol. II, No. 1.
1 Dufferin to Northbrook, 16 October 1886, Dufferin Papers (hereafter referred to as D.P.); Dufferin’s

Minute, enclosure to Home (Public) Despatch to Secretary of State. No. 67, dated 6 November 1888
(hereafter referred to as Dufferin’s Minute of 6 November 1888); Dufferin, Speeches, 1884–88.
2 Dufferin’s Minute of 6 November 1888.
3 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 20 March 1887, D.P. The Secretary of State, Lord Cross, put the point

even more crudely in his letter to Dufferin, dated 8 Sept 1886: “But there are two distinct classes in
India—first the masses, and next the ‘educated natives’.” D.P.
4 Dufferin’s Minute of 6 Nov. 1888.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 26 April 1886, D.P.; Dufferin to Northbrook, 16 Oct. 1886, D.P. Also

see Secretary of State, Dufferin, 8 Sept 1886, D.P., and Secretary of State to Dufferin, 14 April 1887,
D.P.
9 Dufferin’s Minute of 6 Nov. 1888.

10 16 Oct. 1886, D.P. Also Dufferin to Secretary of State, 26 April 1886, D.P.

11 See, for example, B.B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes, London, 1961, pp. 346–50.

12 See my The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, New Delhi, 1965.

13 C.E. Buckland, Bengal Under the Lieutenant-Governors, Calcutta, 1901, Vol. II, pp. 811–12.

14 Also see my article Two Notes on the Agrarian Policy of Indian Nationalists, 1880–1905’, The

Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. I, No. 4.

15 D.P. The theme of the Irish ‘Villain’ occurs again and again in Dufferin’s correspondence. In his

letter to the Secretary of State, dated 30 Nov. 1885, he refers to pro-tenant Bengal officials as “Wild
Irishmen”. Ibid.; also see his letter to James Fergusson, 23 March 1885, D.P.; and letter to Queen
Victoria, 16 Feb. 1885, D.P.
16 D.P.

17 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 30 Dec. 1884, D.P.

18 Ibid.

19 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 23 Dec. 1884, D.P. Also see his letter to Secretary of State, 6 Jan.

1885, D.P.
20 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 23 Dec. 1884, D.P. Also see his letter to Secretary of State, 6 Jan.

1885, D.P. It is to be noted that earlier the Government has claimed this provision to be a big step
forward.
21 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 6 Jan. 1885, D.P.

22 Dufferin to S.C. Bayley, 29 Jan. 1885, D.P.

23 Ibid. Earlier Bayley had informed Dufferin on 27 Jan. 1885: “Our Bill narrows the grounds of

enhancement, but gives much greater facilities for applying them.” D.P.
24 D.P.

25 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 23 Dec. 1884, D.P.

26 Ibid.

27 D.P. Dufferin gives in this letter a long list of the pro-zamindar changes in the Bill. The Secretary of

State, in turn, confirmed this in his Legislative Despatch No. 24, dated 23 June 1885.
28 D.P.

29 (Emphasis added). D.P.

30 See, for example, Dufferin to Northbrook, 30 July 1885, D.P.; Dufferin to Secretary of State, 7 Aug.

1885, D.P.; Dufferin td Secretary of State, 1 Feb. 1887, D.P.; Dufferin to Secretary of State, 17 Sept.
1888, D.P. ; Dufferin's Minute of; Dufferin to Secretary of State 3 Dec. 1888, D.P. The Secretary of State
too warned the Viceroy against “some danger of forfeiting the goodwill and confidence of all the
respectable classes, as it is with such people that I would identify the policy of Her Majesty’s
Government”. 11 Oct. 1888, D.P.
31 See my The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 Jan. 1878, 2 Jan. 1980, 5 March 1880, 29 Dec. 1881; Hindu, 19 Dec. 1884.

Also Bengalee, 17 January 1880, Indu Prakash, 3 March 1884; Swadesamitran, 11 Dec. 1884; and many
other nationalist papers.
35 Resolution VI.
36 Report of the Indian National Congress for 1885, pp. 66–72.

37 See The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India.

38 Ibid.

39 Report of the Indian National Congress for 1887, p. 135.

40 See, for details, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India. The correctness of the

nationalist demand in this respect was fully acknowledged later by the authorities. Thus Edward Law,
the Finance Member, observed in 1903: “As regards the raising of the limit of exemption of the income
tax, we believe that the tax on incomes under a thousand rupees is, in the main, paid by petty traders,
by clerks in commercial and Government offices, and by pensioners, who, small as is the present
impost, feel it to be a severe blow...Moreover, we have reason to fear that it is in the lower categories of
incomes that hardship is perhaps felt in the matter of inquisitorial proceeding on the part of assessors,
who, possibly, sometimes fix assessments at unjustifiably high rates...” Financial Statement, 1903–04,
para 89.
41 P. Baneijea, A History of Indian Taxation, Cal., 1930, p. 70 and Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 March 1880.

42 Letter, dated 14 Aug. 1885, D.P.

43 Letter, dated 7 Aug. 1885, D.P.

44 Letter to Dufferin, dated 8 Sept. 1885, D.P.

45 D.P. In contrast, the Hindu of 7, 9, and 12 January 1886 criticised the lack of progression in the

Income Tax Act of 1886. It wanted graduated taxation. It also asserted that a rate of 2½ per cent was
too low for those earning high incomes (Voice of India, Jan. 1886). Also Bangabasi, 9 Jan. (Report
Native Press Bengal, 16 Jan. 1886).
46 Dufferin to Secretary of State, 22 Dec. 1885, D.P.

47 Hindu, 7, 9, and 12 Jan. 1886 (Voice of India, Jan. 1886); Indian Nation, 25 Feb. 1886 (Voice of India,

Feb. 1886); Gujarat Mitra, 10 Jan. 1886 (Report Native Press Bombay, 16 Jan. 1886); G.V. Joshi,
Writings and Speeches, Poona, 1912, pp. 141– 42, 161, 165, 190. Also Bangalee, 17 January 1880.
48 Letter, dated 3 Feb. 1886, D.P. Also see letter from J.A. Godley, Permanent Under-Secretary of State

for India, to D. Mackenzie Wallace, Private Secretary to the Viceroy, dated 9 Oct. 1885, D.P.
49 D.P.
50 Ibid.

51 Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor-General of India, 1886, Vol. XXV, p. 27.

52 Letter to Northbrook, dated 16 Oct. 1886, D.P.

53 P. Banerjea, op.cit., pp. 276–97.

54 Quoted in John Strachey and Richard Strachey, The Finances and Public Works of India from 1869–

1881, London, 1882, pp. 222–23.

55 Lytton, quoted in Lady B. Balfour, The History of Lord Lytton's Indian Administration, 1876–83,

para 192.
56 Financial Statement of 1882–83, para 192.

57 D.P. In contrast, see the theoretical exposition of the nationalist position by G.V. Joshi in his

brilliant article “The Burmah Deficit and the Enhancement of the Salt Duties” which appeared in the
Journal of the Poona Saruajanik Sabha in April 1888. See his Writings and Speeches, pp. 137–90.
58 D.P.

59 Mahratta, 22 Jan. 1888; Hindu, 25 Jan. 1888; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 26 Jan. 1888; Sanyivani, 28 Jan.

and 4 Feb. (Report Native Press Bengal 4 Feb. and 11 Feb. 1888 respectively); Tribune, 11 Feb. [Voice of
India, March, 1888); Swadesamitran., 28 Jan. and 25 Feb. (Report Native Press Madras, 31 Jan. and 29
Feb. 1888 respectively); almost all the papers of Bombay for the week ending 28 Jan. 1888, Report
Native Press Bombay, 28 Jan. 1888; Joshi, op.cit., pp. 161–66, 190.
60 Report Native Press Bombay, 28 Jan. 1888.

61 Letter, dated 27 Feb. 1888, D.P. Cf. Dufferin to Secretary of State 12 Jan. 1888: “Formerly a Viceroy

could save a considerable sum attached to the appointment...but now during the time that I am in
Calcutta, thanks to the fall in silver and to the income tax, my expenditure exceeds my income by
from £250 to £300 a month, which is very serious and very hard. In fact I am receiving more than
£2,000 a year less than even my immediate predecessor, Lord Ripon.” D.P.
62 See above.

63 D.P. Publicly he was even more profuse in the praise. In the Legislative Council he said: “But I

cannot help expressing my satisfaction at hearing from our hon’ble colleague Raja Peary Mohan
Mukheiji that the recent increase which we have made in the salt-duty has met with his approval.
Representing so fully as he does the views of the intelligent and educated Native community of India,
that expression of opinion on his part is very valuable.” Abstract of the Proceedings of the Legislative
Council of the Governor-General 1886, Vol. XXVII, p. 26.
64 For detailed treatment of this aspect, see The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India.

G.V. Joshi, for example, wrote in the Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha: “...the debate was
discreditable to the Legislative Chamber which, sitting as the guardian of the nation’s sacred interests,
showed no respect for its own independence, and was afraid to speak out against the Executive
Government; that it was more discreditable to the native members, who ought to have known their
duty better; and that, above all, it was most discreditable to the system which permits of such trifling
on the part of an irresponsible Government with the actualities of a hard position. In fact, this debate
supplies to our mind one argument the more in support of the demand of the National Congress of
Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, for the reconstruction of the Legislative Councils on an elective basis.”
Op.cit., p. 144.
65 D.P.

66 Ibid.

67 Emphasis added.

68 Letter, dated 17 Aug. 1888. D.P.

69 “It must always be remembered, however, that though common sense and a certain knowledge of

affairs and of the world may limit the programme of the leaders to what they think they have a chance
of getting the ideal in the minds of the major part of their followers is an India in which the British
Army shall ward off invasion from without and preserve them from tyranny and give them free scope
to administer their democratic affairs untrammelled by the interference of white men, except perhaps
in the person of a Viceroy and a limited number of high officials.” Letter to the Secretary of State,
dated 26 April. 1886, D.P.
70 He had a similar objection to the Indian press: “...how far an absolutely free and uncontrolled Press,

for the most part conducted by extremely clever and perfectly unscrupulous men, is compatible with
our existing regime or any modification of it that is possible.” This was the crux of the matter.
71 D.P.

72 (Emphasis added). Ibid.

73 (Emphasis added). Ibid.

74 “Personally I should feel it both a relief and an assistance if in the settlement of many Indian

administrative questions affecting the interests of Her Majesty’s subjects, I could rely to a larger extent
than at present upon the experience and counsels of Indian coadjutors Amongst the natives I have
met, there are a considerable number who are both able and sensible, and upon whose loyal
cooperation one could undoubtedly rely. The fact of their supporting the Government would
popularise many of its acts which now have the appearance of being driven through the Legislature by
brute force, and if they in turn had a native party behind them, the Government of India would cease
to stand up, as it does now, an isolated rock in the middle of a tempestuous sea.” Dufferin to Secretaiy
of State, 26 April 1886, D.P.
75 “But my fear is that the moderate men have already lost, as always happens in such cases, a great

deed of their original influence, and that they will be eventually overpowered and dominated by the
more violent and extravagant section of their fellow countrymen. Were this to be the case, the
introduction of a larger native element into our Legislative Councils would prove an embarrassment
rather than an assistance.” After having pointed out the danger of Indian members hindering all
legislation which would benefit “the uneducated and unrepresented masses”, Dufferin further
remarked: “Moreover it is very doubtful even if they wished to assist the Government, whether
moderate Native Members would have sufficient backbone to withstand the attacks of the Press, of
which they are horribly afraid.” D.P. Also see Dufferin’s letter to Northbrook, dated 16 October 1886,
D.P.
76 D.P.
 Lenin and the National Liberation
Movements

In spite of the wide impact of Lenin’s thought on the socialist movements in

Europe, North America, and Australia, it is in the colonial and semi-colonial
world of Afro-Asia that it has led to the most revolutionary consequences
since the days of the October Revolution. Moreover, Leninism was the main
form in which Marxist ideas were adopted and absorbed by the people of the
colonial world. Undoubtedly, the writings of Marx and Engels contained
some of the basic ingredients of the Marxist approach to the national and
colonial question;1 and other revolutionaries, for example, Mao Tse-tung,
Ho Chi-minh, Kim Il-sung, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, have enriched it
further. But the ideas of Marx and Engels on the subject were rather patchy
and had been developed in the earlier period of world capitalism. It was
through the writings of Lenin that the broad outline of a theory of
revolution was provided to the people of the colonies and semi-colonies.
Even though the national liberation movements in the colonial countries
had been initiated in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, it was
during World War I that the basis for the growth of powerful nationalist
movements was laid in most of these countries. The colonial people now
looked for new doctrines and ideologies to wage a successful struggle
against imperialism. Lenin applied Marxist ideas to an analysis of the new,
monopoly stage of capitalism—imperialism—and to the peculiar conditions
of nationalist struggles in the colonies. His analysis helped the colonial
people to understand the social forces which could help them overthrow
imperialism. It helped them to link their struggle to the wider world
revolutionary process. Lenin gave the colonial people confidence in their
own cause, the analytical framework needed to understand their situation
and to change it, in his theory of the state and of imperialism the capacity to
see and understand their enemies and to grasp the central role of political
power in society, and in the concept of a revolutionary communist party the
instrument to bring their revolution of fruition.

Lenin, as other Marxists, paid so much attention to the theory of national

liberation struggles because of the high place assigned to social knowledge
in the Marxist view of social change. Marxism holds that just as knowledge
of nature enables us to control and change it, similarly it is possible to study,
understand and change society. Social development has not been and is not
a mere jumble of stray happenings. Like the laws of nature there are laws or
tendencies of social development which when grasped in their inter-
connections can be used to consciously direct this development.2 All their
life Marx and Engels grappled with the laws of human development,
particularly for the epoch of capitalism. Lenin, basing himself on this
approach, struggled to evolve an understanding of the process of revolution
in a backward capitalist country in the era of modem imperialism and later
of the process of world revolution. As a by-product of this effort he also
helped evolve an understanding of the laws of social development in the
colonial and semi-colonial countries.
We may at this stage direct attention to a basic aspect of Lenin’s approach,
which, on the one hand, is exemplified in his theory of colonial revolutions
and, on the other, enabled him to arrive at this theory, making a sharp
departure from the viewpoint of his contemporaries. This aspect is his
emphasis on a basic constituent of Marxist method—the need to study any
event or situation concretely and in its specific historical context. For
Marxists, he repeatedly pointed out, there are no fixed formulae or ‘general
statements’ apart from their historical context.3 And an important aspect of
this historical specificity is the knowledge of a country’s peculiarities and
historical development. “Marxist theory absolutely requires”, he wrote in
1914, “that every social question be examined within definite historical
limits, and — if it refers to a particular country (e.g. the national programme
for a given country) — that due account be taken of the specific features
distinguishing that country from others within the same historical epoch.”4
Lenin applied this approach to a concrete historical study of World War I
just as he had done so earlier for many years in the analysis of the nature and
character of the coming Russian revolution. So far as the approach to the
national and colonial questions is concerned, he specifically urged in his
polemics with Rosa Luxemburg in 1914 that an answer must be sought not
by a priori reasoning but “by making a historical and economic study of
national movements”.5 He underlined this point even more strongly once life
made him assume the leadership of the international socialist movement. He
repeatedly warned the colonial people not to rely on the experience of other
countries, but, while learning from the common struggle of the Russian and
other peoples, to constantly evaluate their own experience and thus find
answers to the peculiar problems of their revolutions.6 In the Preliminary
Draft of the Theses on the National and Colonial Questions presented to the
Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Lenin laid down
that the Communist Party “must base its policy on the national question
too, not on abstract and formal principles, but, firstly on an exact appraisal
of the specific historical situation and primarily, of economic conditions....”7
In his Report to the Congress on the work of the Commission on the
National and Colonial Questions, Lenin was even more explicit: “In this age
of imperialism, it is particularly important for the proletariat and the
Communist International to establish concrete economic facts and to
proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates, in the solution
of all colonial and national questions.”8 Nothing sheds better light on this
aspect of Lenin’s approach than the fact that he, the leader of one of the
greatest achievements in human history, the October Revolution, and of its
successful defence against imperialist intervention, cautioned the people of
the Soviet republics of the Caucasus against being overawed by the tactics
through which this achievement had been made possible. In a letter written
on 14 April 1921, Lenin told the communists of these republics that “the
most important thing” for the successful fulfilment of their task was that
they “be fully alive to the singularity of their position, of the position of their
republics, as distinct from the position and conditions of the R.S.F.S.R.; that
they appreciate the need not to copy our tactics, but thoughtfully to vary
them in adaptation to the differing concrete conditions.” The people of
Russia had “to make the first breach in world capitalism” against heavy odds
and very adverse international circumstances. But the communists of the
Caucasus had now the opportunity of “building the new with greater
caution and more methodically.” In particular they must avoid copying
Russian tactics and should “analyse the reasons for their peculiar features,
the conditions that gave rise to them, and their results.” In the end he
exhorted them to “apply not the letter, but the spirit, the essence, the lessons
of the experience of 1917-21.”9
This aspect of Lenin’s approach, this emphasis on the concrete and the
historical, is crucial to an understanding of Lenin’s ideas on the colonial
revolutions. This explains the continuous evolution of his own ideas on the
subject and particularly the constant shift in his understanding of the role
that colonial revolutions would play in the world revolution against
imperialism as the international situation constantly changed. Even more it
explains why his ideas on the colonial problems remained vague, very
general, and in fact a skeletal structure, never reaching the state of finished
theory. As a theoretician of the colonial revolution Lenin had certain
advantages. His grasp of the character of modem imperialism both in its
economic and political aspects, his capacity to keep in the forefront the
perspective of world revolution, his experience of preparing for and making
both the bourgeois democratic and the socialist revolutions in a country
half- European, half-Asian, his experience of the problems of the oppressed
nationalities of the vast Tsarist Empire, all enabled him to see the problems
of the colonial peoples as no other contemporary European could. But he
was also aware that he was far away from the scene of the colonial
revolutions, nor did he have the time to study their problems in any detail.
He was therefore not willing to ‘legislate’ or ‘decree’ for the colonial peoples
or prepare a blue-print for them to follow. We may say that Lenin opened
the doors of revolution to the peoples of the colonies, but he also taught
them that concrete application of his ideas was the task of the people
actually engaged in revolution. The people of each country had to make
their own revolutions in the particularity of their own situations. The
wisdom of these injunctions has been borne out by the experience of the
Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions. Adherence or non-adherence
to these injunctions goes a long way in explaining the varying fortunes that
the thought of Lenin has met in different countries.
The attention paid by Lenin to the study of concrete situations and his
insistence on the need to analyse and generalise on the basis of the specific
experience was highlighted at the Second Congress of the Communist
International when Lenin first came in contact with Asian revolutionaries.
Before them Lenin was all modesty. Knowing the utter shallowness of their
understanding of Marxism, he treated them and their opinions with respect
for they came from the colonial lands and were therefore, repositories of
direct knowledge concerning them.10 He readily agreed to make some
changes in his own draft. For example, Lenin bent backwards in
accommodating M.N. Roy and his ideas at the Congress, even though in this
case his modesty led him to make a mistake insofar as he did not criticize
these ideas publicly and he let some of them remain as the supplementary
Theses moved by Roy and accepted by the Congress.11

Lenin’s involvement with the colonial question was many- sided and
developed over a long period under the impact of concrete events and
ideological controversies. From the very beginning Lenin demarcated
himself from the contemporary socialists by paying serious attention to
problems of the national liberation movements of the East. He was, of
course, helped in the evolution of his thought on the subject by his
experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905. His ideas on the question
found their best summing up in the Preliminary Draft of the Theses on the
National and Colonial Questions presented to the Second Congress of the
Communist International in 1920.12
 Lenin’s ideas on the national liberation movements may be discussed
under several heads. But several of these are well known and may not be
taken up here at length in spite of their undoubted importance. In fact, it is a
measure of the success of Lenin’s thought that they are now so universally
accepted, at least in words, that people have forgotten that once they were
enveloped in the dust of controversy. Some of these aspects are: Lenin’s
concrete economic and political exposure of colonialism, its class basis and
its reactionary role in the colonies;13 his sympathy for the people of the
colonies and recognition of and support to their demand for independence
and right of self-determination; his active support to the national liberation
struggles of the colonies and his role in solving democratically the problem
of the oppressed nationalities in the Soviet Union. It is well known that he
made the attitude towards the national and colonial question one of the
basic tests a person must pass before he could call himself a socialist. “It is
our right and duty to treat any Social Democrat of an oppressor nation who
fails to conduct such propaganda (in favour of freedom for the oppressed
countries, B.C.) as a scoundrel and an imperialist.”14
Some of Lenin’s socialist contemporaries such as Rosa Luxemburg, who
were not social-imperialist, i.e., socialists in words and imperialists in deeds,
agreed with him in principle in sympathizing with the oppressed people of
the colonies and demanding their liberation, but they tended to ignore the
existing national liberation movements or to take an attitude of indifference
towards them. A major reason for this indifference was their tendency to see
the colonial people as politically passive, incapable historically of playing an
active role in their own liberation or in the emerging world revolution. The
colonial movements were seen as historically insignificant. The very
liberation of colonies they felt was to be in the main the work of successful
socialist revolutions in the advanced, capitalist countries.15
Lenin differed radically from this approach. He opposed the attitude of
indifference towards the colonial peoples’ struggle, described such an
attitude as “reactionary”, and put forward the view that the people of the
colonies were fully capable of liberating themselves (though they should be
given full support by the workers of the imperialist countries), of making
revolutions in their lands, and of playing an active and independent role in
the world revolutionary process. He was, in fact, among the first European
socialists to note that the people of the colonies have already, since the
beginning of the twentieth century, embarked on the path of revolution. In
fact, he regarded this as one of the important, distinguishing features of the
new epoch of imperialism and world revolution.
It has been suggested by some scholars that this recognition of the
revolutionary potentialities of the colonial peoples’ movements was mainly
‘tactical’ It is suggested that Lenin came to it after 1920 when the Soviet
Union needed, for its survival, international allies in the East after the
expectations of revolution in the East had been falsified. A simple chart of
the historical sequence of the published articles embodying Lenin’s views on
the national liberation movements of the East would refute such a
misconception. In fact, from the outset Lenin carried forward in this respect
the traditions that Marx and Engels had set up in their writings on the
Taiping Revolution, the Revolt of 1857, the Irish revolutionary movement,
and other similar movements of the nationally oppressed peoples.16 It is not
necessary to reproduce or discuss here the innumerable comments he made
over the years regarding the active historical role of the peoples of the
colonies. It will suffice to quote from a few of his writings to bring out and
illustrate his views.
In 1908, in the well-known article ‘Inflammable Material in World
Politics’, Lenin hailed the peoples of Asia for awakening from “deep
slumber”, for rising up “against capital and the capitalist colonial system”,
and declared that they were entering the “tormenting school” which will
teach them “how to conduct civil war and how to carry the revolution to
victory.” “The class-conscious European worker already has comrades in
Asia, and their number will grow with every passing day and hour”.17 In
1912, writing on “Democracy and Narodism in China”, Lenin takes note of
“the immense spiritual and revolutionary enthusiasm” of the Chinese people
and “the deep- going revolutionary movement of the hundreds of millions”
and declares that the Chinese people were “capable not only of bemoaning
its age-long slavery and dreaming of liberty and equality, but of fighting the
age-long oppressors of China.”18 In 1913, in the article “The Awakening of
Asia”, Lenin took note of the spread of national liberation movement to
Turkey, Persia, China, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).19 In 1916,
replying to Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Junius’ Pamphlet, quoted above, Lenin
asserted: “National wars waged by colonies and semi-colonies in the
imperialist era are not only probable but inevitable.... The national liberation
movements there are either already very strong, or are growing and
maturing.”20 The nationalist movements of the East reached a new stage of
militancy after the World War I and the Soviet Revolution, and Lenin
confidently-noted this advance. In a message dated 5 May 1922 to the
Pravda on its tenth anniversary, he confidently predicted that the people of
India, China and rest of Asia were “inexorably and with mounting
momentum... approaching their 1905.”21 And Lenin’s vision was crystal clear
when, in his last work written on 2 March 1923, he predicted:

In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by

the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming
majority of the population of the globe. And it is precisely this majority
that, during the past few years, has been drawn into the struggle for
emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there
cannot be the slightest shadow of doubt what the final outcome of the
world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is
fully and absolutely assured.22
Lenin’s grasp of the active role that the colonial people could play, and did
play, in their own history as also in the world revolution not only was crucial
in the conduct of the world revolution, i.e., its tactics, disposition of its
forces, etc., and in giving the European people sorely needed faith in social
revolution in periods when the revolutionary tide in their own lands was at
an ebb, but has played an active, inspiring role in the colonial world. It is one
of the factors which go to explain the popularity of Leninism among the
colonial peoples.

Once the active historical role of the colonial revolutions was recognized,
the question arose as to what kind of revolutions were they to be; or what
was the nature and character of the national liberation movements; or, in
other words, wherein lay their historically progressive character? To start
with, Lenin identified the colonial question with the question of subject
nationalities of Europe. In particular, the ‘theoretical foundations of both
were the same’ for both represented a common stage in the process of
historical development. Both were aspects of democratic struggle, of
bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e., they were concerned with the
establishment of bourgeois economic relations. The economic basis of both
the movements lay in the fact that once the capitalist class comes into being
in an oppressed nationality in Europe or in a colony or semi-colony, its
interests require the creation of a nation state which in turn can be achieved
only through a powerful national movement.23
According to Lenin, the bourgeois national liberation movements had a
very positive role to play in Asia; and this for several reasons. For one, he
wrote in 1912, the bourgeoisie in Asia was still young, vigorous and rising. It
was quite capable of fighting militantly for its own interests and therefore for
democratic demands.24 Secondly, these revolutions had the historic task of
introducing radical agrarian reforms, i.e., “the necessity of destroying
feudalism in all its forms and manifestations.”25 Thirdly, they were arousing
millions of popular masses to intense political activity and struggles.26 In
particular, they developed the boldness and initiative of the peasantry which
was the principal social support of these movements.27 And most of all these
movements fight against the main enemy of the people of the world—
imperialism.28 To see the positive aspects of colonial nationalism was, of
course, not to ignore its class character. Lenin noted in 1913 that “the Asian
revolutions have revealed the same spinelessness and baseness of liberalism
(as in Europe, B.C.)... and the same sharp demarcation between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie of every stripe.” He went on to say that “after
the experience both of Europe and Asia, whoever now speaks of non-class
politics and of non-class socialism simply deserves to be put in a cage and
exhibited alongside of the Australian Kangaroo.”29 Similarly, in the
Preliminary Theses, Lenin emphasized that the policy on the national
question must be based, among other things, “on a clear distinction between
the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers and exploited, and the
general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests
of the ruling class.”30 But we will have more to say on this subject a little
later.
The entire concept of the progressive role of the bourgeois democratic
national liberation movements is linked with Lenin’s theory of development
of revolution by stages. This means that in a backward capitalist or colonial
country the process of revolution is to be clearly demarcated into two stages
—the stage of bourgeois democratic or anti-colonial, anti-feudal revolution
and the stage of socialist revolution.
According to Marxism, humanity passes in the course of its development
through distinct historical eras or periods each of which is characterised by
a distinct mode of production. These periods are clearly demarcated one
from the other; for example, in Europe the eras of feudalism, capitalism, and
socialism are separated from each other by decades and even centuries. The
conceptual as well as the practical difficulty arises when in many backward
capitalist countries, such as Germany in mid-nineteenth century and Russia
in the beginning of the twentieth, the bourgeois democratic, anti-feudal
revolution is delayed and comes on the historical agenda at a time when on a
world-wide plane the question of socialist revolution has taken the centre of
the stage. This applies to the colonial revolutions to an even greater extent
for here not only these two factors exist but a fresh one also insofar as the
main enemy of both revolutions is the same—capitalism in its international,
imperialist form. This necessity to operate on two historical planes in the
same historical period, of organizing national struggle while not abandoning
the social one, has posed many of the complex theoretical problems that
Marxists have had to face during the twentieth century. Lenin made original
contributions to the discussion of all of them. One of his most fruitful
formulations was that of the two stages in the development of revolution in
the countries which were yet to complete their bourgeois democratic
revolution.
Originally, this concept was developed by Lenin in his Two Tactics of
Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution written in the midst of the
Revolution of 1905 to explain the role of the proletariat in the bourgeois
democratic revolution then under way. As applied to the colonial countries,
the theory of stages of revolution means that the two stages of the revolution
—the democratic and the socialist—must be kept distinct. The two stages
are clearly demarcated by their separate historical content; each stage
reflected a qualitative change in the social reality. The characteristic of the
first stage or the bourgeois democratic stage is that only the democratic
tasks which in the colonial situation meant “overthrowing foreign
oppression”31 are accomplished. This character of the bourgeois democratic
stage of the revolution was in the hands of workers and peasants. This stage
just could not be skipped for it was a part of the objective historical reality.32
It was essential and inevitable due to concrete historical conditions and not
because of lack of subjective desire on the part of the revolutionaries. In
other words, even the subjectively most revolutionary leadership must first
complete the historically given task.33 An example of just such actuation in
an Asian setting was taken up by Lenin in 1912 in dealing with Sun Yat-sen
in his article “Democracy and Narodism in China”. Lenin points out that a
large number of progressive Chinese have become subjectively socialist
because they have borrowed their ideas of liberation from Europe and
America where “socialism is on the order of the day”. At the same time “the
objective conditions of China, a backward, agricultural, semi- feudal
country numbering nearly 500 million people, place on the order of the day
only one definite, historically distinctive form of this oppression and
exploitation, namely, feudalism.” Consequently, “out of the subjective
socialist ideas there emerges... a programme for the destruction of feudal
exploitation only.” In other words, in spite of his Narodism and subjective
socialism Sun Yat-sen emerged as an advocate of “a purely capitalist, a
maximum capitalist, agrarian programme.”34 And the objective, historically
given task being that of struggle against feudalism, whenever a party of the
Chinese proletariat comes into being it would also “certainly carefully single
out, defend and develop the revolutionary-democratic core of his political
and agrarian programme.”35 In other words, according to Lenin, the
criterion of revolutionary quality of political work was not that of taking up
the most advanced political tasks in the abstract, in this case socialist tasks
in the stage of democratic revolution, but that of carrying out the tasks of
the historically given stage of revolution, in this case the democratic
revolution, in a thorough-going, radical manner, releasing in the process the
political energies of the submerged millions 36
 Some of Lenin’s critics felt that the importance attached by Lenin to the
bourgeois nationalist phase of the revolutionary movements would
undermine the struggle for socialism, especially as it would make the
workers tail behind bourgeois leadership. They asserted that imperialism
being a world system, it was only by its overthrow by the world socialist
revolution that the oppressed nations could be liberated.37 Lenin replied that
the bourgeois democratic stage had to be kept distinct and brought to
completion precisely for the sake of the struggle for socialism. For one, there
could be no socialist revolution without “an all-round, concrete
revolutionary struggle for democracy,”38 for only such a struggle brings the
masses into the struggle for socialism.39 As pointed out above, Lenin was
fully conscious of the tremendous revolutionary role that national liberation
struggles could play in releasing popular, mass energy. On the other hand,
he believed that “before feudalism, absolutism, and alien oppression were
overthrown the development of the proletarian struggle for socialism was
out of question.”40
An equally important constituent of the theory of revolution by stages
was the concept of uninterrupted revolution. While the different stages of
revolution were not to be confused with each other and were to follow each
other in a historical sequence, each having distinct, non-overlapping
functions to perform, this did not mean that they were to be necessarily
separated from each other by a large span of time. Lenin wrote in 1921: “We
have consummated the bourgeois democratic revolution as nobody had done
before. We are advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly
and unswervingly, knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois-
democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall.”41 Earlier, in 1916, he had
remarked: “The socialist revolution is not a single act, it is not one battle on
one front, but a whole epoch of acute class conflicts, a long series of battles
on all fronts, i.e., on all questions of economics and politics, battles that can
only end in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.”42 Thus the socialist
revolution could follow on the heels of the nationalist revolution depending
on the correlation of political forces on the national as well as the
international planes.43 Seen in this light, the bourgeois democratic or
national revolution may serve as a preliminary step towards, or a prelude—
though an essential one—to, the socialist revolution.44 Looked at another
way, the very thorough completion of the democratic revolution and the
barring of the road to its reversal required its passing into the socialist
revolution. Thus, as Lenin put it in 1921, “the first develop into the second.
The second, in passing, solves the problems of the first. The second
consolidates the work of the first.”45 Even earlier, in 1905, Lenin had placed
this dual step by step but uninterrupted revolutionary programme before
the Russian revolutionaries: “At the head of the whole people, and
particularly of the peasantry—for complete freedom, for a consistent
democratic revolution, for a republic! At the head of all the toilers and
exploited — for socialism!”46
According to Lenin, the extent of the time-gap between the two stages of
the revolution was not theoretically determined; it depended on the practice
of the revolutionary classes and parties47 and on the manner of activity of
the socialist revolutionaries in the first, democratic stage of the revolution.48
The basic questions here were: how thoroughly had the masses been aroused
in the struggle for democratic demands? To what extent had the peasantry
been stirred up? Whether proletarian leadership of the revolutionary
movement had been firmly established or not?49
Lenin’s understanding of the uninterrupted character of the revolution by
stages demarcated him sharply from the Mensheviks who would let the
boureoisie lead the bourgeois democratic revolution and then wait for
capitalism to develop and mature before the task of overthrowing it was
begun. One of the tasks Lenin set before the revolutionaries of the backward
countries was to shorten the transition between the two stages, even more to
enable the first to grow into the second, a task which he successfully fulfilled
in 1917. And, referring to the national liberation movements in the colonies
and semi-colonies, he confidently predicted in 1922 that “in the coming
decisive battles of the world revolution, this movement of the majority of the
world’s population, originally aimed at national liberation, will turn against
capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play a much more
revolutionary role than we have been led to expect.”50 Lenin’s prediction has
been amply fulfilled in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam and
Cuba. And in every case the first stage grew into the second, the revolution
was uninterrupted; but this result was achieved in every case by the most
thorough-going completion of the anti-imperialist bourgeois democratic
tasks and by the all-sided revolutionary activity and organization of the
masses which was brought into being in the course of the struggle to
complete the first stage of the revolution. In this way Lenin’s theory of stages
of development of revolution played a crucial role in enabling the most
backward victims of imperialism to make the most thorough-going
revolutions of our time leading to the establishment of socialism in these
countries ahead of the advanced capitalist countries. The clear demarcation
between the two stages of the revolution in the colonies and semi-colonies
enabled their revolutionaries to discover the principal contradiction
operating in their countries—that between imperialism and the colonial
people. It also enabled them to concentrate their fire against the principal
enemy and thus to build a very wide political front, especially between the
proletariat and the peasantry. On the other hand, the concept of the
uninterrupted character of the democratic revolution in our times enabled
the proletariat and the peasantry to exercise the leadership function in the
democratic revolution, to avoid falling into the Menshevik error of letting
the bourgeoisie seize the reigns of power after completion of the first stage of
revolution, and to boldly march to socialism after quickly completing ‘boldly
and extensively’ the tasks of the democratic stage of the revolution.

One of the basic questions dealt with by Lenin was that of the attitude to be
adopted by the communists (and the international communist movement)
towards the bourgeoisie in the course of the bourgeois democratic national
liberation movements. Tied up with this was the preliminary question of
defining the role of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry in these movements.
Lenin started by pointing to the “clear distinction to be drawn between
the two periods of capitalism.” The first is the period of its ascendancy when
its struggle against feudalism and absolutism leads it to create mass national
movements drawing in “all classes of the population into politics”,
particularly the largest section of the population, the peasantry. The second
is the period of its decline—“the eve of capitalism’s collapse”—when it faces
the proletariat. Typical of this period “is the absence of mass bourgeois-
democratic movements.”51
Clearly the colonies and semi-colonies were currently in the first,
historically progressive phase of capitalism. In these countries, on the one
hand, capitalism had the buoyancy of a class on the rise and, on the other, it
was oppressed by imperialism. Moreover, capitalism comes into conflict
with imperialism in its efforts to create a nation-state in which it could best
flourish-52 In several countries, the bourgeoisie was also in conflict with
local feudal and medieval forces which acted as a barrier to capitalism and
with which imperialism was allied.53 This led the colonial bourgeoisie to
come closer to the people.
At the same time Lenin also noted the tendency of the colonial
bourgeoisie in particular cases to vacillate and compromise with
imperialism and feudalism, of some of its sections to even go over to
imperialism, and to use nationalist slogans to deceive the workers.54 Lenin’s
view of colonial bourgeoisie, therefore, stressed its vacillating role (with both
positive and negative possibilities) rather than put a one-sided emphasis on
its ‘in general’ radical or ‘in general’ reactionary character.55 The first
emphasis would glorify the role of the bourgeoisie, make it ‘respectable’, and
tend to make the proletariat tail behind it; while the second would lead to
the total negation of the role of the bourgeoisie in the colonies, and produce
the tendency to follow purely adventurous tactics in the national movement
leading to the rapid isolation of the communist movement from the
peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie.
The second important constituent of Lenin’s approach lay in his seeing the
role of the peasantry as the heart of the bourgeois democratic revolution in
the colonies and semi-colonies. The peasantry was seen not only as the chief
force of this revolution but also as its chief social base or even as the typical
representative of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.56 So far as communist work
in the colonies was concerned, work among the peasants was to play an
important role.57 Moreover, the peasants were destined to play “a very big
revolutionary role in the coming phases of the world revolution.”58 In the
Preliminary Theses, Lenin stressed the need “to give special support to the
peasant movement” and urged the communists “to strive to lend the peasant
movement the most revolutionary character.”59 He even believed that the
time was ripe to try to Implant peasants’ and other toilers’ Soviets in the
colonies and semi-colonies.60 Lenin also worked towards the idea that in
these countries the Communist Party should adjust its role (its membership,
special tasks, etc.) to the level of the peasantry. In these countries, he wrote:
“ This is the crux of the matter. This needs thinking about and seeking
concrete answers.”61
Lenin was here making a major contribution to the theory and practice of
revolution in the colonies and semi-colonies. Marx and Engels had, of
course, seen some of the potentially revolutionary qualities of the peasantry
when allied with a national liberation movement.62 Similarly, others, in
particular Mao-Tse-tung, have gone ahead of Lenin in linking agrarian
revolt with the national movement, in seeing national liberation struggle as
a peasant war in a colonial setting, or in seeing bourgeois democratic
revolution as being basically a peasant revolution. But the crucial linkage
was made by Lenin and the basic step forward was taken by him. He had
provided the foundation.63 He could not have done more. He was not a
prophet or blue-print maker for other peoples’ revolutions. He was a
revolutionary thinker and leader who discerned and analysed the emerging
reality of the colonial world on the basis of his grasp of Marxism and his
experience of the Russian and world revolutionary process. Further
deepening of his social ideas had to be and could have been done only by
those who were actually engaged in making colonial revolutions.
Lenin firmly held the view over a long period of time that, in view of the
progressive role of the bourgeoisie in the colonies and semi-colonies and
because their revolutions were yet at the bourgeois democratic stage, the
communists should support and participate in the existing bourgeois
democratic liberation movements and should ally, howsoever temporarily,
with all bourgeois elements taking active part in these movements.64 In
other words, the national liberation movement should be seen as an anti-
imperialist united front of all those who were willing to fight against
imperialism.
 This issue was decisively thrashed out at the Second Congress of the
Communist International in 1920 when Lenin’s view as put forward in his
Preliminary Theses was accepted and M.N. Roy’s and Serrati’s view that the
workers and peasants must organize a separate liberation movement distinct
from the bourgeois-led movement was defeated.65
While Lenin’s general formulation of support to the bourgeois democratic
liberation movements was widely accepted— even M.N. Roy in the end
accepted it, at least formally—very soon a major controversy arose which
was to plague the communist movements in the colonial world for years
after. This was the question of concrete tactics towards the existing national
liberation movements with their varying class compositions, programmes,
and degrees of radicalism in relation to imperialism and feudalism. The
question, in other words, was: which types of bourgeois nationalist
leaderships were to be given active support and allied with.
The roots of this controversy go back to a change in the language of
Lenin’s “Preliminary Draft of the Theses on the National and Colonial
Question”. In the final version as it emerged out of the discussions in the
Commission on the subject, wherever Lenin had mentioned support to
“bourgeois democratic” movements, the words were changed to support for
the “national revolutionary” movements.66
Why was this change made? What did the word ‘revolutionary’ here
signify?
In presenting the Report of the Commission, Lenin made it clear that the
purpose of the change was not to negate his entire understanding of the
bourgeois democratic character of the national liberation movements or of
the policy of supporting them or collaborating with them.67 In his speech
before the Commission, Lenin had said, contesting Roy’s views: “In Russia
we supported the liberation movement of the liberals when it acted against
tsarism. The Indian communists must support the bourgeois democratic
movement, without merging with it.”68
The change was made to specify the types of bourgeois democratic
movements with which the communists could ally. Lenin wanted to
demarcate the reformist and the pro-imperialist sections and aspects of
these movements from the
revolutionary sections and aspects.69 In keeping with his understanding
of the vacillating character of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations,
including the colonial ones, he wanted to safeguard the proletariat from the
evil consequences of such vacillations and even betrayals. He, therefore,
urged the communists to support only those movements which were
“genuinely revolutionary”. On the other hand, he urged them to “combat the
reformist bourgeoisie”.70
Another important reason, which we may infer, as to why Lenin made the
change from his Preliminary Theses was to oppose a mechanistic
interpretation of the progressive role of the colonial bourgeoisie. That the
colonial boureoisie was objectively and, therefore, potentially in
contradiction with imperialism should not be taken to mean that it, or all its
sections, would in practice always and invariably fight against imperialism.
The communists would ally with only those of its sections which actually
fought against imperialism and which were, therefore, revolutionary. This
distinction between a position in general and a position to practice was a
part of the importance that Lenin assigned to political aspects of a problem,
particularly in a period of revolution, as apart from its economic bearings.
We have still, of course, to understand more specifically what Lenin
meant by the words “genuinely revolutionary”? And here we must keep in
view, as was pointed out in Section 1 of this paper, that for Lenin a political
position, as distinct from a position of principle, was never defined in
general or in abstract but always concretely, within a definite historical
setting. At the outset, in parenthesis, it may be pointed out that he had made
a distinction between a revolutionary and a reformist bourgeois democratic
national movement even earlier than 1920.71 This distinction was also
inherent in his condemnation in 1913 of the liberal bourgeoisie in China as
being on the verge of treachery and compromise with imperialism.72
The use of the words “genuinely revolutionary” could not possibly mean
that the colonial struggles were to lead directly to socialism or were to lose
their bourgeois democratic character,73 or that the attitude that the
bourgeoisie was likely to adopt towards the masses and on the social
question after the overthrow of imperialism would determine its
revolutionary or reactionary character in the anti-imperialist phase. Nor did
it mean that the reference to revolutionary nationalists to be supported was
not to the bourgeoisie but to the peasantry since the words revolutionary,
reformist, and pro-imperialist could make sense only when applied to the
former. The peasantry was a revolutionary class in the colonial setting (one
on which a Communist Party could be based). The question of supporting it
did not arise; it was to be a basic force of national revolution. It was to be
joined with by the proletariat.
This aspect of Lenin’s thinking is best brought out in contrast with the
ideas of M.N. Roy and Serrati (of Italy). With these two Lenin’s differences
were not merely verbal or those merely needing further explanation, for
both of them missed the real meaning of the theory of development of
revolution by stages. Presenting his case before the Commission on the
National and Colonial Questions, Roy maintained that the Indian masses
“are not fired with a national spirit. They are exclusively interested in
problems of an economic and social nature.” Consequently, they “have no
interest whatsoever in bourgeois-nationalist slogans; only one slogan—land
to the tillers’—can interest them.” Furthermore, “as far as the broad popular
masses are concerned, the revolutionary movement in India has nothing in
common with the national-liberation movement.” He therefore urged the
deletion of paragraph 11 of the Theses which asked the communists to
support the bourgeois democratic liberation movements and said that “in
India the Communist International should assist the creation and
development of the communist movement alone, and the Communist Party
of India should occupy itself exclusively with organizing the broad popular
masses to fight for their own class-interests. ”74
It may also be noted that Roy was quite clear in his mind as to who were
the “revolutionary nationalists” in India. They were the people leading the
Non-Cooperation Movement.75 He did not argue in favour of supporting
revolutionary nationalists as against the reformist nationalists or the pro-
imperialist liberals. He distinctly argued against supporting the
“revolutionary nationalists”, though later, in the Supplementary Theses, he
was compelled to accept the position after his contention had been rejected
by Lenin and the Second Congress of the Comintern.76
Speaking at the Plenary Session of the Congress, Serrati took a position
similar to that of Roy, though from very different premises perhaps. Serrati
held that “in general, no act of national liberation carried out by bourgeois
democratic groups—even if the methods of insurrection are employed—is a
revolutionary act.” He opposed any support to or alliance with bourgeois
democrats, not even with those “who are said to be revolutionary.”77 His
position was also rejected by the Congress.

We may now try to answer the question: What did Lenin mean when he
used the words “revolutionary nationalists” in the final Theses?
Taking Lenin’s thinking as a whole, and keeping in view that he was not
‘decreeing’ for a specific situation but dealing with an entire historical period
in the history of the large number of colonial and semi-colonial countries, it
can be said that in the widest sense the term revolutionary refers to the
thoroughness and commitment with which the concrete, historical tasks of
the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution are struggled for. More
specifically, and in the colonial situation, the words ‘revolutionary
nationalists’ have two broad but clear connotations.
The first touchstone was that of attitude towards imperialism.
Revolutionary nationalists were those who opposed and struggled against
imperialism. In their countries imperialism was the main enemy;
contradiction with imperialism was the principal contradiction. Therefore,
the degree of revolutionary quality of a leadership was to be seen in
relationship to this contradiction.
As Lenin put it in his Report on behalf of the Commission on the
National and Colonial Questions before the Plenary Session of the
Comintern Congress, the section of the bourgeoisie that was not to be
supported was the one which was pro-imperialist, which might have been
‘implanted’ by imperialism, and which might work “hand in glove with the
imperialist bourgeoisie, that is, joins forces with it against all revolutionary
movements and revolutionary classes.” This distinction, it should be again
stressed, was based not on theory or principle but on “irrefutable”
demonstration before the Commission.78 This anti-imperialist role of the
colonial bourgeoisie was, in fact, the raison d’etre of the policy of extending
support, to it.79 It was when the colonial bourgeoisie abandoned this that it
became reactionary.80
The second test of the revolutionary character of a national movement
was the role of the masses and the extent of mass activity in the movement.
As pointed out earlier, one of the positive features Lenin had noted in the
ascendant phase of capitalism was the politicalisation of the masses and
their intense participation in mass movements. The extent to which a
movement awakened the masses, mobilised them, brought them into
politics, and released their latent energy through mass action against
imperialism was a crucial test of the progressive and revolutionary character
of a bourgeois national movement. On the other hand, when political
decisions, even progressive ones, were taken behind the back of the people
through negotiations at the top, the movement can be said to be reformist.
This was the main reason for the high praise Lenin bestowed on Sun Yat-sen
in 1913. “Revolutionary bourgeois democracy, represented by Sun Yat-sen.”
he wrote “is correctly seeking ways and means of ‘regenerating’ China
through maximum development of the initiative, resoluteness and boldness
of the peasant masses in implementing political and agrarian reforms.”81 A
long quotation dealing with the Irish struggle for national liberation from
his major work, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, written in 1914,
makes the point quite clear;

Though, in principle, an enemy of federalism, Marx in this instance

granted the possibility of federation, as well if only the emancipation of
Ireland was achieved in a revolutionary, not reformist way, through a
movement of the mass of the people of Ireland supported by the
working class of England. There can be no doubt that only such a
solution of the historical problem would have been in the best interests
of the proletariat and most conducive to rapid social progress.... Both
the Irish people and the English proletariat proved weak. Only now,
 through the sordid deals between the English Liberals and the Irish
bourgeoisie, is the Irish problem being solved....82
In this respect, we have already dealt at length with the role that Lenin
assigned to the mass activity of the peasants in the national liberation
movement.
Lenin attached another condition for supporting the bourgeois leadership
of the national liberation movements in connection with the role of the
people. It must not oppose the communist effort of “educating and
organizing the peasantry and the broad mass of the exploited in a
revolutionary spirit/83 In other words, the communists were not to appease
the colonial bourgeoisie by keeping the peasant and mass movements under
bourgeois control or within limits acceptable to the bourgeoisie.84
Furthermore, the communists under all circumstances must maintain their
own separate existence, “the independence of the proletarian movement”,
never letting the independent political activity and organization of the
workers and peasants be submerged under bourgeois activity and
leadership.85
Lenin’s emphasis on the role of the masses and the independent
organization of the communists had one clear meaning: a bourgeois
democratic movement should be supported only if it enabled the proletariat
and the communists to make preparations for, to open the way to, the next
stage of the revolution.
The question as to what Lenin meant by the words “national
revolutionaries” can be broached in another manner—by tracing his
approach over the years to the national liberation movements of the East.
This would make it obvious that only the use of the two criteria discussed
above could have led him to describe many of them as ‘revolutionary’.
In the article ‘Inflammable Material in World Politics’, written in 1912,
Lenin hailed “the revolutionary movement in various European and Asian
countries”, and, more concretely, referred to the rise “of the revolutionary
struggle in India,” and the “revolutionary” movements in Persia and
Turkey.86 In 1912, he again referred to “the revolutionary movement of
Asian democrats” in Persia and pointed to “the international significance of
the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people as one that brings
liberation to Asia and undermines the domination of the European
bourgeoisie.”87 In 1913, the entire article ‘Democracy and Narodism in
China’ was an analysis of the revolutionary movement in China under the
leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. In particular the movement was praised
because “it squarely poses the question of the conditions of the masses, of
the mass struggle.”88 In the same year, in the article The Awakening of Asia’,
he pointed to the spread of democratic revolution to the whole of Asia and
took note of the significant new development—“the spread of the
revolutionary democratic movement to the Dutch Indies.”89 In 1915, in the
major article ‘Socialism and War’, Lenin noted that national liberation
movements in China, Persia, India and their de-pendent countries were
arousing hundreds of millions of people in the fight against foreign
oppression90 (thus meeting both the criteria discussed above).
National movements developed in China and India after World War I,
and Lenin’s evaluation of these movements is again instructive. Lenin was
impressed by the sweep of the Non-Cooperation Movement in arousing
mass consciousness and unleashing popular energy after the brutal massacre
at Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar. In his Report to the First All- Russian
Congress of toiling Cossacks, he remarked that in India “an awakening of
political consciousness and the revolutionary movement grew from day to
day.”91 In June 1921, at the height of the Non-Cooperation Movement, Lenin
wrote that the masses of Asia were “becoming an active factor of world
politics and of the revolutionary destruction of imperialism” and that
“British India stands at the head of these countries” because in India “the
maturing of the revolution” was being “accelerated”.92 M.N. Roy has in his
Memoirs referred to his discussions with Lenin in 1920 regarding Gandhi.
To quote him: “Lenin believed that, as the inspirer and leader of a mass
movement, he was a revolutionary.”93 These remarks sum up pithily one of
the main criterion Lenin used for evaluating the leadership of a bourgeois
democratic liberation movement. This positive evaluation of Gandhi lasted
only as long as the mass movement lasted. In February 1922 the mass
movement in India was withdrawn; and this positive evaluation of the
Gandhian leadership also disappeared. While no comment of Lenin on
India of this period is available, the Theses on Eastern Question adopted by
the Fourth Comintern Congress held in November 1922 may serve as a
partial guide to Lenin’s thinking. The Theses after referring to the
“tempestuous growth of the national revolutionary movement in India...”94
points to the “vacillations and hesitations” of the bourgeois nationalist
leadership due to its increasing fears of agrarian revolt. This “timidity” (not
betrayal or “reactionaries” it may be noted, B.C) of the bourgeois leadership
had put “obstacles in the way of organizing and rallying the masses, as the
bankruptcy of the non-cooperation tactics in India shows.”95 In other words,
the role of ‘organizing and rallying the masses’ had made Gandhi a
revolutionary leader earlier, but when this role was no longer performed
Gandhian leadership could be said to have reached the point of political
bankruptcy.
Equally important is Lenin’s and Comintern’s attitude towards Sun Yat-
sen-led Kuomintang in China. Because the Kuomintang at this time not
only satisfied fully the two main criteria of Lenin but also enabled the
communists to get organized and to work among the masses,96 Lenin and
the Comintern encouraged the Communist Party to go beyond uniting with
Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang to joining the latter as individuals,
retaining at the same time their separate party identity.97

In the end, we may note in passing that the later controversies on this
question among the Marxists were derailed mainly because many of them
neglected making a concrete examination of the role of actual, existing
bourgeois nationalist movements in the light of the two criteria discussed
above. Instead they concentrated on an abstract and theoretical discussion
of the position and role of the colonial bourgeoisie and its different sections
and tried to derive tactics towards the nationalist movements on the basis of
such one-dimensional, divorced-from-life, shallow ‘Marxist’ knowledge or
interpretation. This was an important aspect of the tendency to guide
movements through academic postulates and reasoning, which often
bordered on phrase-mongering and casuistry— rather than on the basis of a
concrete study of economics and politics and of real revolutionary
experience. On the question under study, this of course led to constant ‘over-
estimation’ and ‘under-estimation’ of the role of the bourgeoisie in the
colonial countries. Such analysis, and constant evaluation and re-evaluation,
could, and were, then used to justify both compromises with, and surrender
before, the bourgeoisie as well as rank adventurousness and totally nihilistic
approach towards the actual national liberation movements. In Lenin’s entire
approach, on the other hand, the emphasis was not just on the objective role
of the bourgeoisie derived from economic analysis but also on the study and
evaluation of the concrete political practice of the different sections of the
colonial bourgeoisie.98 Similarly, Lenin’s formulation regarding the
vacillating, two-faced character of the colonial bourgeoisie was used not to
study concrete bourgeois class roles and behaviour and on this basic to
evolve concrete political attitudes towards it, but opportunistically to justify
this or that policy.
The differences in grasping the essential features of Lenin’s approach on
the colonial question were particularly glaring in the theory and practice of
the Indian and Chinese Communists. The latter, for example, had in theory
described Chiang Kai-shek as a representative of the feudal and comprador
capitalist forces with which the communists could not unite. Yet, after 1936,
when Chiang showed, under pressure of nationalist opinion, some
inclination to fight Japanese imperialism, they had no hesitation in joining a
united front with him without even demanding or claiming hegemony in
the anti-Japanese struggle.99 Obviously, the crucial factor in the alliance was
Lenin’s criterion of struggle against imperialism.
Similarly, in many instances, emphasis on seeing the positive and negative
aspects of the bourgeoisie led to far more than necessary attention being
focussed on the role of the bourgeoisie in the historical process. This
happened even when the role of the bourgeoisie was held to be negative. In
practice it led to the neglect of the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on the role of
the masses. In trying to assess the degree of revolutionary or reactionary
role of the bourgeoisie the communists tended to neglect their own
revolutionary role of awakening and organizing the workers and peasants in
the context of the bourgeois democratic national liberation struggle.
 NOTES

Read at the Lenin Centenary Commemorative Seminar organized by the

Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, in February 1970 and
published in the India Quarterly, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, Jan-March 1971.
1 See Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, Moscow (n.d.), On Britain, Moscow, 1963; Dona To it, Editor,

Marxism, Nationality and War, 2 vols., London, 1941; Horace B. Davies, Nationalism and Socialism,
New York, 1967; D. Boersner, The Bolsheviks and the National Colonial Question, Geneva, 1957; N.N.
Agarwal, Soviet Nationalities Policy, Agra, 1969; Helene C.d‘En causse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxim
and Asia, London, 1965.
2 For a recent general statement of the Marxist view in this respect, see Franz Marek, Philosophy of

World Revolution, New York, 1969.

3 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (hereafter referred to as CW), Vol. 22, Moscow, 1964, p. 149 f.n.

4 Lenin, The National-Liberation Movement in the East (hereafter referred to as NLME), 2nd

Impression, Moscow, 1969, pp. 70-71.

5 Ibid., p. 65. His complaint against Rosa Luxemburg was that she did not do so when discussing the

national programme for the Russian socialist movement. He wrote: “We are discussing the national
programme of the Marxists of a definite country—Russia— and in a definite period—the beginning of
the twentieth century. But does Rosa Luxemburg examine what historical period Russia is passing
through, what are the concrete features of the national question and the national movements of this
particular country in this particular period?” Ibid., p. 71
6 Ibid., p. 235.

7 Ibid., p. 250

8 Ibid., p. 264

9 Ibid., pp. 283-85.

10 See, for example, M.N. Roy’s Memoirs, Bombay, 1964, pp. 346-47, 380. An extract from Lenin’s

comment in 1912 on Sun Yat-sen’s ideas also illustrates this aspect of Lenin’s approach. While
subjecting Sun’s ideas to searching criticism, he described them as follows: “Before us is a really great
ideology of a really great people...” Lenin, NLME, p. 42.
11 M.N. Roy, pp. 380-81. The injury was partially mitigated by the fact that the supplementary theses

were virtually ignored by the Comintern in its later work.

12 Lenin, NLME, pp. 249 ff. These Theses are hereafter referred to in the main text as Preliminary

Theses. The amended Theses as adopted by the Congress of the Comintern are to be found in Jane
Degras, The Communist International, 1919-1943, Documents, Vol. I, 1919-1922, London, 1956, pp.
138 ff.
13 Especially when contrasted with the approach of a section of the contemporary socialists who had

abandoned the earlier tradition of Marx and Engels. For the role of these socialists, see Boersner, pp.
29-32; d’Encausee and Schram, pp. 15-16, 125-33; A.M. Mc- Briar, Fabian Socialism and English
Politics, London, 1962, Chapter V.
14 CW, Vol. 22, p. 346, Also see NLME, p. 92.

15 See Boersner, pp. 29, 32, 42-43, 57. A good example of this thinking is the following passage from

Rosa Luxemburg’s famous ‘Junius’ Pamphlet of 1916: ‘Only from Europe, only from the oldest
capitalist nations, can the signal come, when the hour is ripe, for the social revolution that will free
humanity. Only the English, French, Belgian, German, Russian and Italian workers, together, can lead
the army of the exploited and enslaved of the five continents. They alone, when the time comes, can
call capitalism to account for centuries of crimes committed against all the primitive peoples, and for
its work of destruction around the globe; they alone can exact revenge.” Quoted in d’Encausee and
Schram, pp. 143-44.
16 For example, in his letter to Kautsky, dated 12 Sept. 1882, Engels had envisaged the possibility of a

successful revolution in India as also in other countries such as Algiers and Egypt. To quote his exact
words: “India will perhaps, indeed very probably, produce a revolution,” Marx and Engels, Selected
Correspondence, 1846-1895, New York, 1942, p. 399.
17 NLME, pp. 12-13. Also see p. 19.

18 Ibid., pp. 42, 44.

19 Ibid., p. 59.

20 CW, Vol. 22, p. 310.

21 NLME, p. 297.

22 Ibid., p. 315
23 Ibid., pp. 65-66, 69, 76.

24 Ibid., p. 43.

25 Ibid., pp. 43-46, 90, 97, 234;CW, Vol. 22, p. 146.

26 NLME, pp. 44, 53, 55, 59, 104, 234.

27 Ibid., pp. 43, 47, 51-52.

28 Ibid., p. 170.

29 Ibid., p. 55.

30 Ibid., p. 250.

31 CW, Vol. 23, p. 59. Regarding the revolution in Russia, Lenin had written in 1905, that “it will be

unable (without a series of intermediary stages of revolutionary development) to affect the

foundations of capitalism... the democratic revolution will not immediately overstep the bounds of
bourgeois social and economic relationships...” CW, Vol. 9, 1965, pp. 56-57. He wrote in 1921: “The
bourgeois-democratic content of the revolution means that the social relations (system, institutions)
of the country are purged of medievalism, serfdom, feudalism.” CW, Vol. 33, p. 52.
32 Later, in 1919, Lenin had admonished those who objected to the recognition of “the right to self-

determination of the despised bourgeoisie” by pointing out that such recognition was “compatible
with what actually exists; eliminate this and the results will be sheer fantasy” and that “we cannot
refuse to recognize what actually exists: it will itself compel us to recognize it.” NLME, pp. 211-16.
33 Lenin wrote in the Two Tactics of Social Democracy: “As representatives of the advanced and only

revolutionary class, revolutionary without any reservations, doubts, or looking back, we must
confront the whole of the people with the tasks of the democratic revolution as extensively and boldly
as possible and with the utmost initiative. To disparage these tasks means making a travesty of
theoretical Marxism...” CW, Vol. 9, p. 112.
34 Ibid., pp. 44-45.

35 Ibid., p. 47.

36 See CW, Vol. 22, p. 145.

37 Boersner, pp. 47, 50.

38 CW, Vol. 22, p. 144. On the other hand, he had written in 1913 that “the path to collectivism is

through democracy.” NLME, p. 62. Earlier still, in 1905, he had said: “But we Marxists should know
that there is not, nor can there be, any other path to real freedom for the proletariat and the peasantry,
than the path of bourgeois freedom and bourgeois progress...” CW, Vol. 9, p. 112.
39 NLME; pp. 103-04; CW, Vol. 23, p. 371.

40 NLME, p. 97.

41 CW, Vol. 33, 1966, pp. 51-52.

42 CW, Vol. 22, p. 144.

43 A concrete analysis of the possibility of the bourgeois democratic revolution growing into the

socialist revolution was made by Lenin in April 1917, ‘in Letters from Afar’. CW, Vol. 23, pp. 295 ff.
44 Ibid., p. 317, Cf. The Communist Manifesto: “The Communists turn their attention chiefly to

Germany because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out
under more advanced conditions in European civilization and with a more developed proletariat than
that of England in the seventeenth and of France in the eighteenth century, and consequently the
bourgeois revolution in Germany can be but the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution.”
Section IV.
45 CW, Vol. 33, p. 54.

46 CW, Vol. 9, p. 114.

47 “Struggle, and struggle alone, decided how far the second succeeds in outgrowing the first,” he

wrote in 1921. CW, Vol. 33, p. 54.

48 The tasks of the democratic revolution must be completed, he wrote in 1905. “as extensively and

boldly as possible and with the utmost initiative.” CW, Vol. 9, p. 112. Also see Vol. 33, p. 53. In 1916 he
had laid the broad guidelines for the uninterrupted growth of the first stage of the revolution into the
second: The democratic demands “must be formulated and put through in a revolutionary and not a
reformist manner, going beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, breaking them down, going beyond
speeches in parliament and verbal protests, and drawing the masses into decisive action, extending
and intensifying the struggle for every fundamental democratic demand up to a direct proletarian
onslaught on the bourgeoisie, i.e., up to the socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie.” CW,
Vol. 22, p. 145.
49 See CW, Vol. 9, pp. 112-14; Vol. 23, pp. 295ff; Vol. 33, pp. 52ff.
50 NLME, p. 290.

51 NLME, pp. 70-71.

52 Clearly this applies only to colonies and semi-colonies. Where a country is neither, the conflict

becomes one between two capitalisms, one of which may be larger than the other as well as more
imperialistic.
53 See above. Also NLME, pp. 62, 65, 69, 76, 92, 274; CW, Vol. 22, pp. 151-52.

54 NLME, pp. 43, 47, 52, 266; CW, Vol. 22, p. 148.

55 It should be stressed that this formulation was made by Lenin always in concrete cases and was not

put as a general tendency rising out of the general features of all colonial bourgeoisies. For example, in
1913, while praising Sun Yat-sen as a representative of the revolutionary tendency among the Chinese
bourgeoisie, he referred to Yuan Shih-Kai as one of the leaders of the liberal bourgeoisie who “are
above all capable of treachery”. NLME, p. 43. Also see ibid., pp. 47, 52. This concretisation of the
formulation was also evident in the Preliminary Theses.
56 He wrote in 1913: “The principal representative or the principal social support of this Asian

bourgeoisie, which is still capable of fighting in a historically progressive cause, is the peasant.” Ibid.,
p. 43.
57 In 1920, Lenin said that Communist Parties could not function in the colonial and semi-colonial

world “without establishing definite relations with the peasant movement and without giving it
effective support.” Ibid., p. 266.
58 Ibid., p. 290.

59 Ibid., p. 255. Also see the Comintern Executive’s “Appeal on the Forthcoming Congress of Eastern

Peoples at Baku” in Degras, pp. 106ff.

60 NLME, pp. 255, 262, 267-68.

61 CW, Vol. 42, 1969, p. 202

62 See Franz Marek, pp. 67-68; d’Encausse and Schram, pp. 121-23.

63 In fact, the peasantry began to be assigned a greater role in his own life time. See the theses of the

4th Session of the Comintern (Nov. 1922) in Degras, pp. 386-87, 394-98.
64 CW, Vol. 22, pp. 151-52 and NLME, pp. 236, 251-52, 254-55.
65 For Roy’s and Serrati’s views see d’Encausse and Schram, pp. ISO. 51, 159-63, 165-67. For the

“Theses on the National and Colonial Question”, adopted by the Congress, see Degras, pp. 139-44.
66 For the changes, contrast the Preliminary Draft [NLME pp’ 250-56) with the final Theses adopted

by the Congress (in Degras, pp. 139-44). d’Encausse and Sehram have given the final Theses along
with the changes made in it from the earlier, Lenin’s draft. See pp. 152-56.
67 NLME, p. 266.

68 d’Encausse and Schram, p. 151.

69 A distinction which was not arrived at on ‘general’ and theoretical considerations but which had

been revealed in reality—which was a real life, concrete historical phenomenon in some of the
colonial countries. See NLME, p. 266.
70 Ibid.

71 CW, Vol. 22, pp. 151-52. Also see p. 145.

72 NLME, pp. 43, 51-52, 62.

73 Ibid., p. 266.

74 d’Encausse and Schram, pp. 150-51.

75 Ibid., p. 163

76 Ibid., p. 162.

77 Ibid., pp. 165-67.

78 NLME, p. 266.

79 We might refer here to the principled, though wrong, position of Roy on this question. Roy

accepted the logic of this argument but he maintained that in the relatively developed countries like
India contradiction between indigenous capitalism and imperialism had been muted and a
compromise arrived at between the two since both felt threatened by the revolutionary upsurge of the
masses and because imperialism was interested in developing capitalist enterprise in these countries.
See d’Encausse and Schram, pp. 190-92.
80 This anti-imperialist aspect of the struggle of the colonial people was emphasized again and again

by Lenin. See, for example, NLME, p. 234. It was also repeatedly emphasized by the Comintern during
Lenin’s life time. See Degras, pp. 385, 394-96.
81 NLME, p. 47. Also see pp. 22, 42, 44, 235; and CW, Vol. 23, p. 31.

82 CW, Vol. 20, p. 441, Also see Vol. 22, p. 145.

83 NLME, p. 266.

84 CW, Vol. 22, p. 145.

85 NLME, p. 255. Also see p. 235 and d’Encausse and Schram, p. 151 (Lenin’s speech in the

Commission).
86 NLME pp. 12-13: Also see p. 18. In 1919 Lenin once again reverted to this period of Indian history

and said that after 1905 a “revolutionary movement” had developed in India. Ibid, p. 233.
87 Ibid., pp. 39-40.

88 Ibid., p. 42.

89 Ibid., p. 59.

90 Ibid., p. 101.

91 Ibid., p. 244.

92 Ibid., p. 288.

93 Roy, p. 379.

94 Degras, p. 383.

95 Ibid., pp. 386-87.

96 According to the thesis of the Second Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (1922): “If we

communists wish to work successfully in the southern Chinese trade unions... we must maintain the
most friendly relations with the southern Chinese nationalists.,” Quoted in E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik
Revolution, 1917-23, Vol. III, Penguin edition, 1966, p. 527.
97 See Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge, Mass, 1966, Chap

III.
98 This was also how Marx had analysed current history in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Bonaparte.
99 Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, New York, 1963, pp. 38 ff.
 Peasantry and National Integration in
Contemporary India

1
Agricultural Class Structure in the Colonial Period

Colonialism brought about momentous social and economic transformation

during which centuries-old social and economic relationships and
institutions were dissolved and replaced by new relationships and
institutions. In the realm of agriculture too, new agrarian relations and class
structure came into being. New classes, absentee landlords and
moneylenders at the top and tenants-at-will, share croppers, and agricultural
labourers at the bottom, came into existence. A new agrarian structure was
born that was neither traditional or feudal nor capitalist. There occurred the
growth of tenancy and a hierarchy of intermediaries between the state and
the actual cultivators on a scale unprecedented in Indian history. By 1931,
one-third of the rural population was landless and most of the remaining
two-thirds were tenants-at-will, sharecroppers and petty peasant-
proprietors.1 Not that exploitative elements were introduced afresh into an
egalitarian and classless society. Economic inequality, political and
economic oppression by zamindars, maliks etc. status differences, and caste
domination had prevailed in ample measure earlier. But the pattern of such
domination and exploitation was now transformed. Moreover, old
institutions and relationships were not consciously overthrown but were
sought to be superimposed upon. Consequently, they disintegrated and
along with them disappeared some of the social protection to the lower
castes and classes provided by mutual help and enforcement of custom
though within the limits of the old structure.
New relationships were evolved by the interaction of the old with the new;
but what occurred was change without social revolution. Consequently, the
new social basis of agriculture was not more conducive either to economic
developing or to economic welfare. The point here is not whether the new
structure was better or worse, nor that the old society disintegrated; but that
what came in its place was as, if not more, regressive and as much of a strait-
jacket on the development of agriculture. The new structure of relationships
or forms of surplus extraction and utilization (a) did not provide incentives
or opportunities to any class or stratum engaged in agriculture in any
position to make modern improvements and (b) led to the siphoning off of
resources from agriculture and the agriculturist.
Broadly speaking these changes came as a result of the introduction of
new land systems, the heavy land revenue demand, legal and political
changes, the destruction of indigenous industries, the disintegration of the
age-old union between agriculture and industry, the integration with the
world capitalist economy in a subordinate position, and above all the fact
that the Indian economy and agriculture underwent a commercial
revolution which was unaccompanied by an industrial revolution. More
specifically, Indian agriculture was commercialized without any change
occurring in its technical base or organization of production.
One major consequence of the colonization of Indian economy and
agriculture was stagnation in agricultural output, decline in productivity, fall
in the per capita availability of food, and in general the increasing
impoverishment of the cultivator.2 However, here we are not in the main
interested in the poverty and misery of the peasant but changes in the
agrarian class structure in the recent colonial and then the post-colonial
period.
We have discussed these changes in very broad outlines, often ignoring
regional differences. It is rather awkward to generalize about the entire
country when wide differences in pattern came into being because of the
varied and prolonged colonial historical process. But we have done so
because the general elements of colonial agriculture and class structure came
to be similar all over the country. At the same time, often statistical data and
other evidence from particular parts of the country have been given because
of the paucity of such data and evidence for all parts or at least of their ready
and easy availability for reference purposes.
(A) At the top of the agrarian class structure came the zamindars and
landlords who owned and controlled most of the land. By the 1920s,
landlordism had become the main feature in both the zamindari and
ryotwari tenure areas. Moreover, through sub-infeudation. the number of
intermediaries had increased. Large number of zamindars and landlords
were new both in functions and personnel. High land revenue demand, its
rigidity, and the new legal and administrative system led to the
expropriation of the older upper classes as well as the peasant proprietors.
Merchants, moneylenders, speculators, officials, professionals, and other
urban groups bought up zamindars or the peasant-owners’ lands to become
landlords. Most of the new zamindars and landlords were absentee and had
little link with land. Not only were they, along with the older zamindars, not
interested in becoming capitalist landlords, often they were not interested
even in organizing the machinery for rent collection. They, therefore, readily
took to sub-infeudation, thus increasing the number of rent receivers and
hence the rent-demand. The middlemen invariably took recourse to every
conceivable legal or illegal mechanism to collect more from the actual tiller
of the soil. In ryotwari areas too land was gradually passing under the
control of landlords and money-lenders. It is to be noted that the alienation
of land by an owner-cultivator did not mean transfer of cultivation but
interposition of a middleman between the previous owner and the new
tenant and the state. By 1947, nearly 70 per cent of the total cultivated land
in British India was owned by zamindars and landlords. In ryotwari areas
about 30 to 50 per cent of the land was in the hands of landlords and the rest
was heavily under debt.3
The zamindars and landlords were not only recruited from money-
lenders but many of them increasingly took to moneylending. The U.P.
Banking Enquiry Committee reported in 1931 that landlords were the
largest source of rural loans in U.P., contributing nearly 40 per cent of all
loans.4
 The stagnant colonial economy with its lack of economic opportunities in
a period of increase in the number of proprietor-landlords produced a sharp
differentiation within the class of zamindars and landlords. Thus, in U.P., in
1945, 0.04 per cent or 804 zamindars owned 27 per cent of the land while
1.49 per cent held 57.77 per cent of the land.5 In the Agra province, 85.5 per
cent of the proprietors paid less than Rs. 25 per year as revenue, while
another 13.2 per cent paid between Rs. 25 and Rs. 250 per year.6 In Bengal,
in 1893, 85.4 per cent of the estates controlled 9.8 per cent of the area, with
an average per estate of 49 acres of land, net rental of Rs. 29, number of four
shares, and net rental income of Rs. 7 per share. The next 13.8 per cent of the
estates controlling 39.3 per cent of the area had an average per estate of
1,228 acres of land, net rental of Rs. 1,711, number of six shares, and net
rental income of Rs. 285 per share.7 This extreme differentiation among the
landlords was to have a very significant impact on the Indian national
movement. The majority of rent receivers were in their incomes and even
life styles not distinguishable from the rich or even middle peasants. They
were impoverished and were getting further impoverished. They were
becoming quite hostile to colonialism and as men born to education and
status and used to political and administrative leadership they could and did
begin to play an active role in the anti-imperialist struggle and to provide
the latter with elements of mass support, especially in elections under a
restricted franchise after 1919. They played an important role in the
‘massization’ of the national movement. Yet, with all their impoverishment,
they were rent receivers. This could not but leave an impress on the social
programme of the National Congress and its pattern of national integration.
Similarly, they also began to play a certain role in the emerging peasant
movement, especially in the 1920s. Apart from direct impact, the pull they
exercised on the rich and middle peasants and through them on the peasant
movement and its programmes was significant.
Commercial bourgeoisie in India was first destroyed but later developed
as the linkage of Indian economy with the world economy gave a lift to
internal trade. Growth of export of agricultural raw materials and food-
stuffs and growth of internal trade in agricultural products as the result of
the growing unification of Indian economy and the pressure on the peasant
to compulsorily sell his products in order to meet his payments to the state,
landlord, and money-lender provided ample opportunity of commercial
bourgeoisie to grow. The village market structure and the compulsive need
of the peasant to sell immediately after the harvest and later to buy for
consumption made the merchant a major appropriator of agricultural
surplus. Commercialization of agriculture which often led to crops being
grown with merchant’s advances and marketed through his monopolistic
channel further strengthened his position, as did the fact that he often
combined the usurer’s function with that of the trader’s. He also increasingly
began to control the land as an absentee landlord.
Colonization of the economy, administrative and legal structure, the land
revenue system, and increasing commercialization of rural life created a
favourable economic and political climate for the village money-lender who
began to occupy a dominating position in the rural economy and to
expropriate both the peasant proprietors and the occupancy tenants and the
zamindars. This led to major tension situations in the country-side and
produced two interesting consequences. In many parts of the country, the
cultivators could be rallied around by the small and even big landlords
against the common enemy, the money-lender. Secondly, the rural tensions
generated by the intrusion of the non-cultivating usurer often threatened
social and political peace and led the colonial administrators to rail against
him. Yet the usurer was a crucial cog in the mechanism of colonial surplus
extraction. He kept the revenue machinery working and other agricultural
processes going. He enabled both the production of export crops and their
eventual export. He was responsible for the maintenance of the minimum
agricultural functions including the reproduction of the peasant. He was the
ultimate and the only safety valve in the countiy-side. In fact, he was as
much an intermediary between the colonial state and the peasant as the
zamindar or the earlier revenue farmer. So the colonial administrator
abused and cursed him as an evil—but also declared him to be a necessary
evil.8
If money-lenders became landlords, many landlords and superior ryots—
rich and middle peasants—became moneylenders. In particular, they lent to
petty tenants, sharecroppers, and agricultural labourers who had no security
to offer and who could therefore not become clients of the regular money-
lenders. The landlords and superior ryots on the other hand could use their
social and caste position and kinship connections to collect. In 1951-52,
nearly 25 per cent of all rural debt was held by agricultural moneylenders in
contrast to the 44.8 per cent held by professional money-lenders.9 Their
competitive position as moneylenders was another point of friction between
landlords and rich peasants and the traditional money-lenders. This enabled
the former to give birth to a spurious radicalism that opposed usurers
without opposing usury in any meaningful sense.
In conclusion to this sub-section, it may be said that the most important
change in agrarian relations during the colonial period was the growth in
the relative strength of the landlord, the trader, and the money-lender.
Moreover, whatever increase of income occurred in agriculture due to a
certain commercialization of agriculture also mostly went to them.
(B) The actual cultivator increasingly became a rack-rented tenant-at-will
or sharecropper, whose terms of tenancy were constantly deteriorating. In
1951, 27.8 per cent of rural agricultural families consisted of peasant
proprietors while tenants and labourers made up the remaining families.10
By the end of the colonial period, the rent and interest burden on the
peasants amounted to 14,000 million rupees or nearly 5,000 million dollars
per year.11
A major feature of the agrarian class structure in the recent colonial
period was the high degree of internal differentiation and stratification
within the peasantry.
At the top emerged a distinct stratum of rich peasants, both owners as
well as protected tenants, who succeeded in benefiting from
commercialization of agriculture because of their control over land, the
protection provided by tenancy legislation to occupancy iyots and legislation
against transfer of land to non-agriculturists, the opportunity to buy the
land of the expropriated peasants, and the scope for money-lending and
trade. In some regions, many of these rich peasants—owners or occupancy
iyots—became, because of the opportunity to get high rents, landlords in
effect while retaining their status as peasants. In others, they strove towards
capitalist or semi-capitalist farming.
 An important aspect of the rural differentiation was the emergence of the
rich peasant money-lenders. Not only was nearly 25 per cent of the rural
debt held by agricultural money-lenders in 1951-52 but in addition 14.4 per
cent of the debt was held by the relatives of the debtors.12
The rich peasant as a rent and revenue payer was opposed to imperialism
as well as to the zamindar. But, as an actual intermediary, whose legal
position was still that of a peasantproprietor or occupancy ryot, or as a
potential intermediary his agrarian and political outlook was deeply
conservative, and this apart from the fact that in any case as a man of
property and employer of labour he was not a radical on the socioeconomic
plane. This conservative character of the rich peasant was a major factor
responsible for the conservative agrarian programme of the National
Congress and the failure of the radical and left nationalist to go, except in a
few cases, beyond the programmatic stage in defence of the interests of the
tenants-at-will, sharecroppers, and agricultural labourers.
Below the rich peasants came a stratum of middle peasants who were very
close in social and economic position as also political and agrarian outlook
to the rich peasants, having survived the colonial process of disintegration
and expropriation.
The vast mass of peasantry was gradually getting reduced to the status of
landless agricultural labourers and petty land holders, described by
Surendra J. Patel as dwarf-holding labourers, some of whom were petty
proprietors and others tenants-at-will and sharecroppers, who had either no
rights in land or were in the grip of indebtedness.13 Now the important
point regarding these dwarf holders is that they were a transitional class;
they were peasants who were on the way to becoming the proletariat. They
could be seen as small peasants, for their outlook and hopes and fears were
those of peasants; or as semi-proletarians whose social interests already
converged towards the landless. But we will have more to say on this aspect
in the section on the agrarian class structure in post-colonial India.
The ranks of landless agricultural labourers were swelled by disinherited
peasants, ruined artisans, and the growth in population which was not
absorbed by modem industrial or service sectors. It is to be noted that the
agricultural labourers constituted a new social class of rural proletarians
which was increasingly becoming distinct from the land-holding peasantry.
The dwarf holder and the landless labourer constituted more than half of the
rural population. They were not only the poorest and the most exploited, but
objectively their problems could not be solved by any reform of the agrarian
system. In fact, their problems could not be solved at all within the agrarian
system.
The numerical distribution of the agricultural population into different
rural classes is a difficult task and has not been fully attempted. Ultimately,
with all the economic and sociological arguments against it, the pattern of
landholdings or operational holdings is the only one statistically available
and serviceable. But even here one has to impose rather arbitrary dividing
lines. Surendra J. Patel believes that those holding or cultivating (as opposed
to owning. The extremes of ownership may not be reflected in cultivation
since landlords rented out their land to many tenants. Consequently
landholdings, whether in ownership or tenancy, give a better idea of rural
class structure and stratification within the peasantry) less than five acres
should be classified as dwarf holders and landless agricultural labourers.
These, according to him, constituted 71.1 per cent of the total agricultural
working population in 1931, with 37.8 per cent constituting the category of
landless agricultural labourers.14 I believe that in general those holding less
than 2.5 acres can certainly be classified as proletarians and semi-
proletarians or dwarf holders. In any case this shows that differentiation
within the peasantry had reached a very advanced stage in the late colonial
period. According to the Agricultural Labour Enquiry of 1951, 19 per cent of
the rural families had no land.15 Of the land-holding families, 38.1 per cent
had less than 2.5 acres of land controlling in all 5.6 per cent of the land (16.8
per cent below one acre and 21.3 per cent between 1 and 2.5 acres). These
may be seen as semi-proletarians or as dwarf holders. 21 per cent of the
rural families held 2.5 to 5 acres of land constituting 9.9 per cent of the area.
These may be seen as the small peasants. 19.1 per cent of the families held 5
to 10 acres of land constituting 17.6 per cent of the area. These may be
regarded as the small and middle peasants. 16.2 per cent of the families held
10 to 25 acres of land constituting 32.5 per cent of the area. These may be
seen as middle and rich peasants. 4.2 per cent of the families held 25 to 50
acres of land constituting 19 per cent of the area. These were clearly the rich
peasants. 1.4 per cent of the families held 50 or more acres of land and
controlled 15.4 per cent of the area. These were the big landowners who
merged with the zamindars.16
The differentiation within the peasantry was moreover occurring all over
the country. For example, in the Punjab, in 1939, 48.8 per cent of the total
holdings were in the size up to three acres and constituted six per cent of the
entire agricultural area, while 6.3 per cent of holdings above 25 acres
constituted 52.8 per cent of the area.17 In U.P., in 1946, 55.8 per cent of the
total holdings were in the size below two acres and constituted 14.1 per cent
of the land, while 0.9 per cent of the holdings in the size over 25 acres
controlled 12.9 per cent of the area.18 In the ryotwari area of Madras, 22.8
per cent of the land owners owned less than one acre of land and 3.4 per
cent of the total land while 0.8 per cent of the lanowners owned more than
18 acres and 13.1 per cent of the total land.19

2
Agrarian Class Structure in the Post-Colonial Period

The nationalist leadership was committed at the moment of freedom to

changes in the agrarian structure. At the same time it had to evolve a new
institutional structure that would serve the needs of economic development
in the long run. From the beginning it recognized a few constraints: (1)
Industrialization, however rapid, would not absorb the vast rural
unemployed and under-employed who must therefore remain in the villages
and live off the land. Capitalist farming could also not absorb this labour
force; rather the opposite. (2) Agricultural production must grow and
agricultural surpluses must flow into the cities. The petty peasant producers
could not perform this task. Only capitalist farmers could do so. (3) In a
relatively overpopulated country like India, capitalist farmers could not be
permitted to dispossess peasant proprietors since a large and undisguisedly
unemployed proletariat would pose immense social and political dangers.
Hence the need for a new institutional structure which would be neither
feudal or semi-feudal nor wholly capitalist; and which would on the one
hand produce marketable agricultural surpluses and on the other keep the
vast rural population engaged in agriculture by preserving the small and
dwarf holder till, after decades of industrialization, it begins to be sucked
into the non-agricultural sector. This structure had to have at its base small
and dwarf peasant property and at its top rich peasant-cum-capitalist
farming. This policy had in fact been suggested during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century by Justice Ranade much of whose thinking percolated
down to the Indian planners through the political as well as the intellectual
traditions.20 Arguing against the zamindari system, which he described as
semifeudalism, Ranade pleaded for a policy of land to the tiller
accompanied by the transformation of the old zamindars into capitalist-
farmers. And, then, he wrote: “A complete divorce from land of those who
cultivate it is a national evil, and no less an evil is it to find one dead level of
small farmers all over the land. High and petty farming... this mixed
constitution of rural society is necessary to secure the stability and progress
of the country.”21 This policy of replacing landlordism by rich and middle
peasants while keeping the small, subsistence farmer-cum-commodity
producer intact so that there was no proletarianization and disintegration of
the peasantry was accepted by the Congress Party and the Government of
India after 1947.22 This policy has sometimes been attacked from the right
by those who want greater leeway for the capitalist farmer, and sometimes
from the left by those who want more equitable distribution of land. The
attack from the right has been easily met, since there has existed scope for
the growth of capitalism, and the dangers of untrammelled concentration of
land are there for all to see.. The technocratic critique that the vast mass of
small holders are economically non-viable has been met with two types of
answers. In the 1950s the promotion of agricultural cooperatives was
stressed. This policy foundered on the twin reality that no pooling of the
resourceless and the landless would be viable and cooperativization of the
rich and middle peasants’ land was beyond the limits set by the existing class
and political structure of the country. The other answer has been to use
statesupported credit and marketing structures and modern technology and
inputs to make the small peasant viable.
The left critique of the ruling agrarian strategy has also been ineffective,
for it was to a large extent based on illusory economic and political
assumptions. Firstly, it accused the ruling classes of preserving semi-
feudalism while what they were doing was to change the agrarian structure
but not by giving land to the landless tiller but by gradually transforming the
landlords into rich peasants and capitalist farmers and by making middle
and large tenants landowners. Then the left argued for land ceiling which
was easily evaded by the big landowners by dividing land among relatives
and children. Land ceiling thus did not generate land for distribution but it
did generate a large number of rich peasant holdings. The left now
demanded lower land ceilings. But this step could be productive of
significant amount of distributable land only if the rich peasant was divested
of land. This was politically not feasible for a regime which depends upon
the rich and middle peasants politically as well as economically. In fact, even
the left dared not attack the rich peasant but either tilted at the windmills of
feudalism or wanted to attack the rich peasant by calling him a semi-feudal
landlord. The fact is that the agrarian class structure of India has been now
so sharply stratified that the rich peasant confronts the proletarian and
semi-proletarian elements and he does so with the support of the middle
and even small peasants.
What has been the impact of land reforms and other policies on the
agrarian class structure? (1) The zamindars and the semi-feudal agrarian
structure have disappeared or are disappearing. But the abolition of the
major intermediaries released little land for distribution to the landless: in
fact initially some of the landholding tenants were ejected by the landlords
from the land which they were permitted to resume for self-cultivation as
rich peasants and capitalist farmers. But many of the previous tenants now
became owner-cultivators. (2) The land reform was pro-landlord in the
sense that the landlords were permitted to remain at the top of the agrarian
class structure, though they were forced gradually to change their class
status. (3) With the growth of owner-cultivation, the rural political and
social domination passed or is passing to the rich peasant. Many of the
agrarian policies, for example regarding ceilings, which are described as
reactionary by the left and are ascribed to feudalism arid landlords, are in
fact the product of the deference paid to rich peasant interests or ideology.
(4) Land ceiling succeeded in reducing big landed property but released no
land for distribution to the landless. Its main impact has been to discourage
the purchase of land by the rich peasants who therefore now use their
economic surplus to improve the land and not to buy it (at the most, they
lease it, often from the small owners). Thus capitalism in agriculture has
been strengthened without dispossession of the small cultivator and without
further concentration of land. If anything it is the rich, middle and small
peasants who have gained at the cost of the very big landowners. Instead, the
deepening of capitalism has created wider employment opportunities. (5)
The form that growth of capitalism takes is the promotion of rich peasant
farming. (6) Tenancy is very much reduced though its extent is less known
than before since it is driven underground. Tenancy is also for that reason
more difficult to fight. Moreover, the areas of advancing agriculture, which
hold up the mirror of the future to the backward areas, are virtually free of
semi-feudal tenancy. (7) At the same time, there has been a constant
increase in the number and proportion of the agricultural labourers so that
they constitute the largest social group in the countryside today. But this
increase has not come from the dispossession of the small peasantry, as is
sometimes believed. In fact, after the initial process of evictions in the 1950s,
no significant dispossession of the small peasant seems to be occurring.23
Let us take a look at the agrarian class structure as it has evolved as a
result of the land reforms and other agrarian changes. Table l24 gives the
percentage of population in different sizes of operational holdings and the
area commanded by each size of holdings. Table 225 is derived from the
survey undertaken by the Reserve Bank of India in 1971-72. It, however,
provides only the percentage of households in each size holding and is given
here only for comparative purposes.

TABLE 1
 Tables 1 and 2 are not strictly comparable since the population in a
household goes up with the size of operated holding. We have, therefore,
based our discussion on Table 1 only.
Land control is thus highly unequal if the entire rural population is taken
to constitute the peasantry. But if we take out the 48 per cent who really
constitute not small peasants but in Lenin’s phraseology proletarians and
semi-proletarians (similarly, the rich peasants are best described as the rural
bourgeoisie and the middle peasant as the rural petty bourgeoisie. The
differentiation on the basis of rich, medium and small peasants still implies
that they are part of the same class), we get, as Table 326 shows, a picture of
viable landowning classes which resembles in terms of inequality and
differentiation, though not in the extent of land owned, the European
peasantry including that of Italy, France and Germany of the modem
times.27

TABLE 2
 TABLE 3

Among the landowners the inequality is not very skewed; and this is
particularly so for the landholders above five acres. The ruling groups have
been and are making every attempt to keep these groups stable and viable
both through legislation and economic policies. Moreover, these groups play
an important part in local and regional politics and have, therefore, the
capacity to protect their interests. Any policy of land ceilings to be effective
must propose the extreme egalitarian step of family holding being limited to
a single family size holding. Politically, this step would be no less radical
than the proposal to collectivize land. This is especially so because of the
relative equality and therefore solidarity between the ‘effective’ peasants.
The real problem for the ruling classes is posed by the 48 per cent who
have no or virtually no land, who cannot be provided adequate employment
or standard of living, and who can never again be reintegrated into the
‘peasantry. Yet, if they become conscious of their changed social position,
their politics will turn against the capitalist system itself. To prevent this
class awareness from emerging, to keep them satisfied when the existing
social structure is incapable of satisfying them, this is the task of politics and
ideology. Part of this burden is taken up by the notion of their being a part
of the peasantry and to keep this illusion going the El Dorado of land
distribution is held up before them. The dwarf holders are given just enough
land to keep their notions and hopes of being owner-peasants alive.
Moreover, this also prevents unity among all those who are really and
historically permanentfy landless. The rest of the burden is assumed by the
notions of social uplift and national integration which do have a great deal
of basis in real life. The question here is: are these 48 per cent proletarians
and semi-proletarians along with the 34 per cent small and medium
peasants or rural petty bourgeoisie to constitute the nation or are they, in the
name of national integration, to wait for decades outside the pale of society
till capitalism develops sufficiently to reintegrate them into the ‘nation’?

3
Peasantry and National Integration before 1947

The leadership of the Indian national movement desired the peasantry’s

integration with the nation and the national movement in order to
strengthen the striking capacity of the anti-imperialist forces. Stung by the
taunt of representing merely the ‘microscopic minority’ of the educated few
—the babus— and more or less ignored by colonial authorities, it embarked
on the course of wider social mobilisation, including that of the peasantry,
to be able to put greater pressure on the colonial rulers to meet its constantly
rising demands. This change in nationalist policy coincided with the period
when the full consequences of colonialism for the Indian peasant were
coming to the surface, moving him into an era of spreading discontent and
economic and political struggle.
(A) To integrate the peasantry into the national movement, the nationalist
leadership promoted two integrative principles. Firstly, the notion of the
peasantry or kisan as a single cohesive social group or one happy family.
One purpose was to overcome the peasantry’s division on caste, communal,
or local bases. The notion of the kisan or peasantry had within it certain
elements of class cohesion and even consciousness. These elements were
later asserted and utilised by radical peasant leadership. But the notion was
not promoted by the nationalist leadership with a view to promote or
accentuate the class struggle against the zamindars and landlords. Rather, it
was seen as an instrument for overcoming the internally divisive tendencies
which weakened the united national struggle against imperialism.
Consequently, despite the large scale propagation of the ‘ideology’ of a single
peasantry or of the kisan, peasant ‘class’ consciousness remained on the
whole at a very low level and did not, in fact, exist at all in several parts of
the country. Peasant consciousness spread very slowly and only when
zamindars and landlords were gradually politically isolated.
The notion of the peasantry as a social group was also used to paper over
the rapidly emerging differentiation within it. In fact, it was even used to
integrate the small and ruined landlords with the peasantry.
The second integrative principle was aimed at making the peasants feel
part of the nation. This was achieved not only by stressing that peasant
interests must predominate in the national movement, but that, further, the
peasantry was the nation, or at least its basic constituent. It is on this ground
that the dominant National Congress leadership frowned upon the separate
organization of kisans. As a resolution passed at the Haripura Session of the
Congress in 1938 asserted: “The Congress has already fully recognized the
right of kisans to organize themselves in peasant unions. Nevertheless it
must be remembered that the Congress itself is in the main a kisan
organization.”28 (Emphasis added).
(B) The objective justification for the Indian nationalist leadership’s efforts
to integrate the peasantry within itself and with the rest of the nation lay,
firstly, in the fact, so well brought out in the works of R. Palme Dutt and
A.R. Desai, that the peasantry’s primary contradiction during this period lay
with imperialism. Hence, the anti-imperialist movement did not merely
‘exploit’ the peasants’ mass strength or place its interests at the command of
the bourgeoisie or middle clas ses, as a certain spurious pro-colonial
‘radicalism’ would have it. It represented to a certain extent the anti-colonial
‘radicalism’ would have it. It represented to a certain extent the anti-colonial
interests of the peasantry. Starting with Dadabhai Naoroji and Justice
Ranade and ending with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the
national leadership’s effort to grasp and explain rural poverty with reference
to colonialism and in the context of the anti-imperialist struggle was
certainly more advanced than the efforts of the colonial authorities and
imperialist writers to explain it outside the colonial framework or than even
the understanding of the leaders of the spontaneous militant peasant
movements of the nineteenth century.
Secondly, with the unification and integration of India, including its
agriculture, economically and politically during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, it became essential that the peasants should learn to
think and act to protect their interests on an all-India plane. For that they
must feel and know that they were part of larger national entities—the
peasantry and the nation. Both these aspects came to be fully recognized by
the peasant movement when it developed autonomously during the 1930s
and 1940s. The peasant movement stressed the importance of the anti-
imperialist struggle for the social development of the peasantry and its own
role in this struggle. In fact, it constantly struggled after 1936 to acquire
greater weight in the nationalist leadership and the national struggle.
Moreover, it was not as if the peasantry or its movements were ‘utilized’
by the national leadership or were ‘sacrificed’ at the altar of nationalism—
ironically this charge was to be made with a vengeance later by certain
conservative ‘peasantists’ against the entire left, socialist and communist
leadership the world over.29 Nationalism helped arouse the peasant and
awaken him to his own needs, demands and above all the possibility of an
active role in social and political development. Nationalism helped the
peasant movement to ‘stand on its feet’, to spread and take roots in the 1920s
and 1930s. It gave cohesion to the peasants, created a sense of solidarity
among them, and taught them elements of modem organization,
overcoming the utterly disjointed and local character of the peasant
movements of the nineteenth century when the more widespread
movements had been held together by religion or by the top zamindar
leadership. Even later, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Kisan Sabha leadership,
getting distanced from the national leadership by its sectarianism, failed to
build a genuine all-India peasant movement or to organize large India-wide
agitations. In fact, the peasant movement as also the national movement
could have overcome and transcended the weaknesses of the nationalist
leadership and its pattern of national integration not by counterposing
peasant interests to bourgeois nationalism but by better integration of
peasantry with the national movement, by more vigorous anti-imperialism,
and by trying to establish a different pattern of class leadership over the
movement.
The linkage between the national and the peasant movements has been
brought out with great clarity by two recent scholars, Majid Siddiqi and K.N.
Panikkar. At the end of his study of the peasant movements in U.P. from
1920 to 1922, Siddiqi concludes: “The association of the kisans with national
politics helped both the peasant movements as well as the political
movements for they drew sustenance from and gave support to each other at
different stages....The movement from below was thus given an initial boost
by the cohesion that politics lent to it.”30 Similarly, K.N. Panikkar concludes
his paper on the peasant revolts in Malabar during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries by referring to the merger of the peasant and national
movements in 1921: “This coalition created a sense of cohesion and
solidarity among the peasantry. It also provided them an effective
organization.”31
(C) The negative aspects of the Indian nationalist pattern of peasantry’s
integration into the national movement lay in three of its important features:
(i) Ignoring the basic features of colonial agrarian structure, the national
leadership on the whole curbed the anti-landlord struggle. Its dominant
sections were opposed to anti-landlord ideologies, policies, and agitations.
They opposed all anti-landlord activities of the peasantry in the name of
nonviolence and the unity of the anti-imperialist struggle. Separate class
organizations of the peasantry, it was said, divided and weakened the
national movement. Opposing the independent mobilisation of the
peasantry, they favoured peasant mobilisation only when it was a part of the
broader national mobilisation against imperialism. Thus Gandhi advised the
agitating peasants of U.P. in February 1921: “You should bear a little if the
zamindar torments you. We do not want to fight with the zamindars....
Zamindars are also slaves and we do not want to trouble them.”32 In May
1921, he again wrote:33

...it is not contemplated that at any stage of non-cooperation we would

seek to derive the zamindars of their rent. The kisan movement must be
confined to the improvement of the status of the kisans and the
betterment of the relations between the zamindars and them. The
kisans must be advised scrupulously to abide by the terms of their
agreement with the zamindars, whether such agreement is written or
inferred from custom.
Similarly, in the Congress Working Committee resolution suspending the
Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922, two out of the ten clauses
concentrated on the ‘legal’ rights of the zamindars.34 In the early 1930s, the
Congress Working Committee twice assured the zamindars that it was not
opposed to them and that it opposed “the confiscation of property” and ‘
class war”.35 Even the leadership of the U.P. Congress, which was much more
to the left on the agrarian question and was supporting and organizing
peasant agitation against high rent, felt it necessary in order to assure the all-
India leadership to state publicly that it worked for “harmony between
zamindars and tenants” and did not preach class war.36
The Congress leadership concentrated, almost exclusively with the
exception of U.P. in 1920-22 and 1930-32, on mobilising the peasants
around the anti-imperialist demand of lowering the crushing burden of land
revenue and other taxes such as salt tax. Gandhi’s peasant campaigns dealt
almost exclusively with issues of opposition to the British administration or,
in one case, British planters. The famous Eleven Points of Gandhi in 1930
included two peasant demands: 50 per cent reduction of land tax and
abolition of salt tax,37 and at the height of the world depression, when the
Indian peasantry was sinking under the burden of rent, usury, and land
revenue, he sought to mobilise the peasants on the question of salt tax
because this alone could unite the peasants from ryotwari as well as
zamindari areas without simultaneously affecting the zamindars.
It may be suggested that the basic critique here should not be that the
national leadership did not promote the anti-feudal revolution with the
slogan of land to the tiller. That would have thrown the landlords, big as well
as small, into the ‘lap’ of imperialism. Not only was it not possible for an all-
class nationalist front to do so, but in view of the strength of British
imperialism before 1939 would perhaps have been bad shortterm tactics and
therefore politically short sighted, for the aim of any effective anti-
imperialist movement had to be the complete isolation of the enemy. The
large number of small and medium landlords in the country need not have
been handed over to imperialism as allies. The need to unite and mobilise
varied interests and diverse classes and social strata into a wide national
front and to neutralise those who could not be so united might indicate a
policy of compromise between internally antagonistic classes, the
underplaying of their mutual contradictions and the balancing of their
conflicting interests.
But the balancing of conflicting interests precisely means both sides
making sacrifices and providing accommodation. If there was to be a class
compromise, on what terms was it to occur? Whose interests would the
compromise serve? Was the compromise genuine or did it mask a surrender
on the part of some classes and groups? Granted that abolition of
landlordism was not to be demanded, how far were the other demands of
the peasants against rack rent, evictions, forced labour, illegal exactions, and
the debt burden and for security of tenure and fair wages for labour fought
for and secured? Even the peasant organization showed enough political
realism to distinguish between their long-term and short-term demands.38
If it was not possible to go as far as the Communists, why not at least go as
far as Jawaharlal Nehru? Even in 1930-32, Nehru and other left
Congressmen fought not for no-rent but fair and just rent.39 Certainly, it
should have been possible for any genuine social compromise to
accommodate most of the immediate demands of the peasants.
 Yet, precisely this was not done. In the name of national unity against
imperialism, the peasants’ class interests were more or less completely
sacrificed. National integration was promoted at the peasants’ unilateral cost.
For years the National Congress failed to evolve a broadbased agrarian
programme. All the three major movements launched by Gandhi, namely,
those of 1920, 1930 and 1942, started without any such programme. Gandhi
and the national leadership offered to the peasant at the most a few “mildly
ameliorative, ‘self-help’ measures” in the name of the constructive
programme. They placed almost their entire emphasis on Swaraj and the
vague talk of agrarian change. The landlords were to be kept in the national
movement by guaranteeing protection of their basic class interests, the peasants
were to be mobilized through the ideology of nationalism.
In the 1930s, some of the anti-landlord peasant demands were taken up
and in one case, that of U.P. in 1930-32, a genuine compromise between the
landlords and tenants was put forward when the U.P. Congress and Gandhi
demanded in 1930 that occupancy tenants should be given a relief of 50 per
cent and the non-occupancy ryots a relief of 60 per cent in their rent
payments. Later in 1931, Gandhi reduced the demand to a relief of 25 to 50
per cent respectively. But despite peasants’ militancy these demands were
not pressed by Gandhi and the all-India national leadership.40 As S. Gopal
has noted, Gandhi in the end “roundly condemned pressure being brought
on landlords, direct appeals not to pay, the proposal of a general 50 per cent
reduction of rent and any refusal to pay less than what was within the
individual’s capacity.”41 It is also to be noted that in Bihar, where
conservative Gandhians held stricter control over the Congress leadership,
the nationalists did not take up any of the major peasant demands against
the landlords. Not only kisans were to be restrained, the leadership was also
to restrain itself.42
Preparing for the elections of 1937 and trying to appease the left within
the Congress ranks as well as to contain its challenge, the dominant
Congress leadership took up with varying degrees of clarity some of the
immediate demands for reduction of land revenue, rent, irrigation rates, and
debt burden, abolition of all feudal dues and levies, moratorium on debt
payments, exemption of uneconomic holdings from revenue and rent,
cancellation of rent arrears, ban on evictions, fixity of tenure with heritable
rights, provisions of cheap credit, abolition of begar (forced labour) and
illegal exactions, living wage for agricultural labourers, imposition of
progressive income-tax on agricultural incomes, promotion of cooperative
farming, and recognition of peasant unions.43 But the Congress organized
hardly any agitations, struggles, or even educational campaigns around these
demands. The record of the Congress ministries from 1937 to 1939 was in
this respect quite dismal. Their agrarian legislation was weak and meagre,
the only significant relief being given vis-a-vis the money-lenders 44 Above
all their attitude towards the peasant movements was not favourable. While
the landlords were consulted and accommodated at every stage, the efforts
of the peasant unions to put pressure through mass mobilization were
condemned and suppressed both at the party and administrative levels.45 In
anger, Nehru wrote to G.B. Pant, the Chief Minister of U.P.: “...the Congress
Ministries are tending to become counter-revolutionary. This is of course
not a conscious development, but when a choice has to be made the
inclination is in this direction. Apart from this the general attitude is
static”.46
There are some indications that Gandhi’s attitude towards the agrarian
question was beginning to change in the last phase of his life. On 9 June
1942, he told Louis Fischer in answer to his question: “What is your
programme for the improvement of the lot of the peasantry?”47 that “the
peasants would take the land. We would not have to tell them to take it. They
would take it.” And when Fischer asked, “Would the landlords be
compensated?”, he replied: “No, that would the fiscally impossible.” In
another interview two days later, Fischer asked: “Well, how do you actually
see your impending civil disobedience movement?” Gandhi replied: “In the
villages, the peasants will stop paying taxes. They will make salt despite
official prohibition.... Their next step will be to seize the land.” “With
violence?” asked Fischer. Gandhi replied: “There may be violence, but then
again the landlords may cooperate.... They might cooperate by fleeing.”
Fischer said that the landlords “might organize violent resistance.” Gandhi’s
reply was: “There may be fifteen days of chaos but I think we could soon
bring that under control.” Did this mean, asked Fischer, that there must be
“confiscation without compensation?” Gandhi replied: “Of course. It would
be financially impossible for anybody to compensate the landlords.”48
Similarly, he told Mirabehn in jail that after independence zamindars’ land
would be taken by the state either through their voluntary surrender or
through legislation and then distributed to the cultivators.49 By 1946, he
even acknowledged that there had always been class struggle in history and
that it could be ended if the capitalists voluntarily renounced their social
role and became workers. After all, he said, capital is really created by labour
and not by the capitalists.50 But this intellectual and ideological development
came too late to affect the national leadership and the Indian bourgeoisie
which were by now ready to ‘ditch’ him with all his ‘idiosyncracies’. For
Gandhi himself, the understanding was too hazy, too much outside the
framework of his overall thought to lead to meaningful political activity. It
was more an expression of his integrity and constant search to grasp the
reality and. in the end, of the profound personal and political tragedy that
was beginning to surround him in his last years. For what could be more
tragic than that this great and moral man had created a framework of
bourgeois politics and set a pattern of leadership which had no place for his
own honest doubts.
To resume our analysis, it is to be noted that in 1945-46 the Congress did
accept the objective of abolition of all intermediaries,51 an objective which
was actually accomplished in the post-war years but in an anti-peasant way
so that semifeudalism or landlordism was attacked and gradually and largely
abolished but without benefiting the mass of lower peasantry. It is to be
noted that neither the pre-independence nor the post-independence
National Congress pressed for even simple ameliorative measures for the
ordinary tenant-at-will or share-cropper or the agricultural labourer.
Moreover in its various agitations, the demands and interests of these classes
and strata were more or less completely by-passed.
Why was all this so? It may by suggested that this extremely weak and
compromising policy towards the landlords was not adopted in the main
because of deference to the interests and wishes of big landlords (i.e.,
jagirdars, talukdars, and big zamindars), against whom the post-
independence land reforms were to be aimed. This policy was much more
the result of deference to the interests and outlook of the following five
strata:
(a) The property-owning conservative instincts of the emerging stratum
of rich peasants who were increasingly taking to landlordism and money-
lending and who tended to dominate both the mass national movement in
the countryside and the emerging peasant organizations and movements. In
the zamindari areas their main interest lay in the security of tenure and
transfer of land ownership to the occupancy tenant and in the ryotwari areas
in lower land revenue and in curbing the all-pervading money-lender-
merchant who was both their oppressor and their competitor.
(b) The small and ruined landlords whose deteriorating economic
condition led them to participate in a big way in the national movement and
even in the peasant movements in the 1920s and 1930s and whose
established social position in the village and relatively higher standard of
education enabled them to acquire leadership positions in these movements.
It is interesting that when in 1935-36 the Bihar peasant leader Swami
Sahajanand Saraswati did accept the programme of zamindari abolition, he
simultaneously declared that only big zamindars were zamindars while petty
zamindars were peasants.52 Earlier, he had resigned in protest against a
socialist majority resolution of the Bihar Kisan Sabha executive demanding
zamindari abolition on the ground that this would alienate those Kisan
Sabha supporters who were small zamindars and large tenants.53
(c) The professional and other members of the middle classes and
intelligentsia, who lived and worked in small towns around the villages, who
often took to petty landlordism and had money-lending connections, and
who also formed the back-bone of the national movement in these semi-
rural areas.
(d) Merchants and money-lenders with their direct links with the
commercial, usurious and rental exploitation of the peasantry.
(e) The class instincts of the bourgeoisie as a propertied group. These
instincts are never radical not to speak of being revolutionary.
The fact that the Indian national movement relied so heavily on electoral
politics and that too on the narrow electoral franchise base of the top 10 to
15 per cent of population made it heavily dependent on these classes and
strata. In the rural areas, in particular, the rich peasants and small landlords
constituted the bulk of voters. On the other hand, the mass of poor peasants
and agricultural labourers had no votes.
(ii) A second major weakness of the national movement was that even at
the level of purely anti-government demands the peasant movement was not
permitted to acquire a broad sweep. The agitations were sought to be limited
to the specific demands of very specific groups, and were often designed to
secure immediate relief. No wide mobilisation of the peasantry occurred
even around Congress-led peasant movements outside U.P., where too the
movement was designed to get relief to sections of the peasantry really hard
hit by the depression. The Champaran and Kaira movements were rather
narrow in scope though quite significant in their political impact. The
Guntur no-tax campaign of 1921 was quickly curbed. The Bardoli
Satyagraha of 1928 was declared by its leader, Sardar Patel, to be non-
political.54 After 1937, the Congress ministries frowned upon any effort to
organize peasant demonstrations even in support of the Congress agrarian
programme.55 It is, moreover, not accidental that Gandhi and the Congress
did not organize a single general no-tax campaign.
(iii) Thirdly, the politics and the political and class consciousness of the
agricultural labourers and poor peasants were completely dominated by the
politics and the political and class consciousness of the rich peasants and
landlords.
Thus from the point of view of the rural poor both aspects of national
integration were flawed. The national leadership’s conception of the nation
subordinated their interests and politics to those of the urban bourgeoisie
and its conception of the peasantry to those of the landlords and the
emerging rural bourgeoisie.
(D) The Indian nationalist pattern of national integration showed major
weaknesses even at the level of nationalism or the anti-imperialist struggle.
(i) Because the class demands of the mass of peasants were not taken up
and reliance was placed almost entirely on the anti-imperialist appeal, the
level of the peasant participation in the struggle remained rather low, except
in a few areas for a short time and in a few areas of Communist-led peasant
movements. The propertied peasants had too much to lose to be willing or
able to sustain a movement for long in the face of severe governmental
repression. The result was that the largely urban based nationalist movement
could not be sustained beyond a short period of one to two years.
Consequently, without large scale, effective mass peasant participation,
the nationalist movement could at no stage go beyond the strategy of
Pressure-Compromise-Pressure or P-C-P56 and often found it difficult to
implement even this strategy by bringing enough pressure to bear upon the
Government.
(ii) In several areas, the peasant-landlord and the peasantmerchant-
money-lender contradictions coincided with religious or caste divisions.
This enabled the communal and casteist forces to augment their appeal with
class and economic appeal, just as the class appeal tended to take on
religious or casteist colouring. Thus, in the Punjab, the landlords and rich
peasants and the colonial authorities first used for years the casteist politics
around the concept of agriculturist castes and later, after 1937, turned to
Muslim communalism. The merchant-money-lenders too tried to protect
their interest by appealing to Hindu communalism. In Bengal, the Muslim
peasantry struggled hard to generate a secular peasant movement against
primarily Hindu landlords and money-lenders, but succumbed in the end to
Muslim communalism when faced with the pro-landlord or very weak anti-
landlord nationalism of the Bengal Congress and the Hindu tinge of much
of the national leadership. In Kerala, the militant tenant movement of 1920-
21 had ended up with elements of communal passion. In Maharashtra,
Andhra, and Tamilnadu the cultivators and landlords had ranged on the
opposite scales of the caste hierarchy.
In all such situations, the nationalist pattern of peasant and national
integration could not succeed without incorporating some elements of class
struggle. The refusal of the dominant national leadership to do so resulted in
the failure of national integration in the Punjab and Bengal where the
communal forces prevailed ultimately. The reverse was the case in Kerala,
Andhra, North-Western Frontier Province and to a certain extent in U.P.
where nationalism based on agrarian radicalism overcame by and large
communal and caste identities. The failure in the Punjab and Bengal was a
major factor in the eventual partition of the country.
In all these cases, it becomes clear that national integration could have
come only through class consciousness and that, contrary to the dominant
nationalist view, not only did the peasant ‘class’ consciousness not divide
Indian society in the face of imperialism, it was the only effective means of
opposing disintegrative communal and caste ideologies and movements
which objectively aided imperialism. National unity and integration had to
be based on a conscious political programme of uniting different classes and
not of ignoring class differences or of subordinating the interests of the rural
poor to the interests of the rural rich. In India, a programme of amorphous,
non-class integration failed to check the growth of social integration based
on varieties of modem false consciousness using elements of traditional
culture, value, and institutions.
(E) It is of course to be noted that the peasantry and the peasant
movement also failed to throw up better principles of integration for itself
and for the nation. The peasantry did not produce its own ideologues or
organic intellectuals or its own thought or even its own organisers. It is
interesting that a peasant party did not emerge in any part of the country.
The politics of the politically aroused peasants tended to be guided by the
left nationalists who used the glamour surrounding the notion of peasantry
to integrate the radical urban youth and small town intelligentsia into the
national movement and around a vague pro-peasant programme that did
not go beyond ameliorative measures or the bounds of a purely anti-
imperialist programme.
(F) The Communist and other left groups showed a better awareness of
the anti-feudal demands of the peasantry but they too on the whole failed In
the two directions in which the nationalist leadership had failed.
To a certain extent the left did not place sufficient emphasis on political
work among the peasants. They failed to raise anti-feudal consciousness and
create and promote the awareness of their own class position among the
peasants. Though they showed a certain awareness of the emerging class
differentiation and divisions within the peasantry, they failed to make a
serious study of the phenomenon or to create its awareness among the
peasants, especially among the dwarf holders and agricultural labourers.
Though they succeeded in creating a certain peasant ‘class’ cohesion against
the landlords wherever the peasant movement was under their guidance,
they failed to guard the peasant movement against the rich peasant or even
small landlord domination. As Swami Sahajanand Saraswati recognized in
1944 in his most radical phase, it was “really the middle and big cultivators
(who were)...for the most part with the Kisan Sabha” and “they are using the
Kisan Sabha for their benefit and gain...” The Swami now pleaded for basing
the Kisan Sabha exclusively on the agricultural labourers and poor
peasants.57
Moreover, with some exceptions, as in Bengal during the Tebhaga
agitation, even when the class position of the tenants-at-will, sharecroppers
and agricultural labourers was recognized in theory and in the programmes,
in practice few agitations and little struggle was organized around their
demands and interests. Quite often just as the Congress leadership sacrificed
the interests of the peasants to those of the landlords in the name of national
unity, the left tended to sacrifice the interests of the rural proletarians and
semiproletarians to those of the rural bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie in
the name of peasant unity.
A very important failure of the left lay in the fact that, while emphasizing
the independent class mobilization of the peasants as peasants outside the
framework of the national movement, it failed to establish a strong link
between the anti-feudal and ‘economic’ consciousness of the peasants and anti-
imperialism Its tendency to place much greater emphasis on purely
economic demands resulted in the lesser political role of the peasantry as
well as in the lower level development of the peasant movement in extent
and depth. The historical task was to simultaneously take up the peasants’
class demands and to make them more militant anti-imperialists. Merely to
make the criticism, which is made by many contemporary and later left-
wing writers, that the national movement subordinated peasant demands to
nationalism is inadequate and does not explain why the left, which followed
the advice of being more thoroughly and militantly anti-feudal, made little
headway among the peasants, except in Kerala and to a certain extent in
Andhra where it combined both. Any effort to keep the peasant movement
away from the anti-imperialist stream weakened the peasant movement itself
For example, in U.P. in 1921, the liberal-dominated U.P. Kisan Sabha’s effort
to keep peasant agitation separate from the nationalist Non-cooperation
Movement failed and resulted in its own dis-integration even though its
demands were more militant than the pro-Congress Kisan Sabha’s.58
Similarly, when the Bihar Kisan Sabha and its popular leader Sahajanand
Saraswati took a stand opposed to the national movement in 1942, their
influence declined sharply among the Bihar peasants.59 The Communists
also went into virtual wilderness during 1930-34 because of the failure to
establish a correct relationship with the contemporary national movement.
The fact was that while the nationalist leadership failed to mobilise the
peasantry because of their neglect of peasants’ class demands, the left too
failed because of the failure to establish a correct linkage with the peasantry’s
anti-imperialist feelings. Here, obviously, the correct policy would have been
to ‘walk on two legs’.

4
Peasantry and National Integration after 1947

The post-1947 period marked a major change insofar as the country won
political independence and state power was no longer exercised by alien
rulers who were interested in accentuating the forces of national
disintegration. But the process of peasantry’s integration into the nation had
not been completed and therefore continued. The forces of national
disintegration have made repeated appearance sometimes involving sections
of the peasantry. Objectively too agriculture has been becoming more and
more national. The dominant political leadership has been making efforts to
mobilise the peasantry for national capitalist development which now
performs the unifying role played earlier by anti-imperialism. The all-India
parties, the electoral process, spread of education, the modern mass media,
and to a lesser extent the all-India peasant organizations and the national
army have been major instruments of national integration.
(A) The task of national integration still had a few positive and unfinished
aspects and has been, therefore, supported by most of the political parties
and politically conscious Indians:
 (i) India had to struggle constantly for economic independence and
against the constant threat of neo-colonialism. National unity is a basic
aspect of the defence and growth of political and economic independence.
(ii) National and economic reconstruction could occur only on a national
plane. The notion of the development of Indian society still exercised, and
exercises, a great pull over the minds of the people.
(iii) In view of the political, economic, administrative, and constitutional
unification of India, political power could be used, as well as captured, in the
end only on a national plane.
(iv) More specifically, the interests of the rural masses in land reforms,
higher wages, agricultural prices vis-a-vis industrial prices, allocation of
state funds, and even social and cultural development—law of inheritance,
social position of women, education, radio, films, etc.—could be best and
successfully fought for only on a national scale.
(v) Socially divisive forces such as caste, communalism and linguism
which affected national integration also impinged upon and disrupted the
economic and political struggle, that is, the class struggles, of the different
sections of the rural masses. These forces have retained a strong hold over
the Indian people, including the rural masses. They still had to be overcome.
For example, caste was and is still used by the dominant rural strata, earlier
headed by the landlords and now mostly by the rich peasants, to keep the
lower classes down and to unite around themselves the middle and small
peasants of the same caste. These divisive forces have remained quite strong
partially because of the fact that little was done before 1947 or after to
spread modem ideas among the peasantry and to actively uproot the old
obscurantist ideas and culture.
(B) While the goal of national unity and national development was
certainly positive in the historical situation, it could not be achieved in the
old way. Gradually, after 1947, the negative aspects of the traditional pattern
of peasantry’s integration into the nation have been acquiring greater
weight. The further unification of the nation could be carried out not under
the slogans of a nation and a peasantry without classes, for there no longer
existed a common alien enemy, but only by identifying the new national but
internal enemy or enemies within both the nation and the village. National
integration had now to proceed through democracy, class struggle,
farreaching socio-economic transformation, and socialism.
(i) It is now widely recognized that benefits of agricultural development
since 1951 have in the main gone to the rich and middle peasants. Apart
from the class configuration, a major factor in this has been the notion of
the peasantry forming a homogenous class, “an integrated rural society”, and
a single village or rural community.60 Thus the Indian planning process was
initiated under the slogan of “community development” for the “rural
sector”. Rural cooperatives and the Panchayati Raj have also been built on
the same assumption of “class fusion.”61 Moreover, the concept of village
community was consciously put forward and advanced as an alternative to
the notions of class cleavage and class struggle in the countryside. The
Community Development Programme, Panchayati Raj, and rural
cooperatives were to become instruments of aggrandizement in the hands of
the rich peasant and landlord-turned-farmer who emerged politically
extremely powerful partly as a result of the adult franchise.
(ii) Above all the ideology of a single peasantry or kisans has prevented
the fuller emergence of class struggle in the countryside.
This ideology increasingly became after 1947—as even before 1947—an
instrument of the rich peasant-small landlord domination over the by now
distinctly emerging social strata or even classes of the small, impoverished
peasants—the dwarf holders—and the landless agricultural labourers. The
notion of the peasantry has hidden the fact, brought out in section 2 above,
that the emerging and even dominating tendency in the Indian countryside
is the division of the peasantry into the rural bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie,
semi-proletarians, and proletarians. Of course, often and simultaneously the
rural upper strata use the divisive ideologies of caste and communalism for
the same purpose.
An important point of difference with the pre-independence period needs
to be noted in this respect. During that period, the entire peasantry was
objectively anti-imperialist, even though different peasant strata had
different interests. But after 1947 the different agrarian classes and strata
have hardly anything in common.
 The powerful position of the rich peasant in the countryside, in the state
legislatures and governments and even at the Centre, aided by the notion of
peasantry, explains both the slow pace of agrarian reform and the failure of
the left-wing parties to organize the agricultural labourers and dwarf holders
except in Kerala and a few other small pockets.
This ideology of their being a peasantry—even if formally divided into
rich, middle, and poor peasantry—formed the basis of much of left-wing
peasant activity, including that of the CPI, CPM, and CP(ML) groups. This
was the basis of their view, held in common, whatever their other
differences, that the chief political task in rural India (or even in India as a
whole) was the making and completion of the anti-feudal revolution.
Consequently, in an effort to organize peasants on an all-class basis (barring
the semi-mythical feudal lord) the organization of the rural proletarians and
semi-proletarians was neglected if not completely ignored.
One political and social consequence was the continuing hold of
conservative political forces on the agricultural labourers.
In contrast to the left, the peasant radicals have instinctively responded to
the changes in rural class structure and advanced the slogan of equality in
place of class struggle, change of social system, etc. The ruling political
leadership has also increasingly adopted this objective of equality thus
confining agrarian radicalism within the ambit of peasant outlook. This
slogan of course makes a powerful appeal to the small and middle peasant,
the low caste agricultural labourer, and even the rich peasant who sees it in
the context of the marked difference between his style of life and that of the
urban bourgeoisie or even middle classes.
(iii) The notion of the peasantry as a class has also led the left to ignore
the historically specific problems of the lower caste rural poor, whose caste
has been and is being used to keep them down. Today this aspect cannot be
seen as a ‘feudal’ survival. This is a specific historical form through which
the rich peasants and small landlords keep down the agricultural workers
and the dwarf-holding sharecroppers and tenants-at-will. This neglect has
enabled the bourgeois and the petty bourgeois elements belonging to these
lower castes to mobilise the rural poor behind their own politics and
interests. Of course, as pointed out earlier, the higher castes also use caste to
keep the small and middle peasants behind them. Struggle against the caste
system is needed to break up both these artificial unities.
(iv) The notions of the peasantry as part of a single nation and as a single
class have also prevented the unity of the exploited rural poor with the
exploited of the urban areas and the radical intelligentsia. Consequently, as
before 1947, certain parties such as the Bharatiya Lok Dal (or BLD) in its
various incarnations and the Akalis have been trying to raise the false
urban-rural dichotomy.
(iv) The notions of the peasantry as part of a single nation and as a single
class have also prevented the unity of the exploited rural poor with the
exploited of the urban areas and the radical intelligentsia. Consequently, as
before 1947, certain parties such as the Bharatiya Lok Dal (or BLD) in its
various incarnations and the Akalis have been trying to raise the false
urban-rural dichotomy.62

NOTES

Presented in August 1976 at the 30th International Congress of Human

Sciences in Asia and North Africa, Mexico.
1 S.J. Patel, 1952, p. 148.

2 George Blyn, pp. 102, 119, 122.

3 Manilal B. Nanavati, p. 374.

4 Bhowani Sen, p. 103.

5 Report of the United Provinces Zamindari Abolition Committee, p. 343.

6 E. Stokes, p. 114. Also see pp. 129-32.

7 Asok Sen, Table III.

8 Bipan Chandra, 1972, pp. 96-99.

9 All-India Rural Credit Survey, Vol. II, p. 167.

10 Computed from Agricultural Labour Enquiry, Rural Man-Power and Occupational Structure, p. 9.
11 S.J. Patel, 1956, p. 7.

12 All-India Rural Credit Survey, Vol. II, p. 167.

13 S.J. Patel, 1952, p. 148.

14 Ibid.

15 Agricultural Labour Enquiry, Vol. I, Appendix VII, Table I.

16 Ibid., Table II.

17 G. Kotovsky, p. 12

18 H.D. Malaviya, p. 107.

19 Ibid.. p. 179.

20 M.G. Ranade, Chapters X, XI, XII. Also see Bipan Chandra, 1966, pp. 486ff.

21 M.G. Ranade, p. 287.

22 See Tarlok Singh, pp. 300ff; Bhowani Sen, Chapter VIII.

23 See Talib and Majid, B.N. Ganguli, V.S. Vyas, and Sheila Bhalla.

24 Utsa Patnaik, 1975, Table I.

25 Derived from the Ail India Debt and Investment Survey, 1971-72, Vol. I, Table 2, p. 17.

26 Derived from Table 1 in the text.

27 See, for example, the following tables:

1. Landholdings in Italy in 1945

2. Landholdings in France in 1908

3. Landholdings in England in 1873

4. Landholdings in Germany in 1907

Based on S.B. Clough, pp. 326, 322, 319, 323 respectively

28 The resolution went on to add: “While fully recognising the right of the kisans to organize Kisan

Sabhas, the Congress cannot associate itself with any activities which are incompatibly with the basic
principles of the Congress and will not countenance any of the activities of those Congressmen who as
members of the Kisan Sabhas help in creating an atmosphere hostile to Congress principles and
policy. The Congress, therefore, calls upon Provincial Congress Committees to bear the above in mind
and in pursuance of it take suitable action wherever called for.” Indian National Congress 1938- 39, pp.
16-17.
29 For this criticism by a radical sociologist, see D.N. Dhanagre, ‘The Politics of Survival’, p. 49.

30 M.H. Siddiqi, pp. 216-17.

31 K.N. Panikkar, p. 627.

32 Quoted from Home Political Deposit, File No. 87, 1921, quoted in M.H. Siddiqi, p. 180. For another

version of the speech, see Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. XIX, p. 352.
33 Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. XX, p. 106.
34 The resolution said: “Complaints having been brought to the notice of the Working Committee

that ryots are not paying rent of the zamindars, the Working Committee advises Congress workers
and organizations to inform the ryots that such withholding of rents is contrary to the resolutions of
the Congress and that it is injurious to the best interests of the country. The Working Committee
assures the zamindars that the Congress movement is in no way intended to attack their legal rights
and that even where the ryots have grievances the Committee’s desire is that redress should be sought
by mutual consultations and by the usual recourse to arbitration.” The Indian National Congress 1920-
23, p. 178.
35 Resolutions passed in its meetings on 29 December 1931 to 1 January 1932, and 17 and 18 June

1934. The Indian National Congress 1930-34, pp. 138 and 184-85.
36 R. Crane, p. 59; and S. Gopal, p. 164.

37 P. Sitaramayya, pp. 619-20.

38 See R. Crane, pp. 86-88; and W. Hauser, pp. 95-96, 107.

39 Nehru, Autobiography, pp. 312 and 232.

40 See S. Gopal, pp. 155-57; R. Crane, pp. 59-60. Also see Gandhi’s letter to Emerson, 23 March 1931

in Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. XLV, p. 335.

41 See S. Gopal, p. 157.

42 Ibid., p. 159.

43 Resolution of the Lucknow Session of the Congress, 1936, The Indian National Congress 1934-36,

pp. 79-80; Congress Election Manifesto, 1936, and Resolution of the Faizpur Session of the Congress,
1936, The Indian National Congress 1936-37, pp. 5 and 96- 97. Also see S. Gopal, p. 214..
44 S. Gopal, p. 229; H.D. Malaviya, pp. 66-9 R. Crane, pp. 102-50; W. Hauser, p. 127.

45 R. Crane, pp. 102-08, 149; W. Hauser, pp. 110-11.

46 Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. VIII, p. 365.

47 L. Fischer, pp. 42-43.

48 Ibid., pp. 72-73.

49 Harijan 29 December 1951, quoted in H.D. Malaviya, pp. 72-73.

50 H.D. Malaviya, p. 76. Gandhi stipulated two basic conditions for the success of the workers.

“Labour had to be made conscious of its strength,” and “it had to have in one hand truth and in the
other non-violence,” Quoted in ibid.
51 Ibid., p. 75.

52 W. Hauser, pp. 100-01.

53 Ibid., pp. 99-100.

54 Mahadev Desai, pp. 42, 102-03, P. Sitaramayya, p. 549.

55 See f.n. 45 above. See, in particular, R. Crane, pp. 104-07.

56 See Bipan Chandra, 1979.

57 Quoted in W. Hauser, pp. 118-19. Also see D.N. Dhanagre, The Politics of Survival’, p. 42.

58 M.H. Siddiqi, pp. xiii, 127, 186-87.

59 W. Hauser, pp. 35, 151, 156.

60 Tarlok Singh, pp. 310 and 306. Also see official sources referred to in P.C. Joshi, 1960.

61 Tarlok Singh, p. 309.

62 Ibid., pp. 308-09.

 Tilak

It is always difficult to write the biography of a popular hero. The tendency

to glorify or to debunk suggests itself too easily. And to write objectively
about a great patriot like Lokamanya Tilak is indeed an uphill task. The
book*, under review by two young lecturers in English from Maharashtra is
an admirable, though only partially successful, attempt to deal objectively
yet enthusiastically with the life of one who can legitimately be called the
Father of Indian Nationalism.
In this, perhaps the most adequate biography of Tilak to date, the authors
have succeeded in bringing out clearly and vividly Tilak’s greatest and
abiding contribution to Indian national movement that only political action
by the masses will succeed in making the English loosen their grip over
India. They point out that “he believed that the pivotal point of our political
struggle was the organized strength of the people expressing itself in fight
against every injustice suffered at the hands of bureaucracy in India." Tilak
from the outset of his political career as a leader of men in the early 1890s
placed the goal of activizing the masses before himself. He wanted to bring
the mass of people into the vortex of Indian politics through widespread
agitation on popular issues of the day. Day in and day out through editorials
in the Kesari and the Mahratta he advocated taking the Congress message to
the people; and after the experience of the agitation against the Partition of
Bengal, he wrote: “People must be trained for struggle which will have to be
waged to win freedom, and the only way to do it is to make them participate
in the struggle.”
 Moreover, Tilak had limitless faith in the people and their political action.
While guiding them in political thinking and action, he never sat in
judgement over them. In this respect, unlike the mystical nationalism of
Aurobindo Ghosh, his was a rational, democratic nationalism based on his
love for and faith in the strength of the Indian people; and, that is why, his
nationalism did not despair of temporary setbacks every one of which was
seen by him as providing political education to the people.
Herein precisely lay the difference between Tilak and the Moderate. The
Moderates were opposed precisely to Tilak’s approach to the masses. Tilak
and the Moderates were not basically divided over questions of methods and
goals of political action. As Tilak himself pointed out again and again, their
goals were the same; and Tilak was also a believer, in general, in
constitutional methods. In sacrifice and courage, G.K. Gokhale was no whit
a lesser man than Tilak. But the former had no faith in the people; he was
afraid that any mass movement would incur the wrath of the British
Government which would result in the total destruction of the existing
political movement. Tilak, on the contrary, had infinite faith in the power of
the masses in action. He was sure that any unreasonable suppression of a
mass movement would only result in further arousing the Indian people and
would lead to a heightened political struggle. So the Moderates agitated to
bring pressure on the alien government, Tilak to educate the people and to
bring them into motion; or, as the authors point out, “Tilak looked to the
masses and the majority, while the moderates were apprehensive of the
forces that the awakening of the masses might unleash.” This is why the
usual discussion in which Pradhan and Bhagwat also indulge in about the
ethics of Tilak’s actions or a comparison between Tilak’s and Mahatma
Gandhi’s ethics is really irrelevant if not also misleading. To Tilak means
were not ethical or unethical in themselves. The real question was whether
they were suitable for the ethical goal in view, i.e., arousing the masses. All
means “which were likely to smother the new forces and to extinguish the
new spark” were bad in his eyes.
At the same time, Tilak’s conception of the masses was inadequate even
though it was the most advanced of the times. This is a point which Pradhan
and Bhagwat have failed to bring out. Tilak believed in a generalized
concept of the masses. For him the people were an undifferentiated mass.
And because the only section of the Indian people who were drawn into
politics at the time were the petty bourgeois strata of the towns, the upper
strata of the peasantry and a section of the petty landlords, to Tilak they
constituted the people. Moreover, being very conscious of the need for
national unity and unable to see how demands of the oppressed classes
could be framed in a manner so as not to divide the Indian people, Tilak
readily fell into the error of basing his entire popular appeal on a purely
national and cultural basis. He, of course, took up very vigorously most of
the economic demands of the entire Indian people against British
Imperialism. But he failed to see that the overwhelming majority of the
Indian people, the peasantry, felt the burden of the foreign yoke primarily
through the agency of the landlords and the moneylenders. Thus, in the
initial years, when nationalism as a feeling was underdeveloped and he was
unable to see the economic issues clearly, Tilak relied upon religious and
cultural feelings to organize a mass national consciousness through his
opposition to the Age of Consent Bill and the Ganpati and the Shivaji
Festivals.
The authors deal at length with this phase of Tilak’s activities as well as
with his attitude to the general question of social reforms. The usual
explanation offered to justify or explain away Tilak’s reactionary stand on
the social issues of the day is that he did not want to split the rising political
movement and alienate the socially orthodox sections of society. The
authors accept that there is some truth in this. They point out that Tilak
himself wrote in the Kesari of the 15th September, 1885, that efforts to bring
about immediate social reforms were likely to create a rift in society and
would consequently weaken the political struggle, and that “there had been
such a degeneration owing to our slavery that the social condition of the
people could not improve until their political condition was bettered and,
therefore, an exhortation to concentrate on social reform to the exclusion of
political reform was suicidal.” Moreover, Pradhan and Bhagwat point out,
Tilak believed in introducing social reforms through education of the people
and not through legislation by an alien government. Any attempt to force
reforms upon the masses would only lead to a rupture between the leaders
and the masses, he believed. Thus, for example, Tilak wrote in the Kesari of
31st May, 1887: “The Kesari has always blamed and criticized the evil
tendencies and bad customs in our society. The Kesari was always of the
opinion that these would have to be removed gradually but there is a
difference in this point of view and that of Mr. Modak. To him the only
remedy is legislation, to us it is the education of public opinion.” And again
in a public meeting on 1st November, 1890, he said: “There has been much
talk about social reforms. But we have to bear in mind that we have to
reform the masses and if we dissociate ourselves from them, reforms would
become impossible.”
All this is true and yet this is not a sufficient explanation of Tilak’s stand
on social questions. This became evident in the case of Tilak’s opposition to
the Age of Consent Bill when in the course of his speeches and articles he
offered a straight, even virulent, defence of the existing practices relating to
child marriage among the Hindus. In keeping with his previous position he
could have refused to support the bill or opposed it on the ground that it
was an attempt of an alien agency to interfere with India’s social customs.
Instead, he employed all his accurate knowledge of the Hindu scriptures to
justify the existing practices as religiously correct and necessary. Thus, in
practice, Tilak often upheld only the orthodox point of view. The learned
biographers of Tilak take up a very sound position in this respect. They
point out that though Tilak intended to strengthen political radicalism, i.e.,
nationalism, by trying to dissociate himself from social reformers, in
practice “he allied himself with the forces of reaction.” That this need not
have been so is borne out by the fact that, as the authors point out, Agarkar,
a friend and co-worker of Tilak in the early years, was both a political
radical and a social revolutionary.
Very interesting in this respect are those few pages of the book where
Tilak and Agarkar are compared and contrasted. It is quite a revelation to us
that Tilak was in his youthful days an agnostic while Agarkar was an atheist.
This perhaps explains Agarkar’s thorough-going philosophical radicalism
and Tilak’s later return to orthodoxy. What has been written of Agarkar in
the volume under review has whetted our appetite good and proper and we
can only wish that a biography of this Maratha writer, teacher, journalist,
leader and philosopher, who deserves to be better known outside
Maharashtra, will soon appear in English.
 At the same time, Pradhan and Bhagwat clearly bring out the fact that
Tilak was not a revivalist or a communalist. It is true that he used revivalism
in the 1890s “as a potent and powerful force to awaken the different sections
of the people”, and to impart to them confidence in themselves. He wrote in
1902: “We have lost our glory, our independence, every thing. Religion is the
only treasure that we have; if we forsake it, we shall be like the foolish cock
in Aesop’s fables that threw away a jewel. In the world of today anything that
we have has to be displayed and shown to the best advantage.” But what was
supposed to be a servant in the hands of Tilak soon became a master in the
hands of less talented people. In 1895, Tilak had written: “If we stick to our
religious or social prejudices and do not allow knowledge conducive to
welfare enter our minds, we shall never rise. If we leave aside our
intransigence, tread warily to grasp knowledge wherever possible, we shall
learn to act in concert...” In reality, better methods than social and religious
revivalism to arouse the Indian people were available, and it should have
been foreseen that revivalism had an obvious tendency to become the
master. It is one of the tragedies of our recent history that in the formative
years of Indian nationalism—1885 to 1919—political nationalism was
accompanied by social reaction and social reform by political conservatism.
How far this was due to the fact that the Indian petty-bourgeoisie of the
time, which was the politically radical element of society, had its origin
primarily in the semi-feudal classes, i.e., the small landlord and the money-
lender, only a detailed socio-economic survey of the period can reveal.
In one other respect, the authors have departed with advantage from the
practice of the previous biographers of Tilak, i.e., concerning Tilak’s two
convictions and imprisonments for sedition. In this book we don’t find an
attempt to ‘exonerate’ Tilak of all such guilt. While criticising Justice
Strachey’s extra-legal stretching of the existing law of sedition in 1897, it is
admitted, rather proclaimed, that while not guilty of any specific act of
sedition, Tilak was certainly guilty of spreading disaffection against British
rule. He at no stage believed in the ‘Providential Mission’ of the English in
India. Convinced from the very beginning of his political career that the
British ruled India for selfish and exploitative reasons, he set out towards the
goal of arousing the Indian people to the real purpose and nature of British
rule in India. He always kept before him the fact that the main contradiction
in India was between the foreign rulers and the Indian people. Even when
Tilak had not yet formed or expressed the idea of expelling the British from
India, his activities led basically in that direction. Consequently the
prosecutions against Tilak are not to be condemned because they were
unjust to Tilak but because they were a visible manifestation of the real,
suppressive nature of the British rule in India.
The major weakness of the book, and one that detracts a great deal from
its otherwise real worth, is its basically unhistorical treatment of Tilak’s life.
The historical narrative is there, of course; but there is no linking of this with
the historical setting. That Tilak acted out his role on the Indian stage at a
time when a rapid transformation was taking place in the economic and
class structure of India, in the consciousness of the Indian people and in the
nature and character of British imperialism in India is more or less ignored
by the two authors. The result is that a great deal of their criticism is ‘ad hoc’,
logical and ‘ethical’ and not historical. More often than not Tilak’s action are
judged—praised and criticised—from the ‘moral’ viewpoint. They write, for
example, that “Tilak always mentioned that India’s political struggle had a
moral basis and he was very proud of the Indian tradition wherein ethics
was the cornerstone of individual as well as social life.” What is not realized
is that this struggle was moral because it was so historically and not because
of any abstract moral principles or traditions. At the very moment when
Indians as a whole were waging a highly moral struggle against their British
rulers, they were in their social life continuing highly immoral practices; for
example, untouchability. This unhistorical approach of the authors leads
them to adopt a slightly apologetic tone towards the ‘ethics’ of Tilak’s
political philosophy and actions, especially when contrasted with the later
philosophy and actions of Gandhiji. In reality, Tilak was one of the most
consistent revolutionary democrats that India has produced in the course of
its struggle for independence. When examined historically, his life and
actions can stand any scrutiny, Gandhian or otherwise.

NOTES

Published in Enquiry, No. 2, 1959.

* G.P. Pradhan & A.K. Bhagwat: Lokamanya Tilak—A Biography, Bombay,
1959
 Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy

Dr Moore’s * is an attempt to understand through comparative history the

totality of historical conditions, and in particular the roles played by the
landed upper class and the peasantry, which have led to the emergence of
political democracy, fascism, and communism. Even though his study deals
in detail only with the political developments in England, France, the USA,
Japan, China, and India, in fact the entire world historical experience,
including that of Germany, Russia, and Italy, is made to bear witness. The
effort is to synthesise recent historical research around the theme of
democracy and dictatorship. This work is thus in the best intellectual
tradition of Marx, Weber, Tawney, Dobb, or C. Wright Mills. Unfortunately
the resemblance ends at the nature of the attempt for the end product is a
mixed bag. Numerous valuable and sometimes brilliant insights are strewn
throughout the book, and many meaningful questions are asked.
On the other hand, the broad generalizations are often either
commonplace, at least to any sophisticated student of modern history, or
patently inadequate in their explanatory or predictive power. To use
American boxing terminology, Dr. Moore is nimble at sparring but rather
weak in the clinches. Moreover, his strong and weak points are often
regionally divided. While his treatment of political evolution in England,
France, the USA, and to some extent Japan is rigorous and rewarding one
feels rather let down by the chapters and comments on India and China.
Part of the explanation perhaps lies in the quality of the extant historical
research on these two countries. In any case the task of the reviewer
becomes difficult. To point to the numerous insights, as also the equally
numerous factual and analytical errors regarding India and China, would
take a great deal of space, as would any demonstration of the inadequacies of
his major hypotheses when seen in concrete historical situations.
The basic hypothesis of Dr. Moore is somewhat as follows: So far as the
agrarian aspects of democracy are concerned its prospects are powerfully
affected by the position taken up by the landed upper classes towards
capitalist social evolution {also described as modernization) and by what
happens to the peasantry as a consequence. The traditional landed upper
classes are compelled to react in the process to the monarchy,
commercialization of agriculture, the peasantry, and the urban bourgeoisie.
In England they came into conflict with the monarchy, on their own took to
commercial agriculture and thus gradually bourgeoified themselves,
destroyed the peasantry and in its place created capitalist farmers and
agricultural labourers, and then, on the one hand, entered into
accommodation with the urban bourgeoisie, and, on the other, competed
with it during the 19th century for the favours of the working class.
In France, the landed upper classes did not come into conflict with the
monarchy and took to commercial agriculture by a different path—by
maintaining the peasantry on land though in a repressed position and by
compelling it to part with a part of its produce which they then took to the
market. This led the peasantry to support the Revolution of 1789 and to
enter into an alliance with the bourgeoisie against the Crown and the landed
aristocracy whose elimination in the end laid the social basis for democracy.
The process, hov/ever, also led to the perpetuation of the peasantry, hence
the ups and downs of democracy in France ever since.
In the United States, there was historically no peasantry and the Civil War
broke the back of the landed upper class based on slavery, i.e., repressive
political control of the agrarian sector. In all these three countries, the way
to modernization was opened through a violent revolution. Moreover, the
peasantry was either expropriated as a social formation by the exercise
of ‘massive violence... by the upper classes’ or was harnessed to bourgeois
interests.
 In Japan, as also Germany, the landed upper classes did not struggle
against the absolutist monarchy and responded to the need to produce for
the market, i.e., commercial agriculture, by taking recourse to repressive
social and political control over the peasant who was permitted to retain his
basic traditional identity. The result was the rise and perpetuation of an
agrarian structure based on landlords and tenants. At the same time, the
landed upper classes allied with a bourgeoisie which had undergone
substantial development but had not possessed the strength to wage a
struggle against them. The two together worked for a reactionary
modernization from above without making a violent political break with the
past. Nor was the weight of the peasantry in the population lessened as the
industrial effort remained weak. The result was Bismrakian Germany and
Keiji Japan.
In both these countries, a prime condition of authoritarianism was
created: the interests of the urban and rural upper strata converged against
the workers and peasants and the two joined hands politically to maintain
order and stability. Later, when the Great Depression threatened order and
stability, both these countries took recourse to fascism based on a
reactionary appeal to the landlords and rich peasants and the use of the
large segments of the landed upper class elements entrenched in the political
system, the armed forces, and the bureaucracy.
A successful imperialist and aggressive foreign policy provided a crucial
mobilising role so far as the peasantry and the urban lower middle classes
were concerned. Thus, Dr. Moore points out, the social price, which was not
paid because a violent bourgeois revolution was avoided, was paid many
times over by the people of Germany and Japan as also of the rest of the
world in later years. One may also infer that a positive feature in the world
today so far as the avoidance of fascism is concerned is the far lesser
possibilities of appealing to the glory of success in wars against other
countries. One instance is the failure of extreme reaction to grow in the
United States as a result of the military failure in Vietnam. Another is the fall
of Ayub regime as a delayed reaction to the stalemate of the Indo-Pakistan
War of 1965. A similar non-success on India’s part has played some role in
cautioning its fascistic political forces.
 Thus, Dr. Moore has brought out quite forcefully the role of the nature of
the solution of the agrarian problem in the political road that the capitalist
societies followed. Very clearly, no repressive rent-extracting landlords class
could permit full working out of political democracy if it would mean, as it
inevitably would, that the numerically superior tenants would use adult
franchise, the right of association, etc., to attack the very basis of
landlordism-rent and control over land. Similarly, he rightly points out that
so long as agriculture is not fully penetrated by capitalism leading to the
abolition of repressive landlordism, the alliance between the bourgeoisie and
the landlords remains a potential source of authoritarianism.
Another crucial aspect is whether landlords dominate the village in the
non-economic fields or that such dominance has been successfully
undermined by the peasantry. At the same time, one cannot leave the issue
at that as Dr. Moore does. In the conditions of mid-20th century India, with
the limited capacity of the urban sector to absorb rural labour, the rural
capitalist strata are not likely to behave as supporters of politi-cal democracy
as British capitalist farmers did. They are more likely to feel as threatened by
the access of agricultural labourers and the poor peasants to organization or
to the ballot box as the repressive landlords. In other words, it is doubtful
that the spread of capitalism to agriculture will strengthen political
democracy in India today, unless one postulates a long-term political
alliance between urban capitalists and the rural poor.
Unfortunately, Dr. Moore has brought out the role of the agrarian
structure in fascism by underplaying, to the extent of distorting the picture,
the role of the changes in the structure of capitalism during the last two
hundred years. Fascism in Germany and Japan was not so much a response
of the remnants of feudalism, though it certainly gained a certain mass
support and bureaucratic military backing from the landed interests which
had not been cleared out of the way by an agrarian revolution or fuller
development of capitalism in agriculture, as the political tool of a dying
monopoly capitalism. Dr. Moore of course notes that fascism appears only
when capitalism fails to work well or to solve its internal strains, that the
German and Japanese monopoly capitalists were the main beneficiaries of
fascism, and that the radical right component of the fascist movements
which had appealed to the backward-looking agrarian interests was soon
snuffed out by the victorious fascist regimes.
In other contexts, he repeatedly points out that a movement is to be
characterized by looking not at its leaders or participants but at its
beneficiaries. To quote him: “In a word, it is not only who fights but what the
fight is about that matters”. It is on this basis that he characterizes the
revolutions in England, France, and the United States as bourgeois
revolutions. But he fails to make this his starting point in the analysis of
fascism. This underplaying of the role of monopoly capitalism is surprising
when we keep in view that his analysis clearly points to one major
generalization, namely, political democracy comes into being and exists only
when capitalism can successfully mobilise the lower orders behind- itself.
The third strand to be taken up by Dr. Moore is that of peasant
revolutions as exemplified by China (and Russia). When the landed upper
classes and agrarian bureaucracies fail to respond positively to
commercialization in agriculture and industry and at the same time fail to
destroy the prevailing social organization among the huge peasant masses,
when they intensify the exploitation of the entire peasantry and thus
succeed in uniting all its sections, when the indigenous bour-geoisie is too
weak to introduce modernization either by making a revolution or through
reactionary means from the top, when the landed upper classes come to
completely dominate the bourgeoisie, the country is not modernized and
the peasantry revolts.
While in France the peasant revolt is harnessed to the bourgeoisie which
then attacks the peasantry, in China (and Russia) it is the Communist Party
that reaps the harvest and then attacks the peasantry. Here Dr. Moore
makes, among others, two serious errors. Firstly, the role of the working
class is virtually reduced to zero (this he does in the case of fascism also).
Now to see the communist revolution in China (and even more in Russia) as
primarily a peasant revolution is more than an exaggeration. It points to a
serious lacuna in historical understanding.
In the earlier part of his book. Dr. Moore has himself fully described the
important role that the peasantry and the urban sans culottes played in the
physical struggles and political battles of the French Revolution without
even indirectly suggesting that it thereby became primarily a peasant
revolution or the urban poor’s revolution. Undoubtedly, the peasantry was a
major force in the Russian Revolution and the main force in the Chinese
Revolution. But not to see the decisive role of the working class in these
revolutions is an error which is hard to understand.
Allied, perhaps, to this error are two others of using ter-minological
inexactitudes. Throughout his penetrating study of the English and French
Revolutions, he discusses political developments sociologically, i.e., by
relating them to social classes, social strata and groups. Not once do we
come across a political group which is discussed as an abstract entity, an
entity in itself and for itself, that is apart from its capacity to represent the
interests of or act as the symbol of a social group. Thus, for example, the
peasantry is opposed by, supported by, led by, used by, allied with by
sections of landed upper classes or urban bourgeoisie and other social strata.
Yet, in the case of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the peasantry is
joined to the Communist Party, an abstract and purely political entity,
whose class or social basis or characterization is nowhere given.
Secondly, we may also take note of the fact that the current sociological
omnibus, catch-all word ’elite’ finds no place in the concrete historical
analysis of the English and French Revolutions or historical developments.
And rightly so, for its use would confuse rather than clarify. We can imagine
what pure ‘elite’ analysis would do tc the analysis of the different phases of
the French Revolution. However, Dr. Moore brings this word into play in the
much less rigorous analysis of the political developments of India and
China.
The most serious error that Dr. Moore makes is that of virtually ignoring
the role of imperialism in modem China and India. Thus, for example, the
fact that the Chinese Revolution was as much an anti-imperialist revolution
as a peasant one is ignored. The Kuomintang reaction after 1927 and 1945
(as also warlordism earlier) is seen as a landlord- based reaction, pure and
simple. The KMT after 1927, it is said, was based on landlords, gangsters,
pseudo-Confucianism. The suppression of Chinese industrial effort was
mainly done by domestic agrarian interests, according to Dr. Moore.
Criticism of imperialism is often seen by Dr. Moore as a ‘convenient
scapegoat’ by Marxists and nationalists.
We need not multiply instances. Suffice it to say that the virtual omission
of imperialism abstracts away the most important segment of the historical
reality of modem China and I India. This also leads him to apply in an
abstract, formal, and mechanical way a historical model derived from the
western historical experience and thus contributes to the sterility of his
analysis of India and China. For example, he fails to see that the capitalist
class in India and China was fragmented and played many diverse historical
roles both section-wise and time-wise. Similarly, the roots of dictatorship in
KMT China were not only in the bourgeoisie’s alliance with, or
subordination to, the landlords but also in their joint subordination to
foreign imperialism.
In fact, in recent times, this last has been an invariable component of
right-wing dictatorships in the ex-colonial world. Examples are the political
systems in Latin America. West Asia, South Korea, and South Vietnam. On
the other hand a primary condition for the survival of political democracy
in India has been its relative freedom from foreign control. The failure to
stucfy the role of imperialism combined with his lack of familiarity with the
historical terrain of India and China makes his discussion of the
developments in India and China stand out as a sore thumb in an otherwise
thought- provoking work.
At the same time an Indian reader would find many valuable directions
for serious research or thought in the European and Japanese parts of Dr.
Moore’s study. In particular, his emphasis on the dangers from landlordism
not only as aji obstacle to economic growth or social justice but also as a
potential and inevitable threat to political democracy is timely. His work
should certainly help turn the attention of Indian historians and even more
sociologists and political scientists to a study of India’s agrarian structure—a
task hitherto left to agricultural economists. The struggle for political
independence bequeathed a democratic political structure which will not be
put on a firm footing till the agrarian roots of authoritarianism are dug out
and the rural rich are no longer available as an ally to the newly emerging
urban forces of dictatorship. The timeliness of Dr. Moore’s study is evident
when we note that the Indian votaries of fascism have been in recent years
finding fertile soil in the upper class and upper caste rural strata of northern
India.
Dr. Moore’s is a valiant effort to take sociology out of methodological
strait-jackets and the ennui of the minutiae and to restore to it the receding
majesty of the broad sweep in dealing with issues which matter and which
do not merely titillate or earn short-lived academic reputations though long-
lasting academic positions. He also rightly assigns a minor role to cultural
explanations and emphasizes the role of social classes and strata. He refuses
to see social change as an exceptional phenomenon and wants the
sociologists also to explain the status quo and stability and the social forces
underpinning them, and benefiting from them.
He rejects the notion that all reactionary ideas are remnants of the past
and wants their social basis in the recent past and present to be examined.
He takes a positive look at the historical role of revolutionary violence and
points to the historical cost of moderation as well as the degree and extent of
violence that an unjust social order represents in its day to day existence.
But pre-conceptions are not so easily given up especially when they deal
with basic problems of one’s society and also involve firmly entrenched
academic traditions. Revolutionary breaks are always difficult to make and
nowhere more than in academic disciplines. But. to use Dr. Moore’s phrase,
the cost of making revolutions is quite high even in the academia. Any
beginnings in that direction are, therefore, to be heartily wel-comed.

NOTES

Published in the Seminar, Number 140, April 1971.

* Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy,
Boston, 1966.