Understanding the present usually involves some grasp of its past. This holds true probably as much for an individual or social group as for an entire country such as India. India has a long and rich history. While knowing about its past in ancient and medieval times is very important, its colonial experience is particularly significant for comprehending modern India. This is not just because many modern ideas and institutions reached India through colonialism. It is also because such an exposure to modern ideas was contradictory or paradoxical. For example Indians in the colonial period read about western liberalism and freedom. Yet they lived under a western, colonial rule that denied Indians liberty and freedom. It is contradictions of this kind that shaped many of the structural and cultural changes that chapter 1 and 2 looks at.

As the next few chapters shall show, our social reform and nationalist movement, our laws, our political life and our Constitution, our industry and agriculture, our cities and our villages have been shaped by our paradoxical experience with colonialism. This has had lasting implications for our specific experience with modernity. The following are just some of the many instances we face in our daily life.

We have a parliamentary and a legal system, a police and educational system built very much on the British model. We drive on the left side of the road like the British. We have ‘bread-omlette’ and ‘cutlets’ as menu offered in many roadside eateries and canteens. A very popular manufacturer of biscuits, is actually named after Britain. Many school uniforms include neck-ties. We often admire the west and as often resent it. These are just some of the many and complex ways that British colonialism lives on in contemporary India.

 

Let us take the example of the English language to show how its impact has been many sided and paradoxical in India. This is not a matter about wrong spellings alone. English is not only widely used in India but we now have an impressive body of literary writings by Indians in English. This knowledge of English has given Indians an edge in the global market. But English continues to be a mark of privilege. Not knowing English is a disadvantage that tells in the job market. At the same time for those who were traditionally deprived of access to formal education such as the Dalits, knowledge of English may open doors of opportunities that were formerly closed.

In this chapter we focus on structural changes that colonialism brought in. We, therefore, need to shift from this broad impressionistic view to a clearer understanding of colonialism as a structure and system. Colonialism brought into being new political, economic and social structural changes. In this chapter we look at only two of these structural changes namely industrialisation and urbanisation. While the focus is on specific colonial context we also briefly touch on developments after independence.

All these structural changes were accompanied by cultural changes which, we look at in the next chapter. However any strict separation of the two is difficult. As you will see the structural changes are difficult to discuss without some mention of the cultural changes too.

1.1 Understanding Colonialism

At one level, colonialism simply means the establishment of rule by one country over another. In the modern period western colonialism has had the greatest impact. India’s past has been marked by the entry of numerous groups of people at different times who have estab-lished their rule over different parts of what constitutes modern India today. The impact of colonial rule is distinguishable from all other earlier rules because the changes it brought in were far-reaching and deep. History is full of examples of the annexation of foreign territory and the domination of weaker by stronger powers. Nevertheless, there is a vital difference between the empire building of pre-capitalist times and that of capitalist times. Apart from outright pillage, the pre-capitalist conquerors benefited from their domination by exacting a continuous flow of tribute. On the whole they did not interfere with the economic base. They simply took the tribute that was skimmed off the economic surplus that was produced traditionally in the subjugated areas. (Alavi and Shanin, 1982)

In contrast British colonialism which was based on a capitalist system directly interfered to ensure greatest profit and benefit to British capitalism. Every policy was geared towards the strengthening and expansion of British capitalism. For instance it changed the very laws of the land. It changed not just land ownership laws but decided even what crops ought to be grown and what ought not to be. It meddled with the manufacturing sector. It altered the way production and distribution of goods took place. It entered into the forests. It cleared trees and started tea plantations. It brought in Forest Acts that changed the lives of pastoralists. They were prevented from entering many forests that had earlier provided valuable forage for their cattle. The box carries a brief account of the impact of colonial forest policy in North-East India.

 

Colonialism also led to considerable movement of people. It led to movement of people from one part to another within India. For instance people from present day Jharkhand moved to Assam to work on the tea plantations. A newly emerging middle class particularly from the British Presidency regions of Bengal and Madras moved as government employees and professionals like doctors and lawyers moved to different parts of the country. People were carted in ships from India to work on other colonised lands in distant Asia, Africa and Americas. Many died on their way. Most could never return. Today many of their descendents are known as people of Indian origin.

To facilitate the smooth functioning of its rule, colonialism introduced a wide array of changes in every sphere, be it legal or cultural or architectural. Colonialism was a story apart in the very scale and intensity of the changes that it brought about. Some of these changes were deliberate while some took place in an unintended fashion. For example we saw how western education was introduced to create Indians who would manage British colonialism. Instead it led to the growth of a nationalist and anti-colonial consciousness.

This magnitude and depth of the structural changes that colonialism unleashed can be better grasped if we try and understand some basic features of capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and organised to accumulate profits within a market system. (We have already discussed the capitalist market in the first book ­– Indian Society.) Capitalism in the west emerged out of a complex process of European exploration of the rest of the world, its plunder of wealth and resources, an unprecedented growth of science and technology, its harnessing to industries and agriculture. What marked capitalism from the very beginning was its dynamism, its potential to grow, expand, innovate, use technology and labour in a way best assured to ensure greatest profit. What marked it too was its global nature. Western colonialism was inextricably connected to the growth of western capitalism. This had a lasting impact on the way capitalism developed in a colonised country like India. In the next section on industrialisation and urbanisation we see how colonialism led to very distinct patterns.

If capitalism became the dominant economic system, nation states became the dominant political form. That we all live in nation states and that we all have a nationality or a national citizenship may appear natural to us today. Before the First World War passports were not widely used for international travel, and in most areas few people had one. Societies were, however, not always organised on these lines. Nation state pertains to a particular type of state, characteristic of the modern world. A government has sovereign power within a defined territorial area, and the people are citizens of a single nation. Nation states are closely associated with the rise of nationalism. The principle of nationalism assumes that any set of people have a right to be free and exercise sovereign power. It is an important part of the rise of democratic ideas. You will be reading more about this in chapter 3. It must have struck you that the practice of colonialism and the principle of nationalism and democratic rights are contradictory. For colonial rule implied foreign rule such as British rule over India. Nationalism implied that the people of India or of any colonised society have an equal right to be sovereign. Indian nationalist leaders were quick to grasp this irony. They declared that freedom or swaraj was their birth- right and fought for both political and economic freedom.

1.2 Urbanisation and Industrialisation

The Colonial Experience

Industrialisation refers to the emergence of machine production, based on the use of inanimate power resources like steam or electricity. In most standard western textbook of sociology we learn that in even the most advanced of traditional civilizations, most people were engaged in working on the land. The relatively low level of technological development did not permit more than a small minority to be freed from the chores of agricultural production. By contrast, a prime feature of industrial societies today is that a large majority of the employed population work in factories, offices or shops rather than agriculture. Over 90 per cent of people in the west live in towns and cities, where most jobs are to be found and new job opportunities are created. Not surprisingly, therefore, we usually associate urbanisation with industrialisation. They often do occur together but not always so.

For instance in Britain, the first society to undergo industrialisation, was also the earliest to move from being rural to a predominantly urban country.

In 1800, well under 20 per cent of the population lived in towns or cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1900 this proportion had become 74 per cent. The capital city, London, was home to about 1.1 million people in 1800; it increased in size to a population of over 7 million by the start of the twentieth century. London was then by far the largest city ever seen in the world, a vast manufacturing, commercial and financial centre at the heart of a still-expanding British empire. (Giddens 2001: 572)

In India the impact of the very same British industrialisation led to deindustrialisation in some sectors. And decline of old urban centres. Just as manufacturing boomed in Britain, traditional exports of cotton and silk manufactures from India declined in the face of Manchester competition. This period also saw the further decline of cities such as Surat and Masulipatnam while Bombay and Madras grew. When the British took over Indian states, towns like Thanjavur, Dhaka, and Murhidabad lost their courts and, therefore, some of their artisans and court gentry. From the end of the 19th century, with the installation of mechanised factory industries, some towns became much more heavily populated.

Urban luxury manufactures like the high quality silks and cottons of Dacca or Murshidabad must have been hit first by the almost simultaneous collapse of indigeneous court demand and the external market on which these had largely depended. Village crafts in the interior, and particularly, in regions other than eastern India where British penetration was earliest and deepest, probably survived much longer, coming to be seriously affected only with the spread of railways. (Sarkar 1983: 29)

Unlike Britain where the impact of industrialisation led to more people moving into urban areas, in India the initial impact of the same British industriali-sation led to more people moving into agriculture. The Census of India Report shows this clearly.

Sociological writings in India have often discussed both the contradictory and unintended consequences of colonialism. Comparisons have been made between the industrialisation in the west and the growth of a western middle class with that of the Indian experience. The box below carries one such observation. It also shows how industrialisation is not just about new machine based production but also a story of the growth of new social groups in society and new social relationships. In other words it is about changes in the Indian social structure.

Cities had a key role in the economic system of empires. Coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai were favoured. From here primary commodities could be easily exported and manufactured goods could be cheaply imported. Colonial cities were the prime link between the economic centre or core in Britain and periphery or margins in colonised India. Cities in this sense were the concrete expression of global capitalism. In British India for example Bombay was planned and re-developed so that by 1900 over three-quarters of India’s raw cotton were shipped through the city. Calcutta exported jute to Dundee while Madras sent coffee, sugar, indigo dyes and cotton to Britain.

Urbanisation in the colonial period saw the decline of some earlier urban centres and the emergence of new colonial cities. Kolkata was one of the first of such cities. In 1690, an English merchant named Job Charnock arranged to lease three villages (named Kolikata, Gobindapur, and Sutanuti) by the river Hugli in order to set up a trading post. In 1698, Fort William was established by the river for defensive purposes, and a large open area was cleared around the fort for military engagements. The fort and the open area (called Maidan) formed the core of the city that emerged rather rapidly.

The Tea Plantations

We have already seen how industrialisation and urbanisation did not happen in India quite the way it did in Britain. More importantly, this is not because we began industrialisation late, but because our early industrialisation and urbanisation in the modern period were governed by colonial interests.

We cannot go into details about different industries here. We simply take the case of the tea industry in India as an example. Official reports show how the colonial government often used unfair means to hire and forcibly keep labourers. And clearly acted on behalf of the British planters. From fictional and other accounts we get a glimpse of what life was for planters in this industry.

Significantly the colonial adminis-trators were clear that harsh measures were taken against the labourers to
make sure they benefited the planters. They were also fully aware that the laws of a colonised country did not have to stick to the democratic norms that the British back home had to follow in Britain.

You have a sense of the lives of the labourers. Let us see how the planters’ lived.

For Indian nationalists the issue of economic exploitation under colonial rule was a central issue. Images of pre-colonial fabled riches of India contrasted with the poverty of British India. The Swadeshi movement strengthened the loyalty to the national economy. Modern ideas made people realise that poverty was preventable. Indian nationalists saw rapid industrialisation of the economy as the path towards both growth and social equity. Development of heavy and machine-making industries, expansion of the public sector and holding of a large cooperative sector were considered very important.

A modern and prosperous India, as visualised by Jawaharlal Nehru, was to be built on an edifice of giant steel plants or gigantic dams and power stations. Read Nehru’s remarks on the Bhakra Nangal dam:

Our engineers tell us that probably nowhere else in the world is there a dam as high as this. The work bristles with difficulties and complications. As I walked around the site I thought that these days the biggest temple and mosques and gurdwara is the place where man works for the good of mankind. Which place can be greater than this, this Bhakra Nangal, where thousands and lakhs of men have worked, have shed their blood and sweat and laid down their lives as well? (Nehru 1980: 214)

Urbanisation in independent India

You would be more than aware of increasing urbanisation in India. Recent years of globalisation have led to enormous expansion and change of cities. In the 21st century, India will be witnessing fast pace of urbanisation with the ambitious scheme of ‘Smart City’ initiated by the Government of India. We shall be dealing with that later in Chapter 6. Here, we draw from a sociological account of the different kinds of urbanisation in India.

Writing on the different kinds of urbanisation witnesses in the first two decades after independence sociologist M.S.A. Rao argued that in India many villages all over India are becoming increasingly subject to the impact of urban influences. But the nature of urban impact varies according to the kind of relations a village has with a city or town. He describes three different situations of urban impact as mentioned in the box.

The above chart indicates that the urban population and the number of UA/Towns in India are increasing. The chart below indicates that the per cent share of the urban population is increasing but decennial growth rate of the urban population shows a decreasing trend.

In 1951, 17.29% of India’s population i.e., 62.44 million people, were living in 2,843 towns. In 2011, 31.16% of India’s population i.e., 377.10 million people, were living in 7,935 towns. This shows a steady increase in terms of absolute numbers, number of UA/towns and the per cent share of the urban population. However, the decennial growth rate of the urban population showed a declining trend during 1981–2001, reversed the trend and showed marginal increase in 2011. The decennial growth rate of the urban population in 1951 was 41.42% and in 2011, it was 31.80%.

For the first time since Independence, the absolute increase in population is more in urban areas than in rural areas. This is due to a sharp decline in the growth rate in rural areas, while the growth rate in urban areas remains almost the same.

Conclusion