The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement

The Economic Exploitation

The main motivation of British domination and rule was the economic exploitation of India. Naturally, with the gradual political awakening, this caught the attention of some Indians and started the reaction against British rule.

The First Steps by the British

Before British rule, there was no private property in land. The self-governing village community handed over each year to the ruler or to his nominee a share of the annual produce. The East India Company put a stop to this and introduced a new revenue system superseding the right of the village community over land and creating two new forms of property on land - landlordism and individual peasant proprietorship. It was assumed that the State was the supreme landlord. Fixed tax payments were introduced based on land whereby payment had to be made to the government whether or not the crop had been successful. A British commentator is reported to have said that they have introduced new methods of assessing and cultivating land revenue which has converted a once flourishing population into a huge horde of paupers. Indeed the first effect was the reduction in agricultural incomes by 50%, thereby undermining the agrarian economy and self-governing village. In 1769, the Company prohibited Indians from trading in grain, salt, betel nut and tobacco, and discouraged handicraft. The Company also prohibited the homework of silk weavers and compelled them to work in its factories. Weavers who disobeyed were imprisoned, fined or flogged. In this way the Company's servants lined their own pockets.

When the British first reached India they did not find a backwater country. A report on Indian Industrial Commission published in 1919 said that the industrial development of India was at any rate not inferior to that of the most advanced European nations. India was not only a great agricultural country but also a great manufacturing country. It had a prosperous textile industry, whose cotton, silk, and woolen products were marketed in Europe and Asia. It had remarkable ancient skills in iron working. It had its own shipbuilding industry in Calcutta, Daman, Surat and Bombay. In 1802 skilled Indian workers were building British warships at Bombay. According to a historian of Indian shipping, the teak wood vessels of Bombay were greatly superior to the oaken walls of Old England. Benares was famous all over India for its brass, copper, and bell metal wares. Other important industries included the enameled jewellery and stone carving of Rajputana towns as well as filigree work in gold and silver, ivory, glass, tannery, perfumery and papermaking.

All this altered under the British, leading to the de-industrialisation of India - its forcible transformation from a country of combined agriculture and manufacture into an agricultural colony of British capitalism. The British annihilated the Indian textile industry unwilling to tolerate a competitor, which had to be destroyed.

The shipbuilding industry aroused the jealousy of British firms and its progress and development were restricted by legislation. India's metalwork, glass and paper industries were likewise throttled when British government in India was obliged to use only British-made paper. The vacuum created by the contrived ruin of the Indian handicraft industries, a process virtually completed by 1880, was filled with British manufactured goods. Britain's industrial revolution, with its explosive increase in productivity made it essential for British capitalists to find new markets. India turned from an exporter of textiles to an importer. British goods had virtually free entry into India while entry into Britain of Indian goods was met with prohibitive tariffs. It was also decided to curtail direct trade between India and the rest of the world. Horace Hayman Wilson in 1845 in

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The History of British India from 1805 to 1835 wrote: 'The foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms. While there was prosperity for British cotton industry there was ruin for millions of Indian craftsmen and artisans. India's manufacturing towns were blighted as in the case of Dacca, once known as the Manchester of India; Murshidabad, which was once Bengal's old capital, was described in 1757 as at least as extensive, populous, and rich as London. Millions of spinners, and weavers were forced to seek a precarious living in the countryside, as were many tanners, smelters, and smiths. India was made subservient to the Empire and vast wealth was sucked out of the subcontinent.'

One of the first to raise this issue was Dadabhai Naoroji. His drain theory (focusing on the economic drainage from India) was presented around 1885. Around the same time Ramesh Chandra Dutt had written on famine and economic exploitation (cf. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India by Naoroji and Economic History of India by R.C. Dutt ). Earlier in 1837, F.J. Shore pointed out that India had been 'drained' of her wealth and in 1839, Montgomery Martin wrote that the annual drain of £3,000,000 on British India amounted in 30 years, at 12% compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,997,917 sterling; or at a low rate, as £2,000,000 for 50 years to £8,400,000,000 sterling. Similarly it was stated and voiced by Naoroji and Dutt that the economic drainage produced successive famines. This was highlighted by Naoroji who wrote about 'the terrible poverty of India and its rapid increase under British rule' at a time when the emerging middle class citizens of India were 'destitute of political experience' and 'were obliged to accept Englishmen at their own valuation'.

However, the successive spells of famine and draught that were inflicted on India served a purpose. Our inert masses were hereto satisfied with a simple and Spartan village life and had no idea that unless the village sequentially linked up with the wider world, a nation could not be formed. It was the onslaught of famine and drought that forced people to sit up and realise that the country was being drained off its resources. It is this realisation that made Sri Aurobindo point out that if British Rule and increasing poverty were related as 'cause' and 'effect', then the inevitable conclusion was that the 'effect' could only be cured by removing the 'cause', i.e. 'by the substitution of autonomy in place of a British or British-controlled government'. It is with this economic logic that Sri Aurobindo convinced even a moderate like Dadabhai Naoroji who traditionally favoured 'Self-government within the British Rule' to declare publicly in an inspired moment, that 'swaraj' or 'complete freedom from British Rule' was the only governing idea of Indian Politics.

We thus see that economic exploitation was the root cause of the Indian people's poverty and hunger.

Under Imperial rule the ordinary people of India grew steadily poorer. As the economic historian Romesh Dutt said, half of India's annual net revenues of £44m flowed out of India. The number of famines soared from seven in the first half of the 19th century to 24 in the second half. According to official figures, 28,825,000 Indians starved to death between 1854 and 1901. The terrible famine of 1899-1900, which affected 474,000 square miles with a population of almost 60 million, was attributed to a process of bleeding the peasant, who was forced into the clutches of the moneylenders whom British regarded as their mainstay for the payment of revenue. Rich though its soil was, India's people were hungry and miserably poor. This grinding poverty struck all visitors -like a blow in the face as described by India League Delegation 1932. In their report, 'Condition of India 1934', they had been appalled at the poverty of the Indian village. The report said: 'It is the home of stark want - the results of uneconomic agriculture, peasant indebtedness, excessive taxation and rack-renting, absence of social services and the

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general discontent impressed us everywhere. In the villages there were no health or sanitary services, there were no roads, no drainage or lighting, and no proper water supply beyond the village well. Men, women and children work in the fields, farms and cowsheds. ...All alike work on meagre food and comfort and toil long hours for inadequate returns.'

India was sometimes called the 'milch cow of the Empire', and indeed at times it seemed to be so regarded by politicians and bureaucrats in London. Educated Indians were embittered when India was made to pay the entire cost of the India Office building in Whitehall. They were further outraged when in 1867 it was made to pay the full costs of entertaining 2,500 guests at a lavish Ball honouring the Sultan of Turkey. In India, the hunger and poverty experienced by the majority of the population during the colonial period and immediately after independence were the logical consequences of two centuries of British occupation, during which the Indian cotton industry was destroyed, most peasants were put into serfdom (after the British modified the agrarian structures and the tax system to the benefit of the Zamindars - feudal landlords) and cash crops (indigo, tea, jute) gradually replaced traditional food crops. Britain's profits throughout the 19th century cannot be measured without taking into account the 28 million Indians who died of starvation between 1814 and 1901.

As the British gained power and exploited the country and moved from Bengal to Madras to Bombay to North India, famines followed resulting in the death of millions of Indian peasants. Romesh Diwan and Renu Kallinapur have tabulated these famines chronologically in Productivity and Technical Change in Foodgrains. In Bengal alone, 10 million died in the 1771 famine. Such exploitation and killing famines continued for a full hundred years. In the famines of 1877-78 in Madras and 1897-1900 all over India 15 million people died. These are moderate estimates. Over hundred years, at least 100 million people were killed by famines alone resulting from British exploitation. It is important to understand, and recognise this reality and the enormity of this exploitation. 100 million people in a hundred years amounts to one million every year. Thus, the result of British exploitation was that at least 2,740 Indians died every day for one hundred years; and this is a conservative estimate. It excludes people killed by hired gunmen by an alien authority. A famine leads not only to deaths but enfeebles the young and weakens the strong. If one uses a multiplier of 30 destitute persons for every one dying, the level of destitution comes to 300 million. This is what colonial rule in India was.

Towards the end of the 19th century, one person who drew attention to the economic plight was Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar. He was a Bihar-born Maharashtrian (18691912), who spent most of his life in Bengal, and was an excellent teacher and writer in both Marathi and Bengali. An active public worker, his blending of rural roots and urban experience, of the language and cultures of two regions and of patriotic scepticism regarding the fruits of colonial rule, made him a symbol of the transformations of Indian society produced by the Nationalist Movement.

His book Desher Katha put forward in popular language the economic critique of colonialism developed by people like Ranade, Dutt, Naoroji and others and was very popular in Bengal as a pamphlet advocating Swadeshi and the boycott of Lancashire cotton. He was instrumental in the awakening of middle-class India as a thinker on economic Swadeshi; he was inspired by the nationalism of Sri Aurobindo and Tilak.

All these factors led to a gradual awakening of the Indian people to the British economic exploitation.

It was inevitable that sooner or later, there would be a revolt against British rule. Since the political consciousness was not yet fully awakened, it took the form of sporadic outbursts in different parts of the country. These revolts were not coordinated and

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therefore were not successful, but they created an atmosphere of courage and defiance which ultimately led to the formation of a national political consciousness. We shall deal in the next chapter with the revolts after the British embarked on their conquest of India.

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