Former Union minister Shashi Tharoor’s speech at Oxford University on July 21, widely reported in the press, called for payment of reparations for losses to the Indian economy due to the 200 years of British colonial rule. Though the speech smacks any viable practicality, it has succeeded at least in underscoring the need to revive a meaningful debate on the economic impact of the British rule. Tharoor minced no words when he said that Britain’s prosperity was entirely due to India’s resources.
British rule meant many things to many people. There are today, clearly two schools of thoughts on the nature of the colonial rule – the admirers’ school and the critics’ school. The critics appear to point out “It is because of the 200 years of British rule that India remained incredibly poor”.
While apologists to the British rule show its rosy side like the viable administrative system, effective police and judiciary, systematic revenue system, the transport revolution through railways, introduction of English education, eradication of social evils etc, the critics have a number of economic innovations that the British introduced to substantiate their arguments. For them, the so-called modernising efforts were peripheral, unintentional and were only means to perpetuate colonialism in an effective manner.
India was subjected to colonial rule for more than two centuries during which period its interests were subordinated to the British economic interests. Introduction of railways, commercialisation of agriculture, capital oriented industry, changes in land tenurial structures capital oriented industries, foreign capital, trade policies etc were all to serve the cause of the British.
The good quality cotton from Khandesh and Berar was taken to feed the hungry mills in Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool and Lancashire. The machine-made cloth flooded the captured markets in India. The broad cloth, “Glasgow Dhotis” the peasant wore in India thus came from Britain.
Such imports spelt doom to the indigenous textile manufacturing. The village looms as a result were made to go silent. While industrial revolution heralded in Britain, it was de-industrialisation that India was gifted with. The mind of the British government in introducing the railway network at a breakneck speed is made clear by Lord Dalhousie in his minutes of April 16, 1853.
Here, he declared his two-pronged policy of using the railways, firstly, to carry agricultural raw materials from the hinterland to the nearest ports to be shipped to Britain cheaply, quickly and safely. The second advantage, he cited, was to transport the finished British goods from the ports to be dumped even in remote Indian markets. It may be pointed out that British colonialism did not enter the body politic in till the arrival of the Indian Railways.
At the height of the freedom movement, Indian national leaders lamented that “every mile of rail the British laid, added a fresh nail to the coffin of Indian economy”. The admirers of the British rule though, viewed Dalhousie’s railways as an “engine for social advancement in India.”
Peasant autonomy
Indian agriculture was made to go the commercial way as cultivation of cash crops replaced food crops. Market forces have taken away the peasant autonomy. Peasant indebtedness became the order of the day. Land lords and money lenders with the blessings of the government had a field day in hastening the process of de-peasantisation.
The nature of the British trade policies was primarily aimed at siphoning off the Indian resources for their economic benefit. It was not the finished product that was exported, but the very raw materials. If oil is exported, the oil expelling industry would prosper, the oil-cake would be available as manure, but these are denied when the kernel itself is exported.
The village Ghani was thrown out of work. The free trade policies helped indiscriminate export of food grains, like wheat and rice to the ‘industrial mother country’ even at a time when people were dying like flies due to severe famines and scarcities. This was the period when “development of under development took place in India”.
Shashi Tharoor’s Oxford speech must have gone down well with his audience as far as the colonial discourse was concerned as the present day scholars, not only in Oxford, but all over Britain, are aware of the ramifications of the colonialism. But his call for reparations evidently lacks logic for the reason that colonial rule was a historical process. Colonialism like mercantilism, militarism and imperialism, played a role as a general phenomenon in the past and India was a victim.
Both Britain and India over decades after independence, seem to have moved in their respective spheres putting behind the hangovers of the colonial legacies. To question a historical process now for anything other than academic debate, will only amount to disregarding the very spirit of history. Let us not judge the past with the present day values.
(The writer is retired profess-or of History, University of Hyderabad)