Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The task of good government in India was not an easy one. In this great subcontinent with a population amounting to almost one-fifth of the human race were to be found an almost unbelievable diversity of cultures, religions, languages, and attitudes. Even in 1950 modern locomotives linked together great cities with advanced industrial production by passing through jungles inhabited by tigers, elephants, and primitive pagan tribes. The population, which increased from 284 million in 1901 to 389 million in 1941 and reached 530 million in 1961, spoke more than a dozen major languages divided into hundreds of dialects, and were members of dozens of antithetical religious beliefs. There were, in 1941, 255 million Hindus, 92 million Muslims, 6.3 million Christians, 5.7 million Sikhs, 1.5 million Jains, and almost 26 million pagan animists of various kinds. In addition, the Hindus and even some of the non-Hindus were divided into four major hereditary castes subdivided into thousands of subcastes, plus a lowest group of outcastes (“untouchables”), amounting to at least 30 million persons in 1900 and twice this number in 1950. These thousands of groups were endogamous, practiced hereditary economic activities, frequently had distinctive marks or garb, and were usually forbidden to marry, eat or drink with, or even to associate with, persons of different caste. Untouchables were generally forbidden to come in contact, even indirectly, with members of other groups and were, accordingly, forbidden to enter many temples or public buildings, to draw water from the public wells, even to allow their shadows to fall on any person of a different group, and were subject to other restrictions, all designed to avoid a personal pollution which could be removed only by religious rituals of varying degrees of elaborateness. Most subcastes were occupational groups covering all kinds of activities, so that there were hereditary groups of carrion collectors, thieves, highway robbers, or murderers (thugs), as well as farmers, fishermen, storekeepers, drug mixers, or copper smelters. For most peoples of India, caste was the most important fact of life, submerging their individuality into a group from which they could never escape, and regulating all their activities from birth to death. As a result, India, even as late as 1900, was a society in which status was dominant, each individual having a place in a group which, in turn, had a place in society. This place, known to all and accepted by all, operated by established procedures in its relationships with other groups so that there was in spite of diversity, a minimum of intergroup friction and a certain peaceful tolerance so long as intergroup etiquette was known and accepted.

The diversity of social groups and beliefs was naturally reflected in an extraordinarily wide range of social behavior from the most degraded and bestial activities based on crude superstitions to even more astounding levels of exalted spiritual self-sacrifice and cooperation. Although the British refrained from interfering with religious practices, in the course of the nineteenth century they abolished or greatly reduced the practice of thuggism (in which a secret caste strangled strangers in honor of the goddess Kali), suttee (in which the widow of a deceased Hindu was expected to destroy herself on his funeral pyre), infanticide, temple prostitution, and child marriages. At the other extreme, most Hindus abstained from all violence; many had such a respect for life that they would eat no meat, not even eggs, while a few carried this belief so far that they would not molest a cobra about to strike, a mosquito about to sting, or even walk about at night, less they unknowingly step on an ant or worm. Hindus, who considered cows so sacred that the worse crime would be to cause the death of one (even by accident), who allowed millions of these beasts to have free run of the country to the great detriment of cleanliness or standards of living, who would not wear shoes of leather, and would rather die than taste beef, ate pork and associated daily with Muslims who ate beef but considered pigs to be polluting. In general, most Indians lived in abject poverty and want; only about one in a hundred could read in 1858, while considerably less could understand the English language. The overwhelming majority at that time were peasants, pressed down by onerous taxes and rents, isolated in small villages unconnected by roads, and decimated at irregular intervals by famine or disease.

British rule in the period 1858-1947 tied India together by railroads, roads, and telegraph lines. It brought the country into contact with the Western world, and especially with world markets, by establishing a uniform system of money, steamboat connections with Europe by the Suez Canal, cable connections throughout the world, and the use of English as the language of government and administration. Best of all, Britain established the rule of law, equality before the law, and a tradition of judicial fairness to replace the older practice of inequality and arbitrary violence. A certain degree of efficiency, and a certain ambitious, if discontented, energy directed toward change replaced the older abject resignation to inevitable fate.

The modern postal, telegraphic, and railroad systems all began in 1854. The first grew to such dimensions that by the outbreak of war in 1939 it handled over a billion pieces of mail and forty million rupees in money orders each year. The railroad grew from 200 miles in 1855 to 9,000 in 1880, to 25,000 in 1901, and to 43,000 in 1939. This, the third largest railroad system in the world, carried 600 million passengers and 90 million tons of freight a year. About the same time, the dirt tracks of 1858 had been partly replaced by over 300,000 miles of highways, of which only about a quarter could be rated as first class. From 1925 onward, these highways were used increasingly by passenger buses, crowded and ramshackle in many cases, but steadily breaking down the isolation of the villages.

Improved communications and public order served to merge the isolated village markets, smoothing out the earlier alternations of scarcity and glut with their accompanying phenomena of waste and of starvation in the midst of plenty. All this led to a great extension of cultivation into more remote areas and the growing of a greater variety of crops. Sparsely settled areas of forests and hills, especially in Assam and the Northwest Provinces, were occupied, without the devastation of deforestation (as in China or in non-Indian Nepal) because of a highly developed forestry conservation service. Migration, permanent and seasonal, became regular features of Indian life, the earnings of the migrants being sent back to their families in the villages they had left. A magnificent system of canals, chiefly for irrigation, was constructed, populating desolate wastes, especially in the northwestern parts of the country, and encouraging whole tribes which had previously been pastoral freebooters to settle down as cultivators. By 1939 almost 60 million acres of land were irrigated. For this and other reasons, the sown area of India increased from 195 to 228 million acres in about forty years (1900-1939). Increases in yields were much less satisfactory because of reluctance to change, lack of knowledge or capital, and organizational problems.

The tax on land traditionally had been the major part of public revenue in India, and remained near 50 percent as late as 1900. Under the Moguls these land revenues had been collected by tax farmers. In many areas, notably Bengal, the British tended to regard these land revenues as rents rather than taxes, and thus regarded the revenue collectors as the owners of the land. Once this was established, these new landlords used their powers to raise rents, to evict cultivators who had been on the same land for years or even generations, and to create an unstable rural proletariat of tenants and laborers unable or unwilling to improve their methods. Numerous legislative enactments sought, without great success, to improve these conditions. Such efforts were counterbalanced by the growth of population, the great rise in the value of land, the inability of industry or commerce to drain surplus population from the land as fast as it increased, the tendency of the government to favor industry or commerce over agriculture by tariffs, taxation, and public expenditures, the growing frequency of famines (from droughts), of malaria (from irrigation projects), and of plague (from trade with the Far East) which wiped out in one year gains made in several years, the growing burden of peasant debt at onerous terms and at high interest rates, and the growing inability to supplement incomes from cultivation by incomes from household crafts because of the growing competition from cheap industrial goods. Although slavery was abolished in 1843, many of the poor were reduced to peonage by contracting debts at unfair terms and binding themselves and their heirs to work for their creditors until the debt was paid. Such a debt could never be paid, in many cases, because the rate at which it was reduced was left to the creditor and could rarely be questioned by the illiterate debtor.