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

All of these misfortunes culminated in the period 1895-1901. There had been a long period of declining prices in 1873-1896, which increased the burden on debtors and stagnated economic activities. In 1897 the monsoon rains failed, with a loss of 18 million tons of food crops and of one million lives from famine. This disaster was repeated in 1899-1900. Bubonic plague was introduced to Bombay from China in 1895 and killed about two million persons in the next six years.

From this low point in 1901, economic conditions improved fairly steadily, except for a brief period in 1919-1922 and the long burden of the world depression in 1929-1934. The rise in prices in 1900-1914 benefited India more than others, as the prices of her exports rose more rapidly. The war of 1914-1918 gave India a great economic opportunity, especially by increasing the demand for her textiles. Tariffs were raised steadily after 1916, providing protection for industry, especially in metals, textiles, cement, and paper. The customs became the largest single source of revenue, alleviating to some extent the pressure of taxation on cultivators. However, the agrarian problem remained acute, for most of the factors listed above remained in force. In 1931 it was estimated that, in the United Provinces, 30 percent of the cultivators could not make a living from their holdings even in good years, while 52 percent could make a living in good years but not in bad ones.

There was great economic advance in mining, industry, commerce, and finance in the period after 1900. Coal output went up from 6 to 21 million tons in 1900-1924, and petroleum output (chiefly from Burma) went up from 37 to 294 million gallons. Production in the protected industries also improved in the same period until, by 1932, India could produce three-quarters of her cotton cloth, three-quarters of her steel, and most of her cement, matches, and sugar. In one product, jute, India became the chief source for the world’s supply, and this became the leading export after 1925.

A notable feature of the growth of manufacturing in India after 1900 lies in the fact that Hindu capital largely replaced British capital, chiefly for political reasons. In spite of India’s poverty, there was a considerable volume of saving, arising chiefly from the inequitable distribution of income to the landlord class and to the moneylenders (if these two groups can be separated in this way). Naturally, these groups preferred to invest their incomes back in the activities whence they had been derived, but, after 1919, nationalist agitation and especially Gandhi’s influence inclined many Hindus to make contributions to their country’s strength by investing in industry.

The growth of industry should not be exaggerated, and its influences were considerably less than one might believe at first glance. There was little growth of an urban proletariat or of a permanent class of factory workers, although this did exist. Increases in output came largely from power production rather than from increases in the labor force. This labor force continued to be rural in its psychological and social orientation, being generally temporary migrants from the villages, living under urban industrial conditions only for a few years, with every intention of returning to the village eventually, and generally sending savings back to their families and visiting them for weeks or even months each year (generally at the harvest season). This class of industrial laborers did not adopt either an urban or a proletarian point of view, were almost wholly illiterate, formed labor organizations only reluctantly (because of refusal to pay dues), and rarely acquired industrial skills. After 1915 labor unions did appear, but membership remained small, and they were organized and controlled by non-laboring persons, frequently middle-class intellectuals. Moreover, industry remained a widely scattered activity found in a few cities but absent from the rest. Although India had 35 cities of over 100,000 population in 1921, most of these remained commercial and administrative centers and not manufacturing centers. That the chief emphasis remained on rural activities can be seen from the fact that these 35 centers of population had a total of 8.2 million inhabitants compared to 310.7 million outside their limits in 1921. In fact, only 30 million persons lived in the 1,623 centers of over 5,000 persons each, while 289 million lived in centers smaller than 5,000 persons.

One of the chief ways in which the impact of Western culture reached India was by education. The charge has frequently been made that the British neglected education in India or that they made an error in emphasizing education in English for the upper classes rather than education in the vernacular languages for the masses of the people. History does not sustain the justice of these charges. In England itself the government assumed little responsibility for education until 1902, and in general had a more advanced policy in this field in India than in England until well into the present century. Until 1835 the English did try to encourage native traditions of education, but their vernacular schools failed from lack of patronage; the Indians themselves objected to being excluded, as they regarded it, from English education. Accordingly, from 1835 the British offered English-language education on the higher levels in the hope that Western science, technology, and political attitudes could be introduced without disrupting religious or social life and that these innovations would “infiltrate” downward into the population. Because of the expense, government-sponsored education had to be restricted to the higher levels, although encouragement for vernacular schools on the lower levels began (without much financial obligation) in 1854. The “infiltration downward” theory was quite mistaken because those who acquired knowledge of English used it as a passport to advancement in government service or professional life and became renegades from, rather than missionaries to, the lower classes of Indian society. In a sense the use of English on the university level of education did not lead to its spread in Indian society but removed those who acquired it from that society, leaving them in a kind of barren ground which was neither Indian nor Western but hovered uncomfortably between the two. The fact that knowledge of English and possession of a university degree could free one from the physical drudgery of Indian life by opening the door to public service or the professions created a veritable passion to obtain these keys (but only in a minority).

The British had little choice but to use English as the language of government and higher education. In India the languages used in these two fields had been foreign ones for centuries. The language of government and of the courts was Persian until 1837. Advanced and middle-level education had always been foreign, in Sanskrit for the Hindus and in Arabic for the Muslims. Sanskrit, a “dead” language, was that of Hindu religious literature, while Arabic was the language of the Koran, the only writing the ordinary Muslim would wish to read. In fact, the allegiance of the Muslims to the Koran and to Arabic was so intense that they refused to participate in the new English-language educational system and, in consequence, had been excluded from government, the professions, and much of the economic life of the country by 1900.

No vernacular language could have been used to teach the really valuable contributions of the West, such as science, technology, economics, agricultural science, or political science, because the necessary vocabulary was lacking in the vernaculars. When the university of the native state of Hyderabad tried to translate Western works into Urdu for teaching purposes after 1920, it was necessary to create about 40,000 new words. Moreover, the large number of vernacular languages would have made the choice of any one of them for the purpose of higher education invidious. And, finally, the natives themselves had no desire to learn to read their vernacular languages, at least during the nineteenth century; they wanted to learn English because it provided access to knowledge, to government positions, and to social advancement as no vernacular could. But it must be remembered that it was the exceptional Indian, not the average one, who wanted to learn to read at all. The average native was content to remain illiterate, at least until deep into the twentieth century. Only then did the desire to read spread under the stimulus of growing nationalism, political awareness, and growing concern with political and religious tensions. These fostered the desire to read, in order to read newspapers, but this had adverse effects: each political or religious group had its own press and presented its own biased version of world events so that, by 1940, these different groups had entirely different ideas of reality.