The Problem of India
Capitalism is no Sleeping Beauty. The apostles of the “inevitability of gradualness” have been pulverised by the crashing blows of events during the last decades. War—crisis—then war again; the false complacency of “improvers” and social reformers is now revealed in all its inadequacy, for like a series of terrific earthquakes, capitalism administers periodical shocks.
The backward countries are particularly affected. Already it is clear that the battleground of the present conflict is moving east. Africa and particularly Asia will bear much of the brunt of the world-war.
Again, the productive powers of the warring countries will be strained to their limits, no source of supply will be left untapped; think of these factors and then think of India.
“The Problem of India,” a “Penguin Special,” is a book of some two hundred and fifty pages. The author, Doctor K. S. Shelvankar, an Indian student, presents his case exhaustively, efficiently and clearly. In his foreword he claims that it is not “pro-British and anti-Indian or vice-versa,” but that he is “pro the things that can bring food and freedom for the millions who are to-day deprived of them.” “Food and Freedom !” In his historical survey of pre-British India the author makes it quite clear that there was not much of the first and none of the other for the masses of peasants and handicraft workers. A multitude of oppressors and exploiters, princelings, landowners and middlemen, plus the inevitable crowd of religious parasites, the priesthood, had to be maintained according to their social status out of the products of the labouring masses. The system of agriculture was backward even when compared to the then feudal structure of Western Europe. This was due to a variety of reasons: Lower fertility owing to lack of irrigation, wasteful methods of tilling, little domestication of animals. It is not the purpose of this article to follow the author deeply into the historical development of India, for Socialists here the main question is the position of India under the rule of British capitalism.
However, Dr. Shelvankar’s investigation of India’s past is an impressive, though necessarily condensed, piece of work. Methodically he describes for us the whole structure of India as it was when the traders from the European continent came to barter and cheat the Indian population under the banner of Christianity. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch and the French and finally the British in the form of the East India Company. The British stayed.
At this time, during the 15th century, the country was under the rule of a Moslem dynasty, the Moguls, having been conquered by a series of attacks some four centuries previously. Victors and defeated were of different religion, the former were Mohammedans, the latter Hindus. The two faiths did not assimilate each other; both existed side by side and do so to the present.
The invasion made little or no difference to the economic life of the country; it merely deposed one ruling group and substituted another. Peasants toiled on the land, the craftsman worked on his job, but the surplus-value, politely called “tax,” went to the princes and priests of Islam instead of to the Brahmin caste.
The Indian feudal structure differed in important essentials from the system prevailing during the same period in Europe. This must be remembered in order to see why India did not develop into capitalism of its own accord, but had to have the capitalist virus injected into the body economic from without.
The Indian village community remained static. The handicraft worker stayed put, the victim of the peasant’s abysmal poverty; the towns remained the pleasure-grounds of the feudal rulers. Commerce was restricted to the needs of the thin upper crust, a mere by-product of an effete social system, as was the highly-skilled artisan labouring in the prince’s courtyards.
Into this paradise for capitalist exploitation came the British merchants and soldiers ready to assume the “white man’s burden” of gold. The Whig politician, Sheridan, described the East India Company as “wielding a truncheon with one hand and picking a pocket with the other.” The truncheon was soon replaced by the rifle and bloody battles throughout the country blazed the trail of British conquest. Then came the mutiny in 1857, the Company was wound up, and India came under the control of the Government, as the “brightest jewel in the British Crown.”
For more than eighty years India has been a Crown Colony. The British ruling class cannot therefore disown responsibility for the conditions now obtaining among the mass of the Indian people. It is not a pleasant thought. Out of a total population of 353 millions, and a working-mass totalling 154 millions, excluding children, about 66 per cent, are still employed on the land either as smallholders or labourers. Only 18 per cent. are employed in trade, transport and industry. There is a middle group composed of professional workers, officials, small business men, etc., numbering roughly 15 millions. Then comes the top layer of big landlords (princes, etc.), industrialists and others living on big private incomes.
The preponderance of agriculture is evident. It is not agriculture as we know it in the Western world. Large-scale farming is practically unknown except in products designed for export such as cotton, jute, linseed, tea and coffee. The production of food grown for home consumption, cereals, pulses, sugar, and so on, has been left to stagnate under a system of primitive small-holdings, the owners of which are burdened down by government tax and money-lenders. The standard of living among these peasants as well as the urban proletariat is so low as to be incomprehensible to our minds. To quote the author:
“Excluding the cultivators, most of whom, clinging to dwindling plots of land, are on the brink of insolvency and steeped in debt, we have sixty or seventy million agricultural and industrial workers holding on to dear life by the skin of their teeth. Very few of them—a fraction of 1 per cent. at the most—earn as much as 1s. or 1s. 6d. per day (i.e., between £12 and £18 a year); all the rest toil and sweat for a few pennies a day.”
How do they exist? Dr. Shelvankar tells us.
“The average village dwelling is a low, flimsy, crooked structure with mud walls, a mud floor and a thatched roof. It is windowless, airless and has no sanitation.”
The urban proletariat vegetate in hovels “with no windows, chimneys or fireplaces. There is neither light nor water supply, and, of course, no sanitary arrangements.”
Their diet is reminiscent of kept animals, only much smaller in quantity. The daily food of an industrial worker in the towns of Bombay or Madras consists of l¼ lb. of cereals and little else. The average consumption of milk per head in working-class households in Bombay “is less than ½oz. supplemented by .05oz. of melted butter.” Many of the peasants exist on an even poorer diet.
Is it any wonder that during the first thirty years of this century “Cholera has claimed 10¾ million victims, influenza 14 millions, plague 12½ millions and malaria 30 millions ” ?
And yet pacifists can only see the horrors of war !
What remedies can be applied to alleviate such distress? As was to be expected, the author of this book argues strongly that first of all India must be freed from British domination before any comprehensive policy of progressive amelioration can be put into effect.
The core of his case is, that by a deliberate policy of imperialist exploitation the development of industry has been stifled, whilst a mortal blow has been dealt to the old village communal system, adding the burden of alien exploitation to the existing native incubus. As a consequence the demand for working recruits to industry is not large enough to relieve the economic pressure on the over-populated small-holdings. He contends that the country has in the main been allocated the role of supplying to British capitalism the natural products so vital for an empire of industry and commerce, plus the provision of countless well-paid sinecures to members of that exclusive ruling-class “freemasonry,” the old school tie.
During and since the last war, however, there has been a marked rise in industrial output, particularly in textiles. It is certain that this industrial impetus will be intensified as a result of the present war. Therefore, even if it were the wish of the British ruling class to retard the growth of capitalism in India, the evolutionary process is not a thing that can be held back for ever.
That is the Socialist view, and it should be taken into account when we are dealing with nationalism in a colonial country. Further, it has yet to be shown that “national liberation” would prove to be something worth the effort and sacrifice for the hungry millions.
For as the author himself notes:
“The outstanding feature of Indian industry to-day is the degree to which ownership and control are concentrated within a comparatively narrow circle. ‘The same set of individuals’—rich merchants with a sprinkling of the more prosperous professional people—‘hold the bulk of the shares in all the cotton, jute and other concerns.’” (Page 155.)
We have still to be convinced that in matters of economic welfare or on any other questions the Indian masses could expect a better deal from their native exploiters.
Dr. Shelvankar seems to recognise the truth of this. He agrees that the handing over of the country to a native bourgeoisie, or worse still, the princes, would not improve the situation. In his view the only hope for India lies in the introduction of a “planned Socialist economy” for which national liberation would provide a stepping stone, a period of brief “transition.”
It is a view which has no basis except in the optimistic imagination of the author, who assumes that “liberation” would give the nascent Indian bourgoisie only a short lease of life. Quite the contrary. Success in the struggle for national freedom may have the effect of eliminating for a long time to come whatever influence (and it is very small indeed) the ideas of independent working-class action, not to speak of Socialism, has in India to-day. The very status of national independence presupposes a powerful native ruling-class secure in the support of a nationalist-minded population.
The author several times quotes Ireland in dealing with the agrarian problem. It is a pity he did not allow himself, and his readers, a glimpse at the virtual stagnation of the working-class movement in the Irish Free State at the present time. It is certain that this standstill is partly the result of the struggle for national independence which completely occupied the energies of the Irish workers.
Dr. Shelvankar wants his working-class compatriots to make the same mistake, but expects them almost immediately after to turn on the movement for which they have suffered and bled, throw over the nationalist illusions with which they have so long been nurtured, and proclaim their conversion to socialist ideas.
However desirable Mr. Shelvankar’s hopes may be, they are totally unrelated to the problems he is attempting to solve. Under present conditions in India, and with the standard of political consciousness prevailing among the majority of its inhabitants, the platform of national liberation can at best only lead to some form of native capitalism. This is clearly seen from the nature of the mass-movements India has so far produced. The Congress Party, though some of its leading spokesmen such as Nehru claim to the Socialists, is in fact no more than a movement of national liberation. This is implicitly recognised by the author himself when he deals with the growth of Indian industrialism during the last war. On page 176 he says: “These developments marked a critical transition in the nature of Indian capitalism. From being predominantly commercial in character, it was launching out into industrial production. But its real strength lay not so much in the economic resources at its command as in its affiliation with a political movement (the Congress Party) which was becoming a menace to imperialism.”
Later, in dealing with the record of Congress in office, in 1937, he has to admit that so far from justifying hopes of a working-class character, it showed even amity to British rule. As for the peasants, they received a rude shock when, in the province of Bihar, their champions entered into a pact with the landlords, whilst “the entire labour movement . . . denounced a Trades Disputes Bill designed to interfere with the right to strike,” which was the act of the Congress Government of Bombay (page 231).
But the chief force in India is still wielded by Ghandi. He is the real spokesman of the peasants, the bulk of the Indian people. For him the future of India lies in the past, a return to the primitive agricultural community; he is the idol of the masses, the illiterate, half-starving millions, who have not yet been pulled out of the primitive slough of religious fanaticism, and are left to the mercies of money-lenders and their agents. Not content with their “legal” whack, they take advantage of that illiteracy to double-cheat their prey.
The author’s sympathy for Ghandism is evident by the approval with which he quotes the policy of the peasant leagues, “which is nothing less than the abolition of landlordism and the cancellation of peasant debts and reorganisation on such a basis that exploitation in every form would be ended and ownership vested in the cultivator himself” (page 221).
This raises the question: What does Dr. Shelvankar mean by Socialism ? What kind of India does he visualise that would justify the term “planned Socialist economy”? For Socialists private ownership of land, as well as any other form of ownership in the means of life, is not compatible with Socialism at all. On the contrary, the small land-owner is a particularly reactionary obstacle to the achievement of Socialism. Dr. Shelvankar reveals his misconception of Socialism when he refers to Russia as a Socialist country, and gives the Soviet state-capitalist order as the example which India must follow.
In fact, the author, like many other left-wing Indian nationalists, completely disguises, perhaps even from himself, the real issues of the Indian problem. The vexed questions of religious and caste differences are fobbed off under the theory of the British policy of “divide and rule.” This may or may not be true. But that they are able to do so depends primarily on the low level of understanding, and particularly class-consciousness, which inevitably exists among the Indian masses to-day.
An important omission from the book is the total absence of any appraisal of the international issues of which the Indian problem is only a part. The wars in Spain and China have apparently taught Dr. Shelvankar nothing, but their lessons have not been lost on Socialists. Backward and smaller countries cannot assume a ”national independence” that does not exist in fact. Even Russia has had to face the bitter tragedy and humiliation consequent upon a balancing of capitalist world-power. The chances of an independent India are nil.
Socialists have, of course, to aim to break down all barriers, whether of nation, race or religion, which to-day divide the workers of the world according to the convenience and benefit of their exploiters. And let it be noted by cynics, pessimists and opponents of Socialism alike: The world to-day is more interdependent than ever before. The conflict raging at present will leave its mark in every corner of the globe. In India it will have far-reaching effects.
Socialists everywhere feel the deepest sympathy for the Indian masses in their struggles to raise their heads from under the yoke of poverty, of domination, alien and native. The problem of India is part of a world-problem; a world-wide movement for the achievement of Socialism is the only solution.
S. RUBIN.
(SOCIALIST STANDARD, DECEMBER 1941)