India in History - Affluence, Decay and Rejuvenation - Part II

A sea route to India for trade became an obsession in Europe in the first half of the second millennium. The Italian sailor Christopher Columbus supported by the Queen of Spain bumped into the US in 1492 in his westward journey to reach India.  The Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama did reach the southern tip of India by sailing around Africa in 1498.  Coincidentally, Babur, the Turk, invaded and occupied India in 1526.

The Portuguese were followed by the Danes, the Dutch, the French and finally the British.  It was a time of  Europe's effort in colonization.  The French and the English came to North America, the Spaniards and the Portuguese were in South America, Africa was variously shared and then all looked at the prize India.  East India Company was a trading unit incorporated in London in 1599, "to venture in the pretended voyage to the East Indies." The British tradesman Thomas Monroe took advantage of Mughul Emperor Jahangir's weakness to drinking and luxuries to gain blanket trading rights in India.  By 1650, the company was entrenched to "trade"in India's shores.

 

Bengal had developed to be an economic center by the Mughuls but the local rulers had developed divided loyalty.  The British moved in by fighting a war. The year was 1757.  The Mughuls collapsed in another war near Delhi in 1761.  The food grain exports had begun in a massive scale.  India suffered her first major famine in the modern times in 1770. More man-made famines followed.

By the time the British were being forced out from the US in 1776, their trading company had taken a good foothold in India.  The defeated soldier from the US, Earl Cornwallis went to India to create the new colony.  He succeeded. They were not traders any more, they were the rulers. The Company operated as a subsidiary to the Crown of England with an Act of the Parliament.  

How India and Indians succumbed to the ruthlessness of Cornwallis is a topic of historical introspection.  India was divided into many regions, each rich and prosperous, but there was no central command.  There was no collective defense.  The British took advantage and applied deceit.  The techniques adopted by the East India Company do not reflect well on the character of the British people.  The goals were self-serving at the cost of exploiting the innocent countrymen in India.  Possibly the food shortage in England made them act reckless. The story is sad.

England was going through technological innovations through Industrial Revolution.  East India Company found India as the supply house.  Massive exports of cotton, indigo, coal, iron ore and forest goods along with food grains left Indian ports for England.  The farmers were coerced to produce indigo and cotton in their food producing fertile lands causing the land to lose its fertility.

Added to the coercion, came taxation.  Taxation was a Mughul and Maratha legacy, but now it was orchestrated to let the farmer's land be usurped by the tax-collecting middle men.  The creation of this new class of middle men as proxy to the Administration has been a legacy of the British in India. Then came the racist Macaulay who pretended as an educationist.  Through his recommendation, English was instituted as the official language. Subsidy for all local educational and cultural institutions was eliminated.  The tax-collecting middle class learned English in Jesuit schools and the common people languished in helplessness and in total devastation.  Some in the middle class got into the administration-approved money-lending business increasing the owe for the common man.

The Company had committed "law and order" to the people in India.  The Parliament created "Acts".  The Company imported officers from England with massive salaries and a large entourage of "servants" to enforce the "Acts".  The "natives" were only good to be Assistants, Clerks and Servants.  Exclusive clubs and cultural societies developed creating an Indian apartheid system.  The arrogance of power did get a jolt with the rebellion among the troops in 1857.  Indigenous forest dwellers also resisted encroachment in to their natural habitat through armed revolts.   A series of famines in the 1860's caused millions to perish.  More rebellions followed.

Among the educated people, the Islamic community rebelled first.  They united their community with the slogan of purity against the British.  The nationalists in Bengal took steps to create privately funded research institutions as opposed to the clerical degree granting academic institutions funded by the British.  English language and travel abroad helped Indians to learn of the struggles in the world.  The Government allowed the formation of Indian National Congress to help arrest the discontent.  But the urge for self-rule had already ignited. 

More privately funded research institutions showed up to create engineers for the steel and textile industry.  Native industries did compete with the imported goods, but the Indian cottage industry was annihilated.  Various thinkers in different parts of the country joined together to discuss techniques and strategies to gain freedom.  Indians excelled and won prizes in the sciences, mathematics and literature.  The Islamic community did join in the common cause for freedom.  Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi returned back from South Africa to lead the grass root movement.

Gandhi's technique of experimenting with spirituality in political negotiations became a model of liberation movement in the world.  Supplemented with common man's sacrifice, Government-ordered impulsive massacres and a grass-root mobilization of a Nationalist Army, India marched towards freedom.  Amidst the chaos, Gandhi persevered on his path of nonviolence. He continued to challenge the conscience of people as India did through the ages.

The Second World War weakened the Empire, but the British were not done yet.  They did a final division of the country to continue to foment the sentiment of the Muslim minority.   The final stroke of breaking up the country remains as the colonial legacy of British rule in India. The legacy of bureaucracy, the disparity of wealth and the privileges of the managerial middle class would possibly not wash away easily.

It is good to note that new literature, art, music and media did develop through the creative minds in people.  The story teller Indian found the new medium of printing, photography, movie-making as interesting tools. Many experimented with the media.  More experiments are continuing.  Fundamental scientific research did continue in various research institutions, but India's wisdom and call to the world on the divinity of humanity is yet to pass through the shields of the new world order.

We will reflect on the current state of India in a later segment.  We have not studied it fully yet.

  

India in History - Affluence, Decay and Rejuvenation - Part I

It is not easy for a person like me who left India being scared of the political wrath to imagine that his own people a hundred years ago were more scared that he was in 1973.  While he could sneak out to a different shore, his own kinsmen had nowhere to go.  Some died out of starvation or cholera, and many did whatever they could to appease the "officers" to get a bowl of rice.  Most would have become fatalists looking blank to the sky. Some could be showing off that they can write the English alphabet to gain attention.  Their Mother India had changed.

The decay of liberal India is not easy to understand. It has not been researched.  There was a time where India was the land of plenty and the land of the free.  It was not only the political freedom, it was social freedom, intellectual freedom and more importantly freedom of existence through plentiful supply of food.  Though the latter was a blessing from the land, a nature-based conservation culture helped sustain the land and nurture the people. 

Indian social philosophy through the local empiricism did discover that all individuals are controlled by their psyche and the latter does help create an aptitude.  Like the tastes in nature, all aptitudes have a purpose and they are important components of sustaining the nature.  We would need aptitude to climb a tree to pluck the fruit and a different aptitude to preserve the seed and sow it in the ground to breed a tree. The former needs strength, the latter needs perseverance.  The society works best when they operate in harmony.

In a society operating on aptitudes, it runs on negotiation and mutual appreciation.  India became the most opulent nation on the earth through the process.  Each person knew his/her role in the society and each person was respected.  There was no disparity.  Aptitude ruled the land,  anyone could be productive.  Everybody had food, everybody had freedom.  Anybody could be a poet or a philosopher or a king or become a tradesman and a jeweler.  Mothers could be cared for to create healthy babies. Each excelled in his/her own work, there was space for all.

In the work with aptitude, the skill is internal and the training is personal.   One does not climb a tree by reading a book.  The book reference did invade India through the external influence of codes.  Codes are prescriptive, skills are innovative.  Codes did help create civil engineering structures like temples and palaces, but individual artistry still retained its value and esteem.  Managers and sponsors did exist, but the artist and the worker retained his/her freedom.

The codes, documentation and regimentation had made the Chinese the greatest economic powerhouse in the world.  In following a code, one needs to sacrifice the personal freedom.  The latter was hard in India.  A code is repressive, it tries to enforce generalization, a hierarchy.  No formula code could work in India, the codes became multi-fold.  There was space for all codes, various denominations.  Unlike China, there was freedom of expression.

The Mongols and the Islamic people arrived to plunder.  The theft was local.  The land had enormous resources to sustain the loot.  However Babur, the Turk, entered India in sixteenth century in search of a home.  India sheltered him, but was too fragmented with its multiple competing thoughts and regions.  Babur and the Moghuls tried to establish a new code which was alien to the land.  The new code allowed execution if one disagreed.  The enforcement was brutal.  The "free thinkers" had not prepared defense against the sword and the gun!

The Moghuls usurped all land in the country to curtail people access to food security.  However they continued to expand the cultivable areas and created "factories" to produce textile and silk.  Indian artisan showed his mantle and India competed with China as the economic powerhouse, both

maintaining a 25% of the world GDP in 1700AD.  China had a dynastic rule by the native rulers, India had a clan rule by the foreign rulers.

The massive bureaucracy of the government laced with bribery, flattery and distrust killed the Mughal empire in two hundred years.  Some local Marathas rose up.  They were good warriors but rather poor administrators.  India got into sad disarray. The most ominous period in India was lurking

with the arrival of the pirates from the west, who pretended entry as traders.       

I will continue in the part II of this article.