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There is a rich and ever growing literature about the impact of colonial rule in India, and we can only highlight certain themes that seem to us to be particularly significant in regard to India today, and its regional diversity. As we have been writing this chapter, the one hundredth anniversary has passed (on 13 April 2019) of the terrible events in the Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar, in Punjab, when Imperial troops fired without warning into a large and peaceful crowd, killing 379 (according to the official enquiry) and injuring more than a thousand. This is a powerful reminder, no matter how reluctant many English people still are to recognize this, that the British, as well as the other European colonial empires, were based on violence, and on racism. A recent study of British rule in India that makes this point most emphatically is by Wilson, who argues that the reliance on force was, at least in part, a reflection of the weakness of colonial rule, and of the failure of the British to establish long-term relationships in Indian society. ‘In practice’, he concludes, controversially, ‘British actions prolonged and fostered chaos far more than they cultivated security and prosperity’ (2016: 498).

Wilson’s conclusions can certainly be disputed, and there are other historians who emphasize positive aspects of colonial rule. The economic historian Tirthanka Roy, for example, though he is not an apologist for empire, thinks that openness and integration into the world economy in the nineteenth century helped Indian business to overcome constraints to which it was subject: ‘By bringing in knowledge and capital from Britain to India, the open economy enabled huge growth in trade and an off-beat industrialization in the 19th century’ (Roy 2018: 261). Roy is critical of the long-established argument that the British effectively ‘underdeveloped’ India, through the open economy that they encouraged. This was the thesis of Indian economic nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (whose arguments actually influenced the formulation of the idea of ‘underdevelopment’ by its foremost exponent, A. G. Frank, in the 1960s–70s – see Frank 1967). They emphasized the ‘drain’ of wealth from India to Britain, through onerous taxation, especially of agriculture, that both paid for the purchase of Indian goods that could then be sold by the colonizers at considerable profit, and for the ‘home charges’ – payments to Britain for the government of India and for the maintenance of the Indian army (which was deployed to extend and to police other parts of the British empire). Some historians have emphasized, too, both the impoverishment of Indian cultivators by the high levels of tax that they paid on the land (land revenue payments), and the ‘deindustrialization’ of India by the British, in the interests especially of the British cotton mill industry (and resistance to the purchase of British-made cotton textiles was one of the rallying cries of the struggle for independence from colonial rule). Roy, however, argues that the long-standing focus of scholars of world history on why India fell behind has led them to miss the central paradox of Indian economic history, which he thinks was the coexistence of robust capitalism and stagnant agriculture.

This was the argument, too, of the historian David Washbrook, writing thirty years before Roy (Washbrook 1988). Indians who owned capital, Washbrook thought, had ‘never had it so good’, because in the context of colonial rule they were able to make very high profits without taking on the risks of entrepreneurship, thanks to the control that they were able to exercise over labour. Roy, however, reckons that capital was generally in short supply in India, likely because of the monsoon climate which caused seasonal boom and slack in the economy ‘on a scale not visible in other societies’, and that led to large fluctuations in the demand for money and in interest rates within the year. Thus it was that ‘The attraction of earning a windfall income in the short-term money market was so great that money was kept idle in the slack season rather than being lent long term’ (2018: 12). But Indian capitalism flourished in the colonial period, at least in part because of knowledge and capital that came in from Britain.

Debate will continue about the economic impact of colonialism in India. There is no room for doubt, however, about India’s declining share in the global economy in the nineteenth century, and the increasing divergence between India and other countries in Asia and the West. At the same time, as Roy argues, there was a successful Indian capitalist class, and successful Indian-owned industries – cotton mills in Bombay (now Mumbai), for example, and the first steelworks established in Asia, set up in eastern India by the Parsi entrepreneur Jamsetji Tata, founder of the company that now owns such an important share of British manufacturing industry. Roy’s argument, too, about ‘stagnant agriculture’ in colonial India is incontrovertible. Evidence collected by Myrdal for his classic work, Asian Drama (1968), shows how poor agricultural productivity was in India, by comparison with much of the rest of Asia, around the time of independence in 1947. Independent India faced a very significant ‘agrarian question’ – what to do about the productivity of agriculture and the poverty of the mass of the people who continued to live in the villages.

The most significant commercial and industrial development in colonial India took place in and around the colonial port cities – Bombay, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Madras (now Chennai) – establishing an economic geography that has persisted into the present century. As the economist Bharadwaj noted (1982), the initial advantages of ‘Bombay’ (the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat) and of ‘Madras’ (present day Tamil Nadu and the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh), in regard both to overall economic growth and industrial development have generally been maintained, though those of ‘Calcutta’ (West Bengal) have not, or at least not to the same extent. Another significant way in which the experience of colonialism may have contributed to the regional disparities that have become ever more pronounced in post-independence India has to do with the long-run effects of the different revenue collection systems used by the British. It has been shown that ‘Areas in which proprietary rights were given to landlords [sometimes described as areas of ‘zamindari settlement’ from the name often given to these taxcollecting landlords] have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas where these rights were given to the cultivators [areas of ‘ryotwari’ settlement]’ (Banerjee and Iyer 2005, Abstract; though see also Iversen et al. 2013, for criticism). These differences may have contributed to the disparities in levels of development between northern and eastern India, on the one hand, and the south and the west on the other, that have become increasingly sharp. On most criteria of both economic and social development, the south and west are distinctly more advanced than the north and east (excepting the contemporary states of the north-west – Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh – which generally compare quite well with the south and west).

But though there was industrialization in colonial India, the great majority of the population and of the labour force remained in the villages and in agriculture. How far, therefore, can there have been the ‘social revolution’ in India that Marx anticipated in the middle of the nineteenth century? He thought that the ‘village system’ of India was being dissolved as a result of ‘English interference’, and that colonialism was producing ‘the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’ (Marx 1853). Marx argued that the development of roads and railways by the British rulers would break down the isolation of India’s villages, and that with new irrigation systems and the development of industry, a ‘social revolution’ would come about. More recently, however, historians have often found reason for arguing that there was considerable continuity, as well as change. The British very largely took over, though they also developed, earlier systems for the taxation of land (discussed by Banerjee and Iyer, whose work is referred to above), and this ensured the reproduction of the power of small numbers of landlords over the very large numbers of small cultivators, under a variety of systems that often made for insecurity of tenure for the actual cultivators of the land. Those with more secure rights, however, and those who held larger amounts of land, became politically powerful in the later part of the colonial period, effectively controlling the local organization of the Indian National Congress, the political party born from the struggle for independence from colonial rule, by the time that India became independent: ‘By 1949 conservative coalitions built by dominant landowning castes in alliance with urban businessmen had captured effective control of most [local] Congress Committees’ (Frankel 1978: 74). These particular ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ severely constrained the possibilities for bringing about social and economic reforms on the part of the national political leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular limiting the prospect of resolving the ‘agrarian question’ by means of redistributive land reform (which was implemented in some other Asian countries; see chapter 4).

The way the British governed India also enhanced the significance of caste identities. Caste was thought to be a guide to the qualities and the capacities of people, so identifying people by their caste was an important instrument of rule. It was for this reason that the colonizers sought to enumerate people by caste in the decennial census that started to be made in 1871. Those with what were held to be a martial character, for instance, were sought for recruitment into the army: ‘by the end of the 18th century there was a general push to identify the “manly races” and to identify the “castes” with appropriate martial qualities’ (Michelutti 2008: 73). In this way a process of ‘essentialization’ of caste (or we might say, a ‘hardening’ of caste) took place under colonial rule – and their caste identities took on a new meaning for Indians (Dirks 2001; Inden 1990). Some groups started to become organized in caste associations – a particular form of civil society organization (combining ascription and voluntarism) that has been seen as exemplifying ‘the modernity of tradition’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). In general, there came about an increased awareness of caste identity – and this is another set of ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ that is of great importance in contemporary India, when caste communities compete through the process of electoral democracy for shares of state resources (see chapter 8).

One aspect of colonial rule in regard to caste that is of enduring importance is the recognition by the colonial state of the disabilities of those groups, many of them originally agrarian slaves (Viswanath 2014), who came to be described as ‘untouchable’. They were deemed by the colonial state to deserve special assistance, or of what has become known generally as affirmative action. The last major piece of legislation passed by the British government concerning the government of India, the Government of India Act 1935, included the reservation of seats in legislative bodies for the so-called ‘Depressed Classes’, and a government order of 1936 contained a list (or ‘schedule’) of such caste communities. In 1943 the colonial state decided to combine reservation of seats with reserved jobs in government service for members of the ‘Scheduled Castes’ (‘SCs’), and these practices were then incorporated into the Constitution of independent India. This principle, of providing special privileges to those considered to have suffered from historical disabilities, came to be extended by the post-colonial state to many other caste communities – described officially as ‘Other Backward Classes’ (‘OBCs’) – and there continue to be claims being made even by groups that are actually very powerful, for this designation. The reservation of government jobs, and of seats in medical and engineering colleges, for the OBCs, is a powerful incentive for claiming the categorization (see chapter 11) – but it further contributes to the hardening of caste identities that began in the colonial period.

The extent to which colonial rule in India brought ‘social revolution’, therefore, was quite limited. The development of an urban middle class, albeit small, might be called a ‘social revolution’. But unlike the case of some other former colonies (a notable example is that of Vietnam), in which there was an armed struggle for independence, led by a radical political party, the struggle for independence in India was in many ways a conservative one that mainly adhered to the principles of non-violence expounded by Gandhi. There were those in India who took the line of violent resistance to colonial rule – the most notable figure being Bhagat Singh, who is a great folk hero (Maclean 2015) – but the mainstream of the freedom movement generally stuck to Gandhian principles. These included equivocation over caste, and even over untouchability, which Gandhi sought to contest in part by describing people from untouchable groups as ‘Harijans’, or ‘Children of God’. The name, today, is rejected as patronizing by many members of the Scheduled Castes, who call themselves ‘Dalits’ (meaning, literally, ‘broken’ or ‘oppressed’), though it is still used by others among them. The Congress movement that led the Indian struggle was conservative, too, in the sense that the leadership always sought to control potential radicalism on the parts of both peasants and workers (see, for example, Pandey 1982). As independence approached in the 1940s, another of the great leaders of the Congress, Vallabhai Patel, made sure that the Indian police force, created by the British on the lines of the Royal Irish Constabulary (an occupying force) rather than on those of the Metropolitan Police, and that had been used frequently to oppose the freedom struggle, remained in place – further ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ that have contributed to the making of Narendra Modi’s India.

The experience of the struggle for independence, however – and it was, probably, the greatest mass movement that the world has yet seen – meant that with the attainment of freedom from colonial rule, there was very little question but that India should be a parliamentary democracy, in line with the liberal ideals that members of the Indian elite had espoused with zeal since quite early in the nineteenth century and had used skilfully against their colonial rulers (see Sarkar 2001 on the historical inheritance of Indian democracy; and on liberalism and India, Bayly 2012). This played a central part in the second moment of historical change that we have distinguished.