Aditya Mukherjee,Political Economy of Colonial and Post-colonial India

Professor Mukherjee, unlike most of the ‘liberal’ critics of the empire, clearly holds that the systemic basis of imperialism was capitalism which saw its most complete fruition in Britain. This is not to say that pre-capitalist colonialism was not harsh and destructive. What differentiates the two are the means, scale, and after-effects. Unfortunately, India suffered a double tragedy with both forms leading to long-term disasters. India’s pillage by Britain first allowed the British to take over the indigenous tax regime through which they financed their trade, a process widely known as the ‘tribute’ system, followed by a capture of India’s domestic market to sell to it products of British factories. In the first two chapters of the book, Mukherjee treats these twin processes both lucidly and comprehensively. While doing so, he takes up for much criticism the argument of Tirthankar Roy, the London-based economic historian who has refurbished the old argument that because British imperialism forced India’s integration in the world market, India was able to enter a phase of economic growth, one which got a further fillip because of the modern modes of transportation and communication developed by the colonial state.

In one of his books, Roy has gone to the extent of claiming that contact with the British allowed for high literacy rates among communities like the Parsee merchants. It matters little to him that education remained the privilege of a microscopic minority under British rule (cf. Mukherjee, p. 63). Mukherjee (p. 63) cites a long quote from Rabindranath Tagore in 1941:

the wheels of fate will someday compel the English to give up their Indian Empire. What kind of India will they leave behind, what stark misery? When the stream of their centuries’ administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind them.

Among many of Roy’s assertions glorifying British imperialism, there is one, viz., that ‘had it not been for the rich merchants selling cotton and indigo, Indians would not get the Presidency College of Calcutta or the Elphinstone College of Bombay, still two of the best colleges in the country’ (How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: The Paradox of the Raj, p. 15). This argument is akin to justifying the trans-Atlantic slave trade whose benefactors were the premier universities of England, Oxford and Cambridge. In 2019, the University of Cambridge started a two-year academic project to study how much it had benefitted from the slave trade. In 2020, demonstrations brought down the statue of Edward Colston, a rich slave trader from Bristol. According to estimates, 85% of the wealth used to establish the University of Bristol came from the slave trade, Colston being one of the chief donors. Would that justify slave trade?

Mukherjee clearly refutes one of the many ‘imagined’ benefits of imperialism bandied about, viz., that it enabled a massive net flow of foreign capital into India. In reality, most foreign capital in the twentieth century came in the form of loans to meet the massive balance of payments deficits caused by unilateral charges remitted to the metropolis in the form of Home Charges or debt servicing, or interest charges and dividends accruing on earlier foreign loans or investments. Or it arose in India out of ‘earnings’ obtained in the country by Europeans.

Mukherjee has also marshalled evidence to show that ‘if one pits the outflow on current account due to interest, dividends and Home Charges against net inflow due to foreign borrowing on the capital account, one will find that there was an outflow of capital from India virtually throughout the colonial period’ (p. 40).

In fact, after the First World War, most of the sectors controlled by foreign capital saw a steady decline in foreign investment. For instance, between 1921 and 1938 the net foreign industrial investment in Indian industry was worth a mere £17 million, whilst new investment in Indian industry as a whole was estimated at £144 million.

Another major argument of the book is about the need for markets by an industrialising Britain which it readily found in a colonised India. Since the need for a market necessitated a stopping of Indian textile exports, there was need for the search of an ‘alternative exportable commodity’ that would help in the realisation of the tribute from India. That commodity was found to be opium. Indian markets were now saturated with British textiles taking away the livelihoods of the local spinners and weavers. The ships that came to offload the textiles went on with opium from India offloaded in China causing the gravest damage to the health of the Chinese people. It was surely one of the nastiest undertakings of British imperialism.

Since the opium that was grown by the Indian peasantry was paid for by Indians themselves (hence the word tribute), the value was realised by the sale of opium in China in exchange for tea and silk that Britain was able to import,—and so for free. Exports of opium from India shot up by more than six times between 1816 and 1830. Atul Kohli in his latest book Imperialism and the Developing World shows that by 1836, some 35,000 chests of opium were being imported into China, and about 15% of China’s population became opium addicts. John K. Fairbank has indicted the opium trade as ‘the most long, continued and systematic international crime of the modern times’.

Apart from the dire health consequences, the Chinese economy suffered massive deflationary pressures because most of the imported opium was being paid through silver. In India, the local peasants were coerced under imperial monopoly into growing opium and then selling it for a very low price to the Company, while the silver tael proceeds of the East India Company’s opium exports were used to offset Britain’s deficits in its trade with China. In 1855, opium exports to China were worth £6.23 million against which Britain imported tea and silk worth about £8.23 million from China (p. 83)—in effect, for free.

In a chapter on colonial agriculture, Mukherjee shows that there was a little trace of big landlords organising production on their own or of an improving tenantry, so as to create a labour pool for capitalist agriculture. The chapter becomes important in the context of the debate about the indigenous development of capitalism in India. Through a case study of Assam, it is shown that what was vitally lacking was the capital with the petty producers who mostly depended for their income on various types of bonded labour rendered at estates covering large tracts of land. Furthermore, the poorer peasantry was subject to high rent (up to 50% of the yield in value), which seemed to the landlords a much easier way of making money than any industrial investment.

Despite high rents, Mukherjee cites two reasons which foreclosed the possibility for widespread land improvement and the rise of capitalist agriculture. First, the money rent that was paid, albeit exhorbitant, was not the capitalist ground rent typical of capitalist agriculture but an absolute ground rent that rested on the monopoly over the best agricultural lands by big landlords; second, much of the government-owned wastelands were far off and beyond the reach of poor farmers who had neither the capital nor implements to make use of that land.

The book has some fine entries on the Indian capitalist class’ association with the national movement, Nehruvian planning according to Mukherjee, in fact represented the ‘Left nationalist stand whose main concern was achieving independent anti-imperialist development’ (p. 259). Another fascinating chapter titled Colonialism and Communalism: A Legacy Haunting India Today is a must-read for anyone who wants to wean away India from the dangerous path of communal hatred.

Right at the outset, Mukherjee warns his readers that ‘today communalism is wantonly masquerading as nationalism’. The distinction between the two, thanks to the (in)glorious WhatsApp University, the unrelenting hate campaign by the mainstream media and untruths about the role of communalists such as Savarkar in the national movement, has seemingly been dimmed. Arguing against this dangerous trend, Mukherjee notes that

communalism as an ideology is a particular way of looking at and mobilizing society which began to be promoted in India in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it is based on the myth that Indian society is divided into homogenous religious communities which shared common economic, political, cultural and social interests. (p. 374)

The communal assertion is belied by the fact there exists no commonality, barring religious affiliation, between a Muslim or a Hindu landlord and his less fortunate compatriots whose blood and sweat have sustained the landlord’s prosperity.

Although there exists no basis for communalist rhetoric, if analysed on lines of class and imperial exploitation, its fury engulfed India leading to a bloody vivisection and the rise of religious radicalism in almost all the states that now constitute India. Mukherjee argues that this was made possible by a conscious attempt by the colonial state. It first began with the publication of James Mill’s History of British India (1826) wherein the history of India was categorised as successively the Hindu, Muslim and British periods. This made possible a post hoc communal identification of Indian history. It is no surprise that later communalists took this fallacious categorisation at face value and demonised the Muslims for their rule. The fact that the Muslim cultivator was taxed as exorbitantly as his Hindu counterpart during the so-called Muslim rule continuously evaded attention.

Indian history is replete with examples of syncretism, both at the elite and the popular level. Historical facts, such as Guru Arjan’s invitation to a Muslim saint Mīān Mīr to lay the foundation stone of Harmandir Sahab (now the Golden Temple), are deliberately overlooked in order to foment animosity among the common people. Indeed, at the popular level, religious distinctions were so hard to recognise that the Census of India (1911) talked of tens of thousands of people in the Bombay province alone as ‘Hindu-Muhammadans…whose creed and customs partook of both religions’ (p. 376).

Professor Mukherjee has rendered us a great service by giving us his life’s work in a fine compendium. What makes the book even more important is the timing of its publication. Indians would fare far better and have more arrows in their argumentative quiver against the rising tide of communal fascism if they pick up this book as soon as it hits the stores.

The only difficulty with the book perhaps is price, viz., ₹1,950. Perhaps, the publishers may consider bringing out a cheaper, paperback edition for wider circulation.