During British colonial rule, urban centres such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were growing. While, in the early 19th century, 11 per cent (17.6 million) of the population lived in cities, the urban population had doubled to 32.8 million by 1911 (but, due to the general growth of the population, it remained at 11% of the total population). After 1920 there was a rapid increase of the urban population:
between 1921 and 1951 it more than doubled, and, by 1951, 17.3 per cent of India’s total population lived in cities.30 However, despite the increase of the urban population, the rural population continued to be the large majority and consisted of 82.7 per cent by 1951. This meant that, ‘barring the cotton mills, tea and coffee plantations, a few sugar refineries and distilleries, the greater part of India outside the few centers of industry was agricultural’, as the historian Bagchi observed.31
These figures do not directly show the effects of the disastrous famines that occurred in different regions during British rule. It is estimated that, between 1860 and 1910, the victims of famines and the resulting diseases, such as cholera, amounted to 20 million people.32 The reasons for the famines were very
27 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 1983), p. 116.
28 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress. Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 334.
29 Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, p. 116.
30 Douglas E. Haynes & Nikhil Rao, “Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating the Urban History of India, ca. 1920–1970”, SouthAsia. Journal of South Asian Studies XXXVI (2013) 3, pp. 322–3.
31 Bagchi, “Indian Demography and Economy”, p. 184.
32 David Arnold, Südasien, ed. by Jörg Fisch, Wilfried Nippel, & Wolfgang Schwentker, Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte. Band 11 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2012), p. 412.
complex.33 However, one important factor also connected to the aforementioned economic developments increasing India’s dependency, was an increased vulnerability to food shortages due to a change in cropping patterns. After the 1850s, there was a ‘rapid expansion of new types of exports from India – Western Indian raw cotton, Punjab wheat, Bengal jute, Assam tea, south Indian oilseeds and hides and skins, etc.’.34 The Industrial Revolution in England generated huge demands for such raw materials and, at the same time, the construction of the railways and the opening of the Suez Canal made agricultural exports of cash crops on a large scale possible. This led to a massive shift in cropping patterns, with a reduction of the land used for food crops and increased production for export. This is seen as an important factor in escalating the vulnerability of the rural population especially, to hunger and even famine.35
While the colonial government invested comparably little in agriculture, at the same time enormous investments were made in the building of infrastructure such as roads, bridges, railways (starting in 1844) and telegraph links, in order to enable the export of raw materials to England and the import of manufactured goods. These investments were financed through tax and, because farmers and farm labourers comprised the majority of the population, mainly through their taxes, increasing their financial pressures. Despite this, these investments barely created any skilled labouring jobs for the rural population.36
Quite apart from the difficult economic situation of the rural population, another topic that is important to keep in mind for this dissertation, because it captured Gandhi’s attention – particularly during the 1930s – is caste. Caste is a complex factor in the history of marginalization of (not only) the rural population, and even though the topic is far too complicated to go into detail here, it is important to mention some key issues. The economist Sukhadeo Thorat defines caste as a
‘system of social and economic governance (…) based on distinct principles and customary rules’. Thereby, the caste system ‘involves the division of people into
33 See, for example: Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
34 Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, p. 25.
35 Surinder Jodhka, “Agrarian Structures and their Transformations”, in: The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology, ed. by Veena Das (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1220–1.
36 See the argument in chapter 3 of Rothermund, An Economic History of India, pp. 19-30
social groups (or castes) in which the social and economic rights of each individual caste are pre-determined by birth’.37 There is also controversial debate concerning how static a definition of caste can be, but I will not go into that matter in detail here.38 The mechanisms of oppression based on caste, such as unequal and hierarchical division of rights, have been the subject of massive protests, especially among those who were (and are still today) suffering most from caste-based discrimination, that is, the so-called ‘untouchables’ at the lowest strata of society.39
In his preoccupation with the marginalized role of manual work in society, Gandhi, himself a member of a rather privileged caste, also saw caste as to blame due to its rigid ideas of segregating society according to a hierarchical order of
‘better’ and ‘worse’ or ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ occupations:
We look down upon those who do manual work. In Kathiawad one has to bathe if one happens to touch a weaver. Since all this is being done in the name of religion, we have become complacent. The main reason for all this is that we acquiesced in our slavery and abjectness for so many years.
Had we assigned to craftsmen and artisans a place of dignity in society, like other countries we too would have produced many scientists and engineers. But now we must wake up.40
For Gandhi, it was a shame that those working with their hands and belonging to the lowest strata of the caste system were regarded as impure and therefore often subject to caste-based discrimination; he also saw this situation as connected to India’s ‘slavery’ in colonial power structures. In his critical statements on caste he was not alone. Issues of caste and caste-based discrimination had, for a long time, been at the centre of controversial debates among nationalists with regard to a reform of Hinduism and Indian society.41 In the search for a solution with which to address the situation, Gandhi held a moderate standpoint. He was not, in general, opposed to the caste system, and believed in a voluntary ‘change of heart’
37 S. Thorat, “Caste, Exclusion and Poverty”, in Unquiet Worlds: Dalit Voices and Visions, ed. by M. Sharma (New Delhi: Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2004), p. 21.
38 See, for example, the recent publication: Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2013).
39 The term used today is Dalits, meaning ‘downtrodden’ or ‘oppressed’. See, for example, an historical overview of the Dalit Movement in: G. Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution:
Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1991).
40 CWMG Vol. 95, p. 332 Gandhi
41 See especially chapters 4 and 6 in: Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
of those privileged by it rather than in radical reforms.42 At the same time, he also stressed the importance of social work benefitting what he called the harijan communities.43 His approach was heavily criticized by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), a lawyer and social reformer born into an ‘untouchable’ community, who had studied in England and the USA.44 Contemporary to Gandhi, he became the most prominent voice of what today is called the Dalit Movement. Ambedkar criticized Gandhi’s approach towards the problem of caste-based discrimination as too weak and his approach as paternalistic.45 The two men also had very different ideas on education as a tool to solve the problem. While Gandhi, as I will further develop in the next part of the chapter, section 1.3, strongly opposed the kind of education that developed during British colonialism, Ambedkar was convinced of the liberating effects of English education in the fight against upper-caste domination, and wanted to increase the access of ‘untouchable’ children to higher education.46