The Wind on the Heath (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gypsies are in the news again. Dramatically, because a couple of them have been involved in murder cases and, more prosaically, because of a recent spotlighting of their continual clash with some county by-laws and state regulations. These laws control the rights of vagrants, the permissible period for roadside and common camping, child education, and so on. Some county authorities, in trying to enforce the law, have come under fire from the Gypsies' romantic sympathisers (who are often well enough endowed with worldly goods not to live in a caravan, nor sell clothes pegs for a living).

What is the background to this controversy? Where did these strange folk come from; what is their history? The safest theory is that they stem from the Doms, ancient outcast tribes in India who were musicians, dancers and metal workers. Some Persian monarch, it is recorded, transplanted such a group to the Tigris Valley and North Syria. In 855 A.D. the Byzantines moved them to the Balkans. All the while, they continued their old crafts of metal working, making music and dancing. Records from Greece and Rumania show them, in the 1340's, as serfs and personal slaves of the land-owning Boyars—which they continued to be, in Rumania, right up to 1850. The Turkish invasion of the Balkans caused a widespread emigration and some Gipsy bands, in the 1440's, were caught up in this, moving to Central and Northern Europe.

They seemed to have been under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Church. Some evidence indicates that a Papal order required them to do penance for embracing the Moslem faith whilst they were living under Turkish rule. It is all rather uncertain. Some authorities have them in Europe far earlier, descendants of the wandering metal workers and tinkers, standing apart from the tribes. Here, in fact, is the origin of the “Wayland Smith” legends.

The Gipsy custom of stealing and telling fortunes caused some townsfolk to doubt the sincerity of their penance and the story, like their welcome, were rather thin. All manner of harsh laws were enacted against them. In 1500 the Imperial State annulled the safe conduct which the Princes had issued to Gypsies. Italian states banished them. Some German states ordered all male Gypsies to be shot. Henry VIII forbade separate Gypsy courts and Elizabeth I for a time banished them under pain of death. The Commonwealth executed some simply because they were Gypsies; on the continent they lived in constant fear during the witchcraft manias. Strangely, the Inquisition gave them protection from these. Spain became very popular with the Romanies and many of them moved in, eventually to embrace Spanish names and manners.

The Gypsies were allowed to have their own courts, and to live under their own customs, because they were regarded as a separate race or nation. This was finished in the upheaval caused by the break-up of feudalism in Europe. Peasants were being thrown off the land, merchants were fighting the old feudal lords, aspiring ruling classes tussled with the Roman Church for its land and wealth. Dreadful wars laid Germany waste. Religious intolerance and bigotry with weird maniacal theories tore open the ideas of the Middle Ages. Serfs, landless peasants and unwanted soldiers took to the roads, trying to escape their states’ harsh laws and treatment by joining Gypsy bands. Thus, the Gypsies became connected, in people's minds, with criminals and outlaws and the word Gypsy became a synonym for ruffian and ne'er-do-well. England, France and Spain deported many Gypsies to the Americas; when Australia was discovered, many were shipped there. Such is the tenacity of the Gypsies that they stuck to their old ways in these distant lands—and many still continue to do so.

The Gypsies have shown no desire to uncover their origin. They have, in fact, been content to. be known in Europe as Egyptians; their headmen were referred to as “Counts of Little Egypt.” They were traced to India through originally, the work of an Hungarian named Valyi, who in 1763 noticed a similarity between the language of some Malabar Hindu friends and that of the Hungarian Gypsies. This started a more scientific study of the Romany language, which is now placed as stemming from Aryan, although so far nobody has been able to find the particular area from which such a dialect could have evolved directly.

Although some Gypsy customs have been modified by the areas in which they live, others have remained more or less constant. One of these is the matrilineal nature of their clans, which lays it down that men can only join a clan by marrying into it (although this custom is reversed in the case of the headmen). Property seems to be inherited by the men, although women can and do inherit it. The moral customs of a clan are decreed by the Tribal Mother. The Headman is—or was—elected to his position. The title of Gypsy King and Queen is in fact a misnomer conferred upon them by outsiders which the Gypsies, being sharp, have used to some advantage. The clans, when they reach any considerable size, tend to break up into new groups; it is doubtful if they still exist in the older form in developed countries such as Great Britain.

In spite of everything the Gypsies have clung to their existence to this day. Sometimes—especially in the Balkans and the Middle East—they have existed by doing work that was frowned upon by others; work like latrine cleaning and public hangings. In Spain they provided the bulk of the tobacco factory workers—which must upset a lot of romantic concepts about them. In Spain, also, they have achieved fame by their dancing skills. The industrialisation of Northern Europe has give them the somewhat higher standards of furnished caravans—higher only when compared to their brothers’ tattered tents. Their speciality —and in Hungary some built up fortunes by it—was horse dealing.

But one by one, the doors have been closing against the Gypsies. The horse is fast disappearing as a beast of burden. Mass produced metal and plastic ware is helping to kill the craft of tinkering. A trained mechanic, not a lore-stuffed Gypsy, is needed to repair a combine harvester. Hertfordshire, for example, as a county which accommodates lots of workers in well laid out, expensive dormitory suburbs and estates, is not very keen on having the roads and commons littered with old tins and burst mattresses left there, to boot, by non rate-paying Gypsies. This county, with its agriculture mainly consisting of market gardens, dairy farms and corn crops, worked by modern mechanisation, has little need for floating, seasonable labour. In contrast, Kent is famous for its hop fields and fruit farms. Even today, these need extra casual labour in season, especially for hop stringing and twining, in which Gypsies play no small part. Kent is trying to establish permanent camp sites for the Romanies—and is regarded, therefore, as a humane county by the starry-eyed Gypsy addicts. Even so, things are changing in the hop fields. New hop picking machines leave only one-third of the crop to be picked by hand. Hop-pickers have seen their numbers reduced over the last 20-odd years from 100,000 to 22,000.

It seems, then, that the days of the wandering Gypsies have not long to run. No tears for that: because they live a life on the move in caravans: it does not follow that theirs is an idyllic existence. They have to find some sort of work in order to live; in spite of their reputation as thieves, it is certain that the proceeds of stealing would not last them for long. And anybody who has picked fruit on piece rates will know that it is no more romantic or idyllic than work on a factory bench. Groups which try to exist by just plain begging rapidly degenerate into whining outcasts, devoid of human dignity. Many people wonder why anyone, even a tiny minority, should try to stand outside the world of hire purchase, mortgages, television and social hygiene.

For centuries, Gypsies have tried to hold themselves aloof. But as it has done with so many others, capitalism is about to catch up with them.

Jack Law

Letter: Sri Lanka (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sri Lanka

Dear Editors,

I would like to draw your attention to a mistake in the article on Sri Lanka in the August issue of the Socialist Standard. The article states that the Tamils were brought to the island, then known as Ceylon, from India during British rule to work as cheap labour on the tea plantations. In fact, this group of "Indian" Tamils account for only about 1.2 million of the total Tamil population on the island. They lived until recently mainly on the plantations in central Sri Lanka.

The remaining 1.4 million Tamils live largely in the North and East of the island. They trace their history in Sri Lanka all the way back to the fifth or sixth century BC. when it is believed the Sinhalese began to settle on the island. By the time the Portuguese colonialists arrived in the 16th century AD. two separate kingdoms — Tamil in the North and Sinhalese in the South were well established. During the British colonial period these two kingdoms were brought under a single administration for the first time. At the time of Independence the idea of a separate Tamil state was regarded as rather extreme by most Tamils. Nevertheless the Tamils were concerned about their future status in an independent Sri Lanka, as they were considerably outnumbered by the Sinhalese.

The case of the Indian Tamils is quite different. They have had no share in the ancient history of either the Ceylon Tamils or the Sinhalese on the island. When they arrived in Sri Lanka they were scarcely better off than slaves. They were resented by the Sinhalese as they were settled on estates in the heart of the Sinhalese area. As the plantation economy boomed they found themselves marginally better off than the Sinhalese peasants in the area. The estates often provided them with some medical care, education and housing. They were disliked also by the Ceylon Tamils as they were mostly low caste Hindus living in abject poverty and dependent on the estates.

However, by the time of Independence they just outnumbered the Ceylon Tamils. They held considerable electoral sway in the central area of Sri Lanka, as they outnumbered the Sinhalese in these areas. Their vote ensured that eight Indian Tamil MPs went to parliament in 1947. In 1948 the Indian Tamils were disenfranchised and deprived of Sri Lankan citizenship. The Indian Tamil MPs were replaced by Sinhalese MPs This action gained the approval of the Ceylon Tamil leaders as well as the Sinhalese.

Since then there have been several agreements with India to repatriate several hundred thousand Indian Tamils and readmit the rest to Sri Lankan citizenship. These measures have been slow, largely unsuccessful, and have only added to the sufferings of the Indian Tamils. Conditions on the estates have deteriorated and the Indian Tamils live under conditions of considerable hardship.

However, it was not until 1977 that the two separate Tamil groups started to join forces. In that year violent anti-Tamil activity was directed at the Indian Tamil estate workers for the first time. This drove many of them out of the central area of Sri Lanka to the North, where they sought refuge with the Ceylon Tamils whose leaders by now were agitating for a separate state. Here they continue to be harassed by the state forces seeking out terrorist suspects.

KM

London

England’s Prosperity—India’s Poverty. (1931)

From the May 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Viscount Rothermere has contributed a couple of articles to the “Evening News” (the first of which appeared on April 15th) under the heading “If we lose India——”

The first article concludes as follows :

“Nowhere in the world, therefore, is it brought home to one more vividly than in Portugal what India means to Britain.

Here is a country that was once, like ours, the proud Mistress of the Seas. She has now sunk to the third rank among the nations of Europe. What raised her to the first place was her connection with India. What brought about her downfall was its loss.

Yet at this very moment there are ignorant and weak-kneed politicians in England deliberately working to lose our grip on that historic key to National Greatness.”

There is something to be said for the position put forward by Rothermere though not perhaps in the way he intended. A good deal of the early accumulation of wealth in England that was converted into capital and helped to speed on the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries was obtained by the wholesale plundering of India.

It had been the practice in India for all, from the highest lo the lowest, to lay by the means to help tide over periods of famine. For this purpose what silver they came by was buried to be later dug up and used. When the Portuguese, French and English adventurers entered India, like Columbus in the New World, they found an Eldorado which they plundered to the best of their abilities ; the last and most successful plunderers were the British. Brook Adams in “The Law of Civilization and Decay,” writes: “Possibly since the world began, no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from the Indian plunder, because for nearly fifty years, Great Britain stood without a competitor” (page 263). The way the booty was obtained is explained in some detail by Adams, from whom the following extracts are taken :

“Upon the plundering of India there can be no better authority than Macaulay, who held high office at Calcutta when the administration of Hastings was still remembered; and who wrote more as a minister than as a historian. He has told how after Plassey “the shower of wealth” began to fall, and he has described Clive’s own gains : “We may safely affirm, that no Englishman who started with nothing has ever, in any line of life, created such a fortune at the early age of thirty-four.” But the takings of Clive, either for himself or for the Government, were trifling compared to the wholesale robbery and spoliation which followed his departure, when Bengal was surrendered a helpless prey to a myriad of greedy officials. These officials were absolute, irresponsible, and rapacious, and they emptied the private hoards. Their only thought was to wring some hundreds of thousands of pounds out of the natives as quickly as possible, and hurry home to display their wealth.

“Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness.” . . .

Thus treasure in oceans flowed into England through private hands, but in India the affairs of the Company (the East India Company) went from bad to worse. Misgovernment impoverished the people, the savings of long years of toil were exhausted, and when, in 1770, a drought brought famine, the resources of the people failed, and they perished by millions : “the very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and the dead.” Then came an outbreak of wrath from disappointed stockholders ; the landed interest seized its opportunity to attack Clive in Parliament; and the merchants chose Hastings to develop the resources of Hindustan.

Hastings was, indeed, a man fitted for the emergency, a statesman worthy to organise India on an economic basis. Able, bold, cool, and relentless, he grasped the situation at a glance, and never faltered in his purpose. If more treasure was to be wrung from the natives, force had to be used systematically. Though Bengal might be ruined, the hoards of neighbouring potentates remained safe, and these Hastings deliberately set himself to drain. Macaulay has explained his policy and the motives which actuated him.   . . .

How he (Hastings) obtained his money, the pledges he violated, and the blood he spilt, is known as few passages of history are known, for the story has been told by both Burke and Macaulay. How he robbed the Nabob of Bengal of half the income the Company had solemnly promised to pay, how he repudiated the revenue which the Government had covenanted to yield to the Mogul as a tribute for provinces ceded them, and how, in consideration of four hundred thousand pounds, he sent a brigade to slaughter the Rohillas, and placidly saw “their villages burned, their children butchered, and their women violated,” has been described in one of the most popular essays in the language. At his impeachment, the heaviest charge against him was that based on his conduct towards the princesses of Oude, whom his creature, Asaph-al-Dowlah, imprisoned and starved, whose servants he tormented, and from whom he wrung at last twelve hundred thousand pounds as the price of blood. By these acts, and acts such as these, the treasure which had flowed to Europe through the extermination of the Peruvians was returned again to England from the hoards of the conquered Hindoos.” (Pages 255-258.)

In 1901 a book by W. Digby was published entitled, “Prosperous British India.” In this book, which runs to 650 pages, Digby presented a detailed record of the terrible story of India’s connection with Britain, and the woe it has brought to the Indian population. He points out that millions of pounds have been drained from India with no return whatever, and gives what he contends is a conservative estimate, that there were, at the beginning of the twentieth century, 70 million continually hungry people in British India (page 85). He points out “that the Pioneer, the ever-ready apologist for British rule in India . . put the Indian people who are living’ in extreme poverty’ at ‘one hundred millions.’ ”

On page 7 the same writer states :

“230,000,000 out of 231,085,132 people in British India have an income, before any taxation is imposed, of only about 12s. per head per annum, or less than one halfpenny per head per day.

"Out of that 12s. at least 2s. 6d. are taken by way of taxation, or twenty per cent. of the total income.”

Digby points to the ruthless exploitation of the peasantry by the Government through taxation which ultimately put many of them deep in the clutches of the moneylender, in illustration of which he writes :

“In one district in 1800 85 per cent. of the land revenue was directly paid to the Government officials by moneylenders, the cultivators being wholly without means to fulfil their obligations, while the leading medical journal in the world ( The Lancet, June, 1901) through its correspondent in Bombay, estimates that nineteen millions of British Indian subjects have, during the last decennium of the nineteenth century, died of starvation, and one million from plague.” (Page 64.)

As an illustration of how the impoverishment of the people under British rule had lessened the power of resistance to the forces of nature, Digby points to the fact that while between 1800 and 1825 there were, only four famines, between 1875 and 1900 there were twenty-two famines.

Digby supports his case by masses of evidence drawn from official sources.

Another writer, Dadabhai Naoroji, provides evidence of a similar kind in a book entitled, “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.” In 1928 Sir Stanley Reed writes, in “India: the new Phase,” “The poverty of the Indian peasant still dominates the situation.”

Such has been the nature and result of British exploitation in India. Is it any wonder that part of the population gives ready ear to those who urge (for their own private ends in the main) that India should rid itself of the foreign exploiters ?

To obtain an idea of the forces of work in India at present, and to grasp what lies behind the Nationalist movement it is necessary to understand something of India’s economic development, particularly during the last twenty years or so.

The following is a brief sketch to aid in understanding the present situation.

India Yesterday.

The economic revolution in India began about the middle of the last century. Until then India was made up of village communities of varying sizes. The artizans were village servants paid in kind by the local community to supply its needs. What trading existed was almost entirely by barter. Money was very little used until the British Government demanded the payment of the Government assessments in cash. The export trade was very small. The chief factor that kept India in the village community stage for such a long period was its comparative isolation from the outside world owing to lack of transport facilities. Roads were few and in such poor condition that they were impassable during rainy periods. Except at a few places along one or two of the larger rivers, navigation offered little help to internal traffic.

In a few years all this was changed.

Indian cultivators produced cotton on a small scale from early times and some of the more refined fabrics were exported to Europe. “With the cheapening of the cotton goods by the introduction oi machinery in England, Indian products were unable to compete and the export declined. America was the principal source of England’s new cotton up to the American Civil War in the 1860’s. This event closed the ports of the Southern States to the export of cotton and produced a cotton famine in Lancashire. The eyes of English manufacturers immediately turned to India and feverish efforts were made to turn India into a cotton producing tributary of the Empire. In the ’50’s of the last century Lord Dalhousie was appointed Governor-General of India and at the instigation of the British Government he immediately set about ending India’s economic isolation. Cotton commissioners were appointed and roads and railway construction was pushed forward.

A Public Works Department was formed. Thousands of labourers were recruited from among the agricultural labourers, the poorer cultivators, village artizans and the weavers. The cotton cultivators were enabled to go ahead to meet the sudden tremendous demand for raw cotton as they were assured of security of tenure against the old village communal arrangement by the operation of the Land Settlement Act. Before 1860 a class of general casual labourers were practically unknown in India. After the new development schemes casual labour became a common feature of Indian life and the stagnation of centuries disappeared. Co-operative and forced labour of cultivators was replaced by wage labour.

The Government’s activity in India rapidly bore fruit. The first line of railway was opened to traific in 1854. Bv 1869 over 5,000 miles of railway were opened to traffic. Between 1859 and 1866 the price of cotton rose more than threefold and the quantity available for export to England more than doubled. It rose from half a million bales in 1859 to one and a quarter million bales in 1865.

For a few years the effect of the American Civil War, together with the discoveries of precious metals in Australia, California, and Mexico, with the consequent rise in prices made cotton growing a profitable industry to the cultivators of the Indian cotton trade. The end of the Civil War and the resumption of export by America brought about a sharp fall in the demand for Indian cotton and the position of the Indian cultivators suddenly became very bad. Many prominent Bombay merchants, who had risen on the tide of prosperity, failed. At the same time the benevolent Government, who wished to re-imburse itself for its expenditure on development works, taking the period of prosperity as normal, raised the assessments for revenue purposes and helped the ruin of the peasants, who were compelled to resort to borrowing to meet the increased demands.

In 1875 the Government of India entered on a policy of more and more expenditure in military expeditions and establishments, and as the money had to be found by the Indian population, the burden of taxation pressed more and more heavily on the mass of the people, and the grip of the moneylenders tightened. The resulting distress was greater than had previously been known by the Indian people and was one of the earliest of the “benefits” of British rule in India. Before the coming of the British,, money-lending to cultivators was checked by the restrictions on the transfer of lands and by the refusal of the superior powers to aid money-lenders in recovering debts. But the British had driven a nail into the coffin of the old communal system by permitting the transfer of land and its absolute ownership, which the cultivators had never possessed before. It had also introduced a judicial system which gave the money-lender a great power over the debtor, and a Limitation Act, making the renewal of the debt-bond in short periods compulsory. The debtor was practically reduced to the position of a serf, and the money-lender had a tight grip on his land. Thus commenced the gradual transfer of the lands of the peasants to the money-lenders. In 1879 “the condition of the agriculturist was one bordering on extreme poverty” (see Gadgil—”Industrial Evolution of India”).

In the textile industries generally, as well as in the metal and other industries, the opening up of India by the improved transport facilities brought in the cheap products of the European manufacturers and ruined the finer industry of the village handicraftsman. With the extension of British rule over India, the easy flow of Indian life, interrupted, it is true, by periodical severe famines, was gone forever. India was drawn into the maelstrom of capitalist commerce and industry, and a large portion of its population was rapidly converted from co-operative cultivators and handicraftsmen into a replica of their Western brothers—wage-slaves. The opening up of the country had resulted in the killing of the native industry.

In the nineteenth century, European exploitation of Indian resources began with the introduction of indigo, tea and coffee plantations. These plantations were granted to Europeans and worked by Indian coolies drawn from different parts of India. During their transportation a large proportion of the coolies died, and when the others reached the gardens their miseries were aggravated by the ill-treatment of their employers. The early planting speculations exhibited familiar features of capitalist commercial investment. Land companies were formed, which sold land that existed in places impossible of cultivation. In many cases the surveying had been purely fanciful and the buyer found that the land he had bought in no way resembled the specifications, and was situated in a district occupied by hostile tribes who would have very rapidly claimed his head if he had attempted to claim the land. After 1860, plantations sprang up everywhere.

Factory industry also commenced about this period and represents another of the “benefits” conferred on India by British rule. The cotton boom and the corresponding reckless floating of companies for all purposes was followed by the inevitable crisis and the collapse of credit in 1865. India was now experiencing for the first lime the inevitable accompaniment of capitalist rule. Industry did not recover until 1871. By 1879 there were 56 cotton mills in India, employing 43,000 people, most of them situated in the Bombay district. In 1882 there were 20 jute mills, employing 20,000 people, nearly all of them in the vicinity of Calcutta.

Coal mining also began to grow alongwith the cotton and jute industries, and in 1880 employed 20,000 people.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was an important factor in the increase in India’s export trade, and between 1880 and 1895 there was a tremendous increase in the export of Indian raw products.

By 1898 the number of cotton mills had risen to 144, and the people employed to 139,578. The export of Indian yarn rose from 26,701,716 Ib. in 1879 to 170,518,804 Ib. in 1890. In the jute industry and in coal mining there was a corresponding growth. The export of coal from India commenced in 1900, and by 1894 had reached nearly 54,000 tons. The tea industry was also rapidly growing, but the system of recruiting labour for it was denounced by a member of the Tea and Coal Labour Commission as a “vile pest to society.”

Along with the growth of the commerce and industry there was also growing up a landless labour class, and in 1891 the first Factory Act was passed, against the opposition of the manufacturers. This Act only provided for the regulation of the working hours of children below the age of twelve. The working hours of children between seven and twelve years of age were limited to nine hours. There were no sanitary provisions. The Act only applied to factories employing 100 or more hands and using mechanical power. Tea, coffee and indigo establishments were excluded from the operations of the Act.

The “benefits” of British rule, in India were accumulating !

It is interesting to notice the movement in favour of Factory Acts in India was instigated by Lancashire and Dundee, who complained that they were subject to unfair competition of India on account of the lack of a Factory Act. A further Act was passed in 1891, which was a slight improvement and raised the minimum age limit for children to nine years of age. In coal mining there was no regulation at all and women were largely employed in this industry.

As usual, many of the provisions of the Act were ignored, and in some mills men, women and children worked from sunrise till sunset. The following quotation from Gadgil gives a picture of the conditions at the time in the Kandesh industiy :—

“The evidence before the 1884 Factory Commission was of a terrible nature. One witness stated, “In the busy season—that is in March and April—the gins and presses sometimes work both night and day and the same set of hands work both night and day, with half-an-hour’s rest in the evening. The same set continue working day and night for about eight days.” It was ail the worse because the hands were mostly women. Another witness stated : “The women are looked on as part of the gins, and they belong to the establishment, and two or three hours is longest time they can be absent out of twenty-three without any notice being taken of it.” After working eight days without stopping, they (the gins) are compelled to get another set of hands from Bombay! ” (Page 95.)

In Bombay the employers kept nearly three weeks’ wages in hand and paid monthly.

In the coal mining industry in Bengal, women and children were employed extensively underground.

Gilmac.

(To be continued.)

Indian railways (2010)

Book Review from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engines of Change. Ian J Kerr, Praeger Publishers

Although carried out in a rather annoying academic style, Engines of Change is nonetheless an excellent overview of the history of the railways of India from an economic and social perspective. One of the themes running through the book is the increasing state involvement in the running of the railways in India – partial government ownership beginning as early as 1870, less than twenty years after the opening of the first line. Marx gets a passing mention for his comment that the construction of railways under British rule would hasten industrialisation. By the end of British rule in India, up to 95 percent of the railway system was already nationalised. By the Raj – another nail in the coffin of the ‘Nationalisation = Socialism’ equation! On the same theme, it is interesting to note that ticketless travel, previously viewed as a nationalist anti-British protest, surged after independence – after all now ‘the people’ owned the trains. Currently some 6 million fare-dodgers every year find out just how far their ownership of Indian Railways extends.

Kaz.

The Problem of India (1941)

Book Review from the December 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

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.

Sid Rubin