Was India feudal?

Part - II

In India, slavery was never the dominant mode of production. Even though, there were some eight million slaves in India in the middle of the 19th century, most of them were domestic and debt slaves during that era and in earlier historical periods. India never had a classical slave economy the way Greece and Rome did.

India was not a classical feudal economy in the same sense as England, France and other European powers before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, it was different in this sense. It was possible for India to develop a unique form of capitalism or even socialism in the process of the modernisation of its productive forces.

But British intervention cut across this natural process of the development of productive forces and stopped the rise and emergence of the indigenous and independent mercantile and, later, capitalist class. The economic exploitation of India by British imperialism cut across the process of accumulating wealth in the hands of the local ruling class. The imperialist policies led to the stagnation of both agriculture and industry in India.

The process of capitalist development in India occurred in a peculiar manner – first under the aegis of the British and then under the compromises and conditions that evolved out of British military, political and economic needs that drained capital from India and enforced deindustrialisation. This was followed by controlled partial industrialisation, heavily adverse terms of trade and the non-transfer of technology.

Imperial rule destroyed India’s local handloom industry to fund its own industrialisation. India became one of the major cotton exporters to England. Raw material from India were taken to Britain and the finished products were sent back to Indian markets and other parts of the world, leaving the Indian handloom industry in a shambles and taking jobs away from local weavers.

The characteristic process of imperialism and the expropriation of the colonial population from the land were carried out by the British under the cover of legal forms. This, in effect, transformed the ‘eternal’ land system of the Indian village commune into an inextricable amalgam of feudal and semi-feudal rights and tenures. The British introduced in India “the great desideratum of Asiatic society – private property in the land”, making in this connection a series of “unsuccessful and really absurd (and in effect really infamous) experiments in economics”.

In Bengal, they created a caricature of English landed property on a large scale. In south-eastern India, a caricature of small allotment properties was introduced. In the northwest, they transformed the Indian commune with the common ownership of land into a caricature of itself.

Britain relegated to India the role of an agricultural appendage to imperialism. The destruction of Indian industries, which was carried out in the 19th century, at once drove the population of the ruined industrial centres back to the land and ruined the livelihood of millions of artisans in the villages.

The overcrowding of agriculture forced three-fourths of the entire Indian population to become solely dependent on the land. The proportion of land available for cultivation fell to less than 1.25 acres per head of the agrarian population. The effect of this exaggerated disequilibrium in the company is further aggravated by the stagnation and deterioration of agriculture itself.

The British are directly responsible for this through their disruption of the village economy, their iniquitous efforts to exact land revenue and their expropriation of the peasantry. Their attempts to create parasitic forces in semi-feudal landlordism and their notorious neglect of public works on the land – which have, since time immemorial, been the function of the government and without which the cultivation of the soil cannot be carried on – also contributed to this.

The criminal indifference of the government and the suffocating parasitism of the landlords were responsible for the incredibly low productivity and the exhaustion of the soil. This also resulted in the use of primitive agricultural techniques and the waste of labour on fragmented holdings. Cultivable soil (of which 35 percent was wasted in India) was also neglected and areas under cultivation shrank while the population was on the rise. Those conditions that had pulled a vast majority of the rural population to a level of unspeakable poverty and chronic semi-starvation led to a permanent agricultural crisis that both India and Pakistan failed to resolve even after Independence.

The Indian capitalist class, despite its expansion, remains essentially dependent on an agency of British finance capital and performs a subsidiary role in the exploitation of India. Despite its dreams of industrialisation and a broadened base of exploitation for itself, the Indian bourgeoisie – shackled as it is to imperialism – cannot play the historic role of the West European bourgeoisie in liberating and developing the productive forces. But the colonial situation slowed down the development of an indigenous, progressive and independent industrial bourgeoisie and its development was different from other independent countries.

India, which was one of the major exporters of finished products, became an importer of British goods as its world share of exports fell from 27 percent to two percent. At the beginning of the 18th century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent – as large as all of Europe put together. But by the time the British were kicked out of India in 1947, it had dropped to less than four percent, according to the BBC.

To be continued

The writer is a freelance journalist.