Precapitalist economies are predominantly agrarian. Agriculture accounts for the bulk of output and employment. Industry, in the form of artisan production, produces primarily for the rulers appropriating the surplus and to a lesser extent for the peasants engaged in agricultural production. The gross domestic product, and hence total employment, depends on the size of agricultural output, on its share appropriated as surplus, and on the mode of utilization of this surplus.
A simple illustration will clarify the point. Let us assume for simplicity that industry produces its own current input, that all income is consumed, that peasants and artisans consume only foodgrains and the surplus appropriators consume only the industrial good; an artisan earns the same income as a peasant after he has given a surplus to the rulers, peasants being the only ones from whom the rulers get their income; and that a unit of foodgrain exchanges for a unit of industrial good. If agricultural (foodgrain) output is 100, if the surplus handed over to the rulers is 50, then industrial output is 50. The total GDP of the economy is 200 (since the rulers are supposed under conventional accounting methods to be also rendering a ‘service’).
Now, contrast this situation with one where the rulers do not spend domestically the surplus they extract, but take it out of the country in the form of foodgrains for use elsewhere. Then the GDP would drop by 50, and the artisans would become unemployed; they would seek work on the land and, in the process, raise rents and lower wages. There would be a general retrogression of the economy.
The crucial difference between the two sets of rulers lies in the fact that the latter ‘drain’ away the surplus while the former spend it locally. This indeed was the crucial difference between the colonial rulers and all pre-colonial rulers in India, the reason why colonialism had a poverty-enhancing effect on the Indian economy. True, the colonial rulers did not always take out the surplus in the form of foodgrains; but they did so in the form of primary commodities that were produced on the land earlier devoted to foodgrains and hence constituted foodgrain substitutes.
This simple point, which Dadabhai Naoroji, whose bicentenary is being celebrated this year, had been the first Indian to underscore with his Drain Theory, is ignored today by the Hindutva votaries who talk of “over a thousand years of foreign rule” in India. They look at where the rulers came from and what religion they pursued but not what their rule entailed. Even on this criterion, however, the Hindutva votaries are wrong, since, as recent historical research shows, the so-called ‘Hindu’ rulers who ruled over a thousand years ago had themselves been immigrants into India. There is no question of indigenous ‘Hindu’ rulers being replaced by immigrant ‘Muslim’ or ‘foreign’ rulers; besides, under the rule of the Mughals, there was a joint exercise of hegemony by the Mughals and the Rajputs, which is why looking at the rulers in terms of their religion is so absurd. But the point being made here is that there was a fundamental difference between all preceding rulers and the colonial rulers.
The votaries of Hindutva obliterate this difference and would like everyone to do so for the sake of promoting their project of building a Hindu rashtra. But in doing so, their stance coincides with that of imperialist writers who, predictably, deny any phenomenon of a ‘drain’. We thus have a convergence of perspectives between imperialist historiography and the communal historiography of the Hindutva votaries: both deny the specific feature of colonial rule, namely, that, in contrast to all previous regimes, it unleashed a process of retrogression on the Indian economy.
This, of course, is not the only point of convergence between the two perspectives. The very periodization of Indian history into the ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘British’ periods that the Hindutva votaries advance only replicates James Mill’s periodization in his multi-volume tome, The History of British India, which was informed by an imperialist perspective. This convergence, however, goes much deeper; both perspectives deny altogether the retrogressive effect of British rule on India. This effect is brought out by a comparison of the per capita real income in Mughal India in 1595-96, estimated by Shireen Moosvi, with the per capita real income estimated by S. Sivasubramanian for India in 1901-10; the latter was lower than the former.
The Hindutva perspective on Indian history would not be worth writing about, except for the fact that the Hindutva elements are now in power at the Centre and are trying to use that fact to thrust their perspective down the throats of every student in the country via the University Grants Commission. The UGC, which is supposed to be a funding agency for universities that are statutorily empowered to develop their own academic programmes, has now taken upon itself the task of dictating to universities what their compulsory and optional courses should be in the various programmes, and also the course contents and even the reading lists in each course. Not only is this a wholly unwarranted interference in the universities’ domain but it also amounts to reducing the entire academic community of the country into mere ciphers who would henceforth only teach what the UGC asks them to teach.
This utter devaluation of the academia would obviously do great damage to the standards of teaching and research in the country; but when this devaluation is combined with an attempt to thrust an imperialist perspective on the Indian students, the damage becomes overwhelming.
Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi