The Discovery of India

by Jawaharlal Nehru

Hindu nationalism was a natural growth from the soil of India, but inevitably it comes in the way of the larger nationalism which rises above differences of religion or creed.

An equally important factor in the break-up of the Mughal Empire was the cracking up of the economic structure. There were repeated peasant risings, some of them on a big scale. From

The real protagonists for power in India during the eighteenth century were four: two of these were Indian and two foreign. The Indians were the Marathas and Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan in the south; the foreigners were the British and the French.

Nadir Shah’s raid had two consequences. He put an end completely to any pretensions that the Delhi Mughal rulers had to power and dominion; henceforth they became vague shadows enjoying a ghostly sovereignty, puppets in the hands of anyone who was strong enough to hold them.

The Marathas had in no way been weakened by Nadir Shah and they continued to spread in the Punjab. But in 1761 they met with a crushing defeat at Panipat from an Afghan invader, Ahmad Shah Durrani, who was ruling Afghanistan then. The flower of the Maratha forces perished in this disaster and, for a while, their dreams of empire faded away.

who came and plundered and went back to his homeland. The East India Company had originally established itself for trading purposes, and its military establishment was meant to protect this trade. Gradually, and almost unnoticed by others, it had extended the territory under its control, chiefly by taking sides in local disputes, helping one rival against another.

Yet the Marathas produced a number of very able men, statesmen and warriors, among them being Nana Farnavis, the Peshwa Baji Rao I, Mahadaji Scindhia of Gwalior, and Yaswant Rao Holkar of Indore, as also that remarkable woman, princess Ahilya Bai of Indore.

The Marathas did not consolidate themselves in the vast areas in northern and central India where they had spread. They came and went, taking no root.

The British had power and wealth but felt no responsibility for good government or any government. The merchants of the East India Company were interested in dividends and treasure and not in the improvement or even protection of those who had come under their sway. In particular, in the vassal states there was a perfect divorce between power and responsibility.

It seems clear that India became a prey to foreign conquest because of the inadequacy of her own people and because the British represented a higher and advancing social order. The contrast between the leaders on both sides is marked; the Indians, for all their ability, functioned in a narrow, limited sphere of thought and action, unaware of what was happening elsewhere and therefore unable to adapt themselves to changing conditions.

India was, in fact, as advanced industrially, commercially, and financially as any country prior to the industrial revolution. No such development could have taken place unless the country had enjoyed long periods of stable and peaceful government and the highways were safe for traffic and trade.

The economy of India had thus advanced to as high a stage as it could reach prior to the industrial revolution. Whether it had the seeds of further progress in it or was too much bound up with the rigid social structure, it is difficult to say. It seems quite possible, however, that under normal conditions it would have undergone that change and begun to adapt itself, in its own way, to the new industrial conditions. And yet, though it was ripe for a change, that change itself required a revolution within its own framework.

As it happened, foreign political domination came first and this led to a rapid destruction of the economy India had built up, without anything positive or constructive taking its place.

Just when it was making money with amazing rapidity and in fantastic quantities, Adam Smith wrote about it in The Wealth of Nations in 1776: ‘The government of an exclusive company of merchants is perhaps the worst of all governments for any country whatever.’

The general condition of the masses in Europe was very backward and deplorable and compared unfavourably with the conditions prevailing in India. But there was this vital difference: new forces and living currents were working invisibly in western Europe, bringing changes in their train; in India, conditions were far more static.

Which of these two Englands came to India? The England of Shakespeare and Milton, of noble speech and writing and brave deed, of political revolution and the struggle for freedom, of science and technical progress, or the England of the savage penal code and brutal behaviour, of entrenched feudalism and reaction?

The two Englands live side by side, influencing each other, and cannot be separated; nor could one of them come to India forgetting completely the other. Yet in every major action one plays the leading role, dominating the other, and it was inevitable that the wrong England should play that role in India and should come in contact with and encourage the wrong India in the process.

And yet perhaps it is not inconceivable that if Britain had not undertaken this great burden in India and, as she tells us, endeavoured for so long to teach us the difficult art of self-government, of which we had been so ignorant, India might not only have been freer and more prosperous, but also far more advanced in science and art and all that makes life worth living.

History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their viewpoint; or, at any rate the victors’ version is given prominence and holds the field.

No individual can wholly rid himself of his racial outlook and cultural limitations and when there is conflict between races and countries even an attempt at impartiality is considered a betrayal of one’s own people.

In the old days when war and its consequences, brutality and conquest and enslavement of a people, were accepted as belonging to the natural order of events, there was no particular need to cover them or justify them from some other point of view. With the growth of higher standards the need for justification has arisen, and this leads to a perversion of facts, sometimes deliberate, often unconscious. Thus hypocrisy pays its tribute to virtue, and a false and sickening piety allies itself to evil deeds.

The villain of the British in India is often a hero to Indians, and those whom the British have delighted to honour and reward are often traitors and quislings in the eyes of the great majority of the Indian people.

The British who came to India were not political or social revolutionaries; they were conservatives representing the most reactionary social class in England, and England was in some ways one of the most conservative countries in Europe.

The impact of western culture on India was the impact of a dynamic society, of a ‘modern’ consciousness, on a static society wedded to medieval habits of thought which, however sophisticated and advanced in its own way, could not progress because of its inherent limitations.

Change came to India because of this impact of the West, but it came almost in spite of the British in India. They succeeded in slowing down the pace of that change to such an extent that even today the transition is very far from complete.

The millions of people who lived and functioned in India were just some kind of landlord’s tenants who had to pay their rents and cesses and to keep their place in the natural feudal order. For them a challenge to that order was an offence against the very moral basis of the universe and a denial of a divine dispensation.

In later years these developed in that close and well-knit corporation called the Indian Civil Service—‘the world’s most tenacious trade union,’ as it has been called by an English writer. They ran India, they were India, and anything that was harmful to their interests must of necessity be injurious to India.

In our own day that curious group which has no fixed standards or principles or much knowledge of the outside world, the leaders of the British Labour Party, have usually been the staunchest supporters of the existing order in India.

Practical men must necessarily base themselves on established and known practice, on existing conditions, and not take a leap into the dark unknown merely because of some principle or untested theory.

Authority corrupts and absolute authority corrupts absolutely, and no man in the wide world today has had or has such absolute authority over such large numbers of people as the British Viceroy of India.

Racialism in India is not so much English versus Indian; it is European as opposed to Asiatic. In India every European, be he German, or Pole, or Rumanian, is automatically a member of the ruling race. Railway carriages, station retiring-rooms, benches in parks, etc., are marked ‘For Europeans Only.’

A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today. Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty.

vacuum was created which could only be filled by British goods, and which led to rapidly increasing unemployment and poverty. The classic type of modern colonial economy was built up, India becoming an agricultural colony of industrial England, supplying raw materials and providing markets for England’s industrial goods.

In every progressive country there has been, during the past century, a shift of population from agriculture to industry; from village to town; in India this process was reversed, as a result of British policy.

The transition from a pre-industrialist economy to an economy of capitalist industrialization involves great hardship and heavy cost in human suffering borne by masses of people.

It may be said that a great part of the costs of transition to industrialism in western Europe were paid for by India, China, and the other colonial countries, whose economy was dominated by the European powers.

But our crisis in agriculture, grave as it is, is interlinked with the crisis in industry, out of which it arose. The two cannot be disconnected and dealt with separately, and it is essential for the disproportion between the two to be remedied.

Long subjection of a people and the denial of freedom bring many evils, and perhaps the greatest of these lies in the spiritual sphere—demoralization and sapping of the spirit of the people. It is hard to measure this, though it may be obvious.

Every previous ruling class, whether it had originally come from outside or was indigenous, had accepted the structural unity of India’s social and economic life and tried to fit into it. It had become Indianised and had struck roots in the soil of the country. The new rulers were entirely different, with their base elsewhere, and between them and the average Indian there was a vast and unbridgeable gulf—a difference in tradition, in outlook, in income, and ways of living.

Big landowners were created by the British after their own English pattern, chiefly because it was far easier to deal with a few individuals than with a vast peasantry. The objective was to collect as much money in the shape of revenue, and as speedily, as possible.

Nearly all our major problems today have grown up during British rule and as a direct result of British policy: the princes; the minority problem; various vested interests, foreign and Indian; the lack of industry and the neglect of agriculture; the extreme backwardness in the social services; and, above all, the tragic poverty of the people.

A people who are weak and who are left behind in the march of time invite trouble and ultimately have only themselves to blame.

Under modern conditions it is impossible to conceive of India being split up into scores of separate independent entities. Not only would there be perpetual conflict but all planned economic and cultural progress would become impossible.

But the Mutiny and great Revolt of 1857 demonstrated the value of the subsidiary state system to the British Government. Except for some minor defections the Indian princes not only remained aloof from the rising, but, in some instances, actually helped the British to crush it. This brought about a change in British policy towards them, and it was decided to keep them and even to strengthen them.

Some of the princes are good, some are bad; even the good ones are thwarted and checked at every turn. As a class they are of necessity backward, feudal in outlook, and authoritarian in methods, except in their dealings with the British Government, when they show a becoming subservience. Shelvankar has rightly called the Indian states ‘Britain’s fifth column in India.’

A number of very remarkable men rose in Bengal in the nineteenth century, who gave the lead to the rest of India in cultural and political matters, and out of whose efforts the new nationalist movement ultimately took shape.

The reluctance of the East India Company to spread education was justified, for as early as 1830 a batch of students of the Hindu College of Calcutta (where Sanskrit and English were taught) demanded certain reforms. They asked for restrictions on the political power of the Company and provision for free and compulsory education.

English education brought a widening of the Indian horizon, an admiration for English literature and institutions, a revolt against some customs and aspects of Indian life, and a growing demand for political reform.

The great difference between the state of Bengal and that of northern and central India in the middle of the century is brought out by the fact that while in Bengal the new intelligentsia (chiefly Hindu) had been influenced by English thought and literature and looked to England for political constitutional reform, the other areas were seething with the spirit of revolt.

Throughout the nineteenth century the new English-educated class, mainly Hindu, looked up with admiration towards England and hoped to advance with her help and in co-operation with her. There was a cultural renaissance and a remarkable growth of the Bengali language, and the leaders of Bengal stood out as the leaders of political India.