04-09-2008, 02:23 AM
<b>Rediscovering India by Dharampal</b>
<i>Courtesy and Copyright Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas (SIDH)</i>
Dharampalji is an accomplished researcher, writer, thinker, sociologist, historian & philosopher. It is his ability to question what looks like obvious, to delve behind it and unravel intriguing and insightful details of Indian history, society & polity that makes Dharampalji very special. A Gandhian & long time associate of Mirabehn & Jayaprakash Narayan, the Dharampal flavor is manifest in each of the articles in this collection - rich in research, delectable insight, and revelations which are spicy & invigorating.
Excerpts from the book based on a review in:
http://www.esamskriti.com/html/new_inside....id=1039&sid=170
Peasants, artisans, those engaged in the manufacture of iron and steel, or in the various processes of its flourishing indigenous textile industry, or its surgeons and medical men, even many of its astronomers and astrologers belonged to this predominant section i.e. Sudras is unquestionable.
When the British began to conquer India, the majority of the rajas in different parts of India had also been from amongst such castes which have been placed in the sudra varna.
Today's backward classes or Sudras cultural and economic backwardness is post 1800 due to impact of British economic policies.
Madras Presidency 1822 survey showed sudras and castes below formed 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the total students in the Tamil speaking areas.
In 1804 according to The Edinburgh Review wages of the Indian agricultural laborer were also much more than British counter part.
Simultaneous to the stigmatizing of caste as an evil, the requirements of conquest, and perhaps also a similarity in classification, attracted the British to the Manusmriti and gave scholarly and legal support to some of its provisions, including those relating to the varnas. A major result of it was to provide validity and traditional sanction to the virtual dispossession of an overwhelming proportion of the Indian people from property or occupancy rights in hand and taking away their rights in the management of innumerable cultural and religious institutions which they had hitherto managed. Further, it also led to the erosion of the flexibility of customs which existed amongst most of the castes, and made them feel degraded to the extent they deviated from brahamanical practice. The listing of the castes in a rigid hierarchical order was another result of this latter approach. The earlier relationship and balance amoung the castes was thus wholly disrupted.
About a century later, i.e., from about the end of the nineteenth century, various factors began to attempt a reversal of what had resulted from previous British policy. In time, this has led to what today are known as backward caste movements. The manner in which their objectives are presented however, seem to suggest as if the 'backward' status they are struggling against is some ancient phenomenon. In reality their cultural and economic backwardness (as distinct from their ritualistic status on specific occasions) is post - 1800, and what basically all such movements are attempting to achieve is to restore back the position, status, and rights they had prior to 1800.
Before arriving at a conscious policy regarding education in India the British carried our certain surveys of the surviving indigenous educational system. A detailed survey was carried out in 1822-25 in the Madras Presidency (i.e. the present Tamil Nadu, the major part of the present Andhra Pradesh, and some districts of the present Karnataka, Kerala and Orissa). The survey indicated that 11,575 schools and 1,094 colleges were still then in existence in the Presidency and that the number of students in them were 1,57,195 and 5,431 respectively. The more surprising information, which this survey provided, is with regard to the broader caste composition of the students in the schools.
According to it, those belonging to the sudras and castes below formed 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the total students in the Tamil speaking areas, 62 per cent in the Oriya areas, 54 per cent in the Malayalam speaking areas, and 35 per cent to 40 per cent in the Telugu speaking areas. The Governor of Madras further estimated that over 25 per cent of the boys of school age were attending these schools and that a substantial proportion, and more so the girls, were receiving education at home. According to data from the city of Madras 26,446 boys were receiving their education at home while the number of those attending schools was 5,532.
The number of those engaged in college-level studies at home was similarly remarkable in Malabar, 1,594 as compared to a mere 75 in a college run by the family of the then impoverished Samudrin Raja. Further, again in the district of Malabar the number of Muslim girls attending school was surprisingly large, 1,122 girls as compared to 3,196 Muslim boys. Incidentally, the number of Muslim girls attending school there 62 years later in 1884-85 was just 705. The population of Malabar had about doubled during this period.
If one looks deep enough, corresponding images of other aspects of Indian life and society emerge from similar British records of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Those indicate not only a complex structure of science and technology (according to tests carried out by the British, the best steel in the world during this period was produced by relatively portable steel furnaces in India, and inoculation against small-pox was a widely-extended Indian practice) but also the sophisticated organizational structure of Indian society.
According to Mr. Alexander Read, later the originator of the Madras land revenue system, the only thing which seemed to distinguish the nobility from their servants in Hyderabad around 1780 was that the clothes of the former were more clean.
<b>
Warriors are now Backwards</b>
Integrating the Notified Tribes - The fifth report of the Bihar Backward Classes Commission 1976 (commonly known by the name of its chairman as, the Mungerilal commission) deals with the denotified groups in Bihar.
While the commission has shown much concern about the problem faced by these groups the most important part of the report seems to be its introduction. According to it, these groups are largely of such people whose ancestors were warriors and gave unceasing battle to the British till they got exhausted and succumbed to the overwhelming British power. Besides being warriors, their main occupations are said to have been of ironsmithy (Iuhar), hunting, jugglery and acrobatics, snake charming and acting. After their total subjugation, on the one hand, they were compulsorily excluded from the rest of society and put under constant police vigilance, and on the other hand, to somehow satisfy their pressing needs (and perhaps also as a symbol of rebellion) took to thieving, begging etc. Furthermore they used to be put to forced labor under statute, and in the later stages some of them put under the charge of the (British) Salvation Army .
A few comments from the Punjab census of 1881 may be reproduced here.
1. The effect of Hinduism upon the character of the followers:
"(Hinduism) can hardly be said to have an effect upon the character of its followers, for it is itself the outcome and expression of that character-. In fact the effect of Hinduism upon the character of its followers is perhaps best described as being wholly negative. It trouble their souls with no problems of conduct or belief, it stirs them to no enthusiasm either political or religious, it seeks no proselytes, it preaches no persecution, it is content to live and let live. The characteristic of the Hindu is quiet, contented thrift. He tills his lands, he feeds his Brahman, he lets his womenfolk worship their gods, and accompanies them to they yearly festival at the local shrines, and his chief ambition, is to build a brick house, and to waste more money than his neighbor at his daughter's wedding."
2. On Village Mussalmans (of Eastern Punjab)
"In the eastern portion of the Punjab the faith of Islam, in anything like its original purity, was till quite lately to be found only among the Saiyads, Pathans, Arabs and other Mussalmans of foreign origin, who are for the most part settled in towns. The so-called Mussalmans of the villages were Mussalmans in little but name. They practiced circumcision, repeated the Kalimah, or mahomadan profession of faith, and worshipped the village deities. But after the Mutiny a great revival took place. Mahomadan priests traveled far and wide through the country preaching the true faith, and calling upon believers to abandon their idolatrous practices⦠But the villager of the East is still a very bad Mussalman⦠As Mr. Channing puts it, the Mussalman of the villages âobserves the feasts of both religions and the fasts of neither."
3. Impact of Islamic Conquest on Caste
"Indeed it seems to me exceedingly probable that where the Mussalman invasion has not, as in the Western Punjab, been so wholesale or the country of the invaders so near as to change bodily by force of example the whole tribal custom of the inhabitants, the Mahomedan conquest of northern India has tightened and strengthened rather than relaxed the bonds of caste; and it has done this by depriving the Hindu population of their natural leaders the Rajputs, and throwing them wholly into the hands of the Brahmans.
The full discussion of this question would require a far wider knowledge of Indian comparative sociology than I possess. But I will briefly indicate some considerations which appear to me to point to the probable truth of my suggestion- We know that, at least, in the earlier and middle stages of Hinduism, the contest between the Brahman and the Rajput for social leadership, of the people was prolonged and- (see Muir's Sanskrit Texts, Vol.I ). The Mahomedan invaders found in the Rajput princes political enemies whom it was their business to subdue and to divest of authority; but the power of the Brahmins threatened no danger to their rule, and that they left unimpaired."
<b>On Industry and how the 'Backwards' of today came into being.</b>
The proportion of the Indian people engaged in industry as distinguished from agriculture, cattle and animal breeding, trade and commerce, cultural and religious pursuits, administration, and police and militia till about the end of the eighteenth century was probably in the range of 20 to 25 per cent. Of these a substantial proportion were occupied in the construction of houses, temples, forts and other public buildings, and in the construction of tanks and roads. The materials used in construction activity would have included stone, baked bricks, mud, various types of tiles, wood, some metal and a variety of mortars. Even a larger proportion seems to have been occupied in the various processes related to the manufacture of cloth-ginning, carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing, printing, finishing, etc. The number of weavers in India around 1800 could well have been in the range of 15-20 lakh families, and the households which would have spun the cotton, woolen or silken thread for the cloth which was woven could easily have been ten times the number of weaver families.
Besides these two, the major areas of industrial activity would have been in the mining and manufacture of metals, the conversion and shaping of metals into consumer articles, in the preparation of chemicals including the manufacture of salt as also of saltpeter; fishing in inland rivers, lakes, tanks, ponds, etc., as well as in the sea; in the collection of herbs including plants used in the making of dyes and of agents which fixed the colour as well as the manufacture of sugar, spirits, medicines, herbal delicacies, and essences, etc.; and a multiplicity of craftsmen who worked in wood, iron, silver, gold, diamonds, cropper, brass, bronze, glass, etc. besides there were the oil extractors, potters, leather workers and so on. Till the end of the eighteenth century, those engaged in industrial pursuits, especially those in the various fields of construction and those engaged in the manufacture and shaping of metals considered themselves in no way inferior to the Brahmins either in learning in ritual status, especially in south India. And even the Brahmins would concede them precedence on many occasions.
Yet it does seem that because of a alien political dominance, or because of some internal tension between those engaged in industry, on the one hand, and those engaged in agriculture, on the other, or because of a combination of these and several others factors, the status of those engaged in industry, and even in trade, commerce and banking, seems to have started to suffer by the early eighteenth century.
The 19th century sees the extensive uprooting, disruption and stagnation of all sphere of Indian industry and the large-scale conversion of those who had been historically and traditionally engaged in them, into mere laborers, and often into a destitute population.
In India the process of uprooting, disruption, etc. planned as it was by the British-run Indian State to suit the needs of England and of those of the West generally and of the newly transformed Western trade and commerce, got directed differently. Initially, the craftsmen, especially those engaged in the making of cloth, in the mining and manufacture of metals, and those engaged in construction, stone work, etc., were through fiscal and other devices reduced to a state of penury and homelessness and led into either a state of bondage or destruction. This turned most of the technological and industrial innovators, designers and craftsmen into mere laborers, and most of the remaining were reduced â because of lack of resources and lack of demand -to a state of industrial crudity and barbarism.
Mining and the manufacture of metals were either directly prohibited by administrative regulations or made economically impossible by the levy of high license fees, take-over of mining land as well as forests by the State as the property, and through the import of tariff supported British and European products into the country. The same began to happen from about 1815 in all sectors of the cloth industry from the stage of carding, spinning, dyeing, weaving, to printing and finishing. By about 1820 Indian industry was wholly on its knees and in the sort of state in which Mahatma Gandhi found it around 1915.
From about 1800 onwards the condition of those engaged in industry had become pitiful in the major industrial centers. This extended to other localities also were because of the rapid decline of Indian agriculture and of India's commerce and trade the industry suffered as well. The craftsmen and their families had enjoyed a citizenship status in the villages as well as the small towns. Most of them had rights to house-sites, back garden, and some manyam land and generally received a substantial proportion of the agricultural produce at the time of harvest. Similarly, many of them received incomes in various shapes from those engaged in commerce, banking and trade. As the localities began to deteriorate and crumble, because of British rack-renting, decline in the overall economy etc., most of the craftsmen became impoverished. Many were no longer needed for the functions they performed and through legalistic arguments even deprived of their manyams and house-sites. This continued during most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and a large number of the craftsmen and others constituting the local infrastructure had to quit the localities.
End.
<i>Courtesy and Copyright Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas (SIDH)</i>
Dharampalji is an accomplished researcher, writer, thinker, sociologist, historian & philosopher. It is his ability to question what looks like obvious, to delve behind it and unravel intriguing and insightful details of Indian history, society & polity that makes Dharampalji very special. A Gandhian & long time associate of Mirabehn & Jayaprakash Narayan, the Dharampal flavor is manifest in each of the articles in this collection - rich in research, delectable insight, and revelations which are spicy & invigorating.
Excerpts from the book based on a review in:
http://www.esamskriti.com/html/new_inside....id=1039&sid=170
Peasants, artisans, those engaged in the manufacture of iron and steel, or in the various processes of its flourishing indigenous textile industry, or its surgeons and medical men, even many of its astronomers and astrologers belonged to this predominant section i.e. Sudras is unquestionable.
When the British began to conquer India, the majority of the rajas in different parts of India had also been from amongst such castes which have been placed in the sudra varna.
Today's backward classes or Sudras cultural and economic backwardness is post 1800 due to impact of British economic policies.
Madras Presidency 1822 survey showed sudras and castes below formed 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the total students in the Tamil speaking areas.
In 1804 according to The Edinburgh Review wages of the Indian agricultural laborer were also much more than British counter part.
Simultaneous to the stigmatizing of caste as an evil, the requirements of conquest, and perhaps also a similarity in classification, attracted the British to the Manusmriti and gave scholarly and legal support to some of its provisions, including those relating to the varnas. A major result of it was to provide validity and traditional sanction to the virtual dispossession of an overwhelming proportion of the Indian people from property or occupancy rights in hand and taking away their rights in the management of innumerable cultural and religious institutions which they had hitherto managed. Further, it also led to the erosion of the flexibility of customs which existed amongst most of the castes, and made them feel degraded to the extent they deviated from brahamanical practice. The listing of the castes in a rigid hierarchical order was another result of this latter approach. The earlier relationship and balance amoung the castes was thus wholly disrupted.
About a century later, i.e., from about the end of the nineteenth century, various factors began to attempt a reversal of what had resulted from previous British policy. In time, this has led to what today are known as backward caste movements. The manner in which their objectives are presented however, seem to suggest as if the 'backward' status they are struggling against is some ancient phenomenon. In reality their cultural and economic backwardness (as distinct from their ritualistic status on specific occasions) is post - 1800, and what basically all such movements are attempting to achieve is to restore back the position, status, and rights they had prior to 1800.
Before arriving at a conscious policy regarding education in India the British carried our certain surveys of the surviving indigenous educational system. A detailed survey was carried out in 1822-25 in the Madras Presidency (i.e. the present Tamil Nadu, the major part of the present Andhra Pradesh, and some districts of the present Karnataka, Kerala and Orissa). The survey indicated that 11,575 schools and 1,094 colleges were still then in existence in the Presidency and that the number of students in them were 1,57,195 and 5,431 respectively. The more surprising information, which this survey provided, is with regard to the broader caste composition of the students in the schools.
According to it, those belonging to the sudras and castes below formed 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the total students in the Tamil speaking areas, 62 per cent in the Oriya areas, 54 per cent in the Malayalam speaking areas, and 35 per cent to 40 per cent in the Telugu speaking areas. The Governor of Madras further estimated that over 25 per cent of the boys of school age were attending these schools and that a substantial proportion, and more so the girls, were receiving education at home. According to data from the city of Madras 26,446 boys were receiving their education at home while the number of those attending schools was 5,532.
The number of those engaged in college-level studies at home was similarly remarkable in Malabar, 1,594 as compared to a mere 75 in a college run by the family of the then impoverished Samudrin Raja. Further, again in the district of Malabar the number of Muslim girls attending school was surprisingly large, 1,122 girls as compared to 3,196 Muslim boys. Incidentally, the number of Muslim girls attending school there 62 years later in 1884-85 was just 705. The population of Malabar had about doubled during this period.
If one looks deep enough, corresponding images of other aspects of Indian life and society emerge from similar British records of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Those indicate not only a complex structure of science and technology (according to tests carried out by the British, the best steel in the world during this period was produced by relatively portable steel furnaces in India, and inoculation against small-pox was a widely-extended Indian practice) but also the sophisticated organizational structure of Indian society.
According to Mr. Alexander Read, later the originator of the Madras land revenue system, the only thing which seemed to distinguish the nobility from their servants in Hyderabad around 1780 was that the clothes of the former were more clean.
<b>
Warriors are now Backwards</b>
Integrating the Notified Tribes - The fifth report of the Bihar Backward Classes Commission 1976 (commonly known by the name of its chairman as, the Mungerilal commission) deals with the denotified groups in Bihar.
While the commission has shown much concern about the problem faced by these groups the most important part of the report seems to be its introduction. According to it, these groups are largely of such people whose ancestors were warriors and gave unceasing battle to the British till they got exhausted and succumbed to the overwhelming British power. Besides being warriors, their main occupations are said to have been of ironsmithy (Iuhar), hunting, jugglery and acrobatics, snake charming and acting. After their total subjugation, on the one hand, they were compulsorily excluded from the rest of society and put under constant police vigilance, and on the other hand, to somehow satisfy their pressing needs (and perhaps also as a symbol of rebellion) took to thieving, begging etc. Furthermore they used to be put to forced labor under statute, and in the later stages some of them put under the charge of the (British) Salvation Army .
A few comments from the Punjab census of 1881 may be reproduced here.
1. The effect of Hinduism upon the character of the followers:
"(Hinduism) can hardly be said to have an effect upon the character of its followers, for it is itself the outcome and expression of that character-. In fact the effect of Hinduism upon the character of its followers is perhaps best described as being wholly negative. It trouble their souls with no problems of conduct or belief, it stirs them to no enthusiasm either political or religious, it seeks no proselytes, it preaches no persecution, it is content to live and let live. The characteristic of the Hindu is quiet, contented thrift. He tills his lands, he feeds his Brahman, he lets his womenfolk worship their gods, and accompanies them to they yearly festival at the local shrines, and his chief ambition, is to build a brick house, and to waste more money than his neighbor at his daughter's wedding."
2. On Village Mussalmans (of Eastern Punjab)
"In the eastern portion of the Punjab the faith of Islam, in anything like its original purity, was till quite lately to be found only among the Saiyads, Pathans, Arabs and other Mussalmans of foreign origin, who are for the most part settled in towns. The so-called Mussalmans of the villages were Mussalmans in little but name. They practiced circumcision, repeated the Kalimah, or mahomadan profession of faith, and worshipped the village deities. But after the Mutiny a great revival took place. Mahomadan priests traveled far and wide through the country preaching the true faith, and calling upon believers to abandon their idolatrous practices⦠But the villager of the East is still a very bad Mussalman⦠As Mr. Channing puts it, the Mussalman of the villages âobserves the feasts of both religions and the fasts of neither."
3. Impact of Islamic Conquest on Caste
"Indeed it seems to me exceedingly probable that where the Mussalman invasion has not, as in the Western Punjab, been so wholesale or the country of the invaders so near as to change bodily by force of example the whole tribal custom of the inhabitants, the Mahomedan conquest of northern India has tightened and strengthened rather than relaxed the bonds of caste; and it has done this by depriving the Hindu population of their natural leaders the Rajputs, and throwing them wholly into the hands of the Brahmans.
The full discussion of this question would require a far wider knowledge of Indian comparative sociology than I possess. But I will briefly indicate some considerations which appear to me to point to the probable truth of my suggestion- We know that, at least, in the earlier and middle stages of Hinduism, the contest between the Brahman and the Rajput for social leadership, of the people was prolonged and- (see Muir's Sanskrit Texts, Vol.I ). The Mahomedan invaders found in the Rajput princes political enemies whom it was their business to subdue and to divest of authority; but the power of the Brahmins threatened no danger to their rule, and that they left unimpaired."
<b>On Industry and how the 'Backwards' of today came into being.</b>
The proportion of the Indian people engaged in industry as distinguished from agriculture, cattle and animal breeding, trade and commerce, cultural and religious pursuits, administration, and police and militia till about the end of the eighteenth century was probably in the range of 20 to 25 per cent. Of these a substantial proportion were occupied in the construction of houses, temples, forts and other public buildings, and in the construction of tanks and roads. The materials used in construction activity would have included stone, baked bricks, mud, various types of tiles, wood, some metal and a variety of mortars. Even a larger proportion seems to have been occupied in the various processes related to the manufacture of cloth-ginning, carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing, printing, finishing, etc. The number of weavers in India around 1800 could well have been in the range of 15-20 lakh families, and the households which would have spun the cotton, woolen or silken thread for the cloth which was woven could easily have been ten times the number of weaver families.
Besides these two, the major areas of industrial activity would have been in the mining and manufacture of metals, the conversion and shaping of metals into consumer articles, in the preparation of chemicals including the manufacture of salt as also of saltpeter; fishing in inland rivers, lakes, tanks, ponds, etc., as well as in the sea; in the collection of herbs including plants used in the making of dyes and of agents which fixed the colour as well as the manufacture of sugar, spirits, medicines, herbal delicacies, and essences, etc.; and a multiplicity of craftsmen who worked in wood, iron, silver, gold, diamonds, cropper, brass, bronze, glass, etc. besides there were the oil extractors, potters, leather workers and so on. Till the end of the eighteenth century, those engaged in industrial pursuits, especially those in the various fields of construction and those engaged in the manufacture and shaping of metals considered themselves in no way inferior to the Brahmins either in learning in ritual status, especially in south India. And even the Brahmins would concede them precedence on many occasions.
Yet it does seem that because of a alien political dominance, or because of some internal tension between those engaged in industry, on the one hand, and those engaged in agriculture, on the other, or because of a combination of these and several others factors, the status of those engaged in industry, and even in trade, commerce and banking, seems to have started to suffer by the early eighteenth century.
The 19th century sees the extensive uprooting, disruption and stagnation of all sphere of Indian industry and the large-scale conversion of those who had been historically and traditionally engaged in them, into mere laborers, and often into a destitute population.
In India the process of uprooting, disruption, etc. planned as it was by the British-run Indian State to suit the needs of England and of those of the West generally and of the newly transformed Western trade and commerce, got directed differently. Initially, the craftsmen, especially those engaged in the making of cloth, in the mining and manufacture of metals, and those engaged in construction, stone work, etc., were through fiscal and other devices reduced to a state of penury and homelessness and led into either a state of bondage or destruction. This turned most of the technological and industrial innovators, designers and craftsmen into mere laborers, and most of the remaining were reduced â because of lack of resources and lack of demand -to a state of industrial crudity and barbarism.
Mining and the manufacture of metals were either directly prohibited by administrative regulations or made economically impossible by the levy of high license fees, take-over of mining land as well as forests by the State as the property, and through the import of tariff supported British and European products into the country. The same began to happen from about 1815 in all sectors of the cloth industry from the stage of carding, spinning, dyeing, weaving, to printing and finishing. By about 1820 Indian industry was wholly on its knees and in the sort of state in which Mahatma Gandhi found it around 1915.
From about 1800 onwards the condition of those engaged in industry had become pitiful in the major industrial centers. This extended to other localities also were because of the rapid decline of Indian agriculture and of India's commerce and trade the industry suffered as well. The craftsmen and their families had enjoyed a citizenship status in the villages as well as the small towns. Most of them had rights to house-sites, back garden, and some manyam land and generally received a substantial proportion of the agricultural produce at the time of harvest. Similarly, many of them received incomes in various shapes from those engaged in commerce, banking and trade. As the localities began to deteriorate and crumble, because of British rack-renting, decline in the overall economy etc., most of the craftsmen became impoverished. Many were no longer needed for the functions they performed and through legalistic arguments even deprived of their manyams and house-sites. This continued during most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and a large number of the craftsmen and others constituting the local infrastructure had to quit the localities.
End.