From the Workers' International Network. Part 1 can be read here.
Here is the second part of our exclusive serialisation of a new book on the history of class struggles in India, written by a long-time supporter of the Workers’ International Network. In this section the writer explains the foundations of the British occupation.
THE BRITISH RAJ
In 1609, a pirate from England – a country located in a part of an offshore island off the coast of Europe – landed up on the shores of the richest country on Earth. William Hawkins was received by the world’s most powerful emperor Jehangir, whose name in Persian meant “conqueror of the world” and who reigned over 70 million subjects.
A century and a half later, in 1757 the merchant adventurer Robert Clive landed on the same territory; and that was the origin of a more sophisticated manifestation of corporate piracy. From the mid-1700s to the early 1800s, the East India Company accounted for half of the world’s trade. India became a source of basic commodities including exotic spices, silk, tea, cotton, indigo dye, sugar, salt, saltpetre… and later, especially opium; a captive market for British goods protected by tariffs (imperial preferences).
Soon, in the words of the early anti-imperialist poet Wilfred Blunt, it became the “cherished conviction shared by every Englishman in India… that he belongs to a race which God has destined to govern and subdue”; to rule, as Kipling put it, over the “lesser breeds without the law”.
For well over 1,500 years, India had been the world’s richest economy, constituting 35-40% of world GDP. In 1700, its share of world income still equalled that of the whole of Europe combined, at almost a quarter. Under British rule it shrank from 24.4% in 1700 down to 4.2% in 1950, and its share of global industrial output from 25% in 1750 down to 2% in 1900. By the time it had emerged from the “civilising” benefits of British rule in 1947, it was among the very poorest countries in the world in terms of per capita income.
In the whole history of British rule, imperialism had never needed a full-scale occupation army in India. Britain conquered India with Indian troops, cunningly intriguing and playing off the rival Maharajahs of the feuding principalities. In 1853, in the heyday of British imperialism and four years before the so-called “Indian mutiny”, Marx wrote:
“While all were struggling against all, the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. A country not only divided between Mohammedan and Hindu, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste, a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest? If we knew nothing of the past history of Hindustan, would there not be the one great and incontestable fact, that even at this moment India is held in English thraldom by an Indian army maintained at the cost of India?”
Unrest
The paradox described by Marx could not be maintained indefinitely. From the beginning of British rule there were countless uprisings: even prior to the uprising of 1857, there had been forty major regional peasant rebellions between 1763 and 1856, to say nothing of tribal uprisings in which hundreds of thousands had died.
Under the heel of British rule a national consciousness was beginning to take root. The military mobilisation of a large number of peasant youth by the East India Company had concentrated and disciplined their ranks… and when the time came, they rebelled against their oppressors. Soon came the Indian War of Independence (contemptuously dismissed in British school textbooks as “the Indian mutiny”). From the “mutiny” of 1857 to the national uprising of 1946, the key factor which undermined British rule was the refusal of the armed forces to obey their imperial rulers. In both cases, the military mutiny was just the spearhead of a mass popular movement.
The first co-ordinated challenge over a wide area to British rule was the uprising of 1857, whch involved almost half the East India Company’s army of 232,224. The revolt engulfed the towns of Doab – Kanpur, Lucknow, Benares, Allahabad, Bareilly, Jagdishpur, Jhansi, Aligarh. The East and the South remained relatively quiescent only due to their exhaustion after previous defeated rebellions. Risings in the cantonments of Bengal, Punjab and Bombay were repressed by the officers. The mutinous sepoys won the support of the city poor and peasants in the nearby villages. They killed their British officers, marched to Delhi, released from Red Fort the deposed Mughal king Bahadur Shah, and forced him to declare himself ruler of all India. 69,000 sepoys massed within the walls of Delhi, and contingents joined them from all over north India. They established a jalsa of six sepoys and six civilians. In Oudh and Bundelkhand kisans sided with the rebels, stormed official buildings and formed their own armed defence squads. They made their own arms, attacked the landlords, stormed official buildings, stopped rent payments, and formed their own armed defence squads.
This unprecedented military rebellion was even more alarming to the Empire because the mutinous soldiers won the immediate support of the city poor and peasants in the nearby villages. There was no communal element to their uprising: Hindu sepoys fought side by side with Muslims under the banner of a Moghul king. The rebel council that they established in Delhi consisted of civilians as well as soldiers. The revolt failed only because the sepoys had no generalised social programme to win the peasantry, but gathered instead under an archaic feudal leadership which had no perspective beyond regaining its lost privileges. Delhi was recaptured after five days, and the uprising was crushed by the most bloodthirsty repression.
The next upsurge too was prompted by a military mutiny in 1908. Three regiments refused to accept uniforms made with British cloth. Bombay workers were shot dead; a reign of terror was imposed in Bengal: homes were raided, shops looted, schoolchildren flogged for singing the hymn of national revolt Vande Mataram.
The workers’ awakening
Amid the worldwide revolutionary storms following the First World War, 1919 saw a gigantic wave of protest. 125,000 Bombay textile workers came on strike. A hartal was called. As in 1857, there was wide fraternisation between Hindus and Muslims which sent a wave of panic through the colonial establishment. At Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, 1,600 rounds were fired on an unarmed crowd; at least 379 people were killed and 1,200 wounded. Martial law was imposed throughout Punjab. There were wholesale shootings, hangings and bombings, and the notorious racist decree was imposed ordering Indians to crawl through the streets of Amritsar.
The wave of struggle was not stemmed by the massacre. In the first six months of 1920 there were two hundred strikes involving one a half million workers, a raid on an armoury in Chittagong, Bengal, and a widespread peasants’ movement in Uttar Pradesh.
A renewed upsurge began in 1928, when 500,000 workers came out on strike. There were railway strikes in Kharagpur and Lilluah, on the GIP railway, and throughout South India Railways, and in Bombay a six-month textile workers’ strike, and then another in 1929. Democratic strike committees were elected. The Bombay Chronicle wrote: “Socialism is in the air.”
Yet another wave of protest came in 1937, with a general strike in Kanpur, and in Bengal a strike of 225,000 jute workers. Then in 1940, regardless of the outbreak of war, came another strike of 175,000 Bombay textile workers, with 350,000 staging a one-day sympathy strike, followed by strikes of 20,000 Kanpur textile workers, 20,000 Calcutta municipal workers, jute workers in Bengal and Bihar, oil workers in Assam, coal miners in Dhanbad and Jharia, steel workers in Jamshedpur… Between August and December 1942, more than 60,000 people were arrested, and at least 940 shot dead in the streets.
Next in this series…
CLASS STRUGGLES IN INDIA part 3: Divide and rule
No comments:
Post a Comment