|
|
|
In the repose of his 101st year, Nirad C. Chaudhuri should feel less
lonely. He has, at long last, company, company in the shape of his
forsaken country's current finance minister. The finance minister, sworn
in afresh earlier this month, is an ideologue with a long view. That
apart, he both knows and speaks his mind.
He had evidently a Euro-American audience as his target. He used the
occasion to deliver an apostrophe extolling the tremendous deeds of the
East Indian Company As an Indian citizen, he was overwhelmed by awe and
admiration as he counted the myriad good things that great company,
under royal charter of exclusive monopoly of trade with India, did to
the latter country For that ennobling mission, contemporary Indians, he
implied, should remain ever beholden to the company With folded hands
and bent knees, the finance minister has this stentorian plea to post
with the West: let the misunderstandings of the intervening period be
forgotten and forgiven, the Western powers must agree to despatch 1,000
reincarnations of the East India Company to take charge of India; they
must reap profit from this country in the manner the original company
did 250 years ago, by flooding it with an avalanche of investable funds.
The finance minister has thrown a challenge to the historiography
Indians have been accustomed to during the past century or thereabouts.
The East India Company, generations of Indian school children have been
taught, was the other name for plunder and mayhem. This company looted
India and squeezed it dry; because of its machinations India was
progressively deindustrialized, its agriculture shrivelled, and the
country's overall rate of economic growth retrogressed throughout the
late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Once the British crown took over from the company, the exploitation
actually deepened. Most Indians were denied, as part of purposive state
policy, elementary education. Maternity care was non-existent. The
rulers could not care less. The overall quantum of India's primary
production took a nosedive, even as the country's established
industries, including handicrafts, were laid to ruins.
Since the East India Company enjoyed a trading monopoly, it easily
tilted the terms of trade against India's exports and in favour of the
products of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Scotland. The rupee-sterling ratio
was manipulated to further imperial-colonial interests. Inevitably, the
country's balance of payments was in a state of constant crisis, which
facilitated the wholesale outflow of precious metals. The East India
Company hardly brought in any capital. Whatever paltry investments it
undertook were for the specific purpose of maximizing the extraction and
transportation of India's mineral wealth and primary products.
As Indian nationalism bestirred itself, eminencies such as Dadabhai
Naoroji made assiduous estimates of the extent of exploitation
accompanying imperial rule. A proliferation of "drain" theories crowded
the pages of indigenous literature. Foreign domination and repression
soon led to resistance. Concepts such as "self-rule", "dominion status"
and full independence jostled against one another The struggle for
independence gradually came to full bloom. The non-cooperation movement
was succeeded by the civil disobedience agitation and culminated in the
"Quit India" rebellion. Over this entire period, resurgent Indian youth
organized armed uprisings, sporadic or otherwise, against the imperial
power. Thousands of patriots were either shot in cold blood or went to
the gallows; countrymen dutifully hailed them as martyrs.
After a hundred years of endeavour, Indians succeeded in getting rid of
the British yoke, although a price had to be paid in the form of the
Partition. The stigma of the battle of Plassey the ignominy of a teeny
weeny concern like the East India Company subjugating, with minimal
effort, this nation of several hundred millions, was obliterated.
Potted or not, this was the history Indian children were taught during
the days of the freedom movement. The curriculum was faithfully
repeated in the decades following independence. An occasional deviant
like Chaudhuri espoused a different point of view; his cantankerous
discourses had only a curiosity value.
The advent of free market forces has been a great liberalizer; ideas
have veered a full circle. The country's current finance minister has,
as the saying goes, caught the bull by the horns. No inhibitions for
him: with courage in both hands, he has decided to cock a snook at the
history the nation had habituated itself to. The East India Company, he
has dared to assert, was no evil. It brought to India civilization and
enlightenment; it kicked this nation out of the morass of medieval sloth
and helped it come into contact with the boons of the glorious
industrial revolution.
The finance minister marvels at the miracles the East India Company, all
by itself, could render to this till then dark subcontinental that
particular juncture. The limited economic success India attained during
the past 150 years, the finance minister does not have the least doubt,
was on account of the benign consequences of the events set in motion by
the East India Company
To the finance minister, history is not a dead book, lessons have to be
gleaned from it. The most important of such lessons is the following:
if this country is to prove itself truly and well in the comity of
nations, it must invite not one, but at least a thousand reincarnations
of the East India Company to come and once more enslave India.
Our well wishers in the West must not take to heart the canards spread
by the worthless lazybones and malevolent politicians; the exploitative
role painted for the East India Company is pure fiction. It was one of
the earliest transnational entities, acting as catalyst so that
investable capital despatched from the occident could spark off rapid
economic development in the Eastern countries. Instead, what a tragedy,
both in Europe and elsewhere, the wrong kind of scholars captured the
historiography of the times.
The gods in heaven have however finally looked up. Globalization has
knocked off the umpteen silly obstacles that hampered the free
intercourse between nations; the transnational corporations, the
thousand East India Companies in the finance minister's rich imagery,
will henceforth bestow on the poorer nations the required investable
funds and technology to enable them to reach the pinnacles of prosperity
and wealth the Western countries have already arrived at. Hail these
new incarnations of the East India Company; they are the harbingers of
great, good fortune.
There should be no illusion. Great, good fortune, but only for the
creamy layer of native society. The finance minister is right; a narrow
section of the Indian community did exceedingly well under British rule:
the zamindars and taluqdars, the princely set, the mercantile community
who acted as local agents of foreign parties or those whom the alien
rulers trained to advance the cause of the masters. The country got
immiserized. So what, this layer at the top prospered as never before.
The finance minister wants a replication of that phenomenon, but on a
much grander scale. If a thousand East India Companies come in, the
country would be sucked dry in no time, there would be no water and only
rock; a few native gentlemen would nonetheless have a whale of a time.
What is astonishing is not the gumption of the finance minister in
enunciating the ideology of national subjugation in the way he has
enunciated, but the complaisance with which his peroration has been
received by the nation. He has made an ass of our freedom movement, as
if we were morons to eject the benevolent foreign rulers. It is some
weeks since the finance minister spoke his piece. Till today, not one
historian in the country has bothered to challenge his thesis - nor any
politician either. Perhaps we are in eerie proximity to Chaudhuri's
Continent of Circe.
 |
||
|
||
|
||
