|
Who are We?
What do we do?
Latest News
Free Resources
Links
Professional brochureprinter |
Works of Karl Marx 1853
The Future Results of British Rule
in India
Written: on July
22, 1853
Source: MECW Volume 12, p. 217;
First published: in the New-York
Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853; reprinted in the
New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853.
Signed: Karl Marx.
London, Friday, July 22, 1853
I propose in this letter to conclude my
observations on India.
How came it that English supremacy was
established in India? The paramount power of the Great Mogul was
broken by the Mogul Viceroys. The power of the Viceroys was
broken by the Mahrattas. The power of the Mahrattas was broken
by the Afghans, and while all were struggling against all, the
Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. A country
not only divided between Mahommedan and Hindoo, 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 Hindostan, 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? India, then, could not escape the fate of being
conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything,
is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone.
Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history.
What we call its history, is but the history of the successive
intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that
unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is
not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but
whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the
Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.
England has to fulfill a double mission in
India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation
of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations
of Western society in Asia.
Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had
successively overrun India, soon became Hindooized, the
barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history,
conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their
subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and
therefore, inaccessible to Hindoo civilization. They destroyed
it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the
native industry, and by levelling all that was great and
elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule
in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The
work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins.
Nevertheless it has begun.
The political unity of India, more
consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the
Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That
unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened
and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army,
organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the
sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing
to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press,
introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed
principally by the common offspring of Hindoos and Europeans, is
a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The Zemindari and
Ryotwar themselves, abominable as they are, involve two distinct
forms of private property in land — the great desideratum of
Asiatic society. From the Indian natives, reluctantly and
sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a
fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for
government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought
India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has
connected its chief ports with those of the whole south-eastern
ocean, and has revindicated it from the isolated position which
was the prime law of its stagnation. The day is not far distant
when, by a combination of railways and steam-vessels, the
distance between England and India, measured by time, will be
shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country
will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.
The ruling classes of Great Britain have
had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional
interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to
conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to
undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have
discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive
country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to
that end, it is necessary, above all, to gift her with means of
irrigation and of internal communication. They intend now
drawing a net of railroads over India. And they will do it. The
results must be inappreciable.
It is notorious that the productive powers
of India are paralysed by the utter want of means for conveying
and exchanging its various produce. Nowhere, more than in India,
do we meet with social destitution in the midst of natural
plenty, for want of the means of exchange. It was proved before
a Committee of the British House of Commons, which sat in 1848,
that
“when grain was selling from 6/- to 8/- a
quarter at Khandesh, it was sold at 64/ to 70/- at Poona, where
the people were dying in the streets of famine, without the
possibility of gaining supplies from Khandesh, because the
clay-roads were impracticable.”
The introduction of railroads may be
easily made to subserve agricultural purposes by the formation
of tanks, where ground is required for embankment, and by the
conveyance of water along the different lines. Thus irrigation,
the sine qua non of farming in the East, might be greatly
extended, and the frequently recurring local famines, arising
from the want of water, would be averted. The general importance
of railways, viewed under this head, must become evident, when
we remember that irrigated lands, even in the districts near
Ghauts, pay three times as much in taxes, afford ten or twelve
times as much employment, and yield twelve or fifteen times as
much profit, as the same area without irrigation.
Railways will afford the means of
diminishing the amount and the cost of the military
establishments. Col. Warren, Town Major of the Fort St. William,
stated before a Select Committee of the House of Commons:
“The practicability of receiving
intelligence from distant parts of the country, in as many hours
as at present it requires days and even weeks, and of sending
instructions, with troops and stores, in the more brief period,
are considerations which cannot be too highly estimated. Troops
could be kept at more distant and healthier stations than at
present, and much loss of life from sickness would by this means
be spared. Stores could not to the same extent he required at
the various depots, and. the loss by decay, and the destruction
incidental to the climate, would also be avoided. The number of
troops might be diminished in direct proportion to their
effectiveness.”
We know that the municipal organization
and the economical basis of the village communities has been
broken up, but their worst feature, the dissolution of society
into stereotype and disconnected atoms, has survived their
vitality. The village isolation produced the absence of roads in
India, and the absence of roads perpetuated the village
isolation. On this plan a community existed with a given scale
of low conveniences, almost without intercourse with other
villages, without the desires and efforts indispensable to
social advance. The British having broken up this
self-sufficient inertia of the villages, railways will provide
the new want of communication and intercourse. Besides,
“one of the effects of the railway system
will he to bring into every village affected by it such
knowledge of the contrivances and appliances of other countries,
and such means of obtaining them, as will first put the
hereditary and stipendiary village artisanship of India to full
proof of its capabilities, and then supply its defects.”
(Chapman, The Cotton and Commerce of India [pp.
95-97].)
I know that the English millocracy intend
to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of
extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw
materials for their manufactures. But when you have once
introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which
possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its
fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an
immense country without introducing all those industrial
processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of
railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the
application of machinery to those branches of industry not
immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will
therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern
industry. This is the more certain as the Hindoos are allowed by
British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude.
for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and
acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery. Ample proof of
this fact is afforded by the capacities and expertness of the
native engineers in the Calcutta mint, where they have been for
years employed in working the steam machinery, by the natives
attached to the several steam engines in the Burdwan coal
districts, and by other instances. Mr. Campbell himself, greatly
influenced as he is by the prejudices of the East India Company,
is obliged to avow
“that the great mass of the Indian people
possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to
accumulate capital, and remarkable for a mathematical clearness
of head and talent for figures and exact sciences.” “Their
intellects,” he says, “are excellent.”
Modern industry, resulting from the
railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor,
upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to
Indian progress and Indian power.
All the English bourgeoisie may be forced
to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social
condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the
development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation
by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down
the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done
more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging
individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery
and degradation?
The Indians will not reap the fruits of
the new elements of society scattered among them by the British
bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes
shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or
till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to
throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may
safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the
regeneration of that great and interesting country, whose gentle
natives are, to use the expression of Prince Soltykov, even in
the most inferior classes, “plus fins et plus adroits que
les Italiens” [more subtle and adroit
than the Italians], a whose submission even is
counterbalanced by a certain calm nobility, who, notwithstanding
their natural langor, have astonished the British officers by
their bravery, whose country has been the source of our
languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the
ancient German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in
the Brahmin.
I cannot part with the subject of India
without some concluding remarks.
The profound hypocrisy and inherent
barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our
eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms,
to the colonies, where it goes naked. They are the defenders of
property, but did any revolutionary party ever originate
agrarian revolutions like those in Bengal, in Madras, and in
Bombay? Did they not, in India, to borrow an expression of. that
great robber, Lord Clive himself, resort to atrocious extortion,
when simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity?
While they prated in Europe about the inviolable sanctity of the
national debt, did they not confiscate in India the dividends of
the rajahs, 171 who had invested their private savings in the
Company’s own funds? While they combated the French revolution
under the pretext of defending “our holy religion,” did they not
forbid, at the same time, Christianity to be propagated in
India, and did they not, in order to make money out of the
pilgrims streaming to the temples of Orissa and Bengal, take up
the trade in the murder and prostitution perpetrated in the
temple of juggernaut? These are the men of “Property, Order,
Family, and Religion.”
The devastating effects of English
industry, when contemplated with regard to India, a country as
vast as Europe, and containing 150 millions of acres, are
palpable and confounding. But we must not forget that they are
only the organic results of the whole system of production as it
is now constituted. That production rests on the supreme rule of
capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the
existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive
influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world
does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent
organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized
town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material
basis of the new world — on the one hand universal intercourse
founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of
that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the
productive powers of man and the transformation of material
production into a scientific domination of natural agencies.
Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions
of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have
created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution
shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the
market of the world and the modern powers of production, and
subjected them to the common control of the most advanced
peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that
hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the
skulls of the slain.
|
|
