The Growing Poverty of India
The natural outcome of the disastrous policies followed continuously by the British for about 200 years was the extreme poverty of the Indian masses. This poverty grew every year as the British rule progressed. The depth of the poverty in various parts of India had a positive correlation with the duration of the British rule; the longer they ruled, the worse poverty became.
Major (Sir) E. Baring, Finance Minister of India, in his budget speech of 1882, after 125 years of British rule, in proof of his assertion of "the extreme poverty of the mass of the people' of British India, makes a comparison not only with "the Western countries of Europe' but with "the poorest country in Europe' After stating that the income of India was not more than Rs. 27 (equivalent to £2 at that time) per head, he said: “In England the average income per head of population was £33; in France it was £23; in Turkey, which was the poorest country in Europe, it was £4 per head.' This was the official estimate of the per capita yearly income of India; although India's Grand Old Man, worked it out from official figures to be Rs. 20 which "have not yet been shown by anybody to be wrong or requiring correction." Even Baring was not "prepared to pledge myself to the absolute accuracy of a calculation of this sort" Whether it was Rs. 27 or Rs. 28 does not really matter much as even Rs. 27 per head per annum income was sufficient to indicate the extreme poverty of the mass of the people' This income includes the incomes and sala- ries of rich and poor, official and non-official.
So according to one of the highest British officials the average per capita income of India, administered by the most highly paid services in the world, was less than half the income of the worst governed, poorest country-the 'sick man of Europe' Other official reports confirmed this.
A. J. Wilson wrote in the Fraser's magazine in 1882 "The tales of poverty one comes across in all (official) Reports upon the condition of particular districts are per- fectly harrowing-in many it is not poverty in any sense conceivable by us, it is living death.
H. M. Hyndman wrote in 1886 that "the natives of India are growing poorer and poorer, that taxation is not only actually but relatively far heavier; that each successive scarcity widens the area of impoverishment, and renders famines more frequent; that most of the trade is but an index to the poverty and crushing over-taxation of the people; that a highly organized foreign rule constitutes by itself a most terrible drain upon the country.' Hyndman tells us the effect of the British imperialism "The truth is that Indian society, as a whole, has been frightfully impover- ished under our rule, and that the process is going on now at an increasingly rapid rate.
"Even as we look on, India is becoming feebler and feebler. The very lifeblood of the great multitude under our rule is slowly, yet ever faster, ebbing away."
The Viceroy of India made a confidential enquiry into the economic conditions of the people of India in 1888. The reports were sent by the various district officers of the government. Yet the results of even such an enquiry were never made public. Being a member of the British Parlia- ment, William Digby was able to see some of its findings.
All the officers agreed on one point the masses of the coun- try were extremely poor. For details the readers may see Digby's celebrated book 'Prosperous British India' Digby wrote. "India stands in a terribly worse position today (1901) than that which it occupied when the first dawn of 1801 trembled across the Bay of Bengal and flashed upon the, hill tops on the north-eastern coast of Hindustan.
It matters not in what direction one looks, so far as the material prosperity of the vast mass of the population goes, the answer must be seriously adverse in comparison with the ancient time. Not now is prosperity, but once was prosperity. In all of a material character that goes to make a prosperous realm, India on January 1, 1901, was a greater number of leagues behind India on January 1, 1801, than I, for one, care to try to count.
W. S. Lilly, a retired member of the heaven-born Indian Civil Service (I.C.S), wrote about the millions of peasants in 1902 that "their existence is a constant battle with starva- tion, ending, too often, in defeat. Their difficulty is not to live human lives-lives up to the level of their poor stand- ard of comfört-but to live at all and not die.
Sir Charles Elliott remarked in the last quarter of the 19th century that "I do not hesitate to say that half the agri- cultural population never knows from one year's end to another what it is to have a full meal."
Another retired I.C.S. officer wrote in 1903 "Two- thirds of the Indian population, some 200,000,000 of human beings, are made up of ever-hungry cultivators and day labourers.
J. Keir Hardie wrote about the 'real rat plague'—the government of India-in 1909 that government was "harsh and exacting in all its relations towards the people the people of India are but so many seeds in an oil-mill, to be crushed for the oil they yield.
"The real rat plague, then in India is poverty, and the flea which spreads the disease is the Government."
J. Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of Britain in the 1920's and a member of British Parliament when he wrote in 1909 "Sir William Hunter said that 40,000,000 Indians go through life with insufficient food; Sir Charles Elliott estimated that one-half of the agricultural population never satisfied hunger from one year's end to another; from thirty to fifty million families live in India on an income which does not exceed 33d. per day. . The poverty, of India is not an opinion, it is a fact.
Even a British imperialist economist, Vera Anstey, wrote in 1929 about India- 'a byword throughout the world for the poverty of its people'
"Even the casual visitor to India cannot fail to be struck by the contrast between the great material potentiality of the country and the meagre economic achievements of the bulk of the population.
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"A country which has manufactured and exported the finest muslins and other luxurious fabrics and articles, at a time when the ancestors of the British were living an ex- tremely primitive life, has failed to take part in the econo- mic revolution initiated by the descendants of those same wild barbarians.
Obviously, the British rule of India was the cause of India's 'abyss of poverty so deep that one struggles in vain to plumb it" An eminent American historian, thinker and author wrote in 1930: "I came to India admiring the British. .I left India feeling that its awful poverty is an un- answerable indictment of its alien government, that so far from being an excuse for British rule, it is overwhelming evidence that the British ownership of India has been a calamity and a crime the present plunder has now gone on beyond bearing; year by year it is destroying one of the greatest and gentlest peoples of history.'
"The terrible thing is that this poverty is not a begin- ning, it is an end; it is not growing less, it is growing worse; England is not 'preparing India for self-government' she is bleeding it to death."
Brailsford wrote in 1943 that 'in this peninsula, under our rule, the value of human life sank to the lowest imaginable level.'
John Yale, after whose ancestor the Yale University in U.S.A. was named because of a bequest made by him out of the vast fortune (author reckoned it in 1961 to be 5 million dollars) acquired in just 20 years through corruption, tells us the reason of India's poverty: "It is often argued that the Europen nations went to the Orient to do social service to a backward people, and that the cause of India's present economic distress is her headstrong interest in religion. The Europeans went East because there was a great deal of wealth there and good opportunities for helping themselves to some of it. And a basic cause of India's current poverty is that they were so successful in their enterprises and carried so much of their gains away with them. "
The psychological effects of the British rule also were disastrously very deep. Fear of the military, fear of the police, fear of every government servant however small in the bureaucracy, and fear of every white man became the dominant characteristic of the masses of India. There was no enterprising spirit left and no desire to improve their lot, which were the natural results of the chronic hunger and po- verty; and not the result of Hindu philosophy and religion as most of the Western writers would like us to believe.
CONCLUSION
When the British rule began, India was the richest country and 'the metaphor of wealth" for ages throughout the world, her industries supplied varied manufactured goods in all direc- tions in return of which the whole world was ceaselessly pouring its bullion into India for at least three thousand years; and her green fields and prosperous agriculture supplied the nourishing food not only to her own children, but to the whole of Asia. When the British rule ended, India was the byword for the poverty of its people throughout the world; was sup- plied with almost all the manufactured goods by foreign countries in return of which India had to export bullion and goods tainted with her blood and bones, and her extensive plain land could not even feed her own children.
For the British, India was 'in total returns, the most profitable of imperial possessions' and 'a place to make money in, a human cattle farm' For the Indians, the Bri- tish rule was, to use Mahatma Gandhi's words, a "Satanic rule' and 'a Curse. India passed their verdict on the British rule when they declared that it not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India econo- mically, politically, culturally, and spiritually.' Strangely enough, even the doyen of imperialists, Winston Churchill, seemed to agree with India when he said that "Our rule in India is wrong and has always been wrong for India. Out of these "fourfold disasters" brought by the British in India, only the economic disaster has been discussed through the writings of almost all foreigners, mostly British themselves.
Poverty is not just a seven-letter word; rather it is a monster whose claws are very sharp tearing apart the very being of a man. It has been called "the greatest of evils, and the worst of crimes and 'open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society." The British com- mitted "the greatest of evils, and the worst of crimes' No wonder Thomas Paine, described Britain as 'the greatest and ungrateful offender against GOD on the face of the whole earth' who had 'rip up the bowels of whole coun- tries for what she could get." Paine wrote these lines at the time when British rule in India was just starting to show its claws. If he would have seen the force of British imperia- lism (a sophisticated word for robbery) he must have agreed with Dr. Rutherford when he described the "British rule, as it is carried on in India' as 'the lowest and most immoral system of government in the world-the exploitation of one nation by another. Paine could also agree with Howitt when he wrote about the policies of the whitemen in all their colonies as "the most extensive and extraordinary system of crime which the world ever witnessed. **
The horrendous story told in these pages would be 'a shock to glories and virtues of our Western civilization. It is a story of ruthless fight for wealth with little regard for the rights or welfare of 'inferior races' Afer reading these pages, the readers would agree with an Englishman when he said that "England in the East is not the England that we know. "" The readers would also agree with the mother of notorious imperialist, Rudyard Kipling, when she said, 'what do they know of England who only England know.
However it will not be argued that India did not learn anything from the British or Western civilization or vice versa. It is natural that when two civilizations come into contact, they invariably influence, and learn from, each other-even in their enmity. But the important point is that 'much of what was positive was motivated by Britain's economic and administrative interests. That Indians sooner or later benefited was often quite secondary and coincidental,'