People's Democracy

Bourgeoisation And the Great Revolt of 1857

Amit Kumar Gupta

SINCE the great rising of 1857-58 did not go much beyond the Indian midlands (without being able to draw the rest of the vast country to its fold), nor amply clarify such concepts as “an India”, “Indianness” and “independence”, one may perhaps hesitate a bit before accepting it as India’s first war of independence. There could, however, be little wavering or reluctance on the part of most of the students of Indian history for hailing it as one of the outstanding anti-imperialist armed struggles in the world of the 19th century. Its significance is not so much in the militarism of the Indian sepoys, who rose in mutiny against their British masters, as in the support of the civil population that the great rising received, the participation of the commoners and peasants it secured, and the level of popular unity it achieved. And the massive tumult that all these produced together seemed to have shaken the very foundation of such an imperialist rule the like of which Indians had not had the occasion to experience before. Unlike the Sakas and Huns, Arabs and Turks, Afghans and Moghuls, who overran India from time to time, and ran it wholly or partly, but had hardly been very different from its inhabitants in aspirations and attainments, the technologically transformed British possessed the capacity for representing in India a drastically distinct industrialised new world. It is in this sense Marx appeared to have felt that whatever might have been the imperialist crimes of Britain in India, “she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution” (Iqbal Husain, Irfan Habib and Prabhat Patnaik, Karl Marx on India, New Delhi, 2006, p. 17) – the leap towards the formation of a bourgeois society. Marx might have amplified further, which he did imply soon thereafter, that imperial Britain’s serving as a “tool” of history in India could not have always been “unconscious”, and that some of her articulated romantic offsprings, over and above being imperialists themselves, did try consciously to accelerate the historical process roughly between 1820 (in the eased aftermath of the Maratha Wars) and 1856 (the uneased lull before the storm of 1857).

Approximately during these 35 years a talented and a vibrant group of ideologues and administrators – the products of the bourgeois society and the devotees of the capitalist system in Britain – seemed to have gained control over the Indian affairs, and guided the imperial policies. They did not see adequate imperial advantages in the long run if India remained subjected to the one-way traffic of appropriating social surplus through the purchase of its handicrafts and agricultural products (under the buyers’ monopoly) and through a strict control of its revenue. A subjugated India, in their understanding, should not be allowed merely to be plundered, bled and “undersold” (Ibid., p. 47) by the Britishers and thereby steadily killing the goose that would continue to lay golden eggs for them. They apparently felt that India must survive, and also recuperate to uphold the British economy and play second fiddle to it in the emerging world capitalist system. India, therefore, had to be turned into “a reproductive country” (Ibid., p. 47), producing its own sustenance, but more importantly, readying its bounties to be absorbed by imperial Britain. India’s productivity in raw material had to be boosted infrastructurally by unfolding the country’s natural resources, providing irrigational facilities, improving means of conveyance and reinforcing exchange of the produce. Side by side, India had to be developed to an expected extent so as to be able to perform as an increasingly vast market for finished British products almost without any competition. Such “opening up” of India (for its own good and of course immensely for Britain’s) had to occur simultaneously with the bourgeoisation (or modernisation or westernisation) of a medievalistic, statusquoist feudal society. The imperialist “reformers”, touched by Benthamite liberalism, but aroused by the English Utilitarian precept of forcing down “happiness” on the “maximum members”, had to fulfil a double mission in India: “one destructive, the other regenerating” (Ibid., p. 46) – the dismemberment of its old social fabric, and laying the foundation of a western one in its stead.

The “reformers” undertook both the tasks together vigorously enough, though somewhat condescendingly, as well as impetuously, by imparting western knowledge to Indians through the medium of English language, introducing them to western medical science and technology, and trying to codify Indian public law on English legal principles. Contemptuous of the prevalence of superstition, idolatry and unjust, inhuman social practices, the “reformers” sent shock-waves in the country by effecting a number of radical social reforms, and by unleashing Evangelical missionaries in India and setting them on its age-old religious faiths. Simultaneously they exerted themselves in laying the material base for modern industrial development in India, crucially by setting up the railways, and also by building arterial roads and inaugurating telegraphy. Bourgeoisation, howsoever under remote control, depended as much on the sowing of industrialism as on the supplanting of feudalism, and no one perhaps knew it better at that point of time than the determined flag-bearers of the British ruling class. The “reformers” were committed to the closing down of the feudal mode of production in India, and throwing out its perpetrating beneficiaries – the title-holders and landlords, the mahjans and banias, the chiefs and Indian ruling families. To prevent the parasitical class of intermediaries and landlords from growing further, and from perpetuating the various forms of their stark social exploitation of an agrarian country, they decided to go for direct settlement of land with the peasant proprietors – individuals or groups – co-sharing village communities and caste brotherhoods (Bhaiacharas). Following the Ricardian theory that determined rent by subtracting from the total or gross produce the cost of “wages” and the ordinary rate of “profit” on the capital employed, they found the rent-receiving landlords enjoying an “unearned increment”, performing no economic service, and living on the labours of others.

NEW RENT POLICY WREAKING HAVOC

Clearly the rent (the net produce) seemed to them to be a particularly suitable subject for government taxation, and hence they decided upon the policy of maximising land tax on rent (and disincentiving landlordism in the process) on the basis of measurement and differential fertility of plots, and fixing land revenue for 20 or 30 years instead of “in perpetuity”. They led the government to dispossess a large number of Jagirdars, Talukdars and Zamindars by refusing to accept their questionable holding of customary titles, and forced many of them to sell their estates under stiffly pitched tax demands. T.C. Robertson, a Lt. Governor, was taken aback by the method that flattened “the whole surface of society as eventually to leave little of distinguishable eminence between the ruling power and the cultivators of soil”. (Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959, p. 116). The village moneylenders’ performances and their fraudulent practices were also noted with disfavour, and alternate credit facility discussed. Indian princely states were looked down upon as museum pieces of despotism and quasi-medieval governance, and often threatened with annexation, or actually annexed. In the seven years of his tenure as Governor General, Dalhousie had managed to annex seven states to the British-Indian territories, including Oudh. The death-knell of feudalism was clearly being heard in the country throughout 1856.

Had feudalism died in India in the hands of the British, and the country’s bourgeoisation made rapid strides, the path of the “revolution” (bourgeois democratic) that Marx talked about would have been clear. Things did not, however, work out in the manner they might have, and that was wholly on account of imperial Britain’s dramatically getting involved in 1857 in a deadly struggle for its survival. The “reformers” were so deeply engrossed with their pro-capitalist and anti-feudal programme that they failed to notice (or chose to ignore) the fact that the landed magnates’ dispossession had caused hardship to a considerable number of their dependents and retinues, and fanned up dissatisfaction among them, apart from harming the interests of those artisans, artistes and craftsmen who catered to the needs and tastes of the landed elite. But far more significant, and very devastatingly so for the complacent, doctrinaire “reformers” was their inability to get any inkling as to how much the new assessment policy they adopted was wreaking havoc on the cultivators of all kinds, and forcing them into utter desperation. They did not realise that Indian peasants were not capitalist farmers, that they raised their subsistence from the soil by tilling themselves, and not with wage labour, and they hardly sold their stocks to the market and make profit. Hence the principle of “net produce” after deducting “wages” and “profits” from the gross produce could not be applied to them, and they could by no means be charged one-half of the net produce, or more, as assessment unless it was meant to ruin them completely. Besides, no one actually endeavoured, despite some high-brow attempts of the miniscule English-educated, to explain to the average Indian of the time – in his/her idiom – of the advantage of liberal western training that questioned the outmoded values and ways of life, the social reforms that disturbed the privileged guardians of a conservative society, the codification and enforcement of laws that discomforted the unacquainted and disturbed the specially advantaged. The critical offensive against the superstitious and the bigoted, and the Evangelical tirade against the Hindu and the Muhammadan practices, deeply humiliated and hurt many Indians, and prepared the ground for a timely backlash. It was the unshakened belief in the alien “Christian” rulers’ alleged “beef and pork” plot against their religious faiths that goaded the Indian armymen to a mutiny in May 1857. But a religiously stirred mutiny could not have been turned into a violent anti-imperialist struggle, and a great, tumultuous revolt at that, but for the joining of the civil population in it – crucially the heavily assessed, dispossessed and depressed peasantry veering around en masse.

REVOLT LED BY FEUDAL FORCES

The rebellious peasantry, civil population and sepoys, who had not had too many occasions to display leadership qualities, and depended for a lead habitually on their social superiors, as well as exploiters and oppressors, dutifully persuaded the chiefs, title-holders and landed magnates to assume their leadership against the British. The dispossessed, disinherited and disgruntled among the feudal elements did come forward, others followed suit – actively or passively – for the sake of a certain group mentality, but many, true to their class character, sat on the fence and awaited to ally with the winner of the contest, or joined the “paramount power”. Under the leadership of the princes, title-holders and landlords, and with a tottering and retiring Moghul emperor as its emblematic head, the revival of the Moghul rule as its avowed end, and the restoration of the glory of the feudal order as its pious mission – by driving away and killing the alien desecrators of Indian religions and traditions – the rebellion appeared on the whole to be a feudal – a medievalistic and anachronistic one. That the commoners and subalterns had no alternative but to try to further it, and bestow greatness upon it through the sufferings and sacrifices, was indeed a historic tragedy. There was another tragedy that took place on the other side of the fence, where the imperialist “reformers”, who wanted to modernise and bourgeoise the traditional society in India, ended up in smothering those very “cultivators” whom they wished to protect from the stranglehold of their parasitical tormentors. Had they not stretched their doctrinaire land assessment too far, they would not have unknowingly pushed the peasants into the lap of the feudal hierarchy, and provided its aristocratic grumblings with the life force of a great revolt. But what if one of both the tragedies was somehow averted, i.e. the common people and peasantry threw up in the course of the struggle their own leaders to show glimpses of an emancipatory, egalitarian future, or the “reformers” (like Macaulay and the Mills, James and John Stuart, Bentinck and Dalhousie, Holt Mackenzie and Pringle, Thomson and Bird) succeeded without any loss of face – in reducing feudalism to a moribund state, and in leashing Evangelists in the interest of a bourgeois secular ideal?

None of these had actually happened, and British imperialism eventually managed somehow to suppress the great revolt ruthlessly with iron hands, and avenge its own setbacks by committing on Indians generally unparalleled acts of savagery and racism. Like British imperialism’s survival by a whisker, Indian feudalism also survived providentially from its destruction, first in the hands of the “reformers” because of the outbreak of the revolt, and then in the hands of the Queen Empress’s government because of its fear-psychosis about further risings in the corner, and search for security in some alliance. Ironically, the British found it less hazardous and more convenient to make up with Indian feudalism, and use its influence to quieten an unreliable countryside. In her proclamation of 1 November 1858, the Queen Empress announced the rehabilitation of the feudal order in her Indian empire, and pledged herself to the safeguarding and furtherance of interests of the landed aristocracy and landlords of various varieties. India was thus turned into a happy hunting ground for both imperialism and feudalism – the senior and junior partners in close collaboration with each other.