Essay on the Expansion of the Power of British East India Company

The eighteenth century saw the break-up of the Mughal Empire and the steady expansion of the power of the British East India Company. It was a time of general cultural decline in India, but the genius of the land was still at work.

The Urdu language, little used hitherto as a medium of literary expres­sion, became the vehicle of great poetry at the decadent courts of Delhi and Lucknow; while in the Himalayan foot-hills, at the end of the century at the petty courts of local maharajas, by some unexplainable miracle, there worked painters who produced works of unprecedented beauty and sensitivity. With the nineteenth century the subcontinent was exposed to the full force of Western influence, and innovations are too numerous to list.

This cursory survey of the history of cultural change in India is sufficient in itself to show that, as long as civilization has existed there, the country has never been stagnant, but has steadily developed through the ages. India has enjoyed over 4,000 years of civilization, and every period of her history has left something to the present day.

As well as this great legacy of the human past, the people of the subcon­tinent have another inheritance from Nature itself-the land and its climate. We cannot understand South Asia without knowing something about what its people have received from the primeval forces which shaped the surface of the earth millions of years before man existed. In this sense perhaps India’s most important inheritance is the great chain of the Himalayas, without which the land would be little more than a desert.

As the plateau of Central Asia grows warmer in the spring, the warm air rises and winds bearing heavy masses of cloud are attracted towards the high tableland from the Indian Ocean. The movement of the clouds is interrupted by the mountains, and they shed their burden of rain upon the parched, over­heated land.

The monsoon, beginning in June, lasts for about three months, and brings water for the whole year. Except along the coast and in a few other specially favoured areas, there is little or no rain in other seasons, and thus the life of almost the whole subcontinent depends on the monsoon.

The conservation and just sharing out of the available water among the cultivators is a very important factor in the life of India. It has been one of the main concerns of Indian governments for over 2,500 years and indeed the high civilization which is discussed in the pages of this book has depended and still largely depends, on irrigation, promoted and supervised by govern­ment, for its very existence.

In the past, whenever the rains have been inade­quate, there has been famine; whenever a local government has lost grip and become ineffective, irrigation has been neglected, dams have broken, canals have been choked with mud and weed, and great hardship has resulted.

Thus villagers have learnt to co-operate independently of their rulers, by forming their own village government, under a committee of locally respected leaders, the panchayat, to care for matters of common concern such as irrigation, and to settle disputes as far as possible outside the royal courts. On a large scale the climate has perhaps encouraged autocracy, but at the local level it has necessitated government by discussion.

Let it not be thought that the South Asian climate is one which encourages idleness or quietism. There are certainly periods in the agricultural year when little work can be done in the fields, but in a different way, in most parts of the subcontinent, the challenge of nature is just as serious as it is in northern Europe or America. The driest part of the year is also the hottest, in April and May, and it is perhaps just as difficult to sustain life in such conditions as it is in the cold northern winter. The rainy season brings problems of another kind-almost constant heavy rain, floods destroying thousands of lives, rivers changing their courses, epidemics, and stinging insects, some of which carry the germs of such diseases as malaria and elephantiasis.

In the winter season, moreover, though the days are mild and sunny, the nights may be very cold, especially in Pakistan and the western part of the Ganga basin. In such times, when the midnight temperature may be below freezing-point or only a little above it, deaths from exposure still occur.

Only in the tropical coastal areas of the peninsula would climatic conditions permit the survival of a considerable population without much hard work and foresight, sustained by coconuts, bananas, and the abundant fish of the Indian Ocean; and in these favoured areas the population passed the limit at which such a way of life was possible over 2,000 years ago.

The abundant bounty of tropical and sub-tropical nature has been qualified by extreme heat, extreme rainfall, and extreme dryness in different parts of the year. In fact the climate of the subcontinent tends to extremes, and possibly this too has influenced the Indian character and attitude to life, because, though one of the greatest of India’s teachers counseled ‘the Middle Way’, succeeding generations have not always taken this course, and the extremes of rigorous asceticism and abandoned luxury have often gone hand in hand.

South of the Himalayas lay the great plains of the subcontinent, the centres from which civilization expanded in ancient times. Composed of deep silt carried down by the rivers Indus (Sind, Sindhu) and Ganga (Ganges) these plains are naturally very fertile, but for centuries they have supported a dense population, whose peasants used the most easily available form of manure, cow-dung, as fuel.

Hence the fertility of the plains declined, until by the end of the last century many areas had reached a rock bottom of productivity, from which they have begun to emerge only recently, with the introduction of arti­ficial fertilizers and the spread of knowledge of better agricultural methods. In ancient days, however, the fertility and the healthy well-fed peasantry of India were noticed by foreign travellers from the Greek Megasthenes (c. 300 B.C.) onwards.

South of the Ganga are the Vindhya Mountains and the long and beautiful River Narmada, dividing the north from the plateau region of Maharashtra, generally called the Deccan (from Sanskrit dakshina, ‘south’).

The region, less naturally fertile than the great plains, has been for at least 2,000 years the home of tough martial peasants who, whenever energetic leadership appeared to consolidate their clans, would take advantage of the political weakness of their neighbours to raid the wealthier lands to the north, south-east, and south.

The Deccan plateau becomes steadily less rugged and more fertile as one proceeds south and south-east. Along the eastern littoral of the peninsula are fertile riverine plains, the most important historically being that of Tamilnadu, reaching from Madras to Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari, the extreme southern tip of India).

Here, over 2,000 years ago, the Tamil people developed a fairly advanced civilization independently of the Aryan north; this region has throughout its history maintained a consciousness of its differences from the north, and has cherished its own language, while remaining part of the whole Indian cultural area; there may be an analogy between the Tamil attitude to the northern Aryans and that of the Welsh to the English, with the difference that, while many Welshmen have English as their mother tongue, few if any Tamils have a mother tongue other than Tamil.

Yet another inheritance of India from the distant past is her people. De­spite the difficult mountain passes and the wide seas barring access to India, people have been finding their way there from the days of the Old Stone Age, when small hordes of primitive men drifted into the subcontinent.

These are probably the ancestors of one of India’s three main racial types-the Proto- Australoid, so called because of the resemblance to the Australian Aborigines. In India the most pure Proto-Australoid type is to be found among the tribal peoples of the wilder parts of the peninsula, but Proto-Australoid features can be traced almost everywhere in the subcontinent, especially among people of low caste. The ideal type is short, dark-skinned, broad-nosed, and large- mouthed.

The next main stratum in the population of India is the Palaeo-Mediterranean, often loosely called Dravidian, a word not now favoured by anthro­pologists. These people seem to have come to south Asia from the west, not very long before the dawn of civilization in the Indus valley, and they may have contributed to the foundation of the Harappa culture.

Graceful and slender, with well-chiselled features and aquiline noses, the ideal type is parti­cularly to be found among the better-class speakers of Dravidian languages, but it also occurs everywhere in the subcontinent.

Then, in the second millennium B.C., came the Aryans, speakers of an Indo- European language which was the cousin of those of classical Europe. Some have suggested that these people came in two or more waves, the earlier in­vaders being round-headed (brachycephalic) people of the type called Alpine or Armenoids, and the later long-headed folk, typical Caucasoids, similar in build to northern Europeans.

Long before they entered India the people who called themselves Aryans had intermixed with other peoples and their advent meant a severe cultural decline, which lasted for many centuries. Only when Aryan culture was fertilized by the indigenous culture did it begin to advance, to form the classical civilization of India.

There are good arguments for the view that in the finished product non-Aryan elements are more numerous than Aryan. Nowadays the Caucasoid type is chiefly to be found in Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Panjab, but even here one rarely meets pure or nearly pure specimens. As one proceeds east and south the type becomes progressively rarer.

These three, the Proto-Australoid, the Palaeo-Mediterranean, and the Caucasoid or Indo-European, are the most strongly represented racial types among the inhabitants of India; but they are by no means the only ones. Almost every race of Central Asia found its way to India. Turks provided the ruling families in much of what is now Pakistan long before the coming of the Muslims, who were also Turks.

Mongolians of various races have been enter­ing India over the Himalayan and north-eastern passes since long before history. The Muslim ruling classes imported numerous African slaves, who have long since merged with the general population. Persian and Arab traders settled along the west coast from before the Christian era.

Some married Indian women, and the descendants have become indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Others, such as the small but vigorous Parsi community, have kept their stock pure. The various European traders and conquerors have left their mark also. Along the west coast of India and Ceylon an appreciable quantity of Portuguese blood circulates in the veins of the general population, while elsewhere in India the so-called Anglo-Indian community is the result of many marriages and liaisons between European (not only British) soldiers and traders and Indian women.

Thus, in reading these chapters, we must remember also India’s enduring inheritance of climate, land, and people, the basis on which her high civiliza­tion has been built, and which will remain, more or less unchanging, to condi­tion the lives of her people in all their triumphs and vicissitudes in future centuries.