THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULEThe British impact on India was certainly intensified by the expansion of
the railways. But one aspect of this impact which Karl Marx had
emphasised in 1853 did not become evident at all. Witnessing the
beginning of British investment in Indian railways, Marx had predicted
that this would necessarily lead to the industrialisation of the subcontinent,
as rails and engines would be manufactured in India in due course and
other linkage effects would emerge from that. This vision fitted in well
with Marx’s assessment of the role of British imperialism in India: it served
as an instrument of historical progress, breaking up the traditional
structure and blazing a trail for capitalism as a necessary step towards the
classless society of the future. The manufacture of the first Indian
locomotive in Bombay in 1865 seemed to prove Marx’s point; in
subsequent years, however, this kind of production remained the rare
exception rather than the rule. Locomotives, rails, steel construction for
bridges, etc., were all imported from Great Britain. More than 20 per cent
of all British-made locomotives were eventually sent to India. The
enormous improvement of maritime transport after the opening of the Suez
canal in 1869 greatly facilitated this development, which Marx could not
have foreseen in 1853. The linkage effects thus remained minimal and
India’s plentiful resources of coal and iron ore, which could have provided
the base for heavy industry, were not tapped for this purpose.
The linkage effects of the British imperial impact remained ephemeral in
many other respects, too. The interaction of the superimposed
administrative machinery with Indian society was deliberately restricted to
the maintenance of law and order. Modern education was limited to a
small elite, who received mostly higher education in the liberal arts;
technical education was not encouraged and no attempt was ever made to
support primary education. India’s large agrarian society was, so to speak,
governed by remote control from above—which was incompatible with
democratic processes. For this reason, the British administrators were also
not very enthusiastic about the constitutional reforms demanded by what
they considered to be a ‘microscopic minority’ of educated Indians.
The pattern of constitutional reform
In 1885 the Indian National Congress met for the first time in Bombay. It
was a fairly small gathering of members of the educated elite from the
various provinces of British India. At the provincial level there had been
Presidency Associations in Madras and Bombay, as well as the British
Indian Association, Calcutta, whose younger and more radical members
had then sponsored the Indian Association. This latter was particularly
energetic in its pursuit of the idea of a National Congress.
The admission of Indians to the Indian civil service was one of the main
grievances of the members of these associations. Theoretically, admission was