GOLCONDA^165Food, Income,
and Standard of LivingWhat was the condition of the "mass" in pre-British India?
European travelers and visitors reported general poverty, even
misery, and Indian interlocutors agreed. Why so many temples in
South India? "... the soil is immensely productive while the
subsistence needs of the inhabitants are so few." An English traveler
visits a local king who speaks of his peasants as "Naked, Starved
Rascals." Their needs? "Money is inconvenient for them: give them
Victuals and an Arse-Clout, it is enough."^26
Some historians would argue that these strangers saw and
understood less than they thought, or that they blackened the Indian
picture by way of brightening the European. A few have even
asserted—on the strength of estimates of food intake—that the
Indian ryot lived better than the English farm laborer.^27
Such calorimetric cliometrics seem to me implausible in the light
of the gulf between European and Asian techniques. Nor am I
persuaded by efforts to project twentieth-century comparative
income estimates back to the eighteenth century.^28 The
opportunities to distort the result are endless, and the leverage of
even a small mistake extended over two hundred years is enormous.
In these speculative exercises, the numbers deserve credence only
if they accord with the historical context. That context, for India,
was one of limited property rights and technological backwardness.
Western Europe, well on its way to the Industrial Revolution, was
inventing and improving ingenious, labor-saving devices, in
particular, both hand- and power-driven machines. It had long since
passed Asia by. It's as simple as that: more productive techniques
translate into higher incomes.
And What Happened to Omichund?
The negotiations between the British and Mir Jafar were carried out
by two agents, one of them Omichund, a merchant of Bengal who