INTRODUCTIONIn fact, the British conquest of India closely paralleled the pattern of
expansion of the Maurya empire. They subjected the Gangetic basin up to the
Ganga-Yamuna Doab as well as the east coast and penetrated into the interior
of the south where they defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Just like the
Mauryas, the British left large parts of the interior untouched. Indirect rule
was less expensive in areas which did not promise a high yield of land revenue.
But, unlike the ancient Indian empires, the British Indian empire emphasised
efficient administrative penetration. The Mughal heritage was already strong
in this respect, but the British were able to improve greatly upon it. The
Mughal administration was, after all, a military one: the officers who made
the decisions were warriors and not bookkeepers. The British replaced the
warriors with bookkeepers who were under the strict discipline of a modern
bureaucracy. In fact, British bureaucracy in India was far ahead of British
administration at home which was both supported and encumbered by British
tradition. This new system of bureaucratic administration was both much
cheaper and more efficient than the Mughal system. The Mughal warrior
administrator spent a large part of the surplus which he appropriated in the
region from which it had come, but the British collected more and spent less
and could transfer the surplus abroad. This implied a decline of the internal
administrative centres which shrank to a size in keeping with their functions in
the new system. Only the major bridgeheads on the maritime periphery,
Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, grew out of all proportion. They also became
the terminal points of the railway network which linked the interior of India
to the world market. Thus the old regional pattern of Indian history which has
been outlined above was subverted by the British rulers. The pattern was
turned inside out. The periphery provided the new regional centres of the three
great Presidencies which encompassed the three major regions outlined above.
Only some of the capitals of Indian princes who lived on under British
paramountcy remained as rather modest centres in the interior of the country
until the British rulers decided to revive Delhi as the capital of British India.
But this transfer of the capital was more of a symbolic gesture than an
effective change in the structure of British rule. Even independent India could
not easily change the new regional order of India which was dominated by the
great peripheral centres. The rise of new industrial centres in the Indian coal
and iron ore belt around Chota Nagpur has not made much difference in this
respect. These are industrial enclaves in a very backward region which has
never been a nuclear region but rather a retreat for the tribal population.
THE REGIONAL PATTERN OF POPULATION DENSITY
One indicator of the relative changes of the importance of different
regions in India is the density of population. Unfortunately we know very
little about the distribution of population in earlier periods of Indian
history. We can only guess that the great rice areas of the eastern Gangetic