| The
British, of course, did not come to India primarily as
representatives of Western civilization; they came principally as
traders and settled down as rulers. The consequences of the first
role have been extensively discussed and I have not much to add to
the broad consensus that this led to our deindustrialization and
therefore, impoverishment. The same is largely true of other
consequences of their rule. Here, too, a broad consensus obtains.
Even so I would draw attention to a couple of points which, in my
opinion, have not received the attention they deserve.
First, the British disarmed us, for
the first time in history. Till the consolidation of British power
in India in 1858, the Indian peasantry was armed. According to the
Ain-i-Akbari, four and a half million armed men were available for
military service in North India in the sixteenth century and
possibly a similar number below the Vindhyas, judging by the fact
that the Vijaynagar empire could field up to one million soldiers.
This subject has not been discussed much. But the gap in this field
has been ably filled by a recent publication - Dirk H.A. Kolff's
Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy.3 Broadly,
it makes the points that the Indian peasantry in modern Uttar
Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh (which is the area of Kolff's
research) was armed; that a substantial labour market existed; that
there was no dearth of employment opportunities for would-be
soldiers; that these recruits came from all strata of society
including the lowest in ritual terms; that there was no
discrimination in the recruitment and treatment of soldiers of any
kind on the basis of caste; indeed, that caste is a modern ideology
inasmuch as it restricts mobility because from the fourteenth to the
eighteenth century Rajput status was accessible to soldiers; and
that a Hindu soldier had more than one identity. |
