Zachariah, 'British and Indian Ideas of "Development": Decoding Political Conventions in the Late...

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British and Indian Ideas of ‘Development’: Decoding Political Conventions in the Late Colonial State

Benjamin Zachariah

Itinerario / Volume 23 / Issue 34 / November 1999, pp 162 209DOI: 10.1017/S0165115300024645, Published online: 22 June 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0165115300024645

How to cite this article:Benjamin Zachariah (1999). British and Indian Ideas of ‘Development’: Decoding Political Conventions in the Late Colonial State. Itinerario, 23, pp 162209 doi:10.1017/S0165115300024645

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162

British and Indian Ideas of 'Development'Decoding Political Conventions in the LateColonial State

BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

What was the 'late colonial state' in India? Purely chronologically, it mightbe taken to be a period from the 1920s or the 1930s onwards; but this iswith the benefit of hindsight. Most writers are in agreement that, despitethe political rhetoric of British imperialism in India, it was not until theSecond World War that an actual withdrawal from India was seriouslycontemplated by Britain, with the definite reservation that matters of im-perial importance such as defence and economic interest should be con-trolled by Britain as far as possible. If an acceptance by the colonial powerof impending decolonisation is to be the basis of such a characterisation,then it is doubtful whether there was a late colonial state at all. If, on theother hand, a difference in the forms of control and of exercise of powerover the colony from earlier periods is to be the basis of the characterisation'late', then perhaps there is more of a case for a use of the term 'latecolonial state' as more than a mere chronological device.

Rhetorically, of course, the British had promised eventual self-govern-ment in the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms document, and the enormouslyenergetic bureaucratic and political theatricals which began with the SimonCommission's visit to India and culminated in the 1935 Government ofIndia Act can all be said to have been stages of planned withdrawal. Yet- despite the views of some writers who have seen the period from the FirstWorld War to 1947 as one of economic decolonisation1 - it has been widelyrecognised that British imperial policy, in India and elsewhere, found anacceptance of the outward forms of nationalism and some amount of self-rule to be perfectly compatible with continued imperial control.2 Rhetori-cally, therefore, the colonial state in India declared its own lateness - thatis, its impending demise - after the First World War, when the Wilsonianprinciple of self-determination was on everyone's lips; and the formula of'trusteeship' was invented to cover the division of parts of the formerTurkish empire and the colonies of the Central Powers among the victoriousallies. The progress of the peoples who inhabited these territories wasentrusted to the colonial powers; in this atmosphere, the Montagu-Chelms-ford Reforms in India offered Indian nationalists, as a reward for their co-

BRITISH AND INDIAN IDEAS OF 'DEVELOPMENT' 163

operation during the war, a ten-year course in 'nation-building', and anexamination by Statutory Commission thereafter.3

The 'late colonial state' can be, according to this description, dated fromthe time at which the colonial authorities declare that the end is nigh forcolonialism, though they avoid declaring how nigh this might be for aslong as possible. That this is often largely rhetoric is also clear - even if afew well-meaning imperial officials interpret this literally, it is never under-stood to mean more than a gradual and orderly withdrawal, in the fullnessof time; and moreover, as imperial officials closer to the higher ranks ofgovernance recognise, in this long interim period, the continuance of theimperial connection can continue to bring important economic benefitsto the metropolis, if not directly in the form of increased economic strengthand profits, certainly in terms of a parachute effect which slows the processof decline in a time of crisis. In India, the late colonial state arrived relativelyearly: India was allegedly higher on the ladder of civilisation than manyother colonies, and needed a smaller amount of training than other colo-nies. Nevertheless, a certain amount of training was required.

This declaration of its own lateness on the part of the colonial state, evenif widely recognised to be more rhetorical than real, is nonetheless animportant event: first, it sets public standards to which governments haveto be seen to conform (even if they do not actually conform to them); andsecond, it sets in motion certain anticipations of a future situation of im-pending decolonisation and independence. In terms of the first, the stan-dards are set at least as much within the colony itself as by the internationalsituation: for instance, 'trusteeship' implies temporary control, benevolenceand welfare activities. The hostility to formal colonialism expressed by theUnited States, clearly beginning to replace Britain as the major world powerin the period after the Great War, was a major factor in the stress by Britishimperialism on its own benevolent and progressive functions in the inter-war period and after. If, in the process, some imperial officials were ableto convince themselves of the reality of these standards, and to seek sincerelyto live up to them, like the character in the musical comedy,4 this did notnecessarily change the fundamental nature of imperialism. But it does leadto the second point, that of anticipations of decolonisation and indepen-dence - which set in motion certain debates of an urgency that was lackingin their earlier versions, because they were less immediate. Most notableamong these debates were those on 'development'.

In India, the notion of 'development' was closely associated with the'nation-building' programme, which was ultimately to lead to qualificationin self-government. Debates surrounding that crucial concept sped upgreatly in the 1930s and 1940s, and included a wide variety of concernssurrounding India's future, which cannot be understood merely in termsof economic development, to which narrower meaning 'development' wasreduced after the Second World War, and more so in the Cold War contextof the beginning of the new discipline of development economics. This

164 BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

paper is about these wider meanings, the ideas they drew upon, and theirimportance both to the politics of the late colonial state in India and topolitical legitimacy after the end of formal colonial rule. It attempts, forreasons of space, no more than to draw an oudine map of these ideas; butit is hoped that such a map might be indicative of the benefits to historicalanalysis obtainable by attempting to recover a history of ideas and theiroperation in particular colonies.

Section I deals with the importance of understanding 'development' inlate colonial India - its importance for an understanding of politics andsociety. Section II outlines in broad terms why development acquired theimportance it did. Section III looks at the conventions of imperial discoursesurrounding development; Section IV at nationalist notions of develop-ment; Section V attempts an overall analysis of what these late colonialdiscussions on 'development' can tell us about late colonial intellectual for-mations.

I should like to begin by drawing attention to a point that I believe needsto be treated as a guiding factor in any study of colonial India. One of themajor problems of understanding politics in colonial India is that theterminology is misleadingly familiar to us, while the meaning of the termi-nology is often subtly but significantly different. The historian's need tooutline the ways of ordering the world of peoples in the remote past, of'primitive', or 'savage' peoples, as a necessary step towards understandingtheir histories, has long been taken as self-evident. However, the rhetoricof colonial Indian politics, dominated by an educated and articulate middle-class, skilled in the use of occidental discourses, was so familiar to historiansas to apparendy preclude the need for this exercise.

In outlining this principle, I am excluding a large body of existing workthat does in fact emphasise Indian 'difference'.5 Such a focus leads to anoverstated position, in which the similarities are ignored and the differencescelebrated. I would argue that the problem of an apparendy familiar termi-nology masking rather than clarifying its meaning is constantly encounteredin Indian history. This is in part related to the phenomenon of translationalproblems, both cultural and linguistic, arising from the need to communi-cate in an English language-dominated public sphere, and therefore theneed to collate terms in English with terms in Indian languages. This wasa mutual process, in the course of which the meanings of English andIndian language terms shifted towards each other. Consequently, a termin metropolitan usage, even if the same term as one in Indian usage, wouldbe inflected differentiy in India.

There is another aspect to this question of familiarity of terminology.Political arguments in colonial India were interventions into arenas struc-tured by the British colonial power. An effective intervention had to appeal


to principles that the colonial power recognised as valid. These were oftenprinciples which had already secured political and/or academic respectabil-ity in Britain - both British colonial government officials and Indian oppo-nents of the government linked their arguments to these principles, whoselegitimacy was reinforced by their prior status as valid principles in themetropolis. Metropolitan ideas were therefore a potential source of legiti-macy for Indian arguments.

At the same time, standards of legitimacy in India could not be seen tolean too strongly on metropolitan standards alone. A nationalist positioncould not be seen simply to be derived from a metropolitan one, metropoli-tan positions often being closely associated with imperialism to Indianaudiences. Hence the importance of denying charges of adopting 'foreign'elements - the importance of claims to 'difference' from merely metropoli-tan standards in Indian nationalist arguments. This was an implicit problemof the existence of two potential standards of legitimacy in the colonialsituation: Indian (nationalist) and British (colonial).

In practice, the distinctions were not quite so rigid, with certain argu-ments capable of being represented within either convention, and bothconventions co-existing ambivalently. This also meant that 'indigenous'intellectual resources were sought to be drawn upon as standards of legiti-macy, which were said either to reinforce or to undermine the sanctity ofoutside principles. Ironically, these 'indigenous' resources had themselvesbeen crucially shaped by British interventions in earlier periods. Thus, inreading arguments, the historian is faced, in addition to the problem ofthe sameness of terminology masking differences in meaning, the problemof differences in terminology masking similarities in meaning.

The importance of this preamble, in a paper concerned with British andIndian ideas of'development', appears in the context of several misreadingsor inadequate readings of ideas of 'development' in late colonial India,and consequently a misunderstanding of the working of the late colonialstate in India. If the then existing conventions of argument are not under-stood, the statements of various political leaders and potential policy-makersare likely to be taken at face value - which means effectively that they aremisread according to the conventions of later periods by various historians,economists or social scientists.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that the actual courseof events bears little resemblance to the statements of intent of the leadersand policy-makers. For all the socialist rhetoric of the 1930s and 1940s, arhetoric which came to be shared by businessmen and by imperial admi-nistrators in the 1940s, capitalism and imperialism were alive and well. Inexchange for accepting some amount of government control, private capitalcontinued to operate profitably in designated areas of the economy, withthe public sector taking care of major risks, infrastructure and unprofitableinvestment areas. Britain's holding of the sterling balances after the warand after the transfer of power, together with her rationing of hard currency


and designating areas of supply of goods through the Sterling Area andthe Empire Dollar Pool ensured a great deal of British leverage over Indianeconomic affairs even after the end of the formal empire in India and itstransmutation into a 'Commonwealth' of allegedly freely co-operatingnations.6

This confusing distance between events and rhetoric has led to confusionamong historians who have sought to understand the period. Existingstudies have been unable adequately to explain why imperialists, nationalistsand capitalists appeared to adopt the same positions on development inthe 1940s; they conclude, variously, that 'Nehruvian socialism' wasn't social-ism at all (a conclusion possibly true in itself, but which tells us nothingabout the standards by which 'socialism' was judged in that period, evenif the author presents us with his own standards) ;7 that capitalists were soenlightened and positive about their nationalism that they were willing tobe socialists in that cause (and/or because this suited their 'class interest');8

that in the context of the 1940s and 1950s anyone who had been in chargeof the Indian economy would have had a planned one (which evades thequestion of what sort of planned economy and what sort of social goalsthey might have had) ;9 that national planning was simply an adoption ofthe wartime controls set in place by the colonial government (once again,there are similarities, but significant discontinuities and differences, notleast in declared and actual goals);10 or that a new era of 'constructiveimperialism' was about to begin (which does not tell us much about whatsuch 'constructive imperialism' might have meant to those who conceivedit).11

One solution to this problem has been to ignore the rhetoric and toconcentrate on the events. This form of writing is left with a problem ofhow to read its sources: if the rhetoric is merely a mask for more fundamen-tally self-interested behaviour, then how might one use various policy state-ments or statements of intent as historical evidence? One is forced to relyon world trade figures, bank deposits, or balance of payments accounts.Such economic histories, in order to be logically consistent, can make noclaims regarding the intentions of the people involved in decisions, andought to confine themselves to writing about broad economic trends, whichmay or may not have been apparent to contemporaries who were involvedin the events - because these people's statements may simply be lies. Butof course they often do not do that - they cite contemporaries' statementsas evidence of intentions, of attitudes and predispositions, etc. The dangeris, of course, that if the conventions of argument remain opaque, so doesthe evidence.

The problem of shared terms needs therefore to be confronted. Unlessit is understood that the shared terms were necessary conventions of legiti-mate politics, it becomes impossible to disentangle the positions; they appearto be the same, and are in clanger of being read as actually being the same.

But the importance of taking seriously the conventions within which


development was discussed is not merely one of decoding a language forthe benefit of economic historians. There is a social and intellectual historyto be explored in these debates: they are essential to the understandingof the moral and political world of late colonial India, and of immediatepost-independence India. Ideas which form the basis of the accepted politi-cal rhetoric of public arenas are ideas which define the boundaries ofpublicly acceptable political behaviour - and therefore define public stan-dards to which people are expected to conform: a language of politicswhich becomes inescapable in that claims to political legitimacy must bemade in that language. This creates the basis for public debate and thestandards for acceptable action, both crucial for the appearance of democra-cy.12 Deviations from such norms need to be hidden, or justified as onlyapparent deviations, ultimately assimilable within the bounds of the norms.In the case of 'development', its importance as a catch phrase for legitimi-sing all manner of action in India is still too familiar to require elaboration.

When we hear the word 'development' we automatically think in termsof economic development. However, there is generally a penumbra of ideaswhich inform conceptions of economic development. This paper seeks toexplore the social and intellectual history of this penumbra, and conse-quently to relocate the contemporary debates on 'economic development'in the wider context of the stated and unstated assumptions upon whichthey were based. I locate concerns with 'development' within wider notionsof progress, self-government and nation building, which for contemporarieswere inseparably entwined with 'development'.13

II

In India 'development' was an idea around which converged both theBritish justification of Britain's right to rule and Indian opposition to Britishideas of the 'backwardness' of the subject people - racial, social, politicaland economic. By the 1920s and 1930s the idea of 'backwardness' wasframed in predominantly economic terms, in British colonial as well asnationalist arguments: earlier British arguments regarding Indian 'back-wardness' lost their effectiveness, partly as Indian nationalists developedstrong counter-arguments, and partly as arguments which defined 'back-wardness' in terms of other categories became less respectable in Britainitself.

Race and religion, for instance, had long played a role in this - as hada number of 'scientific' theories of evolution, the strands being mutuallyreinforcing. By the 1920s, however, the 'difference' between British stan-dards of political behaviour and those of the Indians needed to be under-played if an increasingly difficult-to-govern India had to be convinced ofthe sincerity of Britain's claim to be progressively granting self-governmentto Indians.14 Though the indication of the existence of such differencesremained an important element in imperial arguments, this was expressed


in a form tempered by the hope that with time things would improve: thiswas not an argument regarding the intrinsic qualities of Indians, but anargument regarding where Indians stood in the stages of civilisation: back-ward, but not incapable of catching up. The two elements were not al-together clearly separated, although by the 1930s it was more common torephrase beliefs of the first kind in terms of the second, at least in publicargument. This also justified the British reluctance to set a concrete timefor its grant of self-government: the period of apprenticeship was almost,but not quite, over.15

The strategies of argument adopted in these debates are well known.The official British argument in India, as elsewhere, was centred on thebeneficial nature of the colonial connection for finance, trade and com-merce, its 'modernising' role through contact with the scientific anddeveloped West and its crucial role in preserving internal peace, law andorder. The subject people responded by attributing 'backwardness' to theeffects of colonial rule itself; in this scheme of things, economic backward-ness, which was a consequence of colonial rule, was itself the cause of otherforms of backwardness.

Conceptions of 'economics' were crucial to these arguments. The lan-guage of economics provided an apparently neutral way of talking about'backwardness', based on supposedly impartial criteria. This did not createagreement among imperialists and nationalists on terms, propositions ortheories in economics; on the contrary, several economic theories whichcould be advanced in opposition to the orthodox economics of balancedbudgets, 'sound finance' and relative inaction on the part of the Govern-ment, became part of the nationalist armoury of arguments against thecolonial government and against colonialism. On the nationalist side, al-though to advocate 'development' was to concede the point regardingIndian 'backwardness'; to acknowledge this particular form of 'backward-ness' was less offensive, it being a contingent 'backwardness', capable ofbeing overcome.

At the same time, the significance of these debates, even when framedin predominantly economic terms or containing strong claims to economi-cally rational argument, extended well beyond the merely economic. Theterms of reference for these debates - 'development', 'modernisation','industrialisation', 'backwardness' - contained in them connotations nottoo far removed from other categories of 'backwardness', which remainedscarcely veiled under colonialism. British colonialism in India was depen-dent on justifications based on ideas of British expertise in the arts ofgovernment, economics and administration, and on assumptions of theinadequacy and inferiority of Indians in these fields. Indians on their partsought to combat the imperial claim to a monopoly of expertise in govern-ment, economic and otherwise, but also to come up with their own concep-tions of 'development'. This was more than a search for a model economicplan (though there were many of those); not just a question of material


betterment: it was also one of the 'moral health' of the nation, as Sir M.Visvesvaraya, engineer, civil servant and former Dewan of the Princely Stateof Mysore, put it.16

'Development', along with the implied or stated terms which it conjuredup along with itself, therefore, became in many cases a synecdoche for themore general problem of the search for a framework within which toconceptualise a future or possible Indian nation, a nation in the act ofbecoming. In the context of the need to anticipate a framework for thedesired independent Indian state, 'development' set off a chain of thoughton various matters seen to be related to it.17 It was felt to be necessary bysome to make explicit certain connections between economic regenerationand development and the wider processes of 'nation-building', 'nationaldiscipline', the 'modernisation' of the masses, or forms of government.

This was not, however, conceived merely in terms of a political problemof 'constructing the nation', but situated in the context of wider philosophi-cal, social and moral questions: what 'improvement' consisted in, the condi-tions of human well-being, the laws of history, the social responsibility ofscience. This rather large set of concerns was raised by the evocative andpotentially limitless connotations of 'development'. A burning question ofthe time was the relative merits of capitalism and socialism - a thread thatruns through most of the arguments. Intermeshed with and often cuttingacross this was the more particular debate on the relative merits of acentralised, State-administered, industrialisation-oriented direction to deve-lopment and a decentralised, village-self-sufficiency based agriculture-and-cottage-industry-oriented order, the latter position championed by Gandhi.However, these distinctions among the various participating groups in thedebate have tended to be overdrawn or misdrawn both by contemporariesand by subsequent writers.

The impact of the Great Depression and the emergence of alternativesto the largely non-interventionist liberal economics of the pre-1914 era18

played a strong catalysing role in incorporating and transforming variousexisting economic nationalist arguments19 as well as a number of existing,and previously discrete, non-economic concerns into a recognisable na-tionalist discourse on 'development'. Yet while various strands of thoughtwere brought together by these events in the world's political economyand the responses they provoked, the latter often provided not much morethan a starting point for a chain of thought which incorporated these eventsinto wider and more intricate arguments.

These events also provided examples which were seen to be emulable inIndia; but as emulable examples which were also appropriated in selectiveand eclectic ways. In the 1930s the Soviet Union's Planning was extremelyinfluential in this regard, and not merely among socialists. This was notthe only example: the economic successes of Japan, the USA through theNew Deal, of Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany were commonly cited as examplesworthy of emulation in some of their aspects, with the emphasis varying


according to political orientation. It became necessary at times to separatethe economic achievements of some of these countries from their politicalbehaviour: thus, from about 1937, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were lesswell-quoted examples; praise for Japan's economic success was explicitlystated not to imply support either for her aggression in China or herbehaviour during the Second World War.20 The Soviet example remainedthe most-cited one, if only by virtue of being apparently the most successful,such success being in large measure responsible for ensuring that its in-fluence extended beyond socialists and cut across the political spectrum.But the goals of most of those citing that example were quite un-Soviet,seeking only to try to emulate its material successes.21 The term 'socialist'was also used loosely; everyone, from the Communists through Nehru tothe Gandhians, and even Indian capitalists, was claiming this term.

The fora for many of the discussions of 'development' - in its separatethemes and on particular issues through official reports and enquiries -were most often provided by the Government; and also in the discussionspromoted by nationalist political groupings around the Congress. (TheCongress was still uncertain as to whether to define itself as a platform ora Party. The Left, who sought to remain in Congress and move it leftwards,wished to see it as a platform, while the right, anticipating losing groundto increasingly popular left-wing ideas, as well as to right-wing parties whoappropriated their agenda, wanted to impose further discipline and baninternal groups.)22 These fora were however peopled not just by the mainprotagonists in politics (who undoubtedly gave to the discussions a legiti-macy and immediacy which they lacked in their purely academic setting),but also by academics and professionals, participants in the wider concernsconnected with 'development', as well as those considered 'experts' in theirparticular fields, and businessmen, whose demands for space within whichto operate more freely were seen as national demands.23 But the discussionsin organised and official fora operated according to the rules of the forumconcerned. This automatically ensured that a number of ideas were muted;but echoes of these ideas could nonetheless often be heard.

At the same time, the participation of people from various fields, whobrought diverse ideas of eclectic origin to shared concerns on the subjectof 'development', created new fora and drew more people into the debates.Many of the important discussions surrounded moral, cultural and spiritualmatters, and took place in the realms of academic discourse as well as inmore informal fora, such as in private correspondence.

There were, thus, on the one hand, those with a wide variety of concernsabout India's future who were drawn into fora and debates in which theycame to characterise their concerns as concerns of 'development'; therewere others who had already characterised their concerns in this way: 'devel-opment' came increasingly in the 1930s to be a way of connecting, and toa degree ordering, a wide variety of issues. 'Development', and its invariableconcomitant, 'planning' (the latter being the means through which the


former would be achieved), began by the 1930s to imply a cluster of termsand ideas which were closely related, with earlier ideas incorporated intothe later formulations.24

It might be noted that nationalist claims to 'development', even whenframed in economic terms, were not necessarily economic; the underlyingassumptions which came into play did not exclude 'cultural', moral, ethnicor other factors. Even an argument regarding the primacy of economics(which was made by many of the participants in the debates) should notbe confused with an argument (which was never made) that 'development'was only about economics. A matter of some disagreement was what exactlywere the factors in addition to economics (as the participants understoodit) which were to be admitted as relevant to the debates, what factors oughtto inform economics, or what factors should be recognised as apart o/economics.Thus, in some cases the question was framed in terms of 'economics'needing to be supplemented by other concerns in finding a view of 'develop-ment' suitable for India:

Along with economic planning, sooner or later, questions will alsocome to the front of reforms and reconstruction in other spheresof national life - political, social, intellectual and spiritual. Theseare all interconnected and changes in them, fast or slow, will beinevitable. Planning under all these heads will come under thecomprehensive title of Nation Building.25

In other cases, most famously the Gandhian (as rephrased in the 1930s),there was an insistence that 'economics' needed to includemoral and ethicalconcerns; in some versions of this argument it was only a 'Western' concep-tion of economics that deliberately sought to exclude these moral andethical concerns.26 But these were not rigidly held distinctions; at any event,whether 'economics' needed to include, or be supplemented by, otherconcerns, the boundaries of 'economics' were not clearly defined.

Arguments framed in terms of 'economics' could not become a sufficientbasis for a nationalist view of 'development', which aspired to be morethan merely economic. However, in order legitimately to secure a hearingin the imperial environment, arguments on 'development' had to a largeextent to conform to 'the rules of political economy', which had a long-standing respectability. The fact that these rules, as applied to India, werebased on a number of stereotypical assumptions on the part of the Britishabout what Indians were and how they ought to progress, was not acknowl-edged, and was not an adequate resource for the discrediting or readjust-ment of the rules. Thus, not only were the existing terms of debate set bythe British, but the spaces in which arguments might proceed were Britishas well, and its discursive rules worked to the benefit of the British.

The solution was to seek to move the boundaries of 'economies'; to widenthe scope of existing fora as far as possible to express the wider views; andto create new fora, drawing more people into sharing the wider concerns.


Intellectual resources in this regard were provided to a certain extent bynew conceptions of political economy emerging in the 1930s, which helpedto make the boundaries of 'economics' more permeable. In the contextof the wider concerns, existing fora proved not to be particularly widenable;but new fora were created, in which 'development' was expressed as farmore than merely 'economies', and successfully drew in people withseparate concerns, who were now able to express these diverse concernsin terms of planning India's future.

Ill

This period of British rule in India can at one level be represented as astruggle between an old-style imperialism and a new-style one - FinanceMember George Schuster's liberal 'Keynesian', more far-sighted views onBritish imperialism, not too distant from Leo Amery's conservative viewson an empire integrated by common economic self-interest; or the RoundTable group's idea of imperial partnership in a 'Commonwealth'.27 Thisview becomes less viable if one looks at the details of debates lower downthe scale of imperial administration regarding what was to be done in India.

Changing perceptions within Britain itself of the economic role of thestate ought to have made it possible to hold slightly broader economicideas with which to deal with the crisis years of the 1930s. Free trade hadremained the dominant doctrine of British official economic thinkingthrough the 1920s, made possible by a hope that economic conditionswould return to 'normal', until the Depression forced a realisation thatthe multilateral trading world of the pre-First World War era could not betaken for granted, and was not likely to be restored in a hurry.28 In termsof doctrine, many tried to defend free trade and to treat the Depression asan aberration; new ideas met with great resistance.29

The changes in economic orthodoxy which were adopted under theNational Government in Britain owed a good deal to the Conservativeelement within it, although for various reasons most groups in Britishpolitics went along with the changes to a greater or lesser extent. The callfor tariff reform was revived, and protective tariffs adopted in 1931; thiswas coupled with a demand for conscious efforts towards the integrationof the Empire in a trading bloc through Imperial Preference, agreementstowards which were drawn up at the Imperial Economic Conference inOttawa in 1932.30 These two initiatives were intellectual contributions ofthe Conservative Party, but became acceptable across political boundaries.The Labour Party had been an opponent of both tariffs and ImperialPreference until the 1930s - in the 1920s largely due to the fear of the risein the cost of food.31 The retreat from this position was largely forced onBritain by the Depression; Imperial Preference as a defence against itseffects was seen as a possible way out.32 John Maynard Keynes, a liberal,and GDH Cole, a Fabian, as members of the Economic Advisory Council,


were in favour of tariffs, stimulating domestic investment, import controls,and subsidies for exports.33 A section of the Conservatives welcomed therecommendation on tariffs, a demand which its supporters dated back toJoseph Chamberlain in 1903; among its supporters was Leo Amery, futureSecretary of State for India, who combined the recommendation of tariffswith a renewal of the call for Imperial Preference within an 'Empire-Com-monwealth', a new and more palatable term for the British Empire whichenvisaged eventual - but not yet - equality of the nations within it.34

Such questions of changed perceptions as did arise emerged from imme-diate practical problems: of protecting Britain as far as possible from theworst effects of the Depression, of keeping a colonial state financially'sound', and of the need for a containment policy against socialists andcommunists, whose increasing appeal was being felt all over the Empire,and whose prediction of the impending collapse of capitalism seemed tobe materialising. In India, as far as policy was concerned, a colony was notto be granted the same measure of right to reassess the principles of itspolitical economy. The need for a balanced budget in the Colonies wasconsidered especially important in the Depression when incomes in primarygoods producing countries collapsed spectacularly along with agriculturalprices and hence export earnings and colonial governments' incomes.35

In India, administrative discussions took note of the new currents; in thefinancial crisis of 1931, a non-deflationary approach was suggested byFinance Member Sir George Schuster but rejected in London.36 Althoughgenerally following the 'sound finance' line dictated from London, Schusterexperimented with government expenditure on infrastructure; he pro-posed taking state intervention on the Soviet and Fascist models seriously;and organised a report on a possible Economic Advisory Committee forIndia.37 His successor, Sir James Grigg, was an old-fashioned Liberal freemarketeer, a close associate of Philip Snowden and Montagu Norman, andhis previous posts had all been in the Treasury. It is instructive to comparethe positions of Schuster and Grigg, if only to illustrate the tension betweenthe positions.

Schuster situated the question of planning India's economy within theargument for Imperial Preference38 - as part of a wider process of reconcilia-tion of British and Indian business interests, and 'rationalisation of eco-nomic effort throughout a group like the British Commonwealth'.39 Hehoped for a 'complementary plan' which would involve the co-operationof Indian and British interests. Schuster believed that the rise of some Indianindustries, which had resulted in the reduction of her cotton and iron andsteel imports from Britain, was acceptable; but he saw great 'possibilitiesof future development in India and of the trade which more highly indus-trialised countries may have with her'.40 To Schuster, a 'balanced' Indianeconomy was and should remain basically agricultural. Agriculture was,however, he argued, to be 'supplemented by moderate-sized industrialestablishments on a sufficient scale to provide a sound commercial basis,


but set down away from large towns so that the workers could still keep intouch with the land'. He was sceptical about the wisdom of large urbanconcentrations and industrialisation, especially as the consumer would stillpay more for his goods than if they had been imported:

Can it be said that the 180,000 additional workers in the cottonmills are happier or are even performing a higher human functionthan they would have been if working in the fields? On the econo-mic plane, has it paid? The consumers of cotton goods are certainlynot getting these cheaper [...]41

This claim to his argument working 'on the economic plane' seems to beseparate from what in the previous sentence sounds like a philosophicaland ethical question: 'happiness' and 'higher human functions'. He wenton to remark that he had 'great sympathy with some of Mr Ghandi's [sic]economic ideas': India, differing as it does from the advanced industrialpowers, and less materialistic in temperament,42 should not aspire to ad-vanced levels of industrialisation, though he did not wish to go as far asGandhi in denouncing all urbanisation and modern industry.43

Schuster argued, before an audience accustomed to regarding conven-tional imperialist arguments as axiomatic, at two levels: that of mutual self-interest, in which he argued that Indian economic 'development', if con-tained within certain parameters, was not damaging to British interests andwas in fact mutually beneficial; and that of principles, both moral and mate-rial: the moral responsibility of British imperialism to look after the materialprogress of India; the protection of India from the vicissitudes of the worldmarket to which Britain had attached her; the overriding of laissez-faire asa guiding principle in consideration of the former two imperatives; but atthe same time the need to protect India from the evils of excessive industria-lisation. Despite the selective appropriation of Gandhi's arguments- Schus-ter was anti-'excessive' industrialisation but not therefore pro-self-sufficien-cy- the basic premise of Britain's right (or duty) to decide the course ofIndia's moral and material future remained unchallenged in these argu-ments, in consonance with the unchallenged existence of that assumptionfor his audience.

Grigg, on the other hand, represented a position in British imperialismthat could no longer be publicly acknowledged. Apart from his rigid viewson finance, he was an embarrassment in political terms. He also discovereda stronger Imperialist self in India. As he wrote to Philip Snowden,

Do you remember once saying to me at the Hague that wheneveryou saw the Union Jack in a foreign country, you invariably becameextremely Imperialistic [?] Well, I am undergoing something of thesame process; I am not becoming Imperialistic in the rather vulgarsense of the word but I am firmly convinced that India's destinyis inextricably mixed up with ours and that it is essential that we


should make it clear that there is no question of our being kickedout.44

His views on 'development' were expressed in a letter to Chancellor of theExchequer Neville Chamberlain soon after his arrival in India, in the natureof a full report to enlighten Chamberlain about the real situation in India.This letter was a reinforcement of some of the standard perspectives ofBritish Indian administration; but, forcefully put into Grigg's inimitablestyle, made explicit the older imperial attitudes which the Indian administra-tion was trying its best to underplay in order to create an atmosphereconducive to political peace.

[...] India is the most desperately poor and inefficient and backwardcountry you can imagine. The representative Indian is not to befound among the few tens of thousands of noisy politicians, journa-lists, stock exchange gamblers and clerks; he is an almost nakedcreature clad in a loin cloth and an umbrella who squats aboutamong his crops by day and breeds like a rabbit by night. And inmy view we have for years neglected the second class for the first.It is quite true that we have removed from the peasant the fear offamine and murder but what with his entire neglect of Malthusianteaching and the slump in agricultural prices his economic positionis if anything worsened. As an antidote to the misfortunes of thecultivator we have played up to the idea of a rapid industrialisationof India by means of stupendously high duties but the effectshaven't been too happy. The prices to the consumer have beengrotesquely high (and the consumer is the peasant plus the Euro-pean), import trade has been cut down enormously and (thoughyou won't agree with this) the ability of the agriculurist [sic] toexport still further reduced while except in the case of steel theenterprise and uprightness of the industrialist have been insuffi-cient to enable the new industries to become established securely.Thus we have pleased nobody not even the industrialist or thepolitician to whom we have been playing up. The last named is aqueer creature mainly because his own mind reflects the incurabledivisions (racial as well as religious) of India. At the moment hehates England or, if he doesn't he finds it necessary to say that hedoes. At the same time he is afraid of her and is afraid that hecan't do without her. His pride demands power or at any rate officewhile his conscience or rather his historical sense tells him he isunfit for it.45

Grigg's statements bring into sharp relief the assumptions regarding 'devel-opment' or lack thereof, which underlay British views on Indian economicdevelopment. However, and possibly more importantly for the purposes ofthis paper, such views were no longer publicly expressed: the rhetoric was


one of gradual handover of power. By the 1940s, and especially in thecontext of the need to rally Indians for the War Effort, the rhetoric ofBritish withdrawal had been extended to include promises of economicand more specifically industrial development for India on the linesdemanded by nationalists.46

Lower down the scale of imperial officialdom, a simple contrast betweenearlier views and more up-to-date views, taking account of the rhetoric ofgradual withdrawal, is more difficult to make. The Civilian who served inhis district often had a rather proprietory view of 'his' peasants, especiallyif he had made it his special interest to document them for and representthem to the outside world. A few examples might be provided here fromofficial initiatives towards rural reconstruction or village uplift.

The idea of looking after the welfare of Indian villages was compatiblewith the general assumption that the 'real' India lived in the villages; thatthe villager was grateful to his District Officer for looking after him so well,and so must continue to be looked after. In addition to this, village upliftand reconstruction programmes were compatible with the Civilian's self-image as one who 'knew the country'. These measures were also well suitedto a self-perception of benevolent service on the part of the Civilian.

As every Imperial administrator had been taught about the Indian, 'themain obstacle to his advance and progress lies in the psychology of therural worker himself, owing to the custom and habit of caste and traditionthat has governed his life and action for generations'.47 It was the Imperialadministrator's job, as it was of the good Christian, to encourage 'self-helpwith intimate expert counsel', hopefully leading to 'spiritual, mental, physical,social and economic' uplift.48 This could, of course, be a thankless taskgiven the proverbial recalcitrance of the peasant; results were often dis-appointing,49 but '[t]he theme of all great romances is the quest [...] forits own sake. There is always the quest.'50

The project of village uplift, rural reconstruction, rural welfare, or ruraldevelopment, whatever the preferred term might be, had a mixed geneal-ogy, of Government initiatives, ' [i] ndividual Indians and voluntary associa-tions of Indians', and 'Missionary bodies'.51 It needs to be noted here that'rural reconstruction' worked either within a general imperialist consensus,or at least did not disturb it, seeking to work in the spaces for manoeuvreleft by British rule. There was also a strong Christian strain in many officialor semi-official initiatives, such as those of the YMCA or of missionaryactivities.52 In many cases, this could not be highlighted; Frank Braynecomplained that Government servants were denied the appeal to religionthat was so useful in England. He had therefore to interpret Christianteachings indirectly, in what has aptly been described as a 'language ofphysical cleanliness, rational productivity and disinterested social service'.53

This combination of elements usually provided a framework within which,by agreeing to disagree, or at least by not talking about disagreements,


officials and non-officials, imperialists and anti-imperialists, could find alimited area of co-operation: rural uplift was 'not political'. Gandhi's All-India Village Industries Association, set up in 1934 in order to undertake'constructive work', similarly claimed a space not explicitly political. Someimperial administrators were not unsympathetic to this initiative of Gand-hi's, as long as it kept him away from politics and concentrated on 'bonafide village welfare work'.54 Surendra Kumar Datta of the YMCA55 maintaineda close correspondence with Gandhi and Mahadev Desai regarding ruraluplift and education, and was one of the ATVTA's 'expert advisers'.56

In Government schemes, village panchayats, five-member village councils,which were considered the basis of ancient Indian 'village republics' bothin nationalist and imperialist histories of India,57 were entrusted with thetask of attending to village uplift; but were not provided any autonomy inthis regard; the path to uplift was laid out in a most patronising tone. TheSarpanch, head of the panchayat, was instructed in a scheme of village uplift,drawn from Frank Lugard Brayne's Gurgaon experiment.58 He was told that

Our object in forming these Panchayats is to train you in self-Government and to make you happy. Through these panchayatswe hope to remove poverty, as poverty brings - Disease, misery,sufferings and unhappiness.59

As propaganda this approach was rather clumsy, but it put forward an ideaof the ignorant peasant who had to be told what to do - self-help withintimate counsel once again - which was widely held in imperial circles.Outlines of the line of approach to be taken tended to insult the villagersin every possible way - they were informed:

Your methods of farming are bad. Your village is filthy [...] Youwaste all your wealth. You keep your women-folk in degradationand slavery [...] You resist all change, you are illiterate and ignorantand you do not make a proper use of your leisure.60

Having been told all this, the villager was expected to listen while he wastold of the seven-step remedial programme to overcome this gloomy situa-tion, relating to co-operative banking and consolidation of holdings, sanita-tion, the ending of unnecessary and wasteful expenditure on jewellery andweddings, agricultural improvements, good cattle stock, emancipation ofwomen. These suggestions made no reference to any significant reformsin agrarian property relations - an omission which was logical in a projectrelated to the maintenance of peace, order and taxes - and instead includedrecommendations on what 'good zamindars' should do.61

'Rural development' could of course be more creatively approached.Malcolm Darling, for instance, sought to transcend its limited conceptionsthrough recommending more positive Government policies and greaterfunding for constructive projects.62 He was also open to new ideas. A peri-pheral member himself of the Bloomsbury group,63 he had gleaned the


basics of Keynesianism from his own conversations, of which he kept notes,with his fellow Kingsman, Keynes, before the publication of the GeneralTheory?* He advocated Keynesian ideas of deficit spending to the Govern-ment of India with regard to co-operative societies, and attacked the 'Secre-tarial codes and orthodox finance' which had brought all reconstructionprocesses to a standstill after the Depression set in by cutting off funds.He pointed to development initiatives being attempted in countries suchas Italy, Turkey and Russia, especially Russia.65 At the same time he wasuncertain as to the good of dispossessing the landlord, who admittedly was'too often a parasite'; he could nonetheless be encouraged to 'imitate theGerman Junker', and ought to realise the advantages of this lest he be'swept away into the limbo of unregretted anachronisms'.66

Darling formulated his ideas of the 'medieval' nature of the Indianpeasantry in the 1920s, in terms of contemporary academic writing. On'the relation of economics to ethics' (the former being 'mainly concernedwith facts' and the latter with 'values'), he wrote in 1928 that the rule ofethics over economics was a 'medieval' characteristic — this premise hedrew from R.H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.67 In India thevillage was 'still medieval in oudook'. Rules of 'morality', which Darlingsaw as 'binding upon economic conduct' in the Indian village, were 'almostsynonymous with custom'. Consequently Darling postulated a static villagesociety, and a static village economy. This was changing in the last thirtyyears due to the impact of better transport and irrigation facilities, makingthe villagers responsive to the 'more dynamic basis of man-made econo-mies'. This was true of 'Hindu, Muhammedan and Sikh'; the boundariesbetween economics and ethics were beginning to shift.68

Darling believed, however, that this could be carried too far; he advocateda principle of 'sufficiency' rather than of 'the gospel of unlimited gain'and the consequent 'danger of arousing the acquisitive instincts of 320millions', especially as there was 'not enough to go round'. He feared 'deepunrest' and 'explosive results' if the latter principle were adopted. QuotingKeynes, he emphasised the undesirability of modern capitalism: it was'absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit,often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers'.69

He rejected the nineteenth-century view of leaving economic matters tothe 'play of natural forces', and called for the interlinking of ethics andeconomics. 'For agriculture is more than the mere gaining of a livelihood:it is a way of life which touches mind and spirit far more deeply than thepursuits whose sole object is gain'.70 It is unclear as to whether he realisedthat this might be read as, or whether he intended this to be read as, adefence of aspects of a 'medieval oudook'.71

The Malthusian danger loomed large in the writings of Darling. Hispapers contain long notes from Malthus' writings on the dangers of over-population, including Malthus' own citations on the subject from ArthurYoung, the Englishman who rode across France on the eve of the Revolu-


tion, and whom Darling was to invoke himself in his own ride across northIndia on the eve of transfer of power.72 'The central idea of Malthus' book[is] that marriage sh[oul]d be deferred till a family can be maintained',Darling wrote, paraphrasing Malthus in terms of his concern at the unwiseand extravagant marriages of his peasants. And ' [t]he more active the forcespushing to an increase in population] the greater the misery when thereis a check upon subsistence. In India a serious check e.g. a famine at onceproduces misery. What if we left the country [?]'73 Viceroy-designate Linlithgowwas also extremely keen on this approach. Having read a report written byDarling on the co-operative movement in the Punjab, he asked Darling formore concrete evidence that population growth was the prime cause ofthe decline in the standards of living in Lyallpur. He added

I am wondering how far I shall feel able to tell India that the over-growth of population is the factor limiting the standard of living,someone has warned me that I may come to be known as the'Contraceptive Viceroy'. I think I should be rather proud of thatepithet if it carried the sense that I had persuaded India to go infor fewer but better babies!74

As were many of his contemporaries, Darling was extremely impressed bythe achievements of the Soviet Union, and saw it as a model worthy ofemulation by India. He saw this as a problem of getting things done:'Russian methods' applied to the running of imperialism, in terms of theeducation of the peasant,75 or collectivisation as a form of co-operation fora 'semi-Asiatic country' with a need of economic rather than political demo-cracy.76 The advocacy of Soviet methods may have been made slightly easierby the fact that the Soviet Union was now an ally in the War; the factremains that diverse ideas were capable of being adapted and incorporatedinto the imperial vision.

Yet even an apparent rejection of imperialism could contain within it animplicit defence of imperialism. This is most apparent in the writings ofPenderel Moon, a civil servant often seen as 'nationalist', and one whostayed on in India after 1947, notably serving in the Planning Commission.

The consistency and rigour of Moon's arguments regarding what heregarded as the undeniable facts of imperial exploitation77 were notmatched by a correspondingly exacting intellectual position with regardto claimed extenuating circumstances for imperialism, as he hesitantlysearched for a way to rescue himself and his colleagues from being indictedin the logic of empire. What then, if any, were the good things about theEmpire in India? For 'the vast, voiceless, illiterate, inconscient masses, whoinhabit the villages of India', Moon could comfort himself that '[t]o them,such terms as the "British Raj", "Independence", "Pakistan", if not entirelyunknown, are at most meaningless abstractions'. Their lives could not bedisrupted by colonialism, or by any other forces, continuing 'as they did


before the Moguls came and before the British came and as they willcontinue to do for generations to come, preserving that age-old village lifeindestructible alike by calamity or progress'.78

This was a good resolution of the problem of imperialism and exploita-tion: colonialism is exploitative, yet it provides order in a society that wouldotherwise revert to chaos. All this, however, receded into the backgroundif it could be argued that the vast majority of Indians, who clearly lived invillages, were not significantly affected by colonial disruption. Yet this wasnot consistently argued; there was ambivalence written into it. It was bothpositive and negative, in the latter sense because the best efforts made byBritish rule to transform the countryside by benevolence will be destinedto failure. These inconsistencies provide a clue to the dilemma of thecolonial official uncertain of the moral propriety of colonialism, and conse-quently the moral propriety of his own position in its administration. Ulti-mately, Britain could be looked upon, 'in Marx's phrase, as just "the un-conscious tool of history". I am proud that our country should have beenchosen by fate, nature, God or whatever you like to call it, to clear up thedebris of the Mogul Empire and to unlock for India the treasures of Westernthought. I think on the whole we were worthy of it.'79 A worthy epitaph forthe Empire had been found, worthy of the principle for which Moon alwaysclaimed to have taken up his calling as a Civilian in India: finally to handover India to its own, now politically mature, people.

This representation of Indian progress as a British triumph was possibleeven as India was incorporated into the post-war Sterling Area, on uncon-genial terms in a new 'Commonwealth'; this was no longer to be called'imperialism', and 'development' was to be 'co-ordinated' in a legitimateway which did not offend nationalist sentiment.80 Internally, however, theold arguments maintained a remarkable consistency: it was not polite tosay so to Indians, but their current state of independence and nationhood,as much as their future development, was a triumph of the British connec-tion. Paradoxically, then, the very process of decolonisation and the realign-ment of financial forces to incorporate the former colonies into a British-controlled Sterling Area could be justified by very similar principles of aprogressive, benevolent colonialism which had justified subjugation andcolonisation.

IVNationalists formulated their concern with Indian 'development' aroundthree main themes: 'socialism', 'science' and 'national discipline', the lasttheme seen as being intimately connected with 'nation-building' and withnational morality.

From the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s, mainstream Indiannationalism began to look more closely at socialism. Younger elements,disappointed at the retreats and reversals of Gandhian Congress politics,


were looking with renewed interest at alternative forms of society, andespecially at the great experiment in social engineering represented by theUSSR, which had managed to avoid the most pressing problem of the time,the Great Depression.

Many members of the Congress Socialist Party considered themselvesMarxists outside the Communist Party.81 It was claimed that the CSP soughtto win over those who were 'objectively anti-imperialist'82 - peasants, workersand petit-bourgeoisie. The logic of this position was spelt out: the onlyforce capable of fighting imperialism were the masses because they werenot dependent on imperialism themselves, while the Indian bourgeoisiewas 'not in a position to play a revolutionary role' due to its close ties withand dependence upon imperialism.83 For the purpose of the nationalstruggle, which was a struggle 'for executing and completing the task ofthe bourgeois democratic revolution',84 an united front policy was necessary;after the attainment of the primary goal, specifically socialist goals couldbe fought for.

The CSP differed from 'orthodox communists' in wanting also to mobilisethe petit-bourgeoisie in unison with the proletariat. The petit bourgeois,the argument went, due to the peculiar development of class problems inIndian society - a semi-developed industrial capitalism in depression - werea disillusioned class due to large-scale unemployment consequent to theDepression; some sections of them suffered, like the working class. 'Theybecome revolutionary, and according to the leadership offered to them,they are capable of being either on the side of Fascism or of Socialism.'

The attempt of the CSP to address itself to the petit-bourgeoisie mighthave also been one of the consequences of the experiences of many of theCSP's members within the Congress, both in their pre-socialist and socialistdays. It was felt that in order to move the Congress leftwards, it was nopoint relying on peasants and workers to do so. Even though some of themwere primary members, they were not particularly politically aware, peasantswere loyal to Gandhian 'romanticism' and the primary membership hadin any case little influence on the Congress' organisational or strategicmachine.85 The intellectual appeal of socialism as a coherent system ofthought, through which the future 'development' of India was to be con-ceived, had to depend, more or less, on a strata of membership capableof assimilating its arguments.

Much of this was justified through a claimed Marxist perspective, butMarxism was not the only road to Congress Socialism. For others, the routeto socialism led past Fabian Socialism to more radical ideas, and, it mightbe added, often back again. This often drew on an emotional bonding withsocialism which affected these mainly middle-class and materially securepeople.86 Yet it sought to claim for itself links with scientific thought. Thereferences to Fabian thought which were current at the time were not inanyway systematic. It may however, be said that Fabianism as an intellectualtool facilitated, when required, a distancing of oneself from the revolu-


tionary left while still maintaining a claim to 'socialism'; and possibly moreimportantly, justifying a socialism brought about by an elite, who moreoverwere great believers in Science.

These claims to Science had lineages of their own in India, which alsostrongly entered the picture. In the course of the insistence on the needto industrialise - a call which went back to the nineteenth century - a greatdeal of attention had been paid to the lack of technology and technologicalskills in India. Nationalists were quick to blame government policy for theinadequate promotion of industrial research or technological training.

In the course of these debates, scientists were increasingly being cast asthe most potentially influential group in the new India; they were in-creasingly being included in discussions on developmental matters as 'ex-perts'; and a number of them had already begun to take this role extremelyseriously, carrying the message of the importance of science to a wide andconstantly increasing readership among the educated middle classes. Jour-nals which catered to a general middle-class readership carried articles onthe importance of science, on occasion discussing rather complicated con-cepts in various branches of science taking for granted the interest of itsreadership in these matters;87 a scientific journal could cater to a generalinterested readership beyond the scientific community, carrying articles onthe intricate details of an electronic engineering, statistics or physics pro-blem alongside news of the latest developments in Sigmund Freud's workin Vienna and the successes of the Soviet industrialisation programme.88

The connection between 'development' and science was an obvious oneif 'development' was intended to privilege industrialisation. It was a connec-tion which was also a logical one for many of the personnel who came tobe closely associated with the planning of such industrialisation, men whowere closely involved in the practice of 'science'.89 This was a social andprofessional circle which had begun closely to associate Science, Develop-ment and Modernity; P.C. Mahalanobis and Meghnad Saha were regularcontributors to the annual Indian Science Congresses; both Saha and Maha-lanobis had worked on the problem of floods in the Damodar Valley, inthe 1920s and 1930s.90 Sir M. Visvesvaraya, ex-Dewan of Mysore, civilengineer and government servant, was one of the Vice-Presidents of Mahala-nobis' Indian Statistical Institute for a while; and Saha, Visvesvaraya andMahalanobis were all involved in the Congress' National Planning Commit-tee (NPC), though Visvesvaraya resigned, and Mahalanobis was more peri-pherally connected.91 Visvesvaraya shared a similar belief in science and itstransformative powers,92 though perhaps it would be more accurate to callhim a technologist, for he believed in applied science, certainly for'backward' countries.

For many, then, Science was interpreted as technology. The main concernwith the teaching of science was centred in imperial discourse around itsclearly practical applications - the promotion of engineering colleges being


one such area. The debate around 'technical education' was also a strongstrand in British India, merging with the demand for industrialisation.While for the India side of the argument, this was to be combined withconstructive government activity, a protective tariff policy, and genuinefiscal autonomy, it was often the limit to what the Government was willingto do. Nevertheless, in connection with 'development' it was urged thatscience should be put to the service of industrial research and technicaltraining of scientists who would thereafter serve industry - a phenomenon,it was claimed by opponents of the government, which was well known inBritain and other industrialised nations.93

Jawaharlal Nehru attempted to trace an intellectual genealogy for himselfat the 1937 Indian Science Congress:

[...] I realised that science was not only a pleasant diversion andabstraction, but was of the very texture of life, without which ourmodern world would vanish away. Politics led me to economicsand this led me inevitably to science and the scientific approachto all our problems and to life itself. It was science alone that couldsolve these problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation andilliteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, ofvast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited bystarving people.94

The 'science alone' part is surprising - possibly meant for his specific audienceof scientists, possibly a rather revealing Freudian slip. Those with socialistsympathies were not usually willing to claim that science was an apoliticalpractice, merely that it could be a search for universally relevant knowledgeif it was freed from its bondage to capitalism.95

From the middle of the nineteenth century to the first decades of thetwentieth century there had been lively debates as to the relevance ofscience and the need to negotiate an 'Indian' version of science and scienti-fic practice. These acquired immediacy in the period surrounding theSwadeshi movement and the corresponding demand for 'national educa-tion'.96 The resolution of this debate was achieved through a conceptionthat the technological achievements of 'Western' science needed to beappropriated so that a national programme of industrialisation could be'launched. This was despite the allegedly material nature of 'Western', 'natu-ral science'-based civilisation, as opposed to the allegedly moral civilisationof India; for without industry Indian sovereignty could not be realised.97

Crucial links in such a resolution were found in the rediscovery for Indiaof an ancient past of scientific practice - for instance Acharya PrafullaChandra Ray's98 two-volume History of Hindu Chemistry challenging the ideaof Science as the achievement of 'Western' thought alone;99 and along thesame lines, Brajendranath Seal's The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus.100

(Seal, philosopher and educationist, was incidentally the man who intro-duced ayoung PC Mahalanobis to practical statistics,101 and the future Vice-


Chancellor of Visvesvaraya's creation, Mysore University.) This tendencywas not unlike Gandhi's argument on the purity and beauty of village life,reaching backwards to a better, golden age - with the consequent implica-tion that to relive that golden age in the present constitutes liberation.

'Science' as a universal framework, with a capacity to legitimise the workof the colonised and to create equality between colonised and coloniserwas a powerful ally to claim in colonial India - 'progress' in science asbeing neutral and universal. This was one ground on which a claim toabolishing the particular claims of 'nativeness' and consequent difference,which was the basis of colonial constructions of its own superiority, couldbe made.102 At the same time the scientist was an Indian scientist - theIndian part of it was relevant, not in Indian science being separate from'Western' science or science as a whole, but in that Indians could contributeas equals in the scientific world. If there was an initial cultural anxietyinvolved in practising a science seen as 'Western',103 by the 1930s, anxietiesarising from being an 'Indian' practising 'Western' science hardly arose ina significant manner; if they had once existed, resolutions to the argumentshad been found; the confidence in the practice of modern science waswidely accepted.104

The links of the 1930s scientists with this strand of thought were quitedirect: P.C. Ray, for instance, was still alive and a major influence on Sanaand his associates, of whom not a few had been taught by Ray at PresidencyCollege. It was possible in the 1930s to argue with far greater confidencethat Science, if not an universal philosophy, was certainly not to be regardedas outside the Indian cultural framework; for it was in the 'East' that 'allthose arts and crafts which are responsible for the greatness of the presentEuropean civilisation' had originated.105 With these tools, the professionalmiddle classes were to conceptualise their project of 'development' forIndia.

The way to nationhood, Gandhi had pointed out in Hind Swaraj, lay throughmoral self-improvement; despite disagreements in other fields, many onthe side of 'modernisation' would have agreed with this. It was thereforethought necessary and desirable to make explicit certain connections be-tween projects of economic regeneration and development and the widerprocess of 'nation-building'.106

Nationalist debates in India had long been concerned with questions ofhow to overcome the stigma of being a backward nation - to this endvarious forms of education and discipline had been advocated. These de-bates were incorporated into later discussions on development. Many feltthat a good deal of the work towards a solution of this problem of lack ofmodernity and power could be solved from the perspective of nationaldiscipline. To this end, Visvesvaraya, writing in 1934, stressed the need formilitary training and conscription 'to introduce the much-needed elementsof regularity, method, and discipline into the daily life of the Indian popula-


tion'. He noted, quoting from a Fascist manifesto, the establishment inItaly of 'leisure time' institutions which 'promote the better enjoyment ofthe free time of workers of all classes with the object of raising their intellec-tual, moral, physical and social status in accordance with a policy of en-hancing national values'.107

He added, 'What has gone wrong with the Indian population is that theircollective will power is feeble [...] In countries like Germany and Japanand generally in most European states, a determined effort is made by theGovernments concerned to promote the physical and economic efficiencyof their citizens [...] .'108 For Visvesvaraya, an urging of the adoption of Fascistsolutions was as straightforward a choice as a resort to Soviet examples,which he did resort to on several occasions.109

It seemed to many at the time that the primary requirement for a visionof the future was that it provided an escape from imperialist dominationthrough a claim on India's part to 'modernity'. The tension between thisclaim to 'modernity' and the socio-cultural behaviour of the masses, whichonly reluctantly lent itself to being called 'modern', created a barrier whichneeded to be bridged, producing in some minds schemes to 'modernise'people who did not meet the standard: cultural and spiritual values wereto be made to conform with the demands of 'modernity'.

It was also possible to be influenced by contemporarily available meta-phors of national purification and health, discipline and control. Therewas a trend towards conceiving the national state as a body, a physical entitycomposed of morally and physically healthy citizens. In 1938, the GeneralEducation Sub-Committee of the National Planning Committee proposeda Compulsory Social or Labour Service to make all young men and womenbetween the ages of 18 and 22 contribute a year of 'national disciplinedservice in such form and place, and under such conditions as the Statemay prescribe in that behalf [sic]'. It moreover proposed to fix generalnorms of physical fitness to be adhered to.110

The sub-committee on Population, while stressing the need for birthcontrol as well as 'self-control', spoke of the need for removing the barriersto inter-marriage 'for eugenic and other social reasons'.111 The Sub-Commit-tee on 'Woman's Role in Planned Economy' came up with the following re-solution:

The health programme of the State shall aim at the eradicationof serious diseases, more especially such as are communicable ortransmissible by marriage. The State should follow a eugenic pro-gramme to make the race physically and mentally healthy. Thiswould discourage marriages of unfit persons and provide for thesterilisation of persons suffering from transmissible diseases of aserious nature, such as insanity or epilepsy.112

From there on, in a project which, in the words of the National PlanningCommittee, involved not just the 'technical co-ordination, by disinterested


experts' of aspects of economic life 'in accordance with social objectivesset by bodies representative of the nation', but simultaneously 'cultural andspiritual values and the human side of life',113 it was a short step towardsthe conceptualisation of the custodians of the national entity as an en-lightened elite who were entitled to conduct the ordering of a nation totheir own liking, if not in their own image, through 'development'.

Socialists would certainly have taken much trouble consciously to main-tain a distance from what they saw as Fascist ideas; but the project isnonetheless recognisable. However, it was also possible to be influencedby contemporarily available metaphors of national purification and health,discipline and control, many of which were authoritarian in nature, andwere not necessarily seen as Fascist; such influences cut across politicallines. Moreover, Fascism was not necessarily discredited in Indian eyes inthe 1930s, linking up with Indian concerns with creating an efficient anddisciplined nation in the process of nation-building: 'merely an aggressiveform of nationalism'.114 And there was less than an intellectually rigorousand consistent engagement with the origins of the ideas borrowed forIndian use.

The language of race efficiency and eugenics was also much used inconnection with national discipline. Once again, this had not clearly beendiscredited as Nazi or Fascist until carried to its logical conclusions by theNazis during the Second World War; in the 1920s, Fabians discussed 'so-cialist man'; and socialists as well as liberals spoke of improving the humanstock;115 John Maynard Keynes had toyed with eugenics in his writings onmathematics and economics.116 In India too, there was a strong confusionamong terms like 'race', 'nation', and 'civilisation', often used interchange-ably, for instance in the tendency to speak of a 'Hindu nation' or a 'Hindurace'.117

In part this can be seen as a problem of translation, both linguistic andcultural: linguistically to discover equivalent terms in Indian languages forthose in English, and vice-versa; and culturally to map Indian concernsonto debates current in British and European contexts. This cultural transla-tion had important political motives, in a public sphere dominated by theBritish colonial state: political arguments in colonial India were necessarilyinterventions into arenas structured by the British colonial power; an inter-vention which was to be effective had to appeal to principles which thecolonial power recognised as valid, and therefore was forced to rebut. Thismeant that an idea which had already secured political and/or academicrespectability in Britain was particularly useful in arguments put forwardin India: the credibility of the idea on which the argument was to be basedhad already been established. The confusion of 'race' and 'nation' cansimilarly be observed in contemporary perceptions regarding language, cul-ture and race. The distinction was never quite clear to the Theosophists,who played a crucial role in the rediscovery of Hinduism in India as wellas provided echoes of recognition for predecessors of the Nazis with their


theories of Aryan supremacy.118 Moreover, the temptation in India to claima similar racial origin to rulers who claimed racial superiority was particularlystrong; although one consequence of this manoeuvre was to deny suchresources to those among Indians who could not claim an 'Aryan' origin.

Not all these strands found their way into the work of the NationalPlanning Committee, or more generally into the conceptualisation of devel-opment planning: crucially, 'race efficiency' was a relevant category, butnot as a sectarian category; rather, 'race' in the NPC's debates appears asan approximate synonym for 'Indian national', having shed its 'Aryan' or'Hindu' connotations. Thus, in being used to conceptualise a disciplined'national' entity which would achieve a shared goal of 'development', apotentially divisive category such as 'race' was turned to an use implyingsolidarity and collective effort.

The routes to such semantic shifts were not always straightforward. Onestrange trajectory was that of the statistician PC Mahalanobis, later to bethe main author of the Second Five-Year Plan.119 Although closely associatedwith Presidency College, and the circles that discussed the role of sciencein the development of national life, he was a relative latecomer to theconcerns that his colleagues articulated.120 Much of his first published work,in the 1920s and 1930s, related to anthropometries, eugenics and race.121

Mahalanobis' interest in statistics was channelled in these directions as aconsequence of his working with Dr N. Annandale, then Director of theZoological and Anthropological Survey of India, on some of the latter'santhropometric data.122 This was the sort of problem to which the youngdiscipline of statistics was being applied, especially through the work ofKarl Pearson, with which these early writings engage.123

At first Mahalanobis maintained his distance from the project in whichhe was involved, absolving himself of responsibility for the conclusions.124

Dr Annandale clarified that he was 'doubtful about the value of bodilymeasurements taken on the live person', and 'suspicious that there wassome fallacy in the whole method'.125 Although the general conclusionsbore out Annandale's doubts, the relevance of the category of race itselfwas not questioned,126 and Mahalanobis stated in his definition of terms,following Karl Pearson's 'Coefficient of Racial Likeness': 'By "race efficien-cy", I would denote stability, combined with capacity to play a part in thehistory of civilisation'.127 In later writing, Mahalanobis overcame his dif-fidence and entered the debates in earnest. In particular, he attempted,through statistical analyses of anthropometric material, to modify the workof H.H. Risley on the Castes and Tribes of Bengal.128 By the time he becameinvolved with national planning, possibly through the influence of hiscolleagues,129 this strand was no longer particularly important to him.

The term 'race' can be read, as used in debates on development, as a redherring; it was a term which did not properly denote the idea which itconventionally implied in European contexts at the time. More relevantwas the need for national discipline, a factor agreed upon by intellectuals


across political barriers. The 1920s, in the aftermath of the Great War andthe Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, saw a focus on a rhetoric and practiceof 'nation-building'; this process of 'nation-building' was seen as necessaryin advancing towards self-government. Imperialist arguments stressed theneed for a period of 'nation-building' before India could qualify for self-government. Although nationalists denied the need for a period of qualifica-tion, they nonetheless believed that a greater sense of national solidarityand discipline had to be created. A number of initiatives for creating thissense of solidarity were already in existence: social service organisations,'constructive Swadeshi' measures, religious reform movements; Indian ap-propriations of that specifically imperialist organisation; the Boy Scouts;paramilitary 'Hindu' outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; and theCongress' own volunteer corps. Some of these groups were explicitly Hindu,sectarian and violent;130 others less so, or not at all. Explicitly sectarianarguments were, however, not acceptable in a programme for nationaldevelopment, which was expected to carry the whole nation with it; if asectarian argument had to be made to appear legitimate, it had to beframed within the rhetoric of economic need (as in the case of argumentsfor cow protection as preservation of national wealth), or national solidarity,in which a sectarian argument operated by blaming an opposing sect ofitself being sectarian, and of breaking the rules of national solidarity.

Many of these movements stressed discipline, physical fitness and martialarts, the ability to use weapons, and obedience to a leader, in differentcombinations. This was not necessarily seen a commitment to militarism:it was a question of discipline and of mass mobilisation rather than ofviolence. Such mobilisation, it was felt, could bring less mainstream groupsinto the nationalist movement - into which category, for instance, womenmight be placed. In 1938, Subhas Bose wrote to a woman who told him ofher desire to serve the country through a women's welfare organisationthat she had set up, advising her to 'give physical training to youngerwomen. They have to learn lathi and dagger play etc' in order to defendthemselves.131 It was in this context - of both mobilisation and control ofmass participation in politics - that Mussolini's success in Italy was inter-preted - as a version of what Indian nationalists hoped to achieve with theIndian masses, and as a particularly effective form of nationalism.132 It needsto be remembered that Mussolini's Fascists were in the 1920s regarded bymany as a progressive force. Moreover, the need for such discipline couldbe stressed for its own sake, or in terms of its necessity for the running ofa future state.

The problem of how to deal with workers was influenced by this tendency:a directly socialist vision would place them at the centre of that vision. Butsuch socialism as the mainstream debates were willing to accommodateagreed that this would have had to be in accordance with the need fornational discipline and efficiency. A relative consensus on this existed acrosspolitical tendencies. Strikes were a betrayal of the work and discipline ethic;


and work was morally uplifting.133 Particularly in rural areas, India had theadvantage of possessing 'a large store of cheap and docile labour'.134 Thisforce had to be drawn upon for industrialisation. As for the organised work-force, quite logically, men like Visvesvaraya, and the industrialists whoframed the Bombay Plan of 1944, felt that workers should avoid conflictwith management - strikes killed golden-egg-laying geese, and so on.135 TheCongress' National Planning Committee, however, shared similar views,though apparently approaching the problem from a different perspective:since capitalists were productive 'human material', in Nehru's words,136

they ought not to be dispossessed in a hurry if productivity and industrialisa-tion was the goal (although they were not to be given control of 'key'industries unless they controlled them already). In such a scenario, workerswere owed certain trade-union and welfare rights - better working condi-tions and hours, promises of health insurance, better safety conditions atwork, maternity benefits, and a wide range of housing and transport facili-ties - greatly exceeding, in their scope, existing conditions, and influencedby socialist principles. In return, they were supposed not to disturb the'industrial peace' too frequently and to submit conflicts to procedures ofarbitration.137 Here, however, the need for discipline and efficiency wasstressed: Trade Unions were entrusted with the responsibility 'to keep theworkers mobilised, disciplined, and efficient; provide for their comfort,welfare and education; secure justice; administer their several funds [...;]suggest lines for new legislation or executive orders on problems arisingfrom the daily experience of workers, and do all other things that concernthe worker's employment efficiency, discipline and welfare'.138 The hierar-chy of priorities is clear: mobilisation, discipline, efficiency; then welfareand justice - a curious role for a trade union.

As the politics of the war and of approaching independence unfolded,serious divergences of opinion were papered over and held together by acommon conventional language - a language that evolved as a means ofsustaining communication among people who would otherwise not havehad a common basis of communication. By the mid-1940s, these conven-tions were in place; as political events speeded up, 'development' wasdiscussed within these conventions.

Two brief examples might be provided here: the Indian industrialists''Bombay Plan' was phrased in terms which could be said to emanate fromthe Congress' National Planning Committee, and was cast as the latter'ssuccessor. Its main objective was obvious to the sponsors of the project:since it was reasonably clear that the Government would soon be a nationalone, it would get round quickly to dealing with the problem of economicdevelopment. In the given anti-capitalist atmosphere world-wide,


leaders of industry [... must] be prepared to make such adjustmentsas may meet all reasonable demands before the socialist movementassumes the form of a full fledged revolution. [...] One of theprincipal tasks of the Committee will therefore be to examine howfar socialist demands can be accommodated without capitalismsurrendering any of its essential features.189

Perhaps more significant was the abandonment by the British governmentof the conventional imperialist defences of empire, and dressing itself innationalist colours. During the War, the British Government of India beganto speak of post-war reconstruction and development. With the significantshifts in the political equations as provided by the war, and the need tosecure as much support from Indians as possible, the Government was nowconcerned with appearing to be especially concerned with legitimate na-tional aspirations, as the phrase went, in India. As a result, as with otherthings, post-war reconstruction had to be phrased in terms acceptable tonationalists. After the publication of the 'Bombay Plan', the Governmentof India decided to take a 'friendly' attitude to the Plan and to refrainfrom 'destructive criticism'.140 Soon afterwards, Sir Ardeshir Dalai, one ofthe authors of the Bombay Plan, was inducted into the Viceroy's ExecutiveCouncil as Member for the newly created Department of Planning and De-velopment.141

The Government of India's Second Report on Reconstruction Planningappeared to concede most of the nationalist demands on economic matters,including an interventionist and protectionist policy on the part of theGovernment in order to encourage industrialisation.142 By this time, how-ever, any proposal which had to be taken seriously had to appear to rejectconventional imperialism, to dress itself in nationalist colours, and in addi-tion to concede socialism.143 The rhetoric of the Second Report duly con-ceded all these things, as did the Government's Statement of IndustrialPolicy in 1945144 - a case of borrowing at second remove, for the Governmentborrowed from the Bombay Plan which had borrowed from the NationalPlanning Committee. Speakers in London at fora traditionally dominatedby old India hands now spoke of the great achievements of Britain inleading India out of backwardness to both impending independence andto development.145 At the end of formal empire, then, rhetorically at leastthere were no further disagreements regarding goals for Indian 'develop-ment', regarding what constituted progress', all that was left to disagree on wasregarding who could claim to be legitimate agents of progress.

A brief review of the trajectories of thought in the period under considera-tion might usefully be provided here. Imperialist arguments, by the 1940s,had abandoned the more strongly held claims to superiority of expertisein governance. A new, less obviously objectionable justification for imperial-ism was commonly used through the 1930s, in which claims to properrespect for Indian nationalist sentiment and 'legitimate' demands were to


play an important role. In such formulations, certain aspects of nationalistdemands were selectively admitted to be acceptable, as long as not held in'extreme' forms. Many of the aspects that were admissible into imperialistarguments were, however, compatible with older visions of a benevolentimperialism, which a great many imperial administrators found difficult toabandon: thus, Gandhi's idea of the 'real' India as rural and non-industrialwas attractive in that the Civilian also believed in the peasant whom heknew and administered, and thought of the urban Indian as inau then tic.In the 1940s, somewhat inconsistently in terms of logical argument, butequally consistent with the psychological impulses it satisfied, the projecteddeparture of the British from India was depicted as the logical fruition ofthe British mission in India: not, as before, as the triumph of the illegitimateand inauthentic urban middle-class agitators, but as an act of supremecreativity: the British had made a nation of India.

Nationalist arguments, meanwhile, worked through an unstable resolu-tion of the concerns with development, in terms of the importance ofscience and technology, of the need for government to express certainsocial concerns (called 'socialism', but whose criteria varied enormously),and of the need for 'national discipline', often expressed in terms of themoral unity of the 'nation'. Given the difficulties of coalitional politicsagainst British rule, radical forms of 'socialism' were not particularly inevidence, though it was extremely important that various measures bereferred to as socialist. Technical expertise and national discipline - thelatter also implying the strong guiding hand of directing expertise - wereequally important aspects of the conventions of legitimate political argu-ment; these three recurrent themes appeared in various combinations.

A fourth theme, which could attach itself variously to arguments usingany or all of the other themes, but which on its own was ineffective as ayardstick of legitimacy, was what might be called the 'indigenist' theme: tobe legitimate, 'development' had to take an Indian, not a 'foreign' path.The themes were contained within a view of development-as-progress -which had to be 'modern' (implying a progress possibly universal in nature),but not 'Western'.

The Gandhian position, insofar as 'development' was concerned, appearsin its eccentricity to be an exception to this general thematic map. But itis in important respects only apparently an exception. Its position ofstrength was with respect to the fourth, 'indigenist' theme. It sought tostress 'indigenous' solutions, within which paths to progress had to benegotiated - a problem that had greatly exercised the Indian nationalistimagination around the turn of the century. However, its construction ofwhat was 'indigenous' was largely dependent on British constructions ofan 'indigenous' India, now ironically internalised as an authentically Indianposition. The successful disassociation, in the Gandhian position, of thecategories 'Western' and 'modern', occurs not through a straightforwardacceptance of the universality of the 'modern', but through the introduction


of separate criteria of 'modernity' - criteria which were not 'Western', buttruly Indian, but which by implication it was desirable to make universallyapplicable. The criteria of 'modernity' had themselves to be tested by'science' as well as 'morality', which were compatible. If these criteria wereproperly applied, the argument went, Gandhians would appear as the truesocialists, with science on their side. The Gandhians also held explicit viewson the importance of moral discipline, in their equation between individualself-control and collective self-rule, which were at least as clear on the issueof the need for a leadership of directing experts (morally enlightened ones,in the Gandhian case) as other nationalists.

By the 1940s, the nationalist arguments that used these themes, whichhad been crystallised in opposition to the conventions of imperialist argu-ment, had begun to lose their opponent. As the conventions of imperialistarguments began to shift towards a more apparently nationalist rhetoric,particularly during the Second World War, many supporters of imperialismwere able to reconcile their acceptance of nationalist positions on develop-ment with their faith in the progressive role of the British in India, nowdissolved into a rhetoric of the partnership of free nations within a mutuallybeneficial Commonwealth. Nationalists could argue that this was an Indianachievement; imperialists could argue that it was a British one.

The building blocks of these arguments, imperialist and nationalist, cen-tralising or decentralising, socialist or capitalist, drawing, as they did on afinite set of conventions, could be extremely similar, although they werepieced together into divergent and often antagonistic arguments.

This sharing of terminology or ideas should not seem too surprising: itwas difficult, in colonial India, to access intellectual resources prior to oruntouched by colonialism in order to make any argument. The recoveryof an authentically 'Indian' past, for instance, was extremely dependenton the early work of European scholars discovering a glorious past forIndia: 'indigenous' intellectual materials, if they existed at this time, couldnot be recognised apart from their representation and refraction throughBritish or colonial sources. There was some amount, therefore, of borrowingamong later nationalists from the work of early Orientalists or British ad-ministrators; and later from official sources and reports.

More specific arguments could be built on particular uses of ostensiblymetropolitan or other ideas; yet they were often used in such forms as tobe unrecognisable except by name as having emanated from a particularsource. It is necessary at times, therefore, to distinguish between a sharedterminology and shared ideas: the same terminology could indicate a possiblesource of an idea in a borrowing from metropolitan or other contexts, butthe refractions the idea underwent in the Indian context might have beenextremely significant in shifting the meaning of the term as used by Indiansaway from the meaning it might have had in its original or conventionallyunderstood context. The extreme eclecticism of such borrowings from


other contexts and the juxtaposition of apparently incompatible ideas canoften be understood in terms of these shifts in meaning.

In addition, some of the assumptions which nationalists adopted fromimperialist conventions of argument were implicitly absorbed without con-scious borrowing. 'Moral and material progress', pinned together in impe-rial discourse, were also bound together in nationalist thought. Gandhianarguments tended to stress the moral aspects of progress, from whichadequate material progress would follow; in most versions, 'modernisers'of various kinds agreed that though the material aspect was more of atangible concern, moral progress would accompany the material. A versionof this argued that the progress towards more 'modern' forms of social lifethrough material benefits accruing to the poorer sections of society woulddecrease the tendency towards pre-modern forms of behaviour - or at anyrate that was what should happen.

Underlying unities of thought, however, are necessary as the groundson which to disagree. This points to a shared discursive framework of latecolonialism in India - which does not imply, therefore, that there was asubstantial consensus operating in the political environment of late colonialIndia. It is important, therefore, to stress that there was a good deal ofvariety within a largely common discourse. It must be recognised that'colonial society' was constituted by both the colonised and the colonising- although apparently separate, and often explicitly in opposition to eachother, they were in close interaction, responding to each other in a dialecti-cal relationship, defining each other against each other.

Nor should this be taken to imply that such an explicitly oppositionalframework was confined to situations in which colonised and coloniserconfronted each other. The implicit existence of two publics in the colonialsituation - a metropolitan and colonial pro-imperialist public and a nativecolonial public (not always anti-imperialist, but which had to be addressedwith arguments different from those which would justify impierialism beforethe former audience) - required that even internal arguments among impe-rialists or nationalists had to take account of the effects of these argumentson the other public. This was a quasi-theatrical situation in which everyargument had a hidden, implicit protagonist - arguments formulated inter-nally took into account the potential effects of their consumption acrossthe imperialist-nationalist boundary. This often took the explicit form ofanticipating opposing arguments: 'the nationalists will argue [...]' or 'thegovernment will say [...]' were phrases that often entered internal debates.

There were thus finite intellectual resources with which to constructdifferent arguments. Each protagonist in the debate juggled the terms- which were common to the political and discursive framework in whichthe protagonists operated - in different ways to make specific arguments.To state the case in general terms, the common intellectual resource-basewas related to a shared and interconnected colonial public sphere andintellectual context - the specifics of particular colonies and the anxieties


and aspirations of groups or classes therein providing the particular charac-ter and directions taken by specific arguments. In the case of India, therewas a schematic predictability about the arguments concerned: in responseto British claims of Indian backwardness, Indians claimed that they werenot backward except economically, which was Britain's fault - progress hadbeen retarded by British rule, and the task of Indians was to get rid of theBritish as a prerequisite for the achievement of modernity. The custodiansof the national movement might debate what precisely the standards ofsuch modernity were, but there was agreement that the British were respon-sible for India's lack of it. But these Indians, who spoke for Indians as awhole, agreed that some Indians were indeed backward. These backwardIndians, the 'masses', had to be rescued from backwardness (the passivevoice in which this claim was phrased often hiding the implicit assumptionregarding who were to be the agents of such a rescue) - the British claimthat Indians had to be rescued from backwardness being mirrored in Indianintellectuals' claims that the lower classes had to be raised to modernity.


Notes

1 B.R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj: The Economics of Decolonisation (Cambridge1978); Clive Dewey, 'The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade: The Eclipse of theLancashire Lobby and the Concession of Fiscal Autonomy to India' in: Clive Dewey andA.G. Hopkins eds, The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India(London 1978).

2 John Darwin, 'Imperialism in Decline?', Historical Journal (September 1980); Carl Bridge,Holding India to Empire (Delhi 1986); John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreatfrom Empire in the Post-War World (Basingstoke 1988) especially page 9.

3 Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms (Calcutta 1918).4 'Make believe you're brave/ And the trick will take you far/ You may be as brave/ As

you make believe you are' (T Whistle a Happy Tune' by Richard Rodgers and OscarHammerstein II, from The King and I (USA 1956)).

5 Much of this tends to focus on groups relatively isolated from the impact of colonialdiscursive categories, or who consciously rejected 'Western' incursions into their 'culture'- ignoring the fact that the latter case requires a clear engagement with categories suchas 'Western' which could hardly be somehow purely Indian and therefore 'different'.

6 See PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914-1990(London 1994) chapter 11; L.S. Pressnell, External Economic Policy since the War I: The Post-War Financial Settlement (London 1986); R.J. Moore, Making the New Commonwealth (Oxford1987); Philip Joseph Charrier, 'Britain, India and the Genesis of the Colombo Plan, 1945-1951' (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1995).

7 Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, 'The Idea of Planning in India, 1930-1951' (UnpublishedPhD dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra 1985).

8 Aditya Mukherjee, 'Indian Capitalist Class and Congress on National Planning and PublicSector, 1930-47' in: K.N. Panikkar ed., National and Left Movements in India (New Delhi1980)

9 This is a view put forward by what seeks to be a standard text-book on the subject ofIndian economic history: B.R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860-1970 (Cam-bridge 1993) 173.

10 Dietmar Rothermund, 'Die Anfaenge der indischen Wirtschaftsplanung im Zweiten Welt-krieg' in: Peter Habluetzel, Hans Werner Tobler and Albert Wirz eds, Dritte Welt: HistorischePraegung und politische Herausforderung: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Rudolf von Albertini(Wiesbaden 1983).

11 C.A. Bayly, 'Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemo-ny', South Asia XVII/2 (1994) 17. The general contention of this essay, that an under-standing of Indian history in the colonial period requires a better understanding ofBritish history, is one with which I agree.

12 I use the word 'appearance' in two senses here - 'coming into being' as well as lwie es aus-siehf.

13 This is not intended as a history of development policy or of influences on such policy,nor as a history of 'economic thought' in India; such histories can be found elsewhere- for instance in Bhabatosh Datta, Indian Economic Thought: Twentieth Century Perspectives(New Delhi 1978), Ajit K. Dasgupta, Gandhi's Economic Thought (London 1996), Ajit K.Dasgupta, A History of Indian Economic Thought (London 1993), and for earlier periodsin B.N. Ganguli, Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (New Delhi 1977);to an extent Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: EconomicPolicies of Indian National Leadership, 1880-1905 (New Delhi 1966) - though it claims tobe a study of policies rather than economic thought - as well as in sections of SumitSarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (New Delhi 1973). Moreover, theabsence in this essay of an analysis of the details of political debates, in the more conven-tional sense of day-to-day manoeuvres and specific problems, should not be read as anindication that such debates did not exist.

14 This was also part of the changing rhetoric of Empire for which Leo Amery, Secretary


of State for India during the Second World War, considered himself a spokesman. SeeAmery's speeches delivered during his tour of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand andCanada in 1927-1928, reprinted in L.S. Amery, The Empire in the New Era (London 1928),with reference to the White Dominions; and the eventual promise of similar status forIndia and the rest of Britain's empire (pp x-xi).

15 Archibald Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy of India, was quite impatient with the Britishtendency to treat Indians like backward children; this, he felt, was outdated and notappropriate to the times. He did not, however, question the validity of the analogy; India,he wrote in his journal, could no longer be treated like a child because it was now a'tiresome adolescent'. Penderel Moon ed., Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal (London 1973)61, entry for 19 March 1944; and page 108, entry for 31 December 1944.

16 M. Visvesvaraya, Planned Economy for India (Bangalore City 1934) preface.17 For instance, in 1933, Nehru received requests to '"educate" public opinion', on 'the

economic policy (8c interconnected other policies — Educational, Domestic i.e. relatingto Marriage and the division or the assimilation of social work and functions between manand woman, Religious 8c Communal, Recreational, 8c Political i.e., relating to the "form"of the govt. It would be useful if you also compared or contrasted, as the case maybe,[sic] your scheme with the main ones on which the world's eyes are now fixed, Bolshevismon the one hand 8c Fascism-Nazism on the other.' Babu Bhagavandas tojawaharlal Nehru,24/9/33, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, Vol 7, f 273.

18 It would not be entirely accurate to call it laissez-faire - this never was completely so,except in economic doctrine. See Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 'Laissez-faire in India', IndianEconomic and Social History Review 11/1 (January 1965).

19 See Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India; also B.N. Ganguli,Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (Delhi 1977).

20 See the early writing of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, for instance Reconstructing India (London1920), or the speeches and essays reprinted in G.D. Birla, The Path to Prosperity: A Pleafor Planning (Allahabad 1950).

21 The Bombay Plan, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, and the Government of India all cited the Sovietexperience as an example of the great possibilities of planning - all operating within acapitalist framework. See P. Thakurdas et al., A Plan of Economic Development for India I 8cII (Bombay 1944); M. Visvesvaraya, Planned Economy for India; Government of India, SecondReport on Reconstruction Planning (New Delhi 1944).

22 See the Congress Socialists' manifesto, reprinted in the Congress Socialist inaugural issue,29 September 1934. See also Milton Israel, Communications and Power (Cambridge 1994).

23 See Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 1931-1939: The IndigenousCapitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge 1985); Basudev Chatterji,Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Politics in India 1919-1939 (Delhi 1992).

24 'Development' in India was related to a wide variety of problems and questions, whichpointed the way to a comprehensive 'reconstruction' - another popular term - of Indianlife. Related terms within this discursive framework had the propensity to start a freeassociation which linked up with the wider social and moral questions implied by 'develop-ment' and carried these along into what were ostensibly 'economic' debates: 'progress',the need to overcome 'backwardness', the moral nature of nationhood. 'Development'in the 1930s incorporated themes which had earlier been autonomous - 'social reform','village uplift', 'rural reconstruction', 'constructive work'; 'cooperative farming' and 'co-operative credit'; 'self-reliance', 'technical education', 'science'; 'socialism'; improvementof the human material constituting the 'nation'; 'nation-building' - many of which hadstrong extra-economic connotations. The term 'development' itself - in the sense ofevolution, and in India in the sense of developing institutions - had been in use at leastsince the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1930s, with hopes of a newly-wonindependence emerging, 'development' as 'improvement' or 'progress' was whole-heartedly embraced within the comprehensive framework implied by 'planning' - themeans by which 'development' could be consciously aimed at. The all-encompassingframework which 'planning' implied was extremely important; it could thus serve as an


umbrella category in which the various ideas surrounding 'development' could bedescribed and discussed. 'Development' and 'planning' in the 1930s, when used withoutthe qualifying adjective 'economic', tended to mean far more than 'economic develop-ment' or 'economic planning'.

25 Sir M. Visvesvaraya, Nation Building: A Five-Year Plan for the Provinces (Bangalore City 1937)3-4.

26 J.C. Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement1? (Wardha 1936), but see also RadhakamalMukerjee, The Foundations of Indian Economics (London 1916).

27 On Schuster's 'Keynesianism', liberalism, and closeness to labour circles see GeorgeSchuster, Private Work and Public Causes: A Personal Record, 1881-1978 (Cowbridge 1979)39-41; Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj, 86-91; on Amery's views on Empire andimperial integration see L.S. Amery, The Forward View (London 1935); see also WilliamRoger Louis, In the Name of God, Go! Leo Amery and the British Empire in the Age of Churchill(New York 1992). On the Round Table group, see A.F. Madden and David Fieldhouseeds, Oxford and the Idea of the Commonwealth (London 1982).

28 During the First World War there had been necessary departures from the ordinarynorms of balanced budgets and a non-interventionist government; food rationing andprice controls had come into operation from 1915. But this was considered an exceptionalsituation, and controls were dismantled after the War. This was considered both necessaryand desirable even by the economic heretics of later years. See Peter Clarke, The KeynesianRevolution in the Making, 1924-1936 (New York 1988) 14-17.

29 In this period, it has been pointed out, governments were operating most often withoutunderstanding what they were doing, on the basis of trial and error. See Eric Hobsbawm,Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth 1969) 179. A few people advocated remedies thatwere outside this framework of ignorance; see Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depres-sion, 1929-1939 (Harmondsworth 1987) 7. The 'Keynesian Revolution', as it is now known,was a long time in the making, facing the opposition of the pillars of the British financialestablishment, the Treasury and the Bank of England. See Clarke, The Keynesian Revolutionin the Making, 1924-1936. This was the formative period of 'Keynesianism', some of theideas of which were being tentatively tried out, arrived at independently of Keynes, in anumber of countries, such as the unbalanced budget in the New Deal. The experiencesthat went into the General Theory were probably at least pardy gleaned by Keynes throughhis experiences of the time, and 'Keynesian' ideas, despite opposition, were beginningto get a hearing in British debates. Yet apart from Keynesian ideas, the examples of theNew Deal in the USA, Soviet Planning, and Fascist and later Nazi experiments in economicmanagement became available through the 1930s. These were intimately connected withthe ideological positions they represented, and if measures which had precedents in anyone system were advocated as emulable examples, it was necessary to delineate adherenceto or divergence from the ideological positions they represented, and the divergencefrom them. The easiest way of avoiding the issue of ideology was to declare a positionon the basis of economic principles alone, thereby apparently defusing the debates oftheir political content and appealing to a supposedly neutral arbitre in the rationalscience of economics.

30 See Ian Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire, 1919-1939 (London 1972) 89-120, and on India: 98-99; Drummond's claim, elsewhere, that British politicians did nothave 'exploitation in mind' because they were primarily preoccupied with the Dominions,where they lacked the political power to impose policies, and 'to a much lesser extentwith India, where in economic policy-making they systematically abstained from usingwhat little political power they still posssessed' - Ian Drummond, Imperial Economic Policy,1917-39: Studies in Expansion and Protection (London 1974) 422 - has been systematicallydestroyed by subsequent work, notably Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire, whichdemonstrates that the rhetoric of British powerlessness vis-a-vis India was useful in con-ceding the appearance of fiscal autonomy and an independent tariff policy, while inpractice policies were still dictated by overall imperial interests as understood by London- as he puts it, disagreements between Delhi and London were 'disagreements regarding


how best British interests were to be preserved' rather than disagreements based onprotecting Indian interests (page 23).

31 Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964 (London1975) 60; Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 126.

32 Trade Union Congress (TUC) Annual Report 1932, 220-222, quoted in Gupta, Imperialismand the British Labour Movement, 234-235.

33 Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government of 1929 andof the National Government that followed, was a dedicated free trader representing theliberal side of the Labour party, and consequently inclined to deal with the situation bydeflationist policies; he resigned on the issue of tariffs in 1932. See Kindleberger, TheWorld in Depression, 126; Drummond, Imperial Economic Policy 1917-1939, 112, 145, 151-177; Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 156-157; Peter Clarke, Hope andGlory: Britain, 1900-1990 (Harmondsworth 1996) 175-177.

34 See L.S. Amery, The Empire in the New Era; Idem, The Forward View (London 1935); Idem,India and Freedom (Oxford 1942). See also Amery's memoirs: L.S. Amery, My Political LifeIII: The Unforgiving Years 1929-1940 (London 1955).

35 For an example of the Indian case, see Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression,1929-1939 (Delhi 1992); Idem, 'The Great Depression and British Financial Policy inIndia, 1929-1934', Indian Economic and Social History Review 17/4 (1981) and Indian Econo-mic and Social History Review 18/1 (1981). For an account of the Bank of England's attemptto ensure control of Indian financial policy through the soon-to-be-formed Reserve Bankof India, see G. Balachandran, 'Towards a "Hindoo Marriage": Anglo-Indian MonetaryRelations in Interwar India, 1917-35', Modern Asian Studies 28/3 (1994).

36 Schuster, Private Work and Public Causes, 114; Rothermund, India in the Great Depression,42-44; Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, 'An Early British Initiative in the Genesis of IndianPlanning', Economic and Political Weekly XXII/5 (31 January 1987).

37 George Schuster, 'Empire Trade Before and After Ottawa: A Preliminary Reconnaissance',The Economist: Special Supplement (3 November 1934); George Schuster, 'Indian EconomicLife: Past Trends and Future Prospects \ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts LXXXIII (31 May1935), address delivered 8 March 1935; 'Note on Economic Policy', National Archivesof India: Finance Department File No: 15-I-F, 1930.

38 On questions of Imperial Preference and India, see Rothermund, India in the GreatDepression, 168-174; see also Basudev Chatterji, 'Business and Politics in the 1930s: Lan-cashire and the Making of the Indo-British Trade Agreement, 1939', Modern Asian Studies15/3 (1985).

39 Schuster, 'Empire Trade'. Also Idem, 'Indian Economic Life', 662, 655-656.40 Schuster, 'Indian Economic Life', 646-647.41 Ibid., 654.42 Ibid., 642: 'I do not wish [...] to suggest that the masses in India, even though they are

so poor, are necessarily more unhappy than in the rest of the world. I believe in factthat even as things are, more absolute and intense human misery prevails among partsof the world in highly industrialised countries which have suddenly lost all chances ofemployment owing to the economic crisis which has cut away the foundations on whichtheir life depended. The very simplicity of Indian life and its less materialistic backgroundhave saved the people some of the misery which has fallen on other countries.'

43 Schuster, 'Indian Economic Life', 664. Schuster recommended three objectives for Indianpolicy: (1) maintenance and development of export markets for 'those commodities inthe production of which India has special natural advantages'; (2) raising of standardsof living so as to provide new internal demand for the products of her rural population;(3) 'the development of industrial activities as an important means towards achievingthe second objective [...]' This involved economic planning, which he urged, was thelogical conclusion to the Government of India's existing policies: 'Indian Economic Life',662.

44 Grigg to Snowden, 13 May 1935, Grigg Papers, PJGG 2/19/2(d).45 Grigg to Chamberlain, 17 August 1934, Grigg Papers, PJGG 2/2/1 .


46 See Sanjoy Bhattacharya and Benjamin Zachariah, ' "A Great Destiny": The British Colo-nial State and the Advertisement of Post-War Reconstruction in India, 1942-45', SouthAsia Research 19/1 (1999).

47 D. Spencer Hatch, Up from Poverty in Rural India (Oxford 1932) ix.48 Hatch, Up from Poverty in Rural India, xi; emphasis in original. Hatch was associated with

the YMCA's rural reconstruction projects in South India.49 D. Spencer Hatch, Further Upward in Rural India (Madras 1938) 7.50 Hatch, Further Upward in Rural India, vii. Hatch's quest was undertaken 'through Indian

primeval jungle armed only with a pocket camera, a New Testament, and an inquiringmind, accompanied by my wife who was the first woman of her race to walk that trail'.

51 Francis Younghusband, Chairman, Indian Village Welfare Association, preface to C.F.Strickland, Indian Village Welfare Association: Review of Rural Welfare Activities in India, 1932(London 1932) 5.

52 This has been noted before - see Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of theIndian Civil Service (London 1993); see also Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, British Christians,Indian Nationalists and the Raj (Delhi 1991), on Brayne: 135-142. Of the non-officialinitiatives which attracted favourable attention, Sriniketan was one which had a certainattraction for Christians - C.F. Andrews, for instance, was associated with it, and LeonardElmhirst was a former student of theology who had almost entered the church: Dasgupta,A Poet and a Plan (Calcutta 1962) 14. J.C. Kumarappa, the Secretary of Gandhi's All-IndiaVillage Industries Association (AIVLA), and the ATVIA's most effective organiser andpropagandist, was also a Christian and had been an accomplished lay preacher beforejoining the Gandhians, in which capacity he continued to put his scriptural knowledgeto good use: he combined a Christian theological world view with Gandhi's teachings toarticulate a philosophy of the Gandhian village movement.

53 Studdert-Kennedy, British Christians, 135.54 See for instance Malcolm Darling, Finance Commissioner, Lahore, to Viceroy-designate,

Linlithgow, 10/1/1936, ff 83-86, Item 6, Box LXI, Darling Papers, Centre for South AsianStudies (CSAS), Cambridge. Darling suggested the government set up a fund to financethe cooperative movement, and consult 'a few Indians with strong rural ties' in thisconnection. 'It might also be politic', he wrote, 'to state that any organisation engagedin bonafedevillage welfare work may receive assistance from the fund. This would conciliatethe Congress party, for they would take it as a hint that Gandhi's organisation would getassistance, as I think it should, if it works on non-political lines.' George Schuster'sapproval of Gandhi's anti-industrialisation position has already been noted.

55 Datta was national secretary of the YMCA for India, Burma and Ceylon from 1919 to1927, and represented the Indian Christians in the Indian Legislative Assembly from1924 to 1926 and at the Round Table Conference in 1931. He was also associated withthe Forman Christian College, Lahore, from 1909, as lecturer in history and biology,and from 1932 to 1942 as Principal. See biographical note, India Office Records (IOR),British Library, London: MSS. EUR.F.178.

56 Gandhi to Datta, 14/12/1934, circular letter, IOR: MSS.EUR.F.178/30, f 56, and Datta'sacceptance letter to Gandhi, 17/12/1934, IOR: MSS.EUR.F.178/30, f 67.

57 The importance of the idea of India being a country of 'little republics' has been notedbefore; the argument was explicitly stated by Charles Metcalfe in the debates over theEast India Company's Charter in 1854, and became an influential part of argumentswidely divergent in content and intention. See John Matthai, Village Government in BritishIndia (London 1913); Sidney Webb, 'Preface' in: John Matthai, Village Government inBritish India; Karl Marx, 'The British Rule in India', New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853(written during the debates in the Commons on the fate of the East India Company'scharter), reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow 1959);M.K Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, bibliography; Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London 1861); Idem,Village Communities of the East and West (London 1871). On Maine, see J.B. Burrow,Evolution and Society (Cambridge 1966) 137-178; on Gandhi (and his admiration of Tol-stoy), see Anthony Parel, 'Introduction' to M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings


(Cambridge 1997). See also Louis Dumont, 'The 'Village Community" from Munro toMaine', Contributions to Indian Sociology ix (1966); Clive Dewey, 'Images of the VillageCommunity: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology', Modern Asian Studies 6/2 (1972).

58 Clive Dewey has written at some length on the assumptions, methods and failure ofBrayne's experiments. Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes.

59 B.R. Yadav, Village Uplift Scheme Introduced in Agra District (Agra, no date but c. 1932) 3.60 Ibid., 3.61 Ibid., 4-25. Occasionally the rhetoric of intended speeches (there is no indication in

these records as to their impact when delivered, or if indeed similar speeches wereactually delivered) attempted to approach the poetic, but succeeded only in indicatingthe lack of poetic instincts of the bureaucracy:

Why are there no flowers in your villages and your homes? Flowers bloom allthe year round in India but there are none in our villages. God gave flowers tomankind to make them bright and happy. You will never have flowers till youhumanise the women.

What are the two prettiest things in the world? Clean, healthy, happy childrenand flowers. Both these grow in the home. Woman is the partner responsiblefor the home, so train the woman that she may learn how to produce flowersand keep your children clean, healthy and happy.

Yadav, Village Uplift Scheme Introduced in Agra District, 25. The confusion of the possessivepronouns 'your' and 'our' in this passage, and the role prescribed for 'humanised' womenis worth noting in this connection.

62 For instance in 1936, when Darling was Finance Commissioner, Lahore, he wrote to thenew Viceroy-designate, Lord Linlithgow, with the outlines of a proposal which he saidhe had been attempting to pursue for some time. This was to the effect that before thenew constitution was inaugurated, a gesture of goodwill would be helpful in order tohelp the 'experiment' succeed. To this end, 'England should return to India as a freegift the £100 million given her during the great war, or at least as much as has actuallybeen paid: the sum, I am told, is £70 million'. The annual interest on this amount, aboutthree crores of rupees, should 'be devoted to the improvement of the Indian peasant'.Darling referred to the general feeling 'amongst thoughtful Indians' that not nearlyenough had been done by the Government in the past to improve the condition of thepeasantry. There was a strong desire to remedy this. 'Gandhi's village campaign is evidenceof this in the political sphere'; Sir John Anderson in Bengal had expressed his determina-tion to do something to improve the Bengal peasantry's condition and had been praisedfor this, and Sir James Grigg's Budget announcement of a sum of one crore rupees forthe strengthening of the co-operative system had 'excited an interest and satisfactionquite disproportionate to the size of the grant'. Darling urged that 'as the administrativelinks between the two countries are loosed [sic], good will will become a more and morevaluable asset', and that the apparently large sum of £70 million should be viewed aswell spent in this context. The best effect, he added, would be obtained if the announce-ment was made when the Constitution was launched, and kept secret until then. Darlingadded a more directly remunerative consideration: 'If the village standard of living canbe appreciably raised over a wide area, considering the millions involved, this might havea most beneficial effect upon British exports. From this point of view alone, the giftmight well prove a first class investment'. Darling to Linlithgow, 10/1/1936, Box LXI,Item 6, ff 83-86, Darling Papers, CSAS. (Schuster and Amery, it might be recalled, useda similar line of reasoning). Linlithgow replied that this was now the Provincial govern-ments' concern; that the British Treasury would be unwilling to provide the money, butthat he had been thinking of giving ministers under the new system 'a little financialrope in order that they may justify themselves before their constituents'; if any moneyshould become available, 'at least a part of it might find its way to the rural population'.Linlithgow to Darling, 27/1/1936, Box LXI, Item 6, ff 87-88, Darling Papers, CSAS.


63 Darling was a close friend of E.M. Forster's and at the fringes of the Bloomsbury set.Forster spent some years in India with Darling. See Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes.

64 Darling Papers, CSAS, Box 1, 28.7, 'Memo, of talk with Keynes (8 February 1934)'. TheGeneral Theory was published in 1936.

65 M. Darling, Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village (Oxford 1934) 340, 342-344.66 M. Darling, Rusticus Loquitur, or the Old Light and the New in the Punjab Village (Oxford

1930) 332, 334, 336. See also Malcolm Darling, 'The Peasant Strength of India', AsiaMagazine (March 1941) 120, where he points to the dispossession of landlords as a distinctpossibility.

67 R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (first published London, 1926; originingin the Holland Memorial lectures at King's College, London, in 1922). Darling presumablyread the 1926 edition; he cites pages 31 and 39. Tawney himself drew on the work ofMax Weber, which according to him was not then widely known in the English-speakingworld: Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth 1977) ix-x, reprint ofTawney's Preface to the 1937 edition.

68 Malcolm Darling, 'Presidential Address on "The Relation of Economics to Ethics"', PapersRead and Discussed at the Eleventh Conference of the Indian Economic Associationheld at Lucknow (January 1928), Indian Journal of Economics: Conference Number VIII/3(January 1928) 477-490.

69 Darling, 'The Relation of Economics to Ethics', 492-495; J.M. Keynes, A Short View ofRussia (1925) 25, quoted in Darling, 'The Relation of Economics to Ethics', 492.

70 Darling, 'The Relation of Economics to Ethics', 496.71 Darling did not see himself as an opponent of capitalism. His criticisms of capitalism

were far from systematic, and informed by a general sense of the injustice of starvationand a faith in the moral values inculcated by Cupertino. On Marxism he appears not tohave found it necessary to disagree with Keynes, who 'was not a Marxian — he found itimpossible to read Marx. A friend had marked for him passages of importance, but theywere so dull and so turgidly involved in the economic doctrines of 1840 that he hadfound it quite impossible to get through Das Capital [sic]. He doubted whether manyCommunists had read him. When I said that it sounded as dull as the Koran, he agreedthat it was just that'. Darling, 'Memo of Talk with Keynes (8 February 1934)', Item 28.7,Box I, Darling Papers, CSAS. It is unclear from this passage as to whether either Keynesor Darling had read the Koran.

72 Item 28.6, Box 1, Darling Papers, CSAS; Malcolm Darling, At Freedom's Door (London1949).

73 Item 28.6, Box 1, Darling Papers, CSAS, emphasis mine.74 Linlithgow to Darling, 13/3/1936, ff 89-90, Item 6, Box LXI, Darling Papers, CSAS.75 '[...] at the first possible opportunity a small committee of educational experts should

be sent to Russia to learn the secret of this notable achievement [in achieving high ratesof literacy] and to guage how far Russian methods can be applied with advantage inIndia'. Sir Malcolm Darling, 'The Indian Peasant in the Modern World', Asiatic ReviewXXXVIII/133 (January 1942).

76 Malcolm Darling, 'The Indian Village and Democracy', Journal of the Royal Society of ArtsXCI (6 August 1943) 493.

77 Penderel Moon, Strangers in India (London 1944).78 IOR: MSS.EUR.F.230/47, f 4.79 Moon, Strangers in India, 43.80 The Colombo Plan declared that 'the vital interests of the countries of South and South-

East Asia, as of the rest of the world, require the restoration of the area to its key positionin world trade': The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-EastAsia: Report by the Commonwealth Consultative Committee, London, September-October 1950(London 1950) 2. For details of post-war economic policy, see Cain and Hopkins, BritishImperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, chapter 11; Pressnell, External Economic Policy Sincethe War I; on the politics of the Colombo Plan see Philip Joseph Charrier, 'Britain, Indiaand the Genesis of the Colombo Plan, 1945-1951'.


81 See Jayaprakash Narayan's statement of objectives and strategy on behalf of the CSP,published in a book aimed at Congress workers: Jayaprakash Narayan, Why Socialism?(Benares 1936).

82 Narayan, Why Socialism?, 154-160.83 Ibid., 136, 143.84 Amarendra Prasad Mitra, 'The Communal Problem and the National Movement', Congress

Socialist I /I (Saturday 29 September 1934) 6. He characterised the Congress as a 'Hindubourgeois party'; such unities as were stressed by Congress did not exist as commonbetween Hindus and Muslims, alienating the Muslim bourgeoisie, and leading to 'Muslimnational idealism', 6-7.

85 The Congress Working Committee or the All-India Congress Committee.86 This route has been traced for Jawaharlal Nehru, the most influential of the 'socialists'

in mainstream Congress politics, from his most radical phase in the mid-1930s, 'almosta scientific socialist' (Bipan Chandra, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936',Economic and Political Weekly X/33-35 (August 1975)) to a commitment to 'development'with most of the socialism left out. (Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the ColonialWorld: A Derivative Discourse? (London 1986); and at a more political level, RaghabendraChattopadhyay, 'The Idea of Planning in India'). Nehru, it might be added, was con-sidered one of theirs by the CSP, although he never joined them and on many a crucialissue deserted the Left. See Jayaprakash Narayan, Why Socialism?. For a good assessmentof Nehru's tendency to accept the position advocated by the Congress Right due to hisadoption of Gandhi as a father figure, see Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography(London 1959). The Indian left seemed to maintain a romantic relationship with Nehru,convinced of his good intentions: 'He was our beautiful but ineffectual angel, beatinghis luminous wings largely in vain' (Hiren Mukerjee, The Gentle Colossus (Delhi 1986)222-223). Bishweshwar P. Sinha, member of the CSP, traced his own path to socialismthrough Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski, J.A. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole and his attractionto the ideas of the Fabian Society; but these ideas 'proved too tame for an Indian whohad played with fire in India'. Sinha, a former Gandhian, believed that Gandhi's essentiallyreligious appeal had to be replaced with a more realist approach; Gandhi's 'rural romanti-cism', he accepted, had 'a certain purificatory value for the higher and middle classes,but they leave the masses cold'. After his Fabian phase he was a supporter of the ILPplatform of James Maxton and Fenner Brockway - 'a middle path between Labour Partygradualism and communist catastrophe', this yielding to a position of greater tolerancefor communists and a united front. 'Why I am a Congress Socialist' - one of a series ofarticles of the same title - Congress Socialist (10 March 1935) 5-6. It is interesting that hespeaks of the communists in terms of tolerance. This foreshadowed later debates in theCSP when it was felt that the Communists were taking over the CSP (the CommunistParty, then oudawed, was operating through the CSP as members). This caused someconsternation as far as some members of the CSP were concerned; the key argumentswere that communists were loyal to the USSR at the expense of Indian interests, or forthose who were not Marxists such as Masani, the feeling that they were being marginalisedin their own party. See Congress Socialist; also Minoo Masani, Bliss Was It in That Dawn...(New Delhi 1977). Minoo Masani, who more than any other socialist travelled the roadback determinedly in the opposite direction, remembers being influenced in his teensby the writings of H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; and was 'greatly moved by that anthologyof the literature of protest through the centuries put together by Upton Sinclair, TheCry for Justice'; Masani, Bliss Was It in That Dawn..., 11. He was later a student at theLondon School of Economics (LSE).

87 For instance the Modern Review and the Prabashi in Bengal.88 One of the stronger advocates of 'modern' solutions to problems of Indian development

was the journal Science and Culture ('A Monthly Journal of Natural and Cultural Sciences'),published from Calcutta, founded and edited by Professor Meghnad Saha. Scientistssubscribed to it (see Bhatnagar to Saha, 12 December 1935, Meghnad Saha papers,Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NML), New Delhi, correspondence


with S.S. Bhatnagar); but among its supporters could be ranked other middle-class intellec-tuals; Shyama Prasad Mookerjee wrote to Saha in 1936, 'It will be a great pity if Scienceand Culture has to be discontinued for want of funds and Bengali enterprise. We mustdevise a way out of this possibility'. S.P. Mookerjee to Saha, 28 October 1936, MeghnadSaha papers, NML, correspondence with S.P. Mookerjee.

89 Meghnad Saha, Presidency College, Calcutta, and Imperial College, London, physicist,author of a scheme to dam the River Damodar, member, from 1938, of the Congress'National Planning Committee; See Ravindra Chandra Ray, Colonial Economy: Nationalists'Response (Varanasi 1996) 74. P.C. Mahalanobis, Presidency College, Calcutta and King'sCollege, Cambridge, physicist-turned-mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-statistician,both close associates of Satyendranath Bose, Einstein's sometime collaborator. See AshokRudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography (Delhi 1996).

90 A.C. Mukhopadhyay, 'A Brief Account of PCM's Work on Meteorology and Flood Controland Irrigation' in: Ashok Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography, 160.

91 He wrote to Nehru in 1940 suggesting that he examined all the reports of the NationalPlanning Committee from a 'purely statistical point of view'. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay,'The Idea of Planning in India', 118. See also Benjamin Zachariah, 'The Developmentof Professor Mahalanobis', Economy and Society 26/3 (August 1997).

92 See M. Visvesvaraya, Reconstructing India (London 1920); Planned Economy for India (Banga-lore City 1934); Memoirs of My Working Life (Bombay 1951); see also the extensive pressclippings of matters related to his career kept by Visvesvaraya, in the Visvesvaraya papers,Microfilm, NML.

93 Although this was strongly argued by Science and Culture — as well as by Visvesvaraya inall his speeches and writings (see Visvesvaraya papers, NML, Microfilm) - there was alsoa sense that the connection between science and technology or industrial research couldbe pushed to extreme lengths. In 1940 Meghnad Saha wrote to his fellow scientist S.S.Bhatnagar, in connection with the proposed Scientific and Industrial Research Board tobe set up by the Government, that though such a Board was necessary and in fact longoverdue, it was necessary to make a distinction between scientific research and industrialresearch to avoid disappointing the public or inviting Government accusations of makingmoney. He cited the experience of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as anexample, stated that many industries that needed setting up needed protection, notresearch, and added, 'I, as a scientific man [sic], do not wish to take upon myself theresponsibility for which I am not fitted. Let it be thrown on the political and industrialleaders.' Saha to Bhatnagar, 29 March 1940, Meghnad Saha papers, NML, cor-respondence with S.S. Bhatnagar, f 7. Saha made the same point in writing to theGovernment: Saha to Ramaswami Mudaliar, 20 March 1940, Meghnad Saha papers, NML,correspondence with Ramaswami Mudaliar, ff 7-11.

94 Jawaharlal Nehru's message to the Indian Science Congress' Silver Jubilee Session, Scienceand Culture III/7 (January 1938) 350.

95 See Congress Socialist.96 See Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists

(Delhi 1995); Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (Calcutta 1973);Dhruv Raina and S. Man Habib, 'Bhadralok Perceptions of Science, Technology andCultural Nationalism', Indian Economic and Social History Review 32/1 (1995); 'The Un-folding of an Engagement: The Dawn on Science, Technical Education and Industrialisa-tion', Studies in History 9/1 (January-June 1993).

97 Raina and Habib, 'Bhadralok Perceptions', 106, 114.98 Of Bengal Chemicals and Swadeshi fame, a larger-than-life figure who became a major

inspiration behind Indian Science. P.C. Ray was an alumnus of Presidency College,Calcutta, and joined the staff of its Chemistry Department after returning from Edinburghwith a D.Sc. in 1889. He established a strong tradition of research in Chemistry at theCollege (during the period 1889-1916, seventy-seven original research papers were pu-blished by him and his co-workers). In the Swadeshi period he founded the BengalChemicals Swadeshi Works, as an exemplar of the possibilities of Indian entrepreneurship.


99 Prafulla Chandra Ray, The History of Hindu Chemistry (Two volumes, Calcutta 1902 and1908). The influence of P.C. Ray was acknowledged by S.S. Bhatnagar in a letter toMeghnad Saha: 'the guiding spirit invisibly working within me has been Sir P.C. Ray'.He asks Saha to convey this to Ray — T think it will please him to know that at least oneamongst his chemical grand-children confesses where the source of inspiration lieshidden'. Bhatnagar to Saha, 13 October 1934, from University Chemical Laboratories,Lahore, Meghnad Saha papers, NML, correspondence with S.S. Bhatnagar, f 1.

100 Brajendranath Seal, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (London 1915).101 Mahalanobis' own acknowledgement of this debt is cited by his biographer: Ashok

Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography (Delhi 1996).102 The universal of this dynamic — a downtrodden group's need for legitimating criteria,

its escape from negative placings of itself- the scientist as scientist, not as native, Jewor Negro - has been discussed in different contexts. Frantz Fanon has made this argu-ment about the tension between a (universal) metropolitan education and the in-escapable particularities of 'negritude' - see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks(London 1980). The argument about tension between the Jew as a practitioner ofscience, claiming inclusion within the Christian/Aryan environment, and the Jew asJew despite this claim, both excluded and excluding himself, has also been made: seefor instance Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton 1993). These questionsare resolved in different ways by different commentators thereon; but this is not theplace for me to enter into a discussion on the relative merits of these resolutions.

103 Ashis Nandy puts it strongly: '[...] modern science which, though overtly universal, hadcome to acquire an essentially western culture over the previous three hundred years';in a colonial society such associations 'were bound to make science a symbol of westernintrusion', Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scien-tists (Delhi 1995) 19. This is of course too strong a formulation, reflecting Nandy's ownagreement with strongly 'culturalist' positions. (An interesting shift in meaning of theterm 'culturalist' has come about over the last fifteen or so years; from being derogatorilyapplied to deviant Marxists to being happily accepted by defenders of essentialised 'tradi-tions'.)

104 Initially, the importance of Science teaching had been strongly linked to inculcatingmodern values in the Indian. Modernity was linked, in the colonial project as well asin much of Indian resistance to that project, to an attempt to impose 'Western' valueson Indian society. In this connection see the debates surrounding the establishment ofthe Hindu College in Calcutta, and subsequently of the Presidency College of Bengal;and the strong emphasis on the teaching of Science therein; for the highlighting ofthis argument, see Benjamin Zachariah, Subhas Ranjan Chakrabarty and Rajat KantaRay, 'Presidency College: An Unfinished History' in: Mushirul Hasan ed., Knowledge,Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in India (New Delhi 1998); see especially mysections on the Hindu College and on the relevance of the teaching of science.

105 Meghnad Saha, 'Editorial', Science and Culture TV/10 (April 1939) 535.106 In 1930, Gyan Chand, economist from Patna University, and later closely associated

with Indian development planning as an admirer of China, put the issue squarely beforehis readership: 'India's political freedom [...] cannot come to us as a gift of the gods.No nation deserves to be free without strenuous exertion or great sacrifices [...] weshould have a right sense of values [...] the leaders of national life have to cultivate, insome measure, the quality of seers and look ahead for inspiration.' Gyan Chand, Essentialsof Federal Finance (Oxford 1930) 1. Gyan Chand's footnotes are full of Harold Laski,G.D.H. Cole and H.G. Wells, as well as British constitutionalists like Bryce and Dicey.

107 Tomaso Sillani, What is Fascism and Why? (Rome 1931) quoted in Visvesvaraya, PlannedEconomy for India, 260.

108 Visvesvaraya, Planned Economy for India, 203, 205, 263-265.109 In the same year he wrote to Gandhi, 'I feel that in this machine age, we should not

hesitate, except in temporary situations, to utilise mechanical power to the utmost limitthat circumstances permit [...] I am enclosing an extract from a speech by the Russian


leader J. Stalin [...]'. Visvesvaraya to Gandhi, 20 November 1934. This was in responseto Gandhi's request to him to be one of the advisers to the All-India Village IndustriesAssociation in matters in which he possessed 'special knowledge': Gandhi to Visvesvaraya,15 November 1934. Visvesvaraya said that he was willing to advise the ATVIA withoutbeing officially involved with it. He objected to Gandhi's views on machinery, and saidthat he would send him a copy of his book Planned Economy for India. Gandhi's replyacknowledged that the two held 'perhaps diametrically opposite views' and that theexcerpt from Stalin had no appeal for him. He nonetheless acknowledged Visvesvaraya's'love of the country'. Gandhi to Visvesvaraya 23 November 1934. These letters arereprinted in Shakuntala Krishnamurthy, Dr Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (Bangalore 1980)61-63.

110 National Planning Committee (NPC) Report, 207-208.111 NPC Report, 148-149.112 Ibid., 114. At this time, Nehru was in Europe, establishing his solidarity with anti-Fascist

and socialist forces. See his regular contributions to the National Herald in that year.113 NPC Report, 10, also cited above. Emphasis added.114 This was the phrase used by Subhas Chandra Bose in an interview with Rajani Palme

Dutt of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1938. Subhas Bose, quotedfrom 'Report of an interview with R. Palme Dutt, published in the Daily Worker, London,24 January 1938', reprinted in: Sisir Kumar Bose and Sugata Bose eds, Netaji CollectedWorks 9: Congress President: Speeches, Articles and Letters, January 1938 - May 1939 (Delhi1995) 2.

115 On the history of eugenics and its uses in political argument from the turn of thecentury onwards, see G.R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900-1914 (Leyden1976); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity(New York 1985); Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville 1968) 3-36,and especially 23-36 on Francis Galton, the man who coined the term and was regardedas the founder of eugenics; on liberal and socialist interpretations of eugenics, seeMarouf Arif Hasian Jr, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens 1996)112-138. For an account of the German case, not limited to the Nazi period, see PaulWeindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism (Cam-bridge 1989); on eugenics outside Europe and North America, see Nancy Leys Stepan,The Hour of Eugenics': Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca 1991).

On the continued respectability of eugenics in the 1930s, see Third InternationalConference on Eugenics, 1932, A Decade of Progress in Eugenics (Baltimore 1934; reprintedNew York 1984). Progressives were well represented: one participant argued that 'funda-mental economic forces' were at work which were 'quite beyond the control of us aseugenists'; that unfortunately 'Galton lived too early to appreciate the principle broughtout by Marx' (H.J. Muller of the University of Texas, 'The Dominance of Economicsover Eugenics', 139); but nonetheless saw a role for eugenics, in 'scientific birth control'and 'the actual increase of those having the more valuable genes', to which endseconomic obstacles had to be removed (page 140). He called for a 'revolutionary attitudetowards women' and asked, 'Do male eugenists suffer from the illusion that mostintelligent women love to be pregnant [...] ?' (pages 140-141). The economic system,he argued, 'acts to foil the true purposes of eugenics' by 'masking the genetic constitutionof individuals and of vast groups through the gross inequalities of material and socialenvironment which it imposes on them' (page 141). But he agreed, 'That imbecilesshould be sterilised is of course unquestionable' (page 138).

Of particular interest in the Indian context is a paper by Henry E. Roseboom andCedric Dover, The Eurasian Community as a Eugenic Problem', which cites P.C. Mahala-nobis' 1922 work with Annandale on the Anglo-Indians, and his analyses of race mixturein Bengal (pages 90-91), of which more below. Dover, an Eurasian and a member ofthe Congress Socialist Party, and one of Jawaharlal Nehru's self-appointed educators,insisted (along with his co-author) on the one hand that 'the problem of the Eurasiancommunity, as the Simon Commission (1930) points out, is essentially economic' (page


89), but on the other hand insisted that 'anthropometric study will demonstrate thephysical equality of its members with those of any other community in the East, evenif it does not suggest the possibility of the physical superiority under improved conditions.He argued for the influence of environment in addition to 'miscegenation' as influencingthe 'characteristics of the community', appealed to a notion of 'hybrid vigour':'a carefully nurtured hybrid is superior to either parent', advocated miscegenation - the'development of mixed breeds' would also remove racial friction - and envisioned afuture world of 'one composite race' (pages 92-93).

116 On Keynes' encounters with the Galton Laboratory, see the public exchanges betweenKeynes and Karl Pearson (1857-1936, Professor of Applied Maths and Mechanics atUniversity College, London; in 1911, upon Galton's death, he became Galton Professorof Eugenics, which he remained until 1933: see Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940 (DNB) (Oxford 1949) 681-684) in 1910 over a study of 'the influence of parentalalcoholism on the physique and ability of the offspring', reprinted in The Collected Writingsof John Maynard Keynes XI (London 1983) 186-216 - categories such as 'feeble-minded-ness' and 'racial difference' in samples from Manchester and Edinburgh were hotlydebated in terms of the representativeness of the sample - a debate which was givenmuch of its heat because of its importance in connection with the claims of temperancereformers, but which was conducted in terms of the discipline of statistics. Keynes arguedthat the Edinburgh population in particular was of low quality, therefore biasing thestudy: '[...] the authors are comparing drunken stock with bad sub-normal sober stock,and find, naturally enough, that there is not much to choose between them' (page 195,emphasis in original) — or in Pearson's paraphrase of his argument, that the Edinburghsample was from 'an exceptionally "low grade" population in which "physical and moralsqualor are rampant"' (page 205) - therefore the differences in degeneracy betweenthe alcoholics and non-alcoholics would not be significant. Pearson argued that thesample was quite representative. In this debate on the interpretation of figures, Keynes'absolute contempt for people from 'low districts' comes across clearly; neither Keynesnor Pearson questioned the validity of figures derived from measurements of Manchesterand Edinburgh schoolchildren by an Anthropometric Committee. Keynes continuedto take the categories of anthropometries as valid, and discussed them in his Treatiseon Probability (1921); his bibliography cites a good deal of Pearson's work: The CollectedWritings of John Maynard Keynes VIII (London 1973) 498-499.

117 In this connection, see Christophe Jaffrelot, 'The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writingsof Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept Between TwoCultures' in: Peter Robb ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi 1995); for thetendency to see caste in terms of race, and the importance of the category 'Aryan', innineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial ethnography - and the tendencyof India writers to absorb these then state-of-the-art academic concerns, see Susan Bayly,'Caste and "Race" in the Colonial Ethnography of India'; on anthropometry and itscolonial uses, see Crispin Bates, 'Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The EarlyOrigins of Indian Anthropometry', both in Robb ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia.See also Carey Watt, 'Education for National Efficiency: Constructive Nationalism inNorth India, 1909-1916', Modern Asian Studies 31/2 (1997), though Watt's concern isnot with the significance of this confusion in terminology. That a concern with 'Hindu'nationhood tended to exclude or alienate minorities who could not be discussed insuch terms has often been pointed out before, to the extent of having replaced the oldnationalist tales of triumphant mass mobilisation interrupted by 'communalism' causedby British divide-and-rule strategies in many text-books. However, there is now a tendencyto carry the argument too far in an opposite direction: namely, that all mainstreamIndian nationalist ideologues leaned towards an exclusionary and consciously 'Hindu'movement, provoking necessarily separate minority, and especially Muslim, nationalisms:see Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley1994); and against this, Benjamin Zachariah's review, Modern Asian Studies 32/1 (1998).Once again, those who used such arguments included some who built their solidarity


around anti-Muslim sentiment, and others who sought to include Muslims and otherminorities in their nationalism through various devices - the Swadeshi movement hadappealed to the Muslims as brothers, using the rakhi - tying ceremony, usually performedby sisters on brothers, to indicate this tie. Rabindranath Tagore, who had been prominentin the Swadeshi movement, was later to realise the limitations of such strategies of creatingcross-community solidarities; others were less aware of this. Gandhi was later to use astrategy of coalition of specifically religious feelings in the Non-Cupertino/Khilafatmovement. See Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 287, 426; Sumit Sarkar,Modern India 1885-1947 (Madras 1983) 196-197, 233-234.

118 See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (London 1967) 110-111; see also Gandhi'sremarks on the sources he read on Hinduism, M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or TheStory of My Experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad 1927 and 1929; this edition Harmonds-worth 1982) 76-77. See also the Theosophical Society's journal, The Aryan Path.

119 Mahalanobis, as mentioned before, was at the time only peripherally connected withthe debates on Indian development planning - he offered to examine all the NPC'sreports from a 'purely statistical point of view': see above.

120 See Indian Statistical Institute, History and Activities, 1931-1963 (Calcutta, n.d.) 1-11;Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 127-128.

121 He kept extensive notes on race and anthropometry, and also took extensive head-length measurements of Bengalis by caste, from which data he published his articles.Trunk T-2, P.C. Mahalanobis Archive, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta.

122 Indian Statistical Institute, History and Activities, 1931-1963, 1.123 DNB1931-1940,681-684; R.L. Kirk, 'P.C. Mahalanobis and Population Genetics in India',

Samvadhvam: House Journal of the Indian Statistical Institute 10/1-4 (P.C. MahalanobisMemorial Volume, December 1974).

124 T frankly confess that I know very little of anatomy. My work on the data supplied hasbeen purely statistical.' P.C. Mahalanobis, 'Anthropological Observations on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, Part I: Analysis of Male Stature', Records of the Indian Museum XXIII(April 1922) 7.

125 Annandale clarified that he meant Eurasians, as the new terminology agreed upon bythe Government of India went, to avoid the derogatory connotations of the term'Eurasian'. Annandale, 'Introductory Note' to Mahalanobis, 'Anthropological Observa-tions on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, Part I', 1.

126 Annandale's note contains an involved debate on racial categories, relative purity ofblood, 'civilised and uncivilised tribes', 'recent Negro blood', 'persons of mixed blood',and so on. Annandale, 'Introductory Note' to Mahalanobis, 'Anthropological Observa-tions on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, Part I', 1.

127 Mahalanobis, 'Anthropological Observations on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, Part I',Appendix I: Note on Statistical Terms, 94.

128 P.C. Mahalanobis, 'Analysis of Race Mixture in Bengal', Journal of the Asiatic Society ofBengal XXIII (1927) 301-333; P.C. Mahalanobis, 'Revision of Risley's AnthropometricData relating to the Tribes and Castes of Bengal' (Abstract), Proceedings of the IndianScience Congress (Nagpur) 18 (1931) 411 (a version of this paper was published in thefirst issue of Mahalanobis' own journal, Sankhya, the journal of the Indian StatisticalInstitute, founded in 1933: Sankhya 1 (1933) 76-105); Mahalanobis, 'Revision of Risley'sAnthropometric Data relating to the Chittagong Hill Tribes' (Abstract), Proceedings ofthe Indian Science Congress (Bangalore), Anthropology Section 19 (1932) 424; Sankhya 1 (1934)267-276; P.C. Mahalanobis, 'Analysis of Racial Likeness in Bengal Castes' (Abstract),Proceedings of the Indian Science Congress (Calcutta), Anthropology Section 22 (1935) 335.Risley wrote in the 1890s, and greatly annoyed many Bengalis by concluding that theywere not Aryan but 'Mongolo-Dravidian'. See H.H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal:Ethnographic Glossary (Calcutta 1891); H.H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Anthropo-metric Data (Calcutta 1891). Mahalanobis himself took a moderate line, arguing that'social barriers and caste restrictions' had not succeeded in suppressing inter-minglingof the 'indigenous stock in Bengal' with the north-east tribes and the aboriginal tribes


from Chota Nagpur; as a consequence 'a larger Hindu Samaj has evolved which is notonly not identical with the traditional society of Vedic or classic times but is in manyrespects even antagonistic. Sectarian obstacles have not proved insurmountable [...]'.Mahalanobis, 'Analysis of Race Mixture in Bengal', 322-323.

129 The only article on industry he wrote before the Planning Commission papers was onefor Meghnad Saha's new journal, Science and Culture. P.C. Mahalanobis, 'Application ofStatistical Methods in Industry', Science and Culture 1 (1935) 73-78. For details on thetrajectory of Mahalanobis' career, see Benjamin Zachariah, 'The Development of Profes-sor Mahalanobis', Economy and Society 26/3 (August 1997).

130 For instance the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), see W.K Andersen and S.D.Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism(Boulder 1987).

131 Subhas Bose to Amita Purkayastha, 3/9/1938, reprinted in Sisir Kumar Bose and SugataBose eds, Netaji Collected Works 9, 271. Translated from Bengali.

132 Several articles in the Modern Review in the 1920s, for instance by Benoy Sarkar, expressthis fascination. Acharya P.C. Ray, a professed Gandhian, quoted Mussolini: P.C. Ray,The Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist (Calcutta 1931) 259. Rabindranath Tagoreaccepted an invitation from Mussolini to visit Italy in 1926, with P.C. Mahalanobis andhis wife joining him as travel companions. (Mahalanobis moved on to London andfrom January 1927 spent some months at Karl Pearson's laboratory). Rudra, PrasantaChandra Mahalanobis: a Biography, 106.

133 The Gandhians shared this position on the moral value of work: as S.N. Agarwal para-phrased it in 1944, manual labour was to Gandhiji 'the law of nature'; and Gandhi'regards the cry for more leisure as dangerous and unnatural'. S.N. Agarwal, The GandhianPlan ofEconomic Development for India (Bombay 1944) 21.J.C. Kumarappa similarly decriedthe need for leisure: J.C. Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement? (Wardha 1949) 62.

134 An official report framed by Sir M. Visvesvaraya and Pandit Hari Kishan Kaul in 1925,pointed out that there was 'a large store of cheap and docile labour' in India, and that'in many parts of the country chronic under-employment is a marked characteristic ofevery day rural life'. As a source they cited Malcolm Darling's The Punjab Peasant inProsperity and Debt (Oxford 1925). See Report of the Indian Economic Enquiry Committee(Calcutta 1925) 6.

135 Visvesvaraya, Planned Economy for India, 240, 242-243; P. Thakurdas et al., A Plan ofEconomic Development for India (Bombay 1944). In 1951, Visvesvaraya wrote in his memoirs,'One common slogan of the West, the importance of which the Indian citizen has notyet sufficiantly grasped, is: "If you do not work/ Neither shall you eat".' Visvesvaraya,Memoirs of My Working Life (Bombay 1951) 142. This was a line of reasoning which alsoentered Gandhian reasoning: S.N. Agarwal's 'Gandhian Plan' in 1944 had stated, quotingSt Paul, unlike Visvesvaraya who did not provide a footnote, ' "He that will not work,neither shall he eat"'. S.N. Agarwal, The Gandhian Plan of Economic Development for India,21.

136 Nehru to K.T. Shah, 13/5/1939, quoted in Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, 'The Idea ofPlanning', 106.

137 NPCReport, 153-157. The discussions on labour had often taken strange turns - discussingthe question of arbitration, the socialist, KT. Shah, had at one point said that 'inPlanned Economy there should be no room for strikes and lock-outs'. Minutes of NPCmeeting, 7 May 1940, at which the Labour Sub-Committee's report had been considered.Walchand Hirachand Archives, File No 48, Part II, f 318, NML.

138 KT. Shah ed., National Planning Committee: Report of the Sub-Committee on Labour (Bombay1947) Section IX: 'Workers' Organisation', 93.

139 P. Thakurdas papers, NML, File 291 Part II: Post-War Economic Development Commit-tee, ff 265-266.

140 Cipher telegram from Wavell, Viceroy, to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India,12 June 1944, f 93, IOR: L/I / l /1061. Accordingly, the Economic Adviser, Sir TheodoreGregory, prepared detailed notes on the plan. See IOR: L/I/ l /1061, ff 95-104 and


ff 27-29. These were intended not only to address 'fallacies and technical defects ineconomic and financial argument' but also to express agreement regarding generalaims and objectives. Cipher telegram from Wavell to Amery, 12 June 1944, IOR:L/I/l /1061,f93.

141 This department took over the job of co-ordinating 'post-war reconstruction and develop-ment' from the 'Inter-departmental Reconstruction Committee of Council'. See IOR:L/I/l/1129; Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, 'The Idea of Planning', 178-242.

142 Government of India, Planning and Development Department, Second Report on Re-construction Planning.

143 The public phrasing of the Second Report in such terms required that it be phrased inthe most general terms possible. Finance Member Jeremy Raisman advised Sir ArdeshirDalai, the Member for Planning and Development, to tread softly in what he said onfinancial matters on the grounds that everything seemed uncertain during the war:Raisman to Dalai, Simla, 15 September 1944, NAI: l(4)-P/45: 'Proceedings of the Re-construction Committee of Council', ff 58-61. The discussions on the preliminary draftsof the Second Report and the correspondence thereon show a concern with toning downthe more categorical commitments contained in it to more non-committal forms (ff68-73). A Planning Branch memo dated 17 October 1944 on the Report's commitmentto meeting the costs of housing for workers suggested that the sentence 'should not beso categorical and should be more non-committal' (f 73).

144 Government of India, Statement of Industrial Policy, 1945, copy in NAI: 8(5)-P/45,'Planning of Industrial Development', ff 119-127. The generalities of the Statementwere bewildering even to those in the Planning bureaucracy, one of whom describedit as 'nebulous', 'redundant', being a repetition of the Second Report, 'not strictly accurate'and serving 'only to confuse the issue' (A.S. Lall, Deputy Secretary, Finance, to AdditionalSecretary, Planning, 11/10/1944, f 2). Another said it betrayed 'loose thinking' andwas 'vague' (V. Narahari Rao's memo dated 18/10/1944, ff 7, 11). A European bureau-crat, C.E. Jones, seemed to understand the reasoning better when he wrote in responseto these criticisms that the Statement was 'highly generalised in form and necessarilyvague' - the vagueness being 'understandable' because the Planning and DevelopmentDepartment was seeking 'to secure general agreement on the main features of theirapproach to the problem' (C.E.Jones' note, 19/10/1944, f 12). A.S. Lall, however, ina Note dated 30/12/1944, predicted that despite the Planning and Development Depart-ment's appearing to 'set great store' by an 'unequivocal declaration' of its desire 'todo everything in its power to promote the rapid industrialisation of India', this wouldnot help the Government's public image; it would 'take not even the more intelligentindustrialist to argue, and argue correctly" that such a statement means, and can mean,very little' (f 19).

145 Lt-Gen. T. Hutton, 'The Planning of Post-War Development in India', Asiatic ReviewXLIII (April 1947).

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