British influence in Bengal arose from Clive’s victory in the 1757 battle of Plassey. That period also coincided roughly with significant developments of political thought in England (e.g. John Locke in the 1680s, Edmund Burke who became influential from the mid 1700s and Adam Smith a little later) and in the USA (e.g. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton).
After the consolidation of Bengal by Robert Clive, the economic advantages of learning English started becoming increasingly obvious. As
a result Indians started to show interest in learning the English
language and its literature. By 1835, Indians were paying good money to
be taught English. T B Macaulay noted in his famous ‘Minute’ that ‘the
natives’ had become ‘desirous to be taught English’ and were no longer
‘desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic’. Indians picked up English
very well. ‘[I]t is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the
Continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so
much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos.’[i]
While the British may have wanted to teach English only so that Indians could become their clerks, once
the Pandora’s Box of knowledge is opened, its consequences are
unstoppable. Indians quickly became aware of the enormous leaps made by
Western political thought over the centuries. This awareness laid the
seeds for subsequent demands for self-rule. But India
faced a steep learning curve first. It had not paid the slightest heed
to what had been going on elsewhere for centuries, if not millennia. But
in the meantime the world had completely changed. People’s power was on the rise as never before in Britain.
While British kings still existed, their powers had been dramatically
truncated. In 1757, a young man of 24 years in Scotland by the name of Adam Smith was thinking about the entire world and examining how the wealth of nations was created. His ideas would convert the tiny island of England into the world’s most powerful nation by the mid-1800s.
It was not possible for Indians to advance straight to the
forefront of the theory and philosophy of freedom given their late
start. While people like Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) started to
internalize the political arguments of freedom, no one could yet articulate new insights. All
that the Indians did in this period, and could have reasonably done,
was to catch up with liberal ideas and start demanding self-governance
in India. Lest we blame these
Indians for lack of creative insight, we must remember that things like
‘independence’, ‘representation of the people’, and even ‘nationhood’
were completely new concepts for most parts of the world then. England had a head-start in freedom which would take many countries a long time to catch up.
Apart from Raja Ram Mohan Roy, other contributors to the political
discourse on freedom in nineteenth century India included Dadabhai
Naoroji (1825–1917), Mahadeo Govind Ranade (1842–1901), Gopal
Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) and Pherozeshah Mehta (1845–1915).
By the time the Indian mind finally caught up with the West by 1850, Western thought had moved even further on its journey. But
also by now, a battle against liberty was under way in the West. A
competing theory to the theory of freedom had arisen in the dying years
of feudalism – the theory of socialism (or communism). Both
liberalism and socialism agreed that kings were no longer needed. But on
what would come next, they differed completely. These radically opposed
Western world views, one founded on freedom, the other on equality, had
begun a battle for the minds and hearts of people.
Socialism wanted us to revert to our tribal state without the
aristocratic overlay of feudalism. It did not want anyone to become
exceptionally wealthy or powerful. Its approach had to be implemented,
where necessary, by chopping the heads of the rich. The socialist model
did not agree with Adam Smith who saw wealth as an unlimited
product of the human mind, a mere consequence of innovation. It saw life
as a zero-sum game where people had to fight for a share of the fixed pie: capital versus labour. In the model of socialism individual
effort, merit or enterprise was irrelevant, for the total wealth was
fixed. Therefore redistribution of wealth was the primary purpose of
life.
The vision of socialism held hypnotic sway amongst untutored minds. It was on the upswing by the mid-1800s. In a brave bid to foil socialism, Frédéric Bastiat wrote The Law in 1850 and John Stuart Mill his essay On Liberty in 1859.
Thinkers of the Austrian school advanced further explorations on the
economic impacts of freedom and created the science of economics. In the early twentieth century Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand advanced these ideas even further.
While socialism overpowered parts of Europe by the late nineteenth
century, England and USA remained the bastions of freedom and kept
trying to improve their political and democratic institutions of
governance. The greatest advances in
freedom therefore took place only in the West, not in India. The Indian
intelligentsia remained focused on its challenge of independence.
The Indian mind was distracted by another thing as well.
Indians had suddenly come down from being supremely haughty and
disinterested in the rest of the world to becoming ruled first by the
Mughals and then by the British. A
doubt arose in their minds that they were potentially racially
inferior. The British encouraged this doubt through their own haughty
behaviour, for when one is powerfully placed it is easy to be arrogant. British racism left little breathing space for Indians to focus on the broader global issues of justice and liberty. But British arrogance was clearly misplaced on two grounds:
First, the rapidly growing
technological prowess of the British was not a product of racial
superiority but the natural consequence of the freedom that its philosophers had propounded and its people fought for over many centuries. It
was this freedom of thought which had enabled its society to become
increasingly more creative and flexible, and thus technologically
superior to other societies. Before the ideas of freedom improved the
life of the common man in England, the British ‘race’ was actually quite
‘inferior’, being short-statured with mediocre intelligence. Normally,
soldiers are the tallest and strongest representatives of any society,
but British soldiers were very short till 1814, averaging only 5 feet 6
inches.[ii]
But even these tiny fellows managed to conquer India because they rode
the steed of freedom which gave them self-confidence and allowed them to
innovate at each step. The rapidly developing sciences in Britain
arising from this culture of freedom led to higher survival rates of its
infants and consequently to rapid population growth. This excess
population also fed into England’s international exploits. The virtuous cycles of freedom kept reinforcing themselves. Their superiority for 150 years or so had nothing to do with race.
Second, it was a great mistake for the British to think that there was nothing for the West to learn from India.
That learning is a two-way street became apparent to them when some
intrepid European scholars discovered the many-splendoured Indian past
using methods of research and analysis hitherto not applied in India.
Such findings about glorious achievements in historical India
brought some comfort, even a sense of renewed confidence, to
English-educated Indians. Unfortunately, with the advent of European scholarship of Indian history, a lot of navel gazing started among Indians. The
Indian mind, both Hindu and Muslim, began to spend most of its time
looking backwards, in reconciling its multi-faceted and possibly
exciting past with its unhappy present. A few Indians did raise
broader issues in relation to freedom, such as Rabindranath
Tagore (1861–1941) and M K Gandhi (1869–1948). However, that was
incidental to the focus on self-rule and opposing racism.
This great mental energy led to the most awe-inspiring independence
movement the world has ever seen. It was an exemplary movement – far ahead of its times in its principle-based standards of political protest. In addition, the British were gently taught a very important lesson in freedom by Gandhi. His
exposition of the equality among peoples and of non-violent protest
were significant contributions to the freedom of mankind as a whole. Through
humane and dignified protest he demonstrated that all humans were
equally worthy of regard. This was of course helped by allegiance of the
British to their rule of law. It is unlikely that Gandhi would have
made a difference with Japanese or German ‘masters’ of that era. His methods also reminded the people of Britain that they should not lower their own principles of liberty by diminishing the liberty of others. As
a result of Gandhi’s actions the age of racial officially came to an
end in many parts of the world. Oppressed peoples of the past, such as
the blacks of the USA and South Africa, acknowledge the contributions of
Gandhi. Gandhi has therefore brought about a fundamental shift in the
world’s landscape of freedom. In
that sense, Gandhi was without doubt the most influential proponent of
individual liberty (and thus, indirectly, of classical liberalism) in
India in the first half of the twentieth century.
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