Examine the social background of growth of Indian nationalism. (2022)
A. R. Desai, in Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948), makes the boldest claim available on this question: Indian nationalism has no pre-colonial ancestry, but is a modern formation produced by the material conditions colonial rule itself created. To examine that claim is to ask whether the transformations he lists were sufficient to make a nation — and what they leave unexplained.
A colonial economy that made a single country
- The Permanent Settlement (1793) and the ryotwari and mahalwari systems replaced the village community’s customary control of land with private property, creating zamindars, tenants and a growing class of landless labour.
- Commercialisation of agriculture tied the cultivator to distant markets and prices; de-industrialisation destroyed the artisan without absorbing him into factories.
- Railways, the telegraph, a uniform currency and a common tariff wall were built for extraction, yet produced an integrated economic space where none had existed.
- The grievance acquired a theory. Dadabhai Naoroji‘s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) formulated the drain of wealth; Utsa Patnaik, in Agrarian and Other Histories (2017), has since estimated transfers from India between 1765 and 1938 at roughly forty-five trillion dollars — a contested figure, but one that conveys why the economic critique became the emotional core of nationalism.
New classes, and a class that could speak
Desai’s point is that colonialism altered India’s “economic anatomy” and with it its “social physiognomy”. Zamindars, peasant proprietors, agricultural labourers, moneylenders and merchants appeared in the countryside; industrialists, an industrial working class and a professional middle class in the towns. Decisive among them was the English-educated intelligentsia, created after Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s Minute on Indian Education (1835) to staff the administration, and the first stratum to think in all-India terms.
Print, reform and administrative unification
A vernacular and English press, learned societies and a growing readership let strangers imagine themselves as contemporaries — the mechanism Benedict Anderson called print capitalism in Imagined Communities (1983). Socio-religious reform, from the Brahmo Samaj to the Arya Samaj and Aligarh, supplied both self-criticism and self-respect. A centralised bureaucracy, a common penal code and a single judicial hierarchy completed the unification that made “India” thinkable as a political unit.
Where the explanation strains
- Anil Seal (The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, 1968) saw not a nation but provincial elites whose animosities and interests drove them into competition for office and patronage.
- Ranajit Guha (Subaltern Studies I, 1982; Dominance without Hegemony, 1997) held that both colonialist and bourgeois-nationalist accounts are elitist, and that peasant insurgency had an autonomous political grammar of its own.
- Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments, 1993) argued that nationalism declared sovereignty first in an inner domain of language, religion and family — a cultural move no economic account reaches.
- Desai expected caste to dissolve with industry. The notified Census 2027 schedule restores caste enumeration for the first time since 1931, which suggests otherwise.
Conclusion
The social background Desai reconstructed is a necessary condition of Indian nationalism, not a sufficient one. Colonial capitalism supplied the classes, the communications and the grievance; culture, religion and subaltern initiative supplied much of the content. A defensible account of the growth of Indian nationalism must hold both together.