E-Paper
Crippling Colonialism
Apologists for colonial rule talk about various development projects that the British started in India. Sadly, there is none that they can name for Bihar.
Apologists for colonial rule talk about various development projects that the British started in India. Sadly, there is none that they can name for Bihar.
A part of the Bengal Presidency (along with Orissa) till as late as 1911, Bihar was exempt from even the passing benefits of colonisation. All development was focussed around Calcutta, and Bihar remained as rural as it had been for centuries.
Indeed, Bihar suffered from some of the worst excesses of British rule. Every bit of the state was "commodified", claims Arvind N Das in his seminal work The Republic of Bihar.
Crippling of Agriculture
The British re-oriented Bihar's agriculture to serve foreign markets, paying little heed to local interests. New laws like the Permanent Settlement not only legitimised centuries-old casteist-feudal structures, but made them even more exploitative.
The forced cultivation of opium and indigo on Bihar's plains is well-known. Local cotton growth was discontinued. At its expense flourished the production of grains, to be sold internationally. While local peasants got less than one-tenth of the produce, the sale of Bihari crops made many a millionaire in England and Scotland (a place in Scotland is still called Patna, after Patna rice whose trade built local fortunes).
As rental income was "fixed", and not a percentage of the produce under Permanent Settlement, landlords also did not bother to modernise agriculture. "Agricultural improvements were discouraged by prevailing patterns of landownership and tenancy," says Stuart Corbridge, a London School of Economics professor who has been studying Bihar's rural society for years. Bihar continued using the same agricultural techniques it had for two millennia.
Even soil was not spared. Colonists scrapped the fertile riverine soil to manufacture gunpowder, used in colonial wars around the world.
Exploitation continued throughout the 18th and 19th century. New practices like the transfer of lakhs of acres of bakasht land from tenants to landlords perhaps made it worse in the 20th.
Commercialisation, with a lack of concern not just for local markets but also the local ecology, led to "natural" disasters. Floods, famines and drought became a regular feature of agrarian Bihar.
With land reforms not implemented even after Independence, these practices hold sway even today in most parts of Bihar, especially in the north.
Crippling of Industry
Bihar had virtually no industrial base even at the time of independence, largely owing to the legacy of colonial rule.
When the British re-orientated local agriculture to suit foreign markets, it had a direct impact on local industry. Farmers could no longer produce crops that would be bought by local entrepreneurs, thus denying the latter essential raw material. For example, the growth of cotton was stopped, killing the flourishing textile industry.
Laws like the Permanent Settlement guaranteed easy income to landlords. Accompanied by lack of urban markets in Bihar (the nearest one was in Calcutta), the spirit of entrepreneurship was never allowed to germinate among the handful who could invest.
The non-agricultural workforce, which would have populated industries if there had been any, was also shipped away to British colonies around the world, or sold to other colonialists, to work as "indentured labour".
