mohan@sbcs.UUCP (Chilukuri K. Mohan) (11/22/85)
I quote from a book by an Indian historian, DharamPal, who has collected several articles by Europeans written in the eighteenth century attesting to the vigorous practice of science and technology in India at the time. I have quoted entirely from the Preface to the book, ignored the parts dealing with Indian Science, and focused on a few aspects regarded more as "technology". In addition to what follows, one should remember the systematic destruction of Indian textile industry when it was realized that India should serve as a producer of cotton from British mills and consumer of British cloth. The aim is to shed light on how British rule "developed" India. QUOTING FROM THE BOOK "Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century" by Dharampal, Pub. Impex India, Delhi. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. "Inoculation against the small pox seems to have been universal, if not throughout, in large parts of Northern and Southern India, till it was banned in Calcutta and other places under the Bengal Presidency (and perhaps elsewhere) from around 1802-3...." There were frequent small pox epidemics rampant in various parts of India in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 2. Alexander Walker (Chapter XII) remarks: "the practice of watering and irrigation is not peculiar to the husbandry of India, but it has probably been carried there to a greater extent, and more laborious ingenuity displayed in it than in any other country". "Besides widespread artificial irrigation, the practices of crop rotation, manuring, sowing by means of the drill plough, adn use of a variety of other implements were fairly widespread". "[according to British Indian archival documents] Theoretically, the land revenue was fixed at 50%. For large parts of India under British rule till 1855 or so the proportion which during most years actually went towards governmental land revenue was appreciably higher... ...[In Madras] during the 1850s about one-third of the irrigated land had over the years altogether gone out of cultivation as the amount of land revenue on such land had begun to approximate the gross produce itself, and at times even exceeded it". There were widespread famines in Bengal and other parts of India: whereas drought years have always been known, the development of famine conditions has everything to do with the heavy taxation burden on farmers who could no longer stock up for the rainless year, as well as the neglect of the irrigation facilities of yore. 3. Among other things, the book goes on to report British documents attesting that the steel produced in India was of a better quality than any known in Britain (in the 18th century). "It is probable that the number of iron and steel furnaces functioning throughout India in the latter part of the 18th century was in the region of 10,000". "... why did they [the steel manufacturing processes] disappear?... ...Mainly the disappearance seemed to have resulted from large-scale economic breakdown and hostile state policy. From about 1800 onwards India was to be treated as a consumer of British manufactures". More on the latter question of reasons for the eclipsing of Indian science AND technology: "It seems that the indigenous budgeting of state revenues left the overwhelming proportions of revenue, through various in-built devices, at the local levels. The British created fiscal system on the other hand not only doubled or trebled the rates of various assessment and effectively brought all people under its sway, but it took away the overwhelming proportions to the central exchequers and the metropolises and places above them. The studied neglect and contempt added to the economic breakdown and the transformation of the fiscal system seems to have completed the uprooting and elimination of indigenous sciences and technologies not only from society but from Indian memory itself". Thus the British underdeveloped India. *** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE ***