Dharampal on British Colonial Agendas

Dharampal, Gandhian and Historian of Indian Science :

"All histories are elaborate efforts at mythmaking. Therefore, when we submit to histories about us written by others, we submit to their myths about us as well. Mythmaking, like naming, is a token of having power. Submitting to others' myths about us is a sign that we are without power. After the historical work of Dharampal, the scope for mythmaking about the past of Indian society is now considerably reduced.
If we must continue to live by myths, however, it is far better we choose to live by those of our own making rather than by those invented by others for their own purposes, whether English or Japanese. That much at least we owe ourselves as an independent society and nation." - Claude Alvares
Dharampal Ji's unmaking of the English-generated history of Indian society has in fact created a serious enough gap today in the discipline. The legitimacy of English or colonial dominated perceptions and biases about Indian society has been grievously undermined, but the academic tradition has been unable to take up the challenge of generating an organized indigenous view to take its place. The materials for a far more authentic history of science and technology in India are indeed now available as a result of his pioneering work, but the competent scholar who can handle it all in one neat canvas has yet to arrive. One recent new work that should be mentioned in this connection is Helaine Selin's Encyclopaedia of Non-Western Science, Technology and Medicine (Kluwer, Holland), which indeed takes note of Dharampal's findings. Till such time as the challenge is taken up, however, we will continue to replicate, uncritically, in the minds of generation after generation, the British or European sponsored view of Indian society and its institutions. How can any society survive, let alone create, on the basis of its borrowed images?
According to Dharampal, the British purpose in India, perhaps after long deliberation during the 17th century was never to attempt on any scale the settlement of the people of Britain or Europe in India. It was felt that in most regions of India, because of its climate, temperature range, gifted, industrious and dense population, the settling of the people of Europe would serve little purpose.
Therefore the purpose was defined as bringing to Britain and Europe, surplus products of the varied industry of the people of India, and the taxes imposed on this industry. Such a proposal, in fact, was very clearly put forward around 1780 by Prof. Adam Ferguson of Edinburgh. Ferguson was a professor of moral philosophy. (Interestingly. he is also regarded as the founder of British sociology.)
Dharampal found that for long periods in the late 18th and the 19th centuries, the tax on land in many areas exceeded the total agricultural production of very fertile land. This was particularly so in the areas of the Madras Presidency (comprising current Tamilnadu, districts of coastal Andhra. some districts of Karnataka and Malabar). The consequences of the policy were easy to predict: in the Madras Presidency, one third of the most fertile land went out of cultivation between the period 1800-1850. In fact, as early as 1804, the Governor of the Madras Presidency wrote to his masters (the President of the Board of Commissioners) in London : - "We have paid a great deal of attention to the revenue management in this country...the general tenor of my opinion is, that we have rode the country too hard, and the sequence is, that it is in a state of the most lamentable poverty. Great oppression is I fear exercised too generally in the collection of the Revenues."
Of course, Dharampal also found within the same archives, information about the Indian civil resistance in various regions of India in the early stages of British rule, like the one in Varanasi region around 1810-11 and in Canara around 1830 and how they were contained. But such events are not taken note of in the formal record as deliberate policy. Even petitions against grievances, though invited, would not be office recorded, unless, the wording of the petition, conveyed a sense of the petitioner's humility and of his (or her) limitless respect for authority.

Excerpts from one such rejected petition against the tax imposed in Varanasi highlight this : - "...former sooltauns never extended the rights of Government (commonly called malgoozaree) to the habitations of their subjects acquired by them by descent or transfer. It is this account that in selling estates the habitations proprietors are excepted from the sales. Therefore, the operation of this tax infringes upon the rights of the community, which is contrary to the first principles justice..."
"...It is difficult to find means of subsistence and the duties, court fees, transit and town duties which have increased tenfold, afflict and affect everyone rich and poor, and this tax, like salt scattered on a wound, is a cause of pain and depression to everyone, both Hindoo and Musulman: - let it be taken into consideration that as a consequence of these imposts the price of provisions within these ten years increased sixteen fold. In such case how is it possible, for us who have no means of earning a livelihood to subsist ?..."
By their methods of extortion and other similar means, the British were able to smash, Indian rural life and society by about 1820-1830. Around the same period, the extensive Indian manufactures met a similar fate. Because of deliberate British policy, the famed Indian village communities so eloquently described by Thomas Metcalfe around 1830, and by Karl Marx in the 1850s, had mostly ceased to exist.
Similar comments could be made about the narratives on Indian science and technology. Initially they were desired for their contemporary relevance and usefulness to the advancement or correction of their British counterparts. But soon after the British began to rule and control Indian life and society, the continuity of Indian knowledge and practice seemed to them a threat.

Therefore it was something to be put aside so that it crumbled or decayed. Dharampal found that such a programme of 'making extinct' was contrived in practically every sphere of human activity, including the manufactures of cotton textiles, the production of Indian steel, and even the Indian practice of inoculation against small pox as early as A.D. 1800.
A similar fate awaited the extensive network of Indian schools and institutions of higher learning when they began to be surveyed in the 1820s and 1830s. Ironically, it is mainly through the British archival records that one becomes aware of the extensive nature of the education network, as well as its speedy decay in the Madras and Bengal Presidency, and somewhat later in the Presidencies of Bombay and in the Punjab. Of course, the view, which we get from such archival material is splintered and not integrated. But the indicators in themselves are of great value. They also provide us glimpses of pre-British life and of aspects of India's society of which we had lost track from about A.D. 1850 when society was broken up and sup- pressed, and an imposed alien system of education made us ignore and forget the innumerable accomplishments of our people.