India. Craig Jeffrey
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Название: India

Автор: Craig Jeffrey

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Зарубежная публицистика

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isbn: 9781509539727

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СКАЧАТЬ in India that Marx anticipated in the middle of the nineteenth century? He thought that the ‘village system’ of India was being dissolved as a result of ‘English interference’, and that colonialism was producing ‘the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’ (Marx 1853). Marx argued that the development of roads and railways by the British rulers would break down the isolation of India’s villages, and that with new irrigation systems and the development of industry, a ‘social revolution’ would come about. More recently, however, historians have often found reason for arguing that there was considerable continuity, as well as change. The British very largely took over, though they also developed, earlier systems for the taxation of land (discussed by Banerjee and Iyer, whose work is referred to above), and this ensured the reproduction of the power of small numbers of landlords over the very large numbers of small cultivators, under a variety of systems that often made for insecurity of tenure for the actual cultivators of the land. Those with more secure rights, however, and those who held larger amounts of land, became politically powerful in the later part of the colonial period, effectively controlling the local organization of the Indian National Congress, the political party born from the struggle for independence from colonial rule, by the time that India became independent: ‘By 1949 conservative coalitions built by dominant landowning castes in alliance with urban businessmen had captured effective control of most [local] Congress Committees’ (Frankel 1978: 74). These particular ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ severely constrained the possibilities for bringing about social and economic reforms on the part of the national political leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular limiting the prospect of resolving the ‘agrarian question’ by means of redistributive land reform (which was implemented in some other Asian countries; see chapter 4).

      One aspect of colonial rule in regard to caste that is of enduring importance is the recognition by the colonial state of the disabilities of those groups, many of them originally agrarian slaves (Viswanath 2014), who came to be described as ‘untouchable’. They were deemed by the colonial state to deserve special assistance, or of what has become known generally as affirmative action. The last major piece of legislation passed by the British government concerning the government of India, the Government of India Act 1935, included the reservation of seats in legislative bodies for the so-called ‘Depressed Classes’, and a government order of 1936 contained a list (or ‘schedule’) of such caste communities. In 1943 the colonial state decided to combine reservation of seats with reserved jobs in government service for members of the ‘Scheduled Castes’ (‘SCs’), and these practices were then incorporated into the Constitution of independent India. This principle, of providing special privileges to those considered to have suffered from historical disabilities, came to be extended by the post-colonial state to many other caste communities – described officially as ‘Other Backward Classes’ (‘OBCs’) – and there continue to be claims being made even by groups that are actually very powerful, for this designation. The reservation of government jobs, and of seats in medical and engineering colleges, for the OBCs, is a powerful incentive for claiming the categorization (see chapter 11) – but it further contributes to the hardening of caste identities that began in the colonial period.

      The experience of the struggle for independence, however – and it was, probably, the greatest mass movement that the world has yet seen – meant that with the attainment of freedom from colonial rule, there was very little question but that India should be a parliamentary democracy, in line with the liberal ideals that members of the Indian elite had espoused with zeal since quite early in the nineteenth century and had used skilfully against their colonial rulers (see Sarkar 2001 on the historical inheritance of Indian democracy; and on liberalism and India, Bayly 2012). This played a central part in the second moment of historical change that we have distinguished.

      Democracy