(a) India had been the world leader in the field of hand spun and hand woven yarn and cloth for many centuries. Many nationalist…

The claim that British rule shattered India’s handicrafts is not merely sentimental; it identifies a deliberate and structural transformation of the Indian economy. Nationalist and Marxist critiques differ in emphasis but are broadly correct.

Deindustrialisation and its critiques India’s hand-spun and hand-woven yarn and cloth had long been world famous. Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain of wealth theory showed how profits, salaries and investments were siphoned to Britain, weakening domestic capital. R.C. Dutt traced how cheap machine-made cloth, backed by imperial tariffs, destroyed Indian textiles. Marx, in The British Rule in India, argued that colonialism dissolved ancient village communities and artisan economies. Nationalists stressed deliberate policy: the Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company’s monopoly of Indian trade, though it retained the tea and China trade until 1833, opening Indian markets to British manufacturers. Discriminatory tariffs—about 3.5 per cent on British imports against heavy internal transit duties—flooded India with cloth. Dhaka muslin and Surat calico disappeared, and spinners, weavers and dyers were reduced to pauperism. Marxists, however, saw this less as conscious conspiracy than as the structural logic of capitalist expansion: India was converted into a market for manufactures and a source of raw materials. The result was not accidental: it combined fiscal extraction, market opening and devaluation of artisan labour. The verdict is that the “shattering” was real and policy-enabled, even if “deliberate” should be understood as institutional design rather than a single plotted intent.

Manifestations of nationalism Nationalism emerged as a response to this economic and political subordination. Politically, the Indian National Congress (1885) began with Moderate petitions, then Extremist demands for self-rule and boycott. Revolutionary terrorism, through the Anushilan Samiti and the Ghadar Party, challenged the state through armed resistance and diaspora mobilisation. Mass nationalism crystallised in the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements, which combined political protest with social mobilisation. Culturally and socially, the Bengal Renaissance, the Swadeshi movement of 1905, educational initiatives, caste reform, religious revivalism such as the Arya Samaj and Deoband, and linguistic regionalism created a shared sense of Indian identity. Swadeshi gave economic boycott a cultural form; educational initiatives sought alternatives to colonial schooling; caste reform and religious revivalism broadened the social base of nationalism. These currents made nationalism not only a political programme but a cultural and moral assertion.

Mir Kasim and the Company’s expectations The Company had expected Mir Kasim to be a compliant Nawab of Bengal. He belied this by transferring his capital from Murshidabad to Munger in 1762, reorganising the army with European officers, and attempting to check Company corruption and arbitrary revenue demands. His move to Munger was intended to escape Company proximity and strengthen his military position. His resistance ended at the Battle of Buxar in 1764, after which the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 granted the Company the Diwani and established a defensive alliance with Awadh. This should not be confused with the later Wellesley-era subsidiary alliance system. The historiographical debate over the nature of subsidiary alliances—defensive pacts or instruments of control—should not be projected back onto 1765. In Mir Kasim’s case, his autonomy was constrained by Afghan and Mughal threats as much as by British pressure. He was therefore less a simple puppet than a ruler caught between imperial demands and internal instability, whose defeat nonetheless opened the way to Company fiscal dominance.

In conclusion, the critiques of colonial deindustrialisation are substantially valid, nationalism was a multi-layered response to it, and Mir Kasim’s case shows that even a nominally subordinate ruler could resist Company expectations until structural power shifted decisively in 1765. Thus colonial economic rupture and nationalist assertion formed a dialectic: oppression generated resistance, while resistance forced the Company to consolidate fiscal and political control.