(a) Do you agree that 'the decline of traditional Indian artisan production was a fact, sad but inevitable'? Discuss. (20…

(a) The decline of traditional artisan production: "sad but inevitable"?

The decline was a fact, but its inevitability is open to question. The decline of crafts such as cotton weaving in Dacca, Murshidabad and Surat, shipbuilding and metal work had several causes. Indian courts and nobility, the principal patrons of luxury crafts, lost power as the British annexed states. The Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company's monopoly and opened India to British manufactures, while Indian goods entering Britain faced heavy duties, often 70 to 80 per cent, in contrast to a few per cent on British cloth in India. Machine-made Lancashire cloth then undercut handloom output. Railways from 1853 carried cheap imports inland. Bipan Chandra cites the fall in Dacca's population from about 150,000 to 30,000 or 40,000, and Bentinck's remark about weavers' bones bleaching the plains. Displaced artisans moved onto overcrowded land.

Some writers called this loss inevitable. Marx thought that Britain had been destroying the old economy and that modern industry would replace it. Morris D. Morris and Tirthankar Roy stress that handloom weaving did not vanish: it survived by specialisation, with output of coarse cloth and fine speciality goods, and revived with the Swadeshi.

Against inevitability, other countries protected their industries, but colonial India had no tariff autonomy, and the state did nothing to help artisans adopt new technology. Indian mills began only in the 1850s at Bombay and Ahmedabad.

The judgement is that some decline was probably unavoidable with industrialisation, but its scale and social cost came from colonial policy.

(b) The significance of tribal and peasant uprisings

The claim is broadly correct. Tribal and peasant revolts, such as the Kol rising (1831–32), the Santhal hool (1855–56) under Sidhu and Kanhu, the Indigo revolt (1859–60), the Deccan riots (1875), Mappila risings and the Munda ulgulan of Birsa (1899–1900), kept up a continuous tradition of resistance. They showed that British rule rested on coercion that the poor would contest, and they built the idea of resistance to exploitation in areas that the later national movement sought to reach. Later Gandhian campaigns at Champaran and Bardoli drew on the same peasant base.

They also gained concessions: the Santhal Parganas were created after 1855, the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act (1879) and the Bengal Tenancy Act (1885) followed peasant protest, and the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (1908) followed the Munda revolt.

The claim must be qualified. Most revolts were local, used traditional weapons, often had religious or millenarian leadership, and were directed against moneylenders, landlords and outsiders (dikus) before the colonial state. They lacked a wider ideology and did not link with the national movement until the twentieth century. Ranajit Guha emphasises their autonomous peasant consciousness, while Bipan Chandra stresses their limits.

The judgement is that their significance was in tradition and in concessions, not in any direct threat to British power.

(c) The press as the chief instrument of nationalist education

The remark is substantially correct for the early phase of the national movement. The nationalist press, including Amrita Bazar Patrika, The Hindu, the Bengalee of Surendranath Banerjea, Tilak's Kesari and Mahratta, and later Gandhi's Young India and Harijan, criticised colonial economic policy, publicised Congress programmes and spread ideas of swaraj and civil rights. Because few people could read, newspapers were read aloud in groups and reached well beyond their circulation.

The government's response shows the press's power: the Vernacular Press Act (1878), the Press Acts of 1908 and 1910, and Tilak's prosecutions (1897, 1908).

But the press was not the only instrument. Public meetings, associations, pamphlets, songs, theatre, and above all the mass movements themselves worked alongside it, and in a country with low literacy the English press reached mainly the educated. The press was the chief instrument of the early, elite phase, then one of several instruments.