(a) Underline the various factors for decline of the Indian cottage industries during the nineteenth century. (20 marks)

(b) Was the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar an expression of anti-landlord and anti-foreign discontent ? Discuss. (20 marks)

(c) “I

Question

(a) Underline the various factors for decline of the Indian cottage industries during the nineteenth century. (20 marks)

(b) Was the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar an expression of anti-landlord and anti-foreign discontent ? Discuss. (20 marks)

(c) “In my belief, congress is to tottering to its fall and one of my great ambitions which in India is to assist it to a peaceful demise.” Comment. (10 marks)

UPSC Answer Check · Accepted Answer

(a) Decline of Indian cottage industries
The decline was a cumulative process with political, fiscal, technological and social causes.

Political and commercial coercion: after Plassey (1757) the English Company replaced the dadni system of merchant advances with direct procurement through its own gomastas, imposing forced advances, low fixed prices and a monopsony that cost Bengal's weavers their independence. The loss of Indian courts as patrons, as princely states were annexed or reduced, destroyed markets for luxury crafts.

Fiscal policy: the Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company's trade monopoly and opened India to British manufactures. British goods entered at low duties while Indian cloth faced high duties in Britain; cotton import duties in India were abolished in 1882, and in 1896 a countervailing excise was placed on Indian mill cloth. Unlike Meiji Japan or protectionist Germany and the USA, the colonial state gave no tariff protection or technical education.

Technology and transport: Lancashire's machine-made cloth and yarn were cheaper. Railways, from the Bombay-Thane line of 16 April 1853, steam shipping and the Suez Canal (1869) removed the protection of distance and carried imports into the interior.

Social effects: old centres such as Dacca, Murshidabad and Surat decayed, and the collapse of hand-spinning removed a major source of women's earnings. Lord William Bentinck's report of 1834-35 noted the weavers' distress, and the new Western-educated class adopted foreign goods.

The extent of "de-industrialisation" is debated. Amiya Kumar Bagchi's figures for Gangetic Bihar show a sharp fall in the share of industrial workers, while Morris D. Morris and Tirthankar Roy argue that handloom weaving adapted and even expanded after 1900 by using cheap mill yarn. The decline was real and severe, though not total.

(b) The Mappila (Moplah) rebellion, 1921
The rising was rooted in agrarian and anti-colonial grievance, but it also turned violently against Hindu neighbours, and historians weigh these strands differently.

Agrarian roots: in south Malabar the jenmi-kanamdar-verumpattamdar tenure placed mostly Hindu landlords (jenmis) over largely Mappila tenants and cultivators. Colonial settlements from the 1790s treated the jenmi as absolute proprietor, and easy eviction and rack-renting provoked a long series of Mappila outbreaks from 1836.

Anti-foreign dimension: the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements brought mobilisation in 1920-21. After a police raid on the Tirurangadi mosque on 20 August 1921, rebels in Ernad and Valluvanad taluks attacked government offices, police and railways; Ali Musaliar and Variyankunnath Kunjahammad Haji set up rebel administrations.

The communal turn: in many places rebels also killed Hindus, carried out forced conversions and attacked temples, which Annie Besant and sections of the Congress condemned. Repression was severe: martial law, heavy casualties and the Wagon Tragedy of 19-20 November 1921, when some 70 Mappila prisoners suffocated in a closed goods wagon between Tirur and Podanur.

Historiography: K. N. Panikkar (Against Lord and State) and Conrad Wood stress agrarian causes; Stephen Dale sees a tradition of frontier Islamic militancy; D. N. Dhanagare examines the Khilafat-Congress link. The Malabar Tenancy Act (1929) addressed tenant grievances.

Verdict: the rebellion was primarily an expression of anti-landlord and anti-colonial discontent, but its communal violence is well documented and must be part of any honest account.

(c) Curzon's prophecy on the Congress
The words are Lord Curzon's, in a letter of 18 November 1900 to the Secretary of State, Lord George Hamilton. Curzon thought the Congress, then a moderate body of petitioners, was weak and divided, and his policies narrowed its space: the Calcutta Municipal Amendment Act (1899) cut elected members, and the Indian Universities Act (1904) tightened official control. (The phrase "microscopic minority" for educated Indians was Lord Dufferin's in 1888.)

His own actions falsified the prophecy. The Partition of Bengal, announced in July 1905 and effective from 16 October 1905, provoked the Swadeshi and Boycott movement, and at the Calcutta session of 1906 Dadabhai Naoroji declared swaraj the goal. The partition was annulled at the Delhi Durbar in December 1911. Curzon's administrative record, including the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act (1904), was real, but his political judgement of the Congress was a serious miscalculation.

(a) Underline the various factors for decline of the Indian cottage industries during the nineteenth century. (20 marks) (b) Was…

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