(a) Examine the social background of growth of Indian nationalism. (20 marks) (b) Explain how land reforms brought about desired…

(a) Social background of the growth of Indian nationalism

A.R. Desai (Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 1948) argued that British rule, by transforming economy and society, unintentionally created the conditions and classes from which nationalism grew.

• Material unification: railways (from 1853), telegraph, post, a uniform legal and administrative system and a market economy knit regions together and created a common field of grievance.
• English education: the Minute of 1835 and the universities of 1857 produced an intelligentsia of lawyers, teachers, doctors and journalists who learned liberal ideas of rights and self-government and led the early Congress (1885).
• New classes: this middle class and an Indian trading and industrial bourgeoisie found their aspirations blocked by colonial policy; peasants and workers joined in later phases, and Desai links each phase to the class leading it.
• Press and associations: newspapers, the Indian Association (1876) and regional associations created a public sphere in which local grievances became national ones.
• Reform movements: the Brahmo Samaj (1828) and Arya Samaj (1875) reinterpreted tradition and built self-respect and a sense of shared culture, while Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) exposed caste inequality.
• Economic grievance: Dadabhai Naoroji's drain theory (Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, 1901) and R.C. Dutt's Economic History of India (early 1900s) gave economic nationalism a basis (Bipan Chandra, 1966).
• Racial discrimination: the Ilbert Bill controversy (1883) exposed the racial limits of colonial liberalism.

Other readings qualify this account:

• Anil Seal (The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, 1968) stressed competition among regional elites for jobs and patronage.
• Subaltern historians such as Ranajit Guha (1983) stressed peasants' autonomous politics.
• Phule and Ambedkar questioned whom the "nation" included.

Nationalism thus grew from colonial modernity and its contradictions, and its middle-class social base shaped both its strengths and its exclusions.

(b) Land reforms and the desired agrarian transformation

Land reforms aimed to end exploitative rent-collection, give land to the tiller and raise equity and productivity.

• Intermediaries: abolition of zamindari, jagirdari and inamdari in the 1950s (for example the UP Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, 1950) removed absentee rent-collectors and brought an estimated 2 crore tenants into direct relation with the state; it is usually judged the most successful reform.
• Tenancy: rent regulation, security of tenure and ownership rights gave about 12.4 million tenants on 15.6 million acres ownership or protected rights by 2002, though many were evicted through "resumption for self-cultivation".
• Ceilings: by February 2015, 68.45 lakh acres had been declared surplus and 50.94 lakh acres distributed to 57.25 lakh beneficiaries, including 19.04 lakh acres to Scheduled Castes and 7.83 lakh acres to Scheduled Tribes (Lok Sabha), about 1.3 per cent of the area operated (Agriculture Census 2015-16). Division of holdings among relatives and litigation limited the gain.
• Where political will existed: Operation Barga (1978) had recorded about 1.46 million sharecroppers in West Bengal by 1994, and Kerala's 1969 Act made tenants owners and gave homestead rights to hutment dwellers.
• Outcomes: panel data for 16 states (1958-92) associate land reform legislation with poverty reduction (Besley and Burgess, 2000). Beneficiaries were mostly superior tenants and intermediate castes rather than Dalits (P.C. Joshi), strengthening the dominant landed castes (Srinivas) from which many Green Revolution capitalist farmers emerged.
• Limits: a 1973 Planning Commission task force found that the reforms had failed to bring about the required change in the agrarian structure; consolidation succeeded only partly in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh; women's land rights were largely ignored.

The reforms changed tenure and class, replacing rent-collectors with owner-cultivators, but not the distribution of land and power.

(c) Challenges in village studies in India

• Unit of study: Dumont and Pocock (1957) argued that the village is not a community because caste divides it; the colonial image of self-sufficient "little republics" (Metcalfe, 1832) also misled.
• Representativeness: Srinivas (1975) warned that generalising from one village is hazardous given rural India's diversity.
• Boundedness: villages have always been connected to markets, the state and migration, so they must be located in wider processes.
• Access and bias: Béteille (1972) examined the constraints on participant observation in a highly stratified village; the researcher's caste, gender and language shape access, and dominant-caste informants can crowd out other voices.
• Records and restudies: Srinivas lost his Rampura fieldnotes in a 1970 fire at Stanford and wrote The Remembered Village (1976) from memory; rigorous restudies are difficult because both researcher and village change.

Combining ethnography with surveys and regional comparison reduces these limits.