Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India

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Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India analyses critical aspects of the political economy of the colonial and the post-colonial period and focuses on the debates on the transition from one to the other. It discusses how Britain's shooting forward in the Great Divergence was predicated on the devastation of the colonial economy. This book explores various modes of colonial subjugation of the Indian economy. A major contribution is the study of the politics of the two contending classes-the capitalist class and the working class. This determined which class perspective exercised ideological hegemony or influence over the national movement and, consequently, over the post-colonial Indian state.
An examination of the Indian national movement's 'idea of India', implemented by the post-colonial Indian state led by Jawaharlal Nehru forms a core theme of the book. It also discusses Indira Gandhi shaping the Indian economy, taking the Nehruvian path to its logical conclusion and then initiating the shift to economic reform. Finally, it explores at length the growing challenge of perhaps the longest- lasting legacy of colonialism- religious communalism-which threatens the 'idea of India' and India's integrity today.

Aditya Mukherjee is former Professor of Contemporary Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also Dean of the School of Social Sciences; Director, Academic Staff College; Director, Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, JNU; and President, Indian History Congress (Modern India), 2007. He has been Visiting Professor at Duke University and La Sapienza, University of Rome, and Fellow at Institutes of Advanced Study at Nantes, Lancaster University, University of Sao Paulo, and University of Tokyo. He has authored Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class (2002) and has co-authored multiple volumes, including India since Independence (2008). He is editor, Sage Series in Modern Indian History, which has published eighteen monographs since 2000.

THE SET OF ESSAYS in this volume were written over four decades, though they have been revised and updated considerably, wherever necessary, for the present volume. One reason for including some essays written as early as the 1970s is because the questions which were bothering historians in the 1960s and 1970s have not lost relevance. In fact, some of them have once again become critical issues of the day.
After independence, historical scholarship in India was trying to break out of the colonial and communal paradigm promoted in the academia controlled by the colonial state. An attempt was also made to explore new areas of social and economic history which affected the lives of the people as a whole rather than a chronicle of rulers and dynasties. A concerted attempt was now made to write scientific, secular and independent history, a history which brought the people into the centre of the discourse. By the 1960s the output of such research began to appear and a serious effort was made by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to reach it to school children, with the tallest of Indian scholars writing for them. The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which was established in 1969, too, committed itself to this task of scientific, secular, independent and progressive pro- people scholarship, not only in the sphere of history but also the other disciplines of the social sciences. (It is not accidental that this university is the prime target of colonial/communal/ obscurantist forces today.)

THE COMMON THEME of these selected essays is the political economy of colonial and post-colonial India. Broadly speaking, the effort has been to try to understand the specific manner in which colonialism had a devastating impact on the Indian economy and society, how it was resisted by the nation as a whole as well as its constituent classes, and how both these phenomena-colonial impact and nature of resistance- had an important bearing on post-colonial developments in India. The book is an attempt to contribute to the relatively new genre of contemporary history in India. There is also a focus on the emerging trend of studying transition periods, in this case the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial.
Part I of this volume, titled 'The Colonial Situation', consists of twelve chapters. Though these chapters deal primarily with the colonial period, many of them draw links with and carry the story over to the post-colonial period. The first five chapters study the impact of colonialism on the Indian economy as a whole as well as on different sectors like agriculture, industry and the monetary and financial sector.
A critique of the colonial and neo-colonial position on the impact of colonialism in India has been done in Chapter 1, 'The Return of the Colonial Perspective in Indian Economic History: The Last Phase of Colonialism in India'. The focus in this chapter is on the last phase of colonialism, roughly the last four decades before independence in 1947, a period which witnessed some positive developments that diverged from the classical colonial pattern which had been established in India.