Insights
British colonial policy went through two phases, or at least there were two strategies between
which its policies actually oscillated, sometimes to its great advantage. At first, the new colonial
apparatus exercised caution and occupied India by a mix of military power and subtle diplomacy,
holding the high ground in the middle of the circle of circles. However, this approach pushed
them into contradictions. Whatever their sense of the strangeness of the country and the
thinness of colonial presence, the British colonial state represented the great conquering
discourse of Enlightenment rationalism, entering India precisely at the moment of its greatest
unchecked arrogance. As inheritors and representatives of this discourse, which carried
everything before it, this colonial state could hardly adopt for long such a self-denying attitude. It
had restructured everything in Europe—the productive system, the political regimes, the moral
and cognitive orders—and would do the same in India, particularly as some empirically inclined
theorists of that generation considered the colonies a massive laboratory of utilitarian or other
theoretical experiments. Consequently, the colonial state could not settle simply for eminence at
the cost of its marginality; it began to take initiatives to introduce the logic of modernity into
Indian society. But this modernity did not enter a passive society. Sometimes, its initiatives were
resisted by pre-existing structural forms. At times, there was a more direct form of collective
resistance. Therefore, the map of continuity and discontinuity that this state left behind at the
time of independence was rather complex and has to be traced with care.
Most significantly, of course, initiatives for modernity came to assume an external character. The
acceptance of modernity came to be connected, ineradicably, with subjection. This again points
to two different problems, one theoretical, the other political. Theoretically, because modernity
was externally introduced, it is explanatorily unhelpful to apply the logical format of the
‘transition process’ to this pattern of change. Such a logical format would be wrong on two
counts. First, however subtly, it would imply that what was proposed to be built was something
like European capitalism. (And, in any case, historians have forcefully argued that what it was to
replace was not like feudalism, with or without modificatory adjectives.) But, more fundamentally,
the logical structure of endogenous change does not apply here. Here transformation agendas
attack as an external force. This externality is not something that can be casually mentioned and
forgotten. It is inscribed on every move, every object, every proposal, every legislative act, each
line of causality. It comes to be marked on the epoch itself. This repetitive emphasis on
externality should not be seen as a nationalist initiative that is so well rehearsed in Indian social
science.
Quite apart from the externality of the entire historical proposal of modernity, some of its
contents were remarkable. Economic reforms, or rather alterations, did not foreshadow the
construction of a classical capitalist economy, with its necessary emphasis on extractive and
transport sectors. What happened was the creation of a degenerate version of capitalism—what
early dependency theorists called the ‘development of underdevelopment’.
