BackDéjà View | Resurrecting the Empire
What if the British had never sailed over? Would things have been better...
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Admit it. At some point in the recent past someone in your immediate circle of friends and family—perhaps even yourself—has half-jokingly asked for the “British to come back and somehow save this country from the jokers who currently run it".
This usually comes as the closing thrust in a heated dinner table conversation about Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi versus Mulayam Singh Yadav versus the Ford Foundation versus paid media versus...Gautam Gambhir?
Its either that or “God, I miss the good old days of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency when everyone came to office on time".
Nobody seriously means this of course. Or at least nobody who is in possession of information and/or a conscience.
But still these idle musings provide much fodder for thought. Especially if you articulate them as hypotheticals. What if the British had never sailed over? What if they had never left? What if Indian kings had been left to their own devices? Would modern India have been very different?
Asking these questions is one thing.
How does one answer any of them with any degree of certainty?
A few months ago I was reading a book titled An Unusual Raja: Mahatma Gandhi and the Aundh Experiment written by Apa Pant, a prince of the erstwhile princely state of Aundh, who later went on to become one of independent India’s star diplomats. It is an interesting book and cheap copies are available for purchase online.
I will leave the substance of Pant’s writing for a future column perhaps.
While reading it I suddenly began to wonder. Perhaps there was a way, albeit contrived, to answer some of those hypothetical questions.
Pre-independent India is often thought of as a single monolithic colonial possession. Things were a little more complicated than that. At the dawn of independence Sardar Vallabhai Patel oversaw the consolidation of some 550 princely states into the new free country. Indeed these princely states accounted for a land area almost as much as that part of the subcontinent that came directly under British rule.
No doubt many of these princely states were just tiny collections of villages with a jaunty flag and a little haveli of a palace, that has since become a boutique hotel.
Others, however, were sophisticated affairs with comprehensive governments and a large state machinery. The Kingdom of Travancore, for instance, had its own currency, civil service, and postal system complete with stamps. (Cough.)
So, what if we compared the quality of governance of these princely states to that of the area under direct British rule? This analysis could help answer some of those hypotheticals. For instance if native kings governed better than the British, one could suggest that an earlier British exit may have been beneficial to the Indian people.
Which is how I came upon a November 2010 paper in The Review Of Economics and Statistics by Lakshmi Iyer of Harvard Business School, titled Direct Versus Indirect Colonial Rule In India: Long-Term Consequences.
Iyer’s paper is based on a rather clever idea. She compares the post-colonial economic outcomes of British India and the princely states, adjusts for a whole host of external factors, and then tries to figure out which gave better results.
In other words: Which parts of India turned out better—the parts ruled by native kings, or those that enjoyed direct rule by British administrators?
I know exactly what you’re thinking to yourself: “DUH! Typical MBA paper by Obvioushema Obviousmalini. The British were tyrants. But at least they knew how to run a state. Kind of."
Aha! No.
This is what Iyer has to say: “I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centres, and roads in the post-colonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period has a significant and persistent effect on post-colonial outcomes."
But didn’t the British improve agricultural yields, you say? Yes, says Iyer, but only because they often chose to annex high-yielding regions in the first place. But then they invested less of this surplus back into the region than the native states. And this came at a great local cost: “Directly ruled areas have higher levels of poverty and infant mortality in the post-colonial period."
Iyer says that the parts of colonial India subject to direct British rule not only lagged behind the princely states during the colonial period, but continued to lag behind them for several years after independence. And are still playing catch-up: “The impact of colonial period governance becomes more muted over the longer term in the fact of explicit post-colonial policies designed to equalize access to schools, health centres, and roads. It is therefore possible to undo the effects of historical circumstances, though the results in this paper indicate that this process can take several decades."
Iyer’s paper opens up several interesting avenues of investigation and, indeed, criticism. (I especially welcome thoughts from readers.)
But at least next time, when someone says something about bringing back the British, you can tell them to shut their treasonous mouths and wave a research paper in their faces.
Every week Déjà View will scour historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.
Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com
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