[Reader-list] On the Question of Capitalist Modernization of Railways in Colonial India

[vandana swami]

RAILWAYS AND THE QUESTION OF CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION
IN COLONIAL INDIA

The railways of India have been overwhelmingly viewed
through economic categories in dominant strands of
history-writing. Regardless of the manner in which the
nature and impact of the railways has been assessed,
they have been almost unanimously accepted as an agent
of capitalist modernization in India. 
For the British, the railways represented progress,
prosperity and freedom from want. Dalhousie’s famous
Railway Minute of 1852 captures this view in exaction
detail. As he writes, ‘it cannot be necessary for me
to insist upon the importance of a speedy and wide
introduction of railway communication throughout the
length and breadth of India. A single glance cast upon
the map will suffice to show how immeasurable are the
political advantages to be derived from a system of
internal communication…which would admit of full
intelligence of every event being transmitted to the
government’ and his statement that ‘great tracts are
teeming with produce they cannot dispose of, others
are scantily bearing what they cannot carry in
abundance if only it could be conveyed wither it is
needed…the establishment of a system of railways in
India judiciously selected and formed would surely and
rapidly give rise within this empire to the same
encouragement of enterprise, the same multiplication
of produce, the same discovery of latent resources, to
the same increase in national wealth and to the same
progress in social improvement that have marked the
introduction of improved and extended communication in
various kingdoms of the western world’. 
Implicit in Dalhousie’s Minute is the view that the
politics of geography or space was in fact irrelevant,
and that the railway experiment in India would easily
demonstrate the universal applicability of the
modernization potential inherent in capitalism.
Further, capitalist modernization through the railways
would not only add to the revenue of the government,
but it would also break the ties of agricultural
dependence by liberating the cultivator from the
stranglehold of zamindar and moneylender alike. This
would be achieved because the railway would bring to
the village ‘millions of keep competitors for the
produce of his fields, whose rivalry with each other
would eventually prove the emancipation of the poor
creature’. Thus, the hardships that the peasant faced,
not being able to convert grain into money due to lack
of railways would be eased.
The faith imposed in the institution of railways was
so tremendous that in 1848, when the East India
Company was still unsure and reluctant about railway
construction, the board members of the East India
railway urged Prime Minister John Russell and tried to
convince him that the railways were of great
importance not only to the improvement, but equally
for the establishment of commercial and industrial
enterprises – without railways, India was stationary
and education could not be spread, and most
importantly, the country was available neither as a
market to sell, nor to buy….
In sharp contrast to the celebratory tone in the
British colonial viewpoint, the economic nationalists
such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chander Dutt
severely criticized the railways and blamed them for
the economic ruin of the country. In his famous ‘Drain
Theory’, Naoroji argued that the railways were a drain
on Indian polity and that the massive expenditures
being made on the railways were squarely unjustified
in view of famines raging across different parts of
the country. This expenditure, argued Naoroji, could
in fact be diverted towards irrigation works that
would help in combating the widespread famines. In his
work Naoroji provided systemic calculations and argued
that the investment of English capital in India for
railways, rather than promoting progress and
prosperity, in fact only caused a further drain on its
resources through an amount of almost 66,000,000
pounds interest paid annually on railway loans to
England. The already impoverished economy of India
could ill-afford such an enormous expenditure
especially because the construction and operation of
railways was in no way benefiting the Indians, but
rather, was bringing profits to the Europeans. As he
wrote, ‘English  capitalists do not merely lend, but
with their capital, they themselves invade the
country. The produce of the capital is mostly eaten up
by their own countrymen, and after that, they carry
away the rest in the shape of profits and dividends.
The people themselves of the country do not derive the
same benefit which is derived by every other country
from English capital. The guaranteed railways not only
ate up everything in this manner, but compelled India
to make up the guaranteed India also from her
produce’.
However, despite his trenchant critiques Naoroji did
not propose abolishing the railways altogether. What
he in fact was critiquing was the colonial governance
of the railways. If the railway operations could be
indigenized, then, suggested Naoroji, the dream of
capitalist modernization could be fulfilled. Likewise,
R C Dutt also systematically critiqued the lack of
India’s representation in colonial governance. Having
made calculations of the economic loss to the Indian
population through the taxes they had to pay for the
railways, Dutt stated that, ‘it has not struck British
administrators that the people of India, whose money
was thus squandered might have been consulted to some
extent…but one of the greatest defects of the Indian
administration is its rigid exclusiveness – there is
no room in the entire machinery of the Indian
government for any effective control by people of
their own concerns’.
Thus, Naoroji and Dutt’s critiques of the railways did
not question the principles of capitalist
modernization, but rather, ascribed these failures to
the lack of employment and training of Indians in the
railways.
Through this short piece, I have tried to question the
principle of the universality of capitalist
modernization as it operated in the context of
railways in colonial India. Were railways really the
agents of this modernization? Did they in fact bring
about a fair play of the principles of laissez faire
economics? What really was the nature of the changes
that railways effected in India?   



	
		
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