Structural Change

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XII (Social Change and Development in India), Chapter 1.

Why do we drive on the left?

Look around you. The Parliament works on a British pattern. So do the courts, the police and much of the school system. Traffic keeps to the left. Roadside eateries serve bread omelette and cutlets. Many school uniforms include a neck tie. We often admire the West and just as often resent it. These small things are traces of colonialism, and the chapter's claim is that colonialism is not only a topic in history. It lives on in our daily lives, because the colonial experience was contradictory: Indians read about liberty and freedom, yet lived under a foreign rule that denied them both. Many of the changes you study in this chapter and the next grew out of that contradiction.

The English language: a paradox in one word

English shows how many sided and contradictory colonial change was.

Structure and culture: how the two chapters divide the work

This chapter looks at structural changes: new political, economic and social arrangements that colonialism brought. It deals with two of them, industrialisation and urbanisation, and briefly touches developments after Independence. The next chapter handles cultural change. The two cannot be strictly separated, so you will see some mention of culture here too.

Understanding colonialism

At one level, colonialism means the establishment of rule by one country over another. India has seen many groups establish their rule over parts of the land at different times. Yet the impact of British colonial rule is distinguishable from earlier rule because its changes were far reaching and deep. The reason lies in the type of economy behind it.

Why the difference. Pre-capitalist conquerors were content to collect a share of what was already produced. A capitalist power wanted to organise production so that profit was highest, and so every policy was geared to the strengthening and expansion of British capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and organised to accumulate profits within a market system. It emerged in the West from a complex process: European exploration of the rest of the world, plunder of wealth and resources, and an unprecedented growth of science and technology harnessed to industry and agriculture. Its marks are dynamism (the potential to grow, expand and innovate) and a global nature. Western colonialism was tied to the growth of western capitalism, which left a lasting impact on how capitalism developed in a colony like India.

Colonialism moved people. Within India, people from present day Jharkhand moved to Assam to work in tea plantations. A new middle class from Bengal and Madras presidencies moved across the country as government employees and professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Others were carried by ship to work in colonised lands in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Many died on the way and most never returned. Their descendants are today known as people of Indian origin.

Deliberate and unintended changes. Some changes were deliberate; others were not. Western education, for example, was introduced to create Indians who would manage colonial rule. Instead it contributed to the growth of nationalist and anti-colonial consciousness.

The built-in contradiction. If capitalism became the dominant economic system, nation states became the dominant political form. In a nation state a government has sovereign power within a defined territory and the people are citizens of one nation. Nation states are closely associated with nationalism, the principle that any set of people has a right to be free and exercise sovereign power, and with democratic ideas. But colonial rule meant foreign rule, and nationalism meant equal right to sovereignty. Indian nationalist leaders grasped this irony and declared that freedom (swaraj) was their birthright. They fought for both political and economic freedom.

Pause and predict: a colonial government introduces English medium schools to produce clerks for its offices. Name one intended and one unintended result.

Check your answer: intended, a class of Indians able to run the administration. Unintended, English educated people who read about liberty and equality, applied those ideas to colonial rule and helped build nationalist consciousness. This is the "paradox" the chapter keeps returning to.

Industrialisation and urbanisation: the colonial experience

Industrialisation is the emergence of machine production based on inanimate sources of power such as steam or electricity. In traditional civilisations most people worked on the land because low technology allowed only a small minority to be freed from farming. In industrial societies the large majority of workers are in factories, offices or shops. New jobs appear in towns and cities, so we usually link urbanisation with industrialisation. They often occur together, but not always.

The British case. Britain, the first society to industrialise, was also the first to become mostly urban. In 1800 well under 20 per cent of its people lived in towns or cities of more than 10,000 people. By 1900 the figure was 74 per cent. London grew from about 1.1 million people in 1800 to over 7 million by the start of the twentieth century.

The Indian case went the other way at first. The same British industrialisation led to deindustrialisation in some sectors of India and to the decline of old urban centres. As manufacturing boomed in Britain, traditional exports of cotton and silk goods from India fell in the face of competition from Manchester.

Why artisans went back to the land. Cheap imported piecegoods and utensils, plus factories of the western type set up in India, weakened many village industries. High prices of farm produce then made agriculture look better, so many artisans gave up their hereditary craft for farming. The change was most noticeable in the more advanced provinces. In regions where the British came first and went deepest, particularly in eastern India, urban luxury manufactures were hit early. Village crafts in the interior held on longer, and were affected seriously only with the spread of railways.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: colonial industrial policy led to deindustrialisation in some sectors and moved people towards agriculture. In reality: economic historians debate how large and how general this decline was, and note that its effect differed by craft and region, which is partly why the textbook is careful to say "in some sectors". Why it matters: when answering, qualify with "in some sectors" rather than writing that all industry disappeared.

Pause and predict: why is urbanisation not always a sign of industrialisation?

Check your answer: because towns can grow for other reasons. Colonial port cities, for example, grew as links in the colonial economy, while at the same time older centres such as Surat and Masulipatnam declined and some towns lost their courts and the artisans and gentry who depended on them.

Colonial cities: the link between core and periphery

Colonial cities expressed global capitalism. In the empire's economic system they linked the economic centre or core (Britain) to the periphery (the colony). Coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai were favoured, because primary commodities could be exported and manufactured goods cheaply imported from there.

The making of Kolkata. In 1690 an English merchant, Job Charnock, arranged to lease three villages (Kolikata, Gobindapur and Sutanuti) by the river Hugli to set up a trading post. In 1698 Fort William was built by the river for defence, and a large open area (the Maidan) was cleared around it for military engagements. The fort and the Maidan formed the core of the city that emerged rapidly.

A divided city. The model South Asian colonial city had a "European town" with spacious bungalows, planned streets, clubs and open space for western recreation such as race courses, golf and cricket. Water, electricity and sewage links were fully used by residents of the European town, while their use in the "native town" was quite restricted.

The tea plantations: a case

The textbook takes tea as an example of how early industrialisation in India was governed by colonial interests. This is not because India began industrialising late, but because the pattern was set by those interests.

Why this case matters. It shows that the laws of a colonised country did not need to follow the democratic norms that the British followed at home, and that colonial administrators knew it.

Industrialisation in independent India

For Indian nationalists, economic exploitation under colonial rule was a central issue, and they contrasted the remembered riches of earlier India with the poverty of British India. The Swadeshi movement strengthened loyalty to the national economy. Modern ideas made people realise that poverty was preventable. Nationalists saw rapid industrialisation as the path to both growth and social equity. So the independent state played an active role: it developed heavy and machine making industries, expanded the public sector, and encouraged a large cooperative sector.

Many new industrial towns emerged after Independence, such as Bokaro, Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur, and townships grew around fertiliser plants and oil wells. The textbook leaves the details of Indian industrialisation and the shift after the 1990s liberalisation to a later chapter.

Urbanisation in independent India

Globalisation in recent years has brought huge expansion and change to cities. The sociologist M.S.A. Rao argued that villages were increasingly subject to urban influences, and that the kind of impact depends on the village's relation with a city or town. He described three situations.

Overseas migrants too. Villagers from Gujarat living in African and British towns, the textbook notes, built houses in their native villages, invested in land and industry and donated to educational institutions.

Pause and predict: a steel plant is built on land next to a group of villages, bringing workers from other States. Which of Rao's three types is this, and what social problem does it create?

Check your answer: the second type, a village near an industrial town. Arrival of immigrant workers raises demand for houses and a market in the village but also creates the problem of ordering relationships between the native residents and the newcomers.

Urban India in numbers

The textbook uses Census data from 1951 to 2011. A UA is an urban agglomeration.

How to read it. The urban population, the number of UA/towns and the percentage share all rose steadily. But the decennial growth rate showed a declining trend during 1981 to 2001, then reversed and showed a marginal increase in 2011. For the first time since Independence, the absolute increase in population was greater in urban than in rural areas, because the growth rate in rural areas fell sharply while the urban growth rate stayed almost the same.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the chapter asks you to judge a place by its occupations, buildings, educational opportunities and way of life. In reality: the Census of India counts a place as urban if it is a statutory town (with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee), or if it has a population of at least 5,000, a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre and at least 75 per cent of the male working population in non agricultural work. Why it matters: it explains why a large settlement can still be counted as rural, and why the textbook asks you to think about what makes a place a town and not a village.

Urbanism as a way of life. Industrialisation and urbanisation mean changes not only in production, technology and density of settlement but in a way of life, a phrase from Louis Wirth (1938).

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: Cultural Change takes the same colonial encounter into culture: social reform, Sanskritisation, westernisation, modernisation and secularisation.
• Later in the book: Change and Development in Industrial Society continues the story of Indian industry after Independence, and Globalisation and Social Change covers the effects of recent decades.
• Class XI link: Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society gives the wider background on urbanisation and change.