The mass upsurges of the 1930s were closely related to decisive economic changes. The world- wide Depression which set in from late-1929 affected India in two main ways : through a very sharp fall in prices, particularly of agricultural commodities, and by bringing about a major crisis in the entire export-oriented colonial economy. The all-India general price-index (1873=100), 203 in 1929, fell to 171 in 1930, 127 in 1931, 126 in 1932, 121 in 1933, and 119 in 1934; it rose slightly thereafter, but was still only 136 in 1937. Agricultural prices had started declining from 1926, in fact, but the collapse from 1930 in India was truly catastrophic. The all-India average of raw cotton prices (1873 = 100), 133 in 1929, fell to 70 in 1931. In Bengal, the price of winter rice (1929 = 100), went down to 45.9 in 1932, while that of jute had slumped to 43.5 by 1934. In the United Provinces, wholesale prices (1901-05 = 100) fell from 218 in 1929 to 162 in 1930, 112 in 1931, and 103 in 1934 (C.J. Baker, Politics of South India 1920-37, p. 174; B.B. Chaudhuri. 'The Process of Depeasantisation
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in Bengal and Bihar 1885-1947', Indian Historical Review, July 1975, p. 117; G. Pandey, p. 160). Depression sharply enhanced the burdens of revenue, rent and interest payments, and the people worst affected were the relatively better off or 'middle' peasants with a surplus to sell (unlike the post-1918 inflation which had hurt the poorest sections hardest). What we know about the pattern of mobilization in the 1930s fits in well with this economic situation. The Congress (and, a little later and in some regions, Left-inclined Kisan Sabhas) rallied peasant proprietors and tenant smallholders (rather than share-croppers or agricultural labourers) around issues like reduction of revenue, irrigation charges, and rent and debt burdens, return of alienated land, or—the most radical slogan of this period—abolition of zamindari. The movement spread much more widely over the countryside than in Non-Cooperation and set up relatively stable organizations, but lacked, in the main, the sporadic and elemental millenarian flavour of 1919- 22. Congress support for even such specific kisan demands was often inhibited by its landlord links, and, as Hardiman has shown, a tendency towards growing conservatism by rich peasants was manifesting itself by the mid-19305 in areas like Gujarat, making Vallabhbhai Patel, the
hero of Bardoli, ultimately the greatest stalwart of the Congress Right. The Depression brought about a qualitative shift in the overall pattern of British colonial exploitation of India, which, though somewhat weakened by the First World War, had remained fundamentally unchanged till 1929. Down to the late-1920s, India still took in about 11 % of British exports (including no less than 28% of Lancashire textiles). Her export-surplus with non-U.K. countries of agricultural raw materials remained crucial for Britain's balance of payments, while India was still a vital field for British capital investment in extractive and export-oriented industries (mining, tea and jute). The Depression brought down the value of Indian exports from Rs 311 crores in 1929-30 to Rs 132 crores in 1932-33 (imports fell off in the same period from Rs 241 crores to Rs 133 crores), and the Home Charges could be met only by massive exports of gold through distress sales by
Indians (Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, pp. 19-20). Lancashire trade faced a major crisis which proved Irreversible : imports of cotton piecegoods from U.K. fell from 1248 million yards in 1929-30 to 376 million
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yards in 1931-32, and—after a slight recovery—to 145 million yards by 1939-40. (Amiya Bagchi, p. 238).
British—and particularly Lancashire—efforts to retrieve the situation underlay much of the political counter-offensive under the National Government from 1932 onwards. That the
Lancashire trade could not be saved, and New Delhi due to financial difficulties went in for more protective duties (on cotton, paper and sugar) of considerable benefit for Indian industrial
growth, have been construed sometimes as proof that India won real economic independence long before 1947. 'If London did not surrender control to elected Indian legislatures [by the financial provisions of the 1935 Act], it did hand power over to the Government of India.' (B.R. Tomlinson, Indian National Congress and the Raj 1929-1942, p. 30) Things in actual fact were considerably more complicated. Protective tariffs, as we shall see, were repeatedly linked to Imperial Preferences for Britain, and Lancashire in any case represented a diminishing interest within the overall structure of British capitalist colonialism. By 1935-36, non-traditional items like electrical goods, telecommunication and wireless apparatus, and sugar machinery had almost caught up in value with textiles in British exports to India. Along with the setting up of
subsidiary manufacturing units behind tariff walls in India by foreign companies (Lever Brothers and Metal Box in 1933, Dunlop and Imperial Chemicals by 1936-37), as well as the device of foreign-controlled 'India Limited' groups, these represented a new kind of imperialist interest in certain types of dependent Indian industrialization. Such moves towards indirect economic control through collaboration with Indian business groups in fact paralleled the constitutional developments of the same period. If commercial domination was ending, financial controls were defended bitterly and with considerable success. The rupee remained tied to sterling at the artificially high Is 6d rate, the Reserve Bank was kept insulated from legislative influence, and the 1935 Act armed the Viceroy with a whole battery of financial 'reservations' and 'safeguards'. As Basudev Chatterji has shown in a recent thesis, India's invisible remittances to the . U.K. (Home Charges, dividends on private capital investments, insurance and bank remittances, freight charges, royalties—what nationalists somewhat crudely called the 'drain of wealth', in other words) represented 16.31%
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of British's total invisible earnings in 1922, 14.77% in 1931, and 15.75% still in 1936. (Lancashire Cotton Trade and British Policy in India, p. 27)
From the point of view of the Indian bourgeoisie, though Depression did create a number of problems, the slackening of at least the older forms of colonial economic ties meant
opportunities for a major advance. Indian mill production of piecegoods went up from 2356.5 million yards in 1929-30 to 2982.7 in 1932-33 and 3905.3 in 1938-39, far surpassing Lancashire imports, though Japan still represented a major threat, particularly to Bombay. Sugar, cement and paper industries developed rapidly in the 1930s, while Tata Steel was strong enough to do
without protection after 1934. Indian capitalist advance was no longer confined to the Bombay- Ahmedabad region, for the 1930s saw significant progress in Calcutta, U.P., south India (the number of cotton mills in Madras province, for instance, being 26 in 1932 and 47 in 1937) as well as certain princely states (Baroda, Mysore, Bhopal, etc.). Apart from market protection, provided by the Lancashire crisis and government tariffs, Indian industry also benefited from the fact that agricultural prices declined much more sharply than industrial, while commercial and rural depression probably led to a transfer of capital from trade, usury and land-purchase to industry.
The political consequences of this growing strength of Indian capitalist groups were by no means unambiguous, for there were, as the following sections will indicate, considerable regional variations in attitudes and repeated conflicts between short-term and long-term interests. For the moment, we may confine ourselves to the general statement that the overall weight of bourgeois groups in national politics expanded massively in course of the 1930s, and at times proved quite decisive in Civil Disobedience, constitutional discussions, and ministry-making alike. Certainly the private papers of British officials (like Irwin, Hoare, or the Bombay Governor Sykes) reveal an almost obsessive concern with Indian business attitudes, while the recently-opened papers of a number of leading businessmen (Purshottamdas Thakurdas, H.P. Mody, Walchand Hirachand and Pheroze Sethna among Indians, Edward Benthall among the British) have become a most important source which confirms the same conclusion.
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Capitalist growth, particularly under conditions of weakening but still formidable colonial domination and world-wide Depression, inevitably meant growing burdens on the working class. Atrocious working conditions were made worse by repeated 'rationalization' drives (in 1928-29 and again after 1934), wage-cuts, and lay-offs. The pattern of consequent labour unrest involved a peak-point in 1928-29 (with 203 strikes and lock-outs involving 506,851 workers and the loss of 31,647,404 working days in 1928), a decline in face of repression (the Meerut trial of 1929- 33) and splits, and a revival again from the mid-1930s (379 strikes and lock-outs involving 647,801 in 1937—R.P. Dutt, India Today, p. 337). As already noted for the 1919-22 period, the high-points of labour militancy and general nationalist upsurge somehow never -coincide—a disjunction of possibly quite considerable significance for the modern history of our country.
While the weakening of ties with Britain and the capitalist world economy did lead to some indigenous industrial growth, this was more than counter-balanced for the country as a whole by the deep agrarian depression. Sivasubramanian's calculations indicate a decline in the per capita national income during the 1930s, and problems were sharpened by a significant demographic change from the 1920s. Population had risen by little more than 20 million between 1901 and 1921, from 284 to 306 millions; the corresponding figures for 1931 and 1941 were 338 and 389 million—a jump of about 80 million in an equivalent period. Economic stagnation and mass poverty remained the dominant features of late-colonial India : at constant (1938-39) prices, per capita national income has been estimated as Rs 60.4 in 1916-17, and only Rs 60.7 in 1946-47.