Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 The contraction of England: an inaugural lecture 1984
- 2 The twentieth-century revolutions in Monsoon Asia
- 3 India and Britain: the climactic years 1917–1947
- 4 The forgotten Bania: merchant communities and the Indian National Congress
- 5 Counterpart experiences: India/Indonesia 1920s–1950s
- 6 Emergencies and elections in India
- 7 East Africa: towards the new order 1945–1963 (with John Lonsdale)
- 8 Africa Year 1960
- 9 The end of the British Empire in Africa
- 10 History and independent Africa's political trauma
- 11 Political superstructures in post-colonial states
- 12 Little Britain and large Commonwealth
- 13 Australia in the eastern hemisphere
- Index
3 - India and Britain: the climactic years 1917–1947
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 The contraction of England: an inaugural lecture 1984
- 2 The twentieth-century revolutions in Monsoon Asia
- 3 India and Britain: the climactic years 1917–1947
- 4 The forgotten Bania: merchant communities and the Indian National Congress
- 5 Counterpart experiences: India/Indonesia 1920s–1950s
- 6 Emergencies and elections in India
- 7 East Africa: towards the new order 1945–1963 (with John Lonsdale)
- 8 Africa Year 1960
- 9 The end of the British Empire in Africa
- 10 History and independent Africa's political trauma
- 11 Political superstructures in post-colonial states
- 12 Little Britain and large Commonwealth
- 13 Australia in the eastern hemisphere
- Index
Summary
In 1936 Rajendra Prasad, president that year of the Indian National Congress, remarked that
from being at one time an organisation of a small number of persons educated in schools and colleges [Congress] has now become the largest organisation of the common people drawn very largely from the village population and counting amongst its members lakhs of peasants and cultivators and a sprinkling of industrial and field workers.
From an early date the Indian National Congress was supported by a small number of individuals drawn from a wide spectrum of Indian communities. It was only in the decades following the First World War that it won substantial rural support. In the early 1930s Congress and British sources seemed to agree that ‘the Congress standing army is at most one lac’ (100,000); and although in 1936 Prasad was writing ‘lakhs’ in the plural, he still did not claim ‘millions’ or ‘crores’ (10,000,000). He drew a clear distinction, moreover, between ‘peasants and cultivators’ on the one hand, and ‘industrial and field workers’ on the other. The main support for Congress, he asserted, came from the former.
In the course of some lectures in Patna in 1971, Professor Nurul Hasan compared the structure of mediaeval India to a pyramid, with the emperor at the apex, below him the ‘chieftains’, and below them the ‘intermediaries’. Then, at the base, superimposed upon a ‘considerable body of agricultural labourers’, were those he called ‘primary zamindars’.
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- Information
- Eclipse of Empire , pp. 58 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991