Urbanisation and Industrialisation

Urbanisation and Industrialisation: The Colonial Experience

Industrialisation means the rise of machine-based production using inanimate power sources such as steam or electricity. In standard Western sociology, we learn that even in the most advanced traditional civilisations, most people worked on the land. Low technological development meant only a small minority could be freed from agricultural work. In contrast, a key feature of industrial societies today is that a large majority of employed people work in factories, offices, or shops rather than in agriculture. Over 90 per cent of people in the West live in towns and cities, where most jobs are found and new opportunities are created.

We usually associate urbanisation with industrialisation because they often occur together — but not always.

The British Example

Britain, the first society to undergo industrialisation, was also the earliest to move from being rural to predominantly urban. In 1800, well under 20 per cent of the population lived in towns or cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1900, this proportion had reached 74 per cent. London had about 1.1 million people in 1800; by the start of the twentieth century, its population had grown to over 7 million. London was then by far the largest city the world had ever seen — a vast manufacturing, commercial, and financial centre at the heart of a still-expanding British empire.

The Indian Experience: Deindustrialisation and Decline

In India, the impact of the same British industrialisation led to deindustrialisation in some sectors and the decline of old urban centres. While manufacturing boomed in Britain, traditional exports of cotton and silk manufactures from India declined in the face of competition from Manchester. This period saw the further decline of cities such as Surat and Masulipatnam, while Bombay, Chennai, and Madras grew.

When the British took over Indian states, towns like Thanjavur, Dhaka, and Murshidabad lost their courts and, therefore, some of their artisans and court gentry. From the end of the nineteenth century, with the installation of mechanised factory industries, some towns became much more heavily populated.

Urban luxury manufactures — like the high-quality silks and cottons of Dacca or Murshidabad — were hit first by the almost simultaneous collapse of indigenous court demand and the external market on which they had largely depended. Village crafts in the interior, especially in regions other than eastern India where British penetration was earliest and deepest, probably survived much longer. They came to be seriously affected only with the spread of railways.

Sociological writings in India have often discussed both the contradictory and unintended consequences of colonialism. Comparisons have been made between industrialisation in the West and the growth of a Western middle class with that of the Indian experience.

Industrialisation and New Social Groups

Industrialisation is not just about new machine-based production — it is also a story of the growth of new social groups in society and new social relationships. In other words, it is about changes in the Indian social structure.

The substitutes offered by the East India Company and subsequently by the British government were land ownership and facilities for education in English. The first remained unconnected with agricultural productivity, and the second with the mainstream of Indian cultural traditions. These alternatives were not sufficient to create any genuine middle class. The zamindars became parasites on land, and the graduates became job hunters.

Colonial Cities: The Concrete Expression of Global Capitalism

Cities had a key role in the economic system of empires. Coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai were favoured because from here primary commodities could be easily exported and manufactured goods could be cheaply imported. Colonial cities were the prime link between the economic centre or core in Britain and the periphery or margins in colonised India. In this sense, cities were the concrete expression of global capitalism.

In British India, for example, Bombay was planned and redeveloped so that by 1900 over three-quarters of India's raw cotton were shipped through the city. Calcutta exported jute to Dundee, while Madras sent coffee, sugar, indigo dyes, and cotton to Britain.

Urbanisation in the colonial period saw the decline of some earlier urban centres and the emergence of new colonial cities.

The Model of the South Asian Colonial City

The European town in a colonial city had spacious bungalows, elegant apartment houses, planned streets, trees on both sides of the street, and clubs for afternoon and evening get-togethers. Open space was reserved for Western recreational facilities such as race and golf courses, soccer and cricket. When domestic water supply, electric connections, and sewage links were available or technically possible, the European town residents utilised them fully, whereas their use was quite restricted to the native town.

The Story of Kolkata

Kolkata was one of the first of such colonial cities. In 1690, an English merchant named Job Charnock arranged to lease three villages (named Kolikata, Gobindapur, and Sutanuti) by the river Hugli in order to set up a trading post. In 1698, Fort William was established by the river for defensive purposes, and a large open area was cleared around the fort for military engagements. The fort and the open area (called the Maidan) formed the core of the city that emerged rather rapidly.

The Tea Plantations: An Example of Colonial Industrialisation

Industrialisation and urbanisation did not happen in India the way they did in Britain. This is not because India began industrialisation late, but because early industrialisation and urbanisation in the modern period were governed by colonial interests.

The tea industry in India serves as an example. Official reports show how the colonial government often used unfair means to hire and forcibly keep labourers, and clearly acted on behalf of the British planters.

How were labourers recruited?

• The tea industry began in India in 1851. Most tea gardens were situated in Assam.
• In 1903, the industry employed 4,79,000 permanent and 93,000 temporary employees.
• Since Assam was sparsely populated and tea plantations were often located on uninhabited hillsides, the bulk of the sorely needed labour had to be imported from other provinces.
• To bring thousands of people every year from their far-off homes into strange lands with an unhealthy climate and strange fevers required financial and other incentives, which the tea-planters of Assam were unwilling to offer.
• Instead, they had recourse to fraud and coercion, and persuaded the government to aid and abet them by passing penal laws.
• The recruitment of labourers for tea gardens of Assam was carried on for years mostly by contractors under the provisions of the Transport of Native Labourers Act (No. III) of 1863 of Bengal, as amended in 1865, 1870, and 1873.

How did the planters live?

The British managers and their wives lived lives of luxury. Huge, sprawling bungalows set on sturdy wooden stilts to protect the inmates from wild animals were surrounded by velvety lawns and jewel-bright flower beds. They had trained a large number of malis, bawarchis, and bearers to serve them to perfection. Their wide verandahed houses gleamed and glistened under the ministrations of this army of liveried servants. Everything from scouring powder to self-raising flour, from safety pins to silverware, from delicate Nottingham lace tablecloths to bath salts, came up the river on steamers. Even the large cast-iron bathtubs that were invitingly placed in huge bathrooms — tubs filled every morning by busy bistiwallahs carrying buckets up from the bungalow's well — had been brought up via steamer.

Industrialisation in Independent India

The colonial state had an important role in the way industrialisation and urbanisation took place in India. The independent Indian state played an active role in promoting industrialisation, in some sense responding to the impact that colonialism had on the growth of industry in India.

For Indian nationalists, the issue of economic exploitation under colonial rule was central. Images of the pre-colonial fabled riches of India contrasted with the poverty of British India. The Swadeshi movement strengthened loyalty to the national economy. Modern ideas made people realise that poverty was preventable. Indian nationalists saw rapid industrialisation of the economy as the path towards both growth and social equity. Development of heavy and machine-making industries, expansion of the public sector, and holding of a large cooperative sector were considered very important.

Many new industrial towns emerged in India in the years after Independence — towns like Bokaro, Bhilai, Rourkela, and Durgapur. Townships were also built around fertiliser plants and oil wells.

Urbanisation in Independent India

Recent years of globalisation have led to enormous expansion and change of cities. In the twenty-first century, India is witnessing a fast pace of urbanisation with the ambitious scheme of 'Smart City' initiated by the Government of India.

Three Types of Urban Impact on Villages

Sociologist M.S.A. Rao, writing on the different kinds of urbanisation witnessed in the first two decades after independence, argued that many villages all over India are becoming increasingly subject to the impact of urban influences. But the nature of urban impact varies according to the kind of relations a village has with a city or town. He describes three different situations: …