Colonialism, Chemical Technology and Industry in Southern India, 1880-1937 - Tapa dura

The central argument is that the differential industrial performance of each Presidency is largely due to the role of the major cash crop, specific to each, within the imperial economic system: jute in Bengal, cotton in Bombay, oilseeds in Madras. Not only was Madras's industrialization inhibited, in comparative terms, by the inability to find a niche for oilseed based manufactures in the export or the domestic market; the technology for these forms of manufacture, essentially of a chemical engineering nature, was more advanced than the mechanical engineering base of the cotton and jute textile industry of the other two Presidencies. Diligent attempts to leap-frog into the era of chemical-based industrialization, albeit with rudimentary technology, were superimposed on the barely perceptible evolution of an economy pivoted on the export of unprocessed cash-crops. The failure of these two processes to integrate into a system-transforming process of industrialization has to be explained in terms of a complex of issues, related both to direct constraints emanating from the colonial connection, and also to problems of technology.

Nasir Tyabji is currently a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Contemporary Studies of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.