Poverty

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Dear Vineet,
You said
> 	I am not a historian or otherwise but it is a widely accepted
> fact in India that the invasions are the real cause of poverty.

With respect, Vineet, I think that the lack of long, careful study of
India's history is precisely why so many people believe these
caricatures of historical causality.  (Actually, that's beginning to
sound like quite a good reason for promoting the teaching of Indian
culture and history!)

Your are right that this is what is widely believed, but that doesn't
make it true, necessarily. It seems reasonable to argue that the causes
of India's poverty are both more nuanced and more obvious than the
theory that I have caricatured as the "robber baron" theory of
Imperialism.   The "nuanced" bit is much more hard to get to grips
with, of course, and involves difficult studies of caste, imperial
economics, technological progress and/or stagnation, and several other
issues.

There were indeed some real robber barons, amongst whom I think I would
count Mahmud of Ghazni.   (What do others think of this?  Were there
"mitigating factors" or "culture-bound" explanations for what Mahmud
did?)  But the Moghuls both took and gave, not least in contemporary
tourist revenues. (Like mad Maximilian with his fairy castle in
Bavaria.)  It is a much more sensitive and controversial thing to start
talking about how much the Raj gave to India, as well as how much it
took, but the historical debt is arguably in both directions.

To try to assess the actual balance of payments for any of this would
be fiendishly difficult to the point of impossibility, since one would
want any such reckoning to take into account all sorts of incalculables
like language, art, music and even genes, as well as more obvious
things like judicial systems, jewellery, cloth, railways, canals,
salaries, botanical transfers, and so forth.

Mostly, my impression is that the people who use arguments about
historical indebtedness most vociferously are those who have the least
factual basis for their broad claims.

The "obvious" bit is, of course, over-population.

> 	India was called a "golden bird" before all these invasions.
> People were happy. Look at all the stories about India. None or almost
> none seems to indicate people were unhappy or poor. 

This isn't true.  There are poor people on nearly every page of writing
from all periods of India's past: the literature abounds in thieves, beggars,
poor wandering brahmanas, rogue ascetics, prostitutes, pimps, poor farmers,
destitute widows, poor tribals, abandoned disabled people, wandering lepers, 
and so on.  Just like in the history of any country.

Best wishes,

Dominik