False Economy - Alan Beattie [77]
Those with particular interest in propagating the system—the high-caste Brahmins—were much in demand by Indian princes as scholars and bureaucrats, because of their high levels of literacy. What better position to propagate a doctrine that entrenched them and their patrons in a leading role in society? "Legitimation by religion has always been decisive for an alliance between politically and socially dominant classes and the priesthood," Weber wrote. In return for a dominant role running a prince's administration, the priests consecrated his position at the top of society according to what they declared to be the principles of Hinduism.
Over time, just as the Islamic partnership and inheritance system hardened and prevented economies from adapting to new circumstances, so did the ossification of social strata in India. It is hard for labor to find new ways of specializing when classes of workers are irredeemably bound to a specific occupation. That goes double when those classifications are used to deny selected classes education and other ways to improve their condition.
And, as we will see in a later chapter, once societies become ordered in a given pattern, they can often become stuck that way. Once the caste system was firmly established, it would have required vast amounts of courage and political energy to get out of it. To establish a new casteless community, a lower-caste leader would have had to persuade a higher-caste counterpart who had necessary complementary skills (such as a high level of literacy) also to break the code.
This fits the facts in India rather better than does the notion that Hinduism itself is intrinsically bad for growth. As far as we can tell, the Indian economy grew quite well very early on, and then got stuck. It got to a relatively high per capita income in ancient times, and then remained at about the same level from 300 B.C. right down to the twentieth century. The economic and social system apparently delivered enough prosperity to avoid the kind of cataclysm that occurred in other societies, while not achieving growth in productivity.
Even with big changes in political rule, when the (Muslim) Moghul dynasty swept down from Central Asia in the sixteenth century and eventually took over almost the whole of the subcontinent, the underlying system of economy and caste was left in place. And, as we will see, the British if anything tightened, rather than loosened, the social bindings, finding caste a useful device to exploit for dividing and ruling. The population of the Indian subcontinent increased from around 100 million in 300 B.C., to 125 million in 1600 to 300 million by 1911, and the economy grew along with it, but per capita income was perhaps only 10 percent or so higher in 1947 than it had been two centuries earlier.
Poor Indians were entrapped in poverty, but it is hard to argue that they choose it. In the presence of a powerful economic incentive and the freedom to act on it, any objections raised by religion or culture are often trampled underfoot. In the 1960s there was a series of scientific agricultural breakthroughs funded by Western institutions, the so-called Green Revolution. Researchers developed new strains of wheat, rice, and other crops with much higher yields than traditional varieties. These were rapidly adopted by growers in India, as in much of the developing world. There were few signs of farmers lounging around their fields, pondering the mysteries of the cycle of rebirth when they could be enriching themselves by responding promptly and substantially to a strong market signal.
In fact, when the Indian economy