India unbound by gurcharan das pdf free download

The truth is that the Raj was economically incompetent. Had it known it, Britain could have gained much from having a larger market for its manufactures. It introduced modern education and helped create a small middle class, but it did not educate the mass of the people. This was its other failure and linked to the first, for development is not possible without mass literacy.

This led to a tragic division of the country. Had India remained united, billions could have been saved in defense expenditures and invested instead in improving the lives of ordinary people in both countries. Whether an undivided India could have survived the Muslim-Hindu animosity is another counterfactual of history. The Raj gave us modern values and institutions, but it did not interfere with our ancient traditions and our religion. India has therefore preserved its spiritual heritage and the old way of life continues.

Many Indians despair over the divisiveness of caste and would prefer to wish it away. However, the hold of the Indian way of life is also a bulwark against the onslaught of the global culture. The British gave us the English language, which allowed us to converse with our compatriots in a country with sixteen official languages. However, English also divided us into two nations—the 10 percent elite who learned English and shut out the 90 percent who did not.

Knowing English today, though, gives Indians a competitive advantage in the global economy and is an important factor in our nascent success in the information economy. The British were different from our other invaders. They did not merge with us and remained aloof to the end. This shook our self-confidence. In school we had learned that the Indian subcontinent was a triangle with the Himalayas, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal as its sides.

The Himalayas ran from east to west and cut off the cold winds from the north. This allowed agriculture to prosper and created wealth, but it also attracted barbarian invaders from the north.

It gave us a warm climate so that no one who came wanted to leave. First came the Aryans, then the Turks, the Afghans, and the Mughals. They came, they stayed, and they merged and became Indian.

To accommodate them we merely created a new subcaste each time and they became part of our diversity. The British did not. But now that they have been gone for more than fifty years, our confidence is restored, especially among the young. Our infuriating diversity may also be of some value.

Because we have always learned to live with pluralism, it is possible that we might be better prepared to negotiate the diversity of the global economy. Two Smells of the Bazaar The principle of competition is, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, built in the very roots of the world; there is something in the nature of things that calls for a real victory and real defeat. Thus, I grew up with a low opinion of commerce and merchants. Partly it was the prejudice of caste. Belonging to the Arora subcaste, we regarded ourselves as Kshatriyas, superior to the trading castes.

Aroras and Khatris were the main Hindu castes of urban Punjab. Because of our administrative ability, we had been functionaries at princely courts.

Despite our low opinion of commerce, we were not above moneylending. When the British came in the mid-nineteenth century to the Punjab, we were among the first to embrace the Western learning and the modern professions.

Although Brahmins were superior to us in the caste hierarchy, they lost their social position because they were slow to learn English and confined themselves to Sanskrit learning and religious duties in the temple. As a child, I remember that my grandmother used to admonish our grocer for manipulating his weighing scale. It was the same with our family jeweler, but with him she did it with more finesse.

Each commercial transaction, it seems, was a challenge in our lives. It was always a case of us—educated, honest, taxpaying citizens—versus them—tax-dodging, street-smart traders. The treachery of the English East India Company and Omichand, the banker of Calcutta, reinforced our ancient prejudice against merchants. The East India Company came to India at the end of the sixteenth century to plunder, but soon discovered that there was more money to be made in trade.

With the decline of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century, autonomous kingdoms had begun to replace the dying Mughal authority.

One of these was Bengal, whose young nawab, Siraj-ud- Dowlah, came into conflict in with the ambitions of Robert Clive and the East India Company.

By now the English had set up the trading post of Calcutta, and it attracted the most enterprising Indian merchants, especially Marwaris from Rajasthan about whom more later. The most powerful among these was the banking house of Jagat Seth, who had played a part in installing the previous nawab. Clive smelled an opportunity in this uncertain political climate where merchants could be kingmakers.

The third member of the conspiracy was Omichand, a banker close to Jagat Seth and intermediary between the nawab and the company. The battle took place on 23 June in Plassey, a village kilometers north of Calcutta. In the end, the nawab lost five thousand men, the British eighteen, and the nawab fled the field. The British had won their most decisive battle in India and changed its history. They had learned how to conquer India. More valuable to the British was the tide they acquired to a large chunk of land around Calcutta, which later expanded to the whole of Bengal and then the entire country.

Just before the battle, Omichand hinted to Clive that he wanted a bigger share of the loot. Otherwise, he would squeal. He drew up two treaties—the real one on white paper and a false one on red paper that he showed to Omichand. The shrewd merchant never recovered and died after a few months. Is it surprising that we are suspicious of merchants and foreign companies? In contrast to these greedy and deceitful villains, we believed that saints—Gandhi and Nehru—had created our new nation in It seemed possible to believe then that India would be great because she was good.

The Indian defeat at Plassey in is similar in some respects to the Chinese defeat in the Opium. War a hundred years later. They were both low-key English victories over ancient and proud civilizations. Both were mild, localized affairs, unimportant to contemporary observers. Yet both started a chain reaction of unpredictable events and opened the ancient lands to a long period of foreign subjugation, bloody conflict, and the entry of Western ideas and technology. A small band of greedy English trader-adventurers showed to the world the impotence of two enfeebled civilizations, and how their immense wealth could be looted with ease.

They proved that the natives were passive and divided, resigned to quick defeat. This humiliation of two great peoples, Indian and Chinese, left a suspiciousness of traders and foreigners and a scar of xenophobia. We may have looked down on our banias, or merchants, but we loved money and the bazaar. People came from all over the northwest to taste its gaiety. And if something could not be had in Anarkali, it was probably not worth having. One day in , he remembered, there was even more excitement than usual.

He was returning after briefing a barrister at the High Court, and he entered the bazaar from the Lahori Gate end. Passing by the splendid row of flower vendors on the left and the mountain of fruit overflowing in an amphitheater on the right, he stopped at the Kesari Aerated Water Company.

He ordered, as he always did, a tall, refreshing glass of fresh lime juice. Suddenly there was a buzz in the bazaar and a cry went out as a procession entered Lahori Gate.

Windows sprang open, balconies filled up, and people began to shower flowers on the fine-looking Jawaharlal Nehru, who was leading the procession on a white horse. Nehru had become the new president of the Congress in the historic Lahore session of Even my grandfather, who had a distaste for street politics, was touched by the spontaneous affection that Anarkali showered upon its future ruler. In the confusion, however, someone in the jostling crowd collided with my grandfather and he fell down.

It was one of the processionists, who turned around and immediately gave my grandfather a helping hand. The stranger apologized profusely. With great courtesy, he offered to take him to a hospital. But my grandfather was not hurt. The stranger had an impressive face, recalled my grandfather. He was slim, dressed in a fresh dhoti and a well-pressed silk kurta and a black sleeveless Jawahar jacket.

Even though he was one of the richest men in India, he was courteous and he spoke very softly. Birla invited my grandfather to join him for tea after the procession. My grandfather readily agreed, and the two drove to the comfortable home of another merchant.

The Birlas, he learned, came from a little village called Pilani, buried deep in the sands of Rajasthan, kilometers due south from where we lived. They belonged to the commercial Maheshwari subcaste.

Shiv Narain decided to go to Bombay. He rode a camel for kilometers, taking twenty days to reach Ahmedabad. From there he caught a train to Bombay, where he stayed until he had amassed a fortune trading in opium, silver, and cotton.

The American South was infamous for slavery, but it was famous for growing fine, long-staple cotton, which it supplied to the textile mills of Britain.

The mills converted it to cloth and sold it around the world. Overnight, the American Civil War came and cut this supply chain. As the supply of raw cotton dried up, prices began to skyrocket. Traders in Bombay smelled an opportunity. The enterprising ones took off for the villages and convinced the farmers of western India to switch over to the particular long variety, suitable for the English mills. Soon the Indian farmers had converted, and with prices booming, a number of traders made huge fortunes in the s supplying the cotton to Lancashire.

Shiv Narain Birla was one of them. Some of these fortunes were reinvested in the first textile mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad in the s and s. But Shiv Narain, after seven years in Bombay, returned to Pilani a rich man. There, surrounded by the sand dunes and shrub of the Aravalli hills, he built a grand haveli for his family, beside a magnificent banyan tree.

He had the exterior walls painted in ocher, with riotous frescoes of parading elephants and camels and charging horses, similar in style to the Bengal Company paintings. In the inner and outer whitewashed courtyards, under elaborately decorated balconies and brackets, he had artists paint scenes of merchant activity, as well as of military action and local flora and fauna. Befitting their new stature, the Birlas also acquired a luxurious bullock-chariot. GD was born in this house and left in the care of female relatives.

GD went to a local school where there were no books and classes were held in the open air. One day the teacher disappeared without warning, taking off, it was rumored, with a local widow, and the school closed down.

At nine, he was sent off to school in Calcutta, and soon after that to Bombay to learn bookkeeping and business skills, and a private tutor was engaged to improve his English. At fourteen, he returned to Pilani to get married, and a year later he had a son. Because of the plague in Bombay, the family shifted to Calcutta at the turn of the century.

A few years later they set up their own firm, specializing in opium futures. The instability of the opium market offered great potential for speculative coups and the Birlas made many successful ones.

At the age of sixteen, GD set himself up in Calcutta as an independent trader in jute, with his own company. Thus began his first contacts with Englishmen, who were his customers. During his association with them he began to see their superiority in business methods and their organizing capacity. But their racial arrogance bothered him. He was not allowed to use the lift to go up to their offices, nor their benches while waiting to see them.

With the coming of the First World War, the demand for jute sacks soared and GD made a handsome fortune. After the war GD wanted to invest his wartime profits in a jute factory in Calcutta, making him the first Birla to enter industry. But it was not easy to break into the stronghold of a Scottish monopoly that had governed the jute industry since its beginning.

Every time GD bought some land to start the mill, the Scots Andrew Yule, in particular would buy land all around it and deny him access to the road. But GD was not deterred. He knew that his future lay in manufacturing. One night he quietly bought land further south, towards Budge-Budge, along a curve on the Hooghly River. Having got the land, he needed credit. The Imperial Bank, under the influence of the monopoly, refused him a loan for the machinery.

Eventually it relented, but it charged him an extremely high rate of interest compared to what it charged British firms. Transport charges too, especially for river traffic, were raised steeply, in a further attempt to stop Indian intrusion into what had been a British preserve. Next, the jute monopolists got to the machine makers in Britain and persuaded them to quote prohibitively high prices for the machines.

In despair, he almost gave up. He agreed to sell the factory to Andrew Yule, his largest competitor. When he walked into the Andrew Yule offices to conclude the deal, the Scottish manager chided him for having had the audacity to start a jute mill.

Stung, GD instantly withdrew his offer. He resolved that come what may, he would break the jute monopoly. After that, he was not to be stopped.

Two years later GD set up a spanking new textile mill in Gwalior in partnership with the maharaja of Gwalior which eventually became one of the largest composite textile mills in the country. The following year he turned the tables on Andrew Yule. The Scottish company had suffered in the postwar depression and it needed desperately to raise cash to pay its debts.

In he took over a confectionery company. As soon as tariff protection was extended to sugar, the Birlas set up four sugar plants between and He also went into publishing, and in a modest way into soaps and chemicals. All his investments prospered, despite the depression, and in the mid-thirties, he started an insurance company and also a large papermaking company called Orient Paper. The Second World War provided another major stimulus to growth and Birla assets grew sixfold during the war.

More significantly, GD became the largest supporter of the Congress freedom movement and a close friend of Mahatma Gandhi. They wrote to each other almost daily—their correspondence, running into four volumes, each of nearly five hundred pages, was published under the title Bapu: A Unique Association.

It also got him into trouble with the British. Birla had come to Lahore when my grandfather chanced upon him. Their meeting left a deep impression on my grandfather. Until that day he had not given much thought to merchants. He had certainly never believed that merchants and commerce were the lifeblood of an economy. Today [the older culture] is fighting against a new and all-powerful opposition from the bania [Vaishya] civilization of the capitalist West.

When he came to power in , Nehru institutionalized the prejudice. Lord Wavell, viceroy in the forties, shared the bias against Marwaris.

Nevertheless, he recognized G. Wavell wrote: I think Queen Mary would find G. Birla better company than J. Tata if she wishes to invite one of them to lunch. Tata is a pleasant enough fellow to meet, but I have not found him communicative, and as a casual acquaintance he is much the same as any other wealthy young man who has had a conventional type of education.

Birla has plenty to say, and whatever one may think of Marwari businessmen and their ways, he is well worth talking to. I think Queen Mary would have a very dull lunch with Tata and quite an interesting one with Birla. Mahatma Gandhi, a bania himself, had no qualms about accepting money from Birla or other businessmen. Nor was he contemptuous of commerce like Nehru. He came from Gujarat, which had many ports and vigorous commerce, and where the merchant was held in esteem. But Gandhi could not change our suspicion of traders and commerce.

The Japanese, on the other hand, who suspect foreigners even more than we do, did succeed in getting over their mistrust of businessmen. The Japanese responded to the Western challenge in a vastly different way. After their humiliation by Commodore Matthew Perry in , they recognized that their ancient civilization was like a paper-thin shoji door, too flimsy to defend them against the superior technology of the West.

Instead of tiresomely proclaiming their own superior past, they humbly went to school during the Meiji period, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They vigorously began to acquire Western learning, skills, and ways. They took to Western dress, laws, methods, and technology.

Unlike the ambivalent Indians and Chinese, they became so good at copying that they eventually beat the West at its own game. The Europeans had brought to India, China, and Japan a virile new culture based on science, modern organization, and the ideas of the Enlightenment. The Japanese responded quickly and with purpose.

The Meiji state sponsored a full-scale reform of the economy and society, and the people responded with discipline and teamwork. They were so successful that by they had defeated the Russians. The Chinese embarked on a more fitful and tragic path, first under the Kuomintang and then the communists, and tens of millions lost their lives in three huge convulsions between and In India, it took three generations of freedom fighters, liberals, reformers, and anticolonialists to create national consciousness and pride.

After Independence, democracy took root in India and gradually the masses acquired a stake in the system, periodically electing representatives even from the lowest castes. But the rulers shackled the energies of the people by adopting a socialist economic path that led us to a dead end.

Indians won their economic independence only after Thus, India embraced democracy before capitalism. This makes its journey to modernity unique, and this singular reversal explains a great deal about Indian society. Among the big three in Asia, Japan won first prize in the economic race, China seems to have taken second place, and India came in last. The Japanese are probably three to four generations ahead of India. The Chinese, who were at a comparable level of development in the mid- s, are now a generation ahead.

Why did India fail? It has little to do with our colonial past. Neither is it a problem of national character. On the same day Pakistan was born, carved out of Punjab and Bengal. Sir Cyril Radcliffe did the actual carving in five weeks, and the demarcation on the map came to be known as the Radcliffe Boundary Award. The partition led to an unprecedented transfer of population and rendered ten million homeless. As a part of this mass movement, over half a million people lost their lives; there were 22, reported cases of rape and kidnapping of women; , people were declared missing.

My family had also become refugees. Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge …. At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance …. We heard the national anthem of the new nation for the first time. Few recognized it. My father was the first to stand up. Then one by one the other listeners got up, until everyone was standing at attention. Despite our travails, we realized our good fortune in having witnessed the birth of our free nation.

Nehru achieved much in the seventeen years that he went on to rule, but he failed in this task. After fifty years the failure is staggering: four out of ten Indians are illiterate; half are miserably poor, earning less than a dollar a day; one-third of the people do not have access to safe drinking water; only a sixth of the villages have modern medical facilities.

Even more devastating, the system that Nehru created and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, perfected actually suppressed growth. The irony is that this system, which was made in the name of the poor, in the end did very little for them.

If a small portion of this money had been spent wisely on education and health, it would have delivered far greater benefits to the average Indian. Famines have been eliminated, and the country sits routinely on a mountain of grain reserves each year.

Life expectancy has doubled from thirty to sixty-four years; literacy has risen from 17 percent to 62 percent although female literacy is below 40 percent. Infant mortality has been halved. The stagnant economy, which grew by 1 percent per year in the first half of the century, has grown by 4. It grew 3. We took a train from Jullunder to Kalka, where we changed to the miniature train for Simla.

The journey through the lower Himalayas to Simla in August refreshed our exhausted emotions and marked the decisive break with our bloody past. The stench of death was left far behind. On each bend of the winding journey there were green slopes with tiers of neatly cultivated terraces. Towards the south, we could see the Ambala plains far below, and the Kasauli hills in the foreground. Higher up, belts of pine, fir, and deodar punctuated the terraces. Masses of rhododendrons clothed the slopes.

Northwards rose the confused Himalayan mountain chains, range after snowy range. The train stopped at Barog, where a white car on rails went speeding by.

It used to be only the white sahibs who traveled in it. Since Independence, everyone is on it. Amazing, how quickly the brown sahibs have slid into the shoes of the departing masters! From afar, it looked like a mythical, green-carpeted garden dotted with red-roofed houses. Our excitement mounted.

It was the best train journey of our lives. Yet this massive construction was not enough to modernize and lift the Indian economy. India alone among the great railway countries remained unindustrialized. In the other railway powers—the United States, Russia, and Germany—the railway had been a dynamo of the industrial revolution.

We were all proud. At a time when jobs were scarce he had landed a coveted job in the railways entirely on his own initiative. He passed an exam, cleared the interview, and went off to Jamalpur for a six-year training program.

Jeet was not impressed with either the colonial setting or the training program. Nor did he think much of his teachers.

But he stuck it out, made a name for himself as a tennis player, and in the end was sent on his first job to Calcutta as assistant mechanical engineer in the Sealdah division.

Over the years, Jeet told us many things about the Railways. The story of Indian Railways began in London in the s. The promoters were adventurous, determined men. Once opened up by railways, they said, India would become a fabulous supply house of cotton and wheat and a huge consumer of textiles and manufactured products of Britain. They told the great mercantile houses that they would be able to bring coal by rail to Calcutta from the mines of western Bengal and become even wealthier.

They put together a powerful coalition in Parliament and exerted great pressure on the British government. They succeeded in getting hugely favorable contracts, which allowed them to raise funds in Britain to build and manage the railway operations in India—all of it guaranteed by the government against any risk of loss.

They could not have got a better deal. The East Indian Railway Company was one of the first to get started. It built and operated a line running a few dozen miles north from Calcutta along the Hooghly River. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. A Liberal Case for a Strong State. Nov 16, Sharath Chandra Darsha rated it it was amazing Shelves: Now the country has realised that its all about the revolutionary ideas that will help the country to think out of the box rather following the outdated policies, Many private entepreneurs are on the move slowly but steadily building up India in a good way And for its liberal voice and for the distinct voice of the author who appears to have the mind of an economist and the heart of a middle-class Indian.

India has failed bigtime in building up the india unbound by gurcharan das quotient india unbound by gurcharan das terms of harnessing their abilities which would bring about the needed outcome. The book starts with a brief history of 18th and 19th century India. This india unbound by gurcharan das account has so much infectious energy, it spills over you. From then on the writing takes on a breathless character, as if Das in his old age has recaptured the spirit that ubbound supposed to awaken Independent India half a century ago.

But once I started to read the book, I was so impressed by the way Das explained the india unbound by gurcharan das of India in rather simple words. During her leadership India was still grappling with a divide created by the castes which further hindered the path to the economic success.

Before reading this book, i was completely unaware of the economic ground of my country on the world platform. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Basically, it says that if the poor get rich and a few people get filthy rich, that is better than worrying about the distribution of wealth gurchaan no one getting rich. None of them saw our Public Enterprises were not making profit but were a unnecessary load to the Government.

Das traces these developments and tells the stories of the major players from Nehru through india unbound by gurcharan das. Also one has to keep india unbound by gurcharan das mind that Nehru and his economic policies were as much a product of their times and the prevailing world-view of the time was pro-socialist as well. Gurucharan Das made this book extremely interesting and informative by powerful usage of anecdotes and statistics. Aug 07, Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it Shelves: Britain has become accustomed to Indian authors whose ease indiaa English belies their mother tongue.

One of the best among recent books on India. In India, there are no plans for a paperback because the hardback is still selling well. He also gets into much details about the opening up gurcharam the economy in by Dr. Published 1 month ago. More important, when the keys become a normal, regular part of your Christian practice, then you can move forward with ever-growing freedom, ever deeper conversion and conformity to Christ.

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