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 The acknowledged high priest of the drain theory was Dadabhai Naoroji. It was in may 1867 that Dadabhai Naoroji put forward the idea that Britain was draining India. From then on for nearly half a century he launched a raging campaign against the drain, hammering at the theme through every possible form of public communication.The drain he declared, was the basic cause of India's poverty and the fundamental evil of British rule in India. Thus, he argued in 1880 it is not pitiless operations of economic laws but it is the thoughtless hand pitiless actions of the British policy it is the pitiless eating ofIndia's substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England in short it is a pitiless perversion of economic laws by the bleeding to which India is subjected that is destroying India. Other nationalist leaders, journalist and propagandists followed in the footsteps of Dadabhai Naoroji. R.C Dutt, for example made the drain the major theme of his Economic History of India, he protested that taxation raised by a king says the Indian poet is like the moisture sucked up by the sun to be returned to the earth as fertilizing rain. But the moisture raised from Indian soil now descends as fertilizing rain largely on other lands not on India So great an economic drain out of the resources of a land wood impoverish the most prosperous countries on earth it has reduced India to a land of famines more frequent, more widespread, and more fatal, than any known before in the history of India, or of the world. The drain theory incorporated all the threads of the nationalists critique of colonialism, for the drain denuded India of the productive capital, its agriculture and industries so desperately needed. Indeed the drain theory was the high water mark of the nationalists leaders comprehensive, interrelated and integrated economic analysis of the colonial situation. Through the drain theory, the exploitative character of the British rule could be made visible. By attacking the drain the nationalists were able to call into question ,in an uncompromising manner the economic essence of imperialism. next page >> |
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