Saturday, April 29, 2017

Global Knowledge Infrastructure and World Wide Web





The year of 2016 was recorded as the hottest year in history as reported by the UK Met Office and NASA and NOAA in the US – and they also depicted that we have experienced 16 of the 17 hottest years during this century. Climate scientists and many scholars currently blame this climate change and global warming on the human activities that have caused in warming up the earth to the level which it was 115,000 years ago (Carrington, 2017). With this drastic change in the climate, we are encountering discourses from around the world and specifically the powerful nation that global warming is a hoax. How do we deal with such denialism and present an alternative discourse showing that the climate change is real and we are already on fire. The apparent changes in the climatic conditions are definitely not enough to stop the narcissist development enthusiasts for looking for all the comfort at the cost of ruining the nature.  In this paper, I will engage with Paul Edwards, author of A Vast Machine, who sets such skepticism to rest using his idea of a combination of data and model which he calls the global knowledge infrastructure and how the World Wide Web is changing the paradigm of climate knowledge. 

Paul Edwards has thoroughly presented a historical view of the evolution of a wide scientific field that was initiated by curiosity of a few explorers and scholars in 19th-century and now is engaged in by a worldwide community of scientists, engineers, and other specialists working with huge number of data, highly complex computer models, and many sophisticated and modern instruments and measurement platforms. His main argument is that the ways in which environmental measurements are now carried out, analyzed, interpreted, and utilized in science and in global debates about environmental management and policy have designed and framed our “knowledge infrastructure”. He has presented the notion that the raw data cannot make up the global climate knowledge without framing in a model that helps us in understanding the overall scenario. This combination of acquiring data globally and passing them through a series of data models is what makes up the “Global Knowledge infrastructure”. Paul is of the opinion that computers are absolutely important in this knowledge and has categorized the knowledge about climate change into three kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which reconstruct climate history from historical weather data; and data models, used to mix and adjust measurements from various sources. 

The introduction of World Wide Web in this changing context of understanding knowledge about climate change has made the dispersion of knowledge easier and accessible. With this openness, there comes an issue of what resources and models to trust when we have everyone accessing the data and presenting their understanding of the climate change. Many people write on internet and/or talk about climate change in popular media and have more reach to people than people who actually research on data and put them in different models. He warns us that one should not buy every argument in climate knowledge; rather the academic papers which go through various peer reviews and survive the critiques can be trusted. The good part is that now “there are too many models, there are too many controls on the data, too much scrutiny of every possibility, and there is too much integrity in the IPCC process that the denialists view of climate change being a hoax cannot be true” (Edwards, 2010).
In conclusion, Edwards has engaged with the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change, showing that over the year data and models have united to form a stable, consistent, and responsible basis for establishing the reality of global warming.

References
Carrington, D. (2017). 2016 hottest year ever recorded – and scientists say human activity to blame. The Guardian. 
Edwards, P. (2010). Vast Machine (1st ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Let the Chai Wala Alone

Many of my friends who call themselves feminist are going crazy over the chai wala picture and sharing the pictures like crazy. There is a huge problem with this. How many people have his consent to do this? EVEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER DID NOT TAKE HIS CONSENT TO TAKE HIS PICTURE OR SHARE IT!! Why is the media outside his chai khana with their camera and all and are making his videos, trying to dig into his personal life and what not? Consider a girl being treated like that, and we would have gone crazy that a poor girl is being objectified. It is not just about gender, it is also because of the class difference. Just because he is a *Chai wala*, you can do whatever the fudge you want with him and his picture? If he was a rich business owner and a hot guy, would people be approaching him and using him in all their social media? Probably not. Also, thinking that he is a guy and objectifying him is okay further suppresses women and ideas of gender equality. Feminism is not biased, it is about all genders and it is about humans. I think, we as a nation and specially the media is violating all his basic consent rights for their fame. He is not in your zoo that you can do all this. Girls and guys, please hold it and respect him and his body just like you want yours to be respected.
PS: I have been viral several times for good cause, and the fame is really fun but the insecurity which comes with it is also very hard to deal with.
Thank you if you read this far.
Here is a video where you can get an idea of how uncomfortable he is.
https://www.facebook.com/ExpressPkVideos/videos/1772219239732309/
#chaiwala #feminism

Saturday, October 15, 2016

The Making of Modern Islam



Modernity is celebrated worldwide by the people of our time, and modern people think of themselves as the best creatures who have ever lived on the surface of earth and are superior to all those people who came before them. The consequences of modernity and progress are rarely considered because of the dominant western discourse, which acts as the promotor and the prophet of modernity. The notion of modernity has changed various aspects of our society, culture, traditions, environment, religion, etc. and these changes are mostly coming as a negative impact on our world and our way of living. Different religions, a modern category itself, including Islam have also gone through various changes with the advent of modernity and are present today in an altered form than how they used to be in the pre-modern era. The way Islam is perceived today has very little connection with the way Islam used to be in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex in the pre-modern period. Shahab Ahmed has given a tremendous alternative discourse to what Islam and being a Muslim means in today’s world in his book “What is Islam?”, by incorporating rich literary heritage, Quranic verses, the Hadiths, and academic work of the leading scholars on Islam who were present in different times and space. In this paper, I would like to discuss how Muslims living in the modern era have “re-formed” and “revived” human and historical Islam by limiting their hermeneutical engagement to dealing with‘Text’ only and giving lesser or no importance to ‘Pre-text’ and ‘Con-text’, prioritizing law and creed over revelation, nationalizing Islam by using language and geography, having less or no engagement with exploration as compared to prescription and attempting to simplifying Islam by ignoring the contradictions in/of Islam.
I have grown up in a Sunni dominated society of Drosh Chitral, which is considered to be one of the most “Islamic” places of Pakistan. Being an Ismaili, I could never express my beliefs and I never dared to perform my Dua in front of others because that would disclose me as being an Aga Khani. That would be a reason for me to be disgraced and called Kafir and Rafizi. People, including myself, have tried to keep a distance from Islam because the modern Muslims have made Islam a very narrow and suffocating category as they have made Islam as their “identity” by excluding as many people as possible from the circle of Islam. This shift has come mainly after the encounter of Muslims of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex with modernity and colonialism. The hermeneutical engagement with the Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text has been reduced to giving authority to the Text only. “My point here is that Muslims have, in making of their modernity, moved decisively away from conceiving of and living normative Islam as hermeneutical engagement with Pre-text, Text and Con-text of revelation, and have instead begun conceiving of and living normative Islam primarily as hermeneutical engagement with Text of revelation” (Ahmed, 2015, page 515). This omission of the Pre-text from the hermeneutical engagement has ceased to produce meaning-making from revelation and thus has not really added anything to the growing Con-text of Islam. The Muslims in the modern era consider Sharia, as a Text, being equal to truth, while we know that in the pre-modern times, Sharia was considered a way which with the presence of Pre-text and Con-text would lead to truth. The Sufis in the pre-modern era did not much consider Sharia because they had exceeded that layer of truth and were in the way of truth by personal search. Jalal Uddin Rumi beautifully puts the hierarchy of Sharia in the Sufi school of thought in Masnavi-yi-Ma’navi (Doublet of Meaning):
“The Law (Sharia’t) is like learning the theory of alchemy from a teacher or a book, and the Sufi path is the transmission of the copper into gold. Those who know alchemy rejoice in their knowledge of it and those who practice it rejoice in their practice of it, and those who have experienced the Real-Truth (haqiqah) rejoice in the Real-Truth saying: We have become gold” (Jalāl, -D. R., &Whinfield, E. H., 1994). These pre-textual discourses have been excluded from normative Islam and modern Muslims think of Sufism as something “mystical” and a practice “other” than Islam. Furthermore, the positioning of meaning-making from Pre-text to Text has constituted Sufism and philosophy from being a private-public explorative to a private individual project based on the discourses of hermeneutical engagement with Text rather than explorative undertaking to make meaning from Pre-Text. One of the prominent scholars of Modern times, Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the poet and hero of the east, who claimed to have revived Islam rejected Sufism because of not serving the purpose, whatever it means, of Muslims: "Buddhism, Persian Sufism, and allied forms of ethics will not serve our purpose” (Iqbal, 1917: 250-51).  The modern form of Sufism is reduced to a personal level, and instead of considering it as a part of wider Islamic experience, it has been marginalized as being impractical and unnecessary.
A major change came in Islam during the modern times because of diminishing of the contradictions in Islam and the inability of the modern Muslims to live with these contradictions and differences as an integral part of Islam. Shahab Ahmed has tried to highlight some of these contradictions in “What is Islam?” by putting them in the form of six questions: wine drinking, Sufism, philosophy, art and painting, Hikmat al ishraq and wahdat al wujud and poetry. These are some of the well debated topics of the Islamic experience, but in modern Islam; there is absolutely no space for these contradictions to be a part of Islam. The very basic pillar of Islam, “kalma”, is based on a contradiction of “La IllahaIllallah” (There is absolutely no God, but God), and the pre-modern philosophers like Hafiz, Rumi, Ibn-e-Tufayl, etc. have lived their lives as a practice of this contradiction. “Contradictions emerge into view as inherent to and coherent with the spatiality of Revelation as Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text. This conceptualization maps onto the human and historical reality of societies of Muslims in that it enables us to apprehend how Muslims allowed for contrary norms and truth-claims to be seen and lived with as consonant with Islam: that is, as Islamic” (Ahmed, 2015: 405). The reason it is hard for modern Muslims to think in terms of contradictions is because the concept of ontology has changed for the moderns. It is impossible for Muslims today to believe in the un-seen (ghaeb), because the dominant western discourse has made it very clear that “what you see is what you get”. The very essence of existence of human beings is a coherent contradiction because we live and die in every moment simultaneously.However for modern people; the idea of existence is that everything else exist because they make them up in their mind. Another important factor which the modern Muslims have left behind which has caused a lack of understanding of meaningful ambiguity and engagement with Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text,is their relation to literary work of poets like Hafiz, Saadi, Jami, Bidil, etc. and their lack of engagement withthe education system of Balkans-to-Bengal complex which was full of paradoxes and metaphors. These contradictory literary works are no more a part of the paideia of the modern societies where Muslims live, whereas they used to be a huge component of the Con-Text of pre-modern Muslim societies. ShamsurRehmanFaruqihasexplained well the importance of Metaphor as an achievement of Hindi poets: “The chief achievement of the Indian Style poets was to treat metaphor as a fact and go on to create further metaphors from that fact. Each such metaphor in turn became a fact and was used to create another metaphor” (Faruqi, 1990: 136). One cannot imagine today to take metaphor as a fact because it is not evident from its Exteriority (zahir), but the Ghazals have layers of meanings in them because of these metaphors which are being ignored and are termed as un-Islamic by the “Mullahs” today. In this way, modern Islamic discourse is missing its contradictory formation which used to be the hidden core (batin) and it is known only by its un-complicated parallel identity with a single dimension of exteriority (zahir). The eradication of meaning making in terms of contradictions, ambiguities and hermeneutical engagements has thus made Islam of the modern world a hollow entity as compared to the Islamic experience of the pre-modern era.
The most important constituent of modernity is the formation of nation-states, and this form of modernity has re-located Muslims throughout the world by bringing them under the control of the modern construct of law. Every state which has Islamic law or does not have Islamic law acknowledges the fact that Islam is only what Islamic law declares to be right and this notion has presented the monovalent terms of prescriptive rather than the explorative approach to Islam. Furthermore, the addition of modern “Islamic Blasphemy Laws” has further restricted the exploration of Islam and has narrowed down the hermeneutical engagement of a Muslim to Text or Sharia only.  The formation of states cannot be effective without the utilization of language, geography and ideology to create a separate identity by making the people of one state “different” from others. The creation of this vague and unrealistic modern identity has had a great impact on the representation of Islam in different parts of the world. While teaching in a primary school, I heard a student saying “Saudi Arabia is very respectful for all of us because we can find “true Islam” there and they speak Arabic, the language of Quran”. This form of dominancy and respect based on geography and language was never present in the Balkan-to-Bengal complex, but we, moderns, have started bowing down to the state of Saudi Arabia as if the Arabic speaking people know Islam better than everyone else.
 Looking at Islam as a Semitic religion is also produced by modern western scholars as Tomoko Masuzava explains in the book “The Invention of World Religion”. He criticizing Abraham Kuenen and Otto Pfleidere, who are of the view that Islam is an ethnic religion of the Arabs and is a Semitic race. He further explains the modern identity of Islam: “The image of Semitic Islam established by the end of the nineteenth century is now eminently familiar to us, so much so that we can see largely oblivious to the fact of its establishment, that there was a time when Islam presented a rather different countenance to the eyes of Europe” (Masuzawa, 2005: 180). These identities would have never made sense to the people of pre-modern times, but thanks to modernity, even Muslims today have adopted such identities. Nations like Pakistan have been made in the name of “Islam” and have thus nationalized Islam by making Pakistan a laboratory for Islam. In the short time after the formation of Pakistan, a former president of Pakistan, Mr. Zia UlHaq, was even successful in nationalizing God by forbidding saying the wordKhuda, a Persian word for God, and replacing it by Allah, the Arabic and thus authentic word for God. The Persian language used to be the richest language in terms of Islamic literature and academia in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, but the Persian poetry of Hafiz, Bidil, Jami, etc. is disappearing from the modern Muslim’s Con-Text because they are no more part of the Islamic education, except for in a few places like Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan where Persian is taught as a “national” language. Plurality of languages had widen the Islamic experience of the pre-modern era, but the dominancy of English and eliminating languages like Persian as part of the nationalization has ruptured modern Muslims’ connection with their past and the Con-Text of the pre-modern time.
Lastly, modern Islam has been deeply affected by some of the dominant hostile parts of Islam like Wahhabism which has totally destroyed the connection of the Islamic experience with the Pre-Text and Con-Textual parts of Islam. They have brutally de-structured the holy places of Muslims like Shrines, Sufi centers, graveyards, etc. in the state of Saudi Arabia by urbanizing the places for capital production. These modern Muslims have no value for these places, but in the pre-modern era these holy places were a metaphor for the truth. The pre-modern notion of Al-majazqantara'l-haqiqa, "The symbol is the bridge leading towards Reality” holds absolutely no importance for modern Muslims while reality cannot be reached without a symbol (Ishara).
In conclusion, modern Muslims have recalibrated Islam by emphasizing Text as the only source of hermeneutical engagement and prioritizing it over Pre-Text and Con-Text, and so ignoring the contradictions in Islam, nationalizing Islam by making it a Semitic and prescriptive set of laws, and by aborting their connections with the un-seen (ghaeb), and with signs, with metaphors and with paradoxes. This does not imply that modern Islam is wrong, but that modern Muslims have created a different identity for themselves based on these epistemological and ontological shiftswhich creates a huge gap between Islam today and how Islam used to be in the pre-modern era.
References
Ahmed, S. (2015). What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press.
Asad, T. (1986). The Idea of Anthropology of Islam. Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arabic Studies, Georgetown University Press.
Faruqi, S. (2004). A Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-e Hindi. Annual of Urdu Studies vol. 19.
Iqbal. (1917)."Islam and Mysticism," The New Era, Lucknow. pp. 250-51, as cited in
Speeches and Writings, pp. 154-6, p. 154.
Jalāl, -D. R., &Whinfield, E. H. (1994). Masnaviima'navi: Teachings of Rumi: the spiritual couplets of MaulańaJalálu-'D-Dín Muhammad I Rúmí. London: Octagon.
Masuzawa, T. (2005). The invention of world religions, or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sabeen Mehmood ke Naam

تحریر: عبدالواحد خان
کچھ یوں وحشت کا عالم ہے کہ بس
تمہاری ہجر پہ تڑپنے سے بھی ڈرتے ہیں

ایک تم ہی تھی شکستِ زندان' بس تم ہی تھی کہ بس
ورنہ لوگ کہاں یوں آزادی کیلئے مرتے ہیں

یہ کہاں کا دستور ہے کہ بندوق اٹھا لیا تم نے
ارے صاحب! بیٹھو تو' بات کرتے ہیں

فاصلوں کو مٹا کے پیار بڑھانا ہے
ہم کیسے لوگ ہیں کہ نفرتیں بکھرتے ہیں

ایک ہی شخص تک نیہں محدود یہ نعرہِ آزادی
یہ کچھ دیوانے لوگ گولیوں سے کہاں سدھرتے ہیں

ایک تشنگیِ آزاد خیالی' ایک جامِ بے خودی
تم پیتے جاؤ ساقی' لاؤ آج ہم بھرتے ہیں

وہ جذبہ سلامت ہے' سبیں ایک ہریالی ہے
یہ جو حیوانِ ناطق ہیں' اسی گلشن میں چرتے ہیں

میں بول اٹھوں گا آج بھی جو بات میرے دل میں ہے
ہم جیسے باغی صاحب' ہر دور میں گزرتے ہیں!

The Down-ride of Colonialism (1914-1939)



After the mutiny of 1857, the British Empire had taken over the subcontinent completely and introduced many reforms and orders to make India the best place for them to use and rule. During the time period of 1857-1914, the British not only dwindled the resources of India, but also used the Indian land as a market for British exports. The drainage of resources was legitimatized by British as a general valid use of its colony along with the exploitation of the Indian troops for its imperialistic goals. The army was chosen after many anthropometric measures and only the martial races were taken in the army thus discriminating openly among the locals. The economy of India was patterned to meet the colonial needs and to pay for the British debts with other countries by using the India’s export surplus. The locals suffered through this until the ‘World War I’ broke out and the British started to lose theirpower followed by disruption in the Indian society and economy. These changes provided the Indian nationalists with a power vacuum to come into play and launch movements of self-rule and independence of India in the years to come.  The colonial framework which was established after 1857 started unwinding as a result of World War 1 in 1920s and set up a ground for decolonization of India with the imminent of World War II in the 1940s. In this paper, I will try to highlight how the interwar period reformed the political framework of India with the change in the economy, state framework, and military, and also howrevolutionary Indian leaders like Gandhi brought a change in the politics of the subcontinent.
The west has the craze of dominance from the start and has waged wars against many nations in order to get more power. In order to go to the fight field of World War I, the British needed a strong army and they recruited a huge number of Indian soldiers for this purpose. The ratio of Indian Soldiers to British soldiers changed from 1:2 to almost 2:1 during the war because the Punjabi and other martial races, which were made martial by the British, were used for the ultimate purpose offulfilling the demands of the lords. According to Jalal and Bose, there were 1.2 million soldiers in Indian army and nearly 60,000 Indian soldiers were killed fighting for Britain. This is just an estimate of the loss during the World War I and this is how the British really used the Indians as their toys who can satisfy their desires of ruling other nations. With this huge army, there was also a need of providing them with food and other supplies. These facilities were provided to them in the war zones, like in the Middle East, and a lot of Indian regions faced food crisis as the food got exported to the army who were fighting for the Raj. India’s defense expenditures increased by some 300 percent during the war. The colonial government had to increase the income tax and custom duties and aggressively raise subscription to war loans. (Jalal & Bose, 2011). These martial measures during the war totally ruined the economy of the India and it slowly caused in sucking up of the resources of India making it a worthless pile of land.
The Indian army during the inter-war period was kept very active inside India as well in order to stop any kind of protests, civil unrest and agitations, because the nationalists had started standing up against the colonial rule for treating their motherland very brutally. As Marston explains: “The Indian army was called many times during the 1920s and 1930s as an aid to the civil power. Omissi noted that in 1922, over a four month period, the army was called out on sixty two occasions” (Marston, 2014). The use of army was definitely a repressive state apparatus which tried to limit political powers to rise against British or do any protests. Many of the political leaders considered the army as a sword of the colonial power and the emergency which was imposed during the war time continued even after that in the form of Rowlatt Acts. This made the locals very uncomfortable because their people had fought for British, but they were getting coercive rewards in return. The people of India then came out to the streets and started nationwidehartals and huge protests which sometime even got violent. The colonial power had to impose martial law at times, but the cruelest incident happened in 1919 in Jallianwalla Bagh where Reginald Dyer ordered to open fire on peaceful crowd of hundreds of people. “Drawing up his Gurkha troops at the entrance, he fired until some 370 trapped protestors lay dead and over 1,000 wounded” (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2006). The violence of the army had reached its peak, and massacres like this triggered the nationalistic uprising in India where the politicians then had good example of colonial injustice.
The continuous demand for self-rule by Indians and the weakening condition of the British power due to the wars brought a change in the British policy about ruling the subcontinent. Edwin Montagu announced in 1917 that the objective of British rule in India would be “gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of the responsible government in India as an integral part of the British empire” (Metcalf &Metcalf, 2006). It is quite interesting to note the phrase “progressive realization of the responsible government” because the British thought that the locals were not capable enough to rule themselves therefore it is the colonial power’s responsibility to make them realize how to rule. Montagu believed that Indian educated people are intellectually British’s children who had been fed by Britain and would be able to carry on the legacy if taught more and polished. This is how British tried to legitimize the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre as well for its ‘moral effect’ and that Indian are like children who need to be scolded and taught the best way to live as a civilized nation. In order to make the idea of self-government practical, Montagu-Chelmsford reforms or the system of diarchy was introduced where the functions of Indian government were dived into two. This was nothing close to the Sawaraj, self-rule, because the main state matters like army, law and order and exports still rested with the center in New Delhi which was under the control of British, and very little power was given to the provinces, like health, education, agriculture and some other sectors. This did not work out very well because British Raj used compulsion along this and definitely failed to convince even Congress to adopt the plan.
The Indian National Congress and Muslim League both put a lot of efforts to bring political upheaval and awareness in Indian public during the inter-war period. In the middle of the mayhem conditions when the rulers and the locals were both getting violent, a very different philosophy emerged in the Indian politics in the form of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha, truth force, and non-cooperation movements. Gandhi was a very important political figure of the inter-war period because he best understood the circumstances and created a nation-wide or rather world-wide influence on people not only as a political leader but also as a spiritual leader and philosopher. Gandhi realized that the British have been able to rule India because they have the support of local people specially those who were in army, civil offices and police. This is where he came up with his idea of civil disobedience, as Marston says: “Civil disobedience (by Gandhi) was an attempt to break down the ingrained response of co-operation, without openly advocating insubordination within the army” (Marston, 2014). This was the perfect political move and probably the best response to the British vehemence because the civil disobedience of Gandhi was always based on his non-violence attitude. British, who claimed to be morally superior before, did not know how to respond to these movements because if they used force, they would be going against their own ideology of moral principles and would also be seen negatively in the global community. This form of politics in return flipped the political scenario and made the Indians morally superior to British and forced them to listen to the demands of Indians.
Muslims and Hindus had quite good ties after the Lucknow Pact of 1916, and Gandhi got the sanction of Congress to join the Khilafat movement in 1920 to support the Muslim’s demand for safety of the Ottoman Khilafat. The alliance of Congress-Khilafat started the non-cooperation movement throughout India under the leadership of Gandhi. Many people think that it was the peak of Hindu-Muslim unity in India in the colonial times, but I personally think that this movement created more gaps and enforced two separate identities in the subcontinent. Metcalf and Metcalf also support this idea in chapter 6 of their book A concise History of Modern South Asia by saying: “ Indeed, the organization of parallel, yet separate, processions and meetings by the Congress and the Khilafatists only intensified, and so institutionalized, this distinction (Muslim and Hindus) between communities” (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2006). An interesting thing to notice here is that neither Jinnah nor Iqbal joined this movement because they believed it was useless and impractical as the goals of the movement lied outside of India. Gandhi called off the non-cooperation in 1922 when a mob killed twenty-two Indian policemen by putting a police station on fire in Cahuri Chaura and this was again the end to the short-lived mirage of Hindu-Muslim unity.
One of the major reasons of the change in the mass political up rise of subcontinent during the inter-war period was the downfall of the economy of India because of British’s exploitation. British took the colonial India as a proprietorship which they can use the way they would like to, as Chatterji writes: “On the eve of the Great War, then, India was unquestionably imperial Britain's most prized possession. But Britain's system of power and profit in India was not immutable” (Chatterji, 1992). In this era not only the agrarian sector but also the industrial sector suffered a major decrease in profit which could be used inside India. Because so much of the money was used in the defense sector during and after the war, the local people had to pay more taxes and there was ultimately shortage of food. “During the short period from 1917-1920 price level rose by nearly 50 percent, with those of the coarse food grains that constituted the staple of the poor further than those of higher-quality crops” (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2006). The countryside people suffered from this the most because the transport system got devastated after the war and neither could they bring their products to the market nor could they get good price for their products. Gandhi joined hands with the rural people and started Champaran Sayagarha against the force cultivation of Indigo and peasants refused to pay taxes and government land revenues. This campaign had two major impacts on the politics of India: firstly, it united people and created harmony to fight against the British irrespective of class difference and secondly, this campaign gave birth to another political wing called the India’s trade Union which solely represented the trade and commerce of India and were backed up by the Kisan movements in various parts of India. Meanwhile, Gandhi also encouraged everyone to participate in the Khadi movement through the All-India spinner Association and the aim was not only to promote local goods but also another attempt to unification of Indian people for the cause of liberation from the colonial powers who were suppressing them in so many different ways.
The economy of the India was taken over by the British both as a producer market and as well as a buyer market. Chatterji explains: “In 1913 India was Britain's largest market, taking 16 per cent of all British exports; she was of course the greatest market for Britain's most important industry—cotton textiles. Britain was also the largest supplier of industrial goods to India, and controlled virtually the entire invisible trade of India” (Chitterji, 1992) This is how important the Indian market was but, the agrarian sector started suffering very badly after the price tumble in the west in 1929 and the foreign money was suddenly stopped because of negative signs of the world market towards Indian exports predictions. This created a havoc effecting all the commodities and the outflow and drainage of gold started because the value of currency was at very low rate. The famines and the Great Depression of 1930s made the relationship between colonial power, the rulers, and the local people even worse. “The policy of free-trade in India secured the latter crucial place in the system of Britain's international settlements; it kept India open for British goods at a time when other markets were closing against her.” (Chitterji, 1992). India was literally being used as a source to balance out the trade of the Britain no matter what the locals suffered through because of this act of insanity. As Bagchi explains: “Although the external economic relation of Britain and India had substantially changed since 1914, India was playing some of the balancing role she traditionally played in the British imperial system” (Bagchi, 1972).
Britain could not just let India go because it was the best possession they had till the late 1930s. In order to keep their influence in India, they kept introducing many political proposals like Cripps Mission, Government of India Act 1935, round table conferences, Simon commission, elections, etc. Denies Judd writes in “The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947”: “It is possible to see the whole process of reform from Morley-Minto measures of 1908-9 to the government of India Act of 1935 as an astute imperial strategy serving to disguise Britain’s determination to hang on to India for as long as possible (Judd, 2004). The British tried violent politics at first which didn’t work against the peaceful protests and later they turned into various discussions and towards the end of 1930s, British had pretty much given up on their persistency to rule Indians by their own choice and policies as the resistance they got from the local nationalists was hard to handle. None of these proposed systems by British really worked because the locals saw the British power declining with time and it reached at very low level during and after World War II.
In conclusion, the inter-war period had a lot to offer in terms of change in the political situations of the subcontinent directly or indirectly effected by the economic conditions of India. The army was exploited, the resources were used outrageously and there were many administration gap in the British Raj which caused in events like the great depression which forced the local people to rise, to revolt and sometime these uprisings even got violent. The British used force to stop the locals from these protests initially, but the mass political movements were successful only after the British got weak because of the wars and also because of the great leadership of people like Gandhi. After the British gave up on compromise and coercive measures on locals, the nationalists of the subcontinent started forcing for a self-rule with the two major parties: Muslim League representing the Muslims and Congress claiming to represent everyone in India. The inter-war era was a time of un-tangling of the colonial rule in many parts of the world including India, and the subcontinent finally got independence from the cruel colonizers in 1947; although,at the cost of partition in the land and among people in the form of Pakistan and India.




Bibliography
Bose S., Jalal A. (2011). Modern South Asia. Oxford University Press.
Metcalf, B., Metcalf, T. (2006). A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press.
Marston, D. (2014). The Indian Army and the end of the Raj.
Chatterji, B. (1992). Trade, tariffs, and empire: Lancashire and British policy in India, 1919-1939. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Bagchi, A. (1972). Private investment in India, 1900-1939. Cambridge England: University Press.
Judd, D. (2004). The lion and the tiger: The rise and fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press.





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