Every Indian schoolboy knows this story: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India in 1917 after studying law in England and a stint in South Africa practising as a lawyer. At that time his name was unknown. Seven months later, he was hailed as a national leader. What captured people’s imagination was his ability to negotiate on behalf of the peasants of Champaran, Bihar, a release from the obligation of growing the unprofitable indigo plant. The moral that we all learned from this, as Gandhiji explained in his My Experiments with Truth, was the virtuousness of standing up for the underdog. But the real truth was something else.
This story came rushing back to my mind the other day. A few days before the Gujarat election someone in my office thought up a very clever software application that allowed you to move a slider — for example, 10 per cent to the right and it would tell you the number of additional seats Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would win if the wind blew 10 per cent their way. You could also move the slider to the left by 10 per cent and see what happens if the wind moved against the BJP. An accompanying map of Gujarat had shaded Assembly constituencies bright yellow (sure BJP seats); light yellow (seats tilting to the BJP); white (could go either way); light green (tilt to the Congress); and dark green (sure-shot Congress). The idea was to let readers judge for themselves the dynamics of the Gujarat election. When we sent the application to newspaper websites, several editors sent back a message: “Thanks, we have forwarded the application to our IT guy.” I guess, in their estimation, such interactive applications did not fall in the realm of journalism, but were something for the “IT guy” to handle — perhaps, along with his other chores of maintenance and upkeep of the word processor PCs on which “real journalists” worked.
I often wonder, in 1916, when the price of organic indigo fell precipitously and worldwide demand for it fell even more precipitously, whether Gandhiji or anyone close to him ever wondered what was really going on.
The story starts in 1765 when the British East India Company acquired the right to collect revenue in 1,800 square miles of land in what is now the state of Bihar. They leased most of this to indigo planters, who in turn leased the land under their control to cultivators, provided them with seeds, gave them a cash advance at the start of the growing season and bought the output. This system worked well for decades till the price for indigo in the world market started falling. The factory owners countered the cultivators’ growing reluctance by using their political connections to pass the Bengal Tenancy Act (1885), which made it mandatory for cultivators to grow indigo on three-twentieth of their land — that too on their best land.
Meanwhile, in faraway England, an 18-year-old chemistry student, William Perkins, while attempting a synthesis of the anti-malarial drug quinine from coal tar, accidentally discovered that a black solid in his flask dissolved in alcohol to give a purple solution, which proved to be an effective dye for silk and other textiles. This was the first synthesis of indigo.
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Successive experiments in Germany during the next two decades gradually brought down the price of synthetic indigo; and, as this happened, the global demand for natural indigo started falling. By 1897, export of natural indigo from Calcutta port had fallen to a tenth of its level of a decade ago. Soon the market for cotton printing was lost to synthetic indigo because of its consistent purity.
The Champaran indigo planters frantically tried to compete with synthetic indigo, but the trajectory of their efforts was in a direction different from that of the German and British. They tried to improve the manure for the indigo plant and then imported a higher-yielding plant from Java, but to no effect. The use of political clout to pass a tenancy act, forcing their tenant cultivators to plant indigo, was a last-ditch attempt to save their business.
While Gandhiji was looking the other way, the “Chemistry Guys” in Germany in their attempt to profitably synthesise indigo unravelled the nature of the chemical bond and went from there to found the giant new industries of synthetic fertilisers and pharmaceuticals.
One can only conjecture what would have happened to India’s industrial future if the Champaran problem had not been constructed and understood as an unfair contract problem and, instead, had been seen for what it truly was: a sideshow in the evolution of a new techno-economic paradigm.
So, the next time an intriguing software application in your industry comes your way, think twice before you lose interest and relegate it to the “IT guy” in your office.
The writer’s book, The Wave Rider, was released last year.
ajitb@rediffmail.com