3 - Depression, dissent and disengagement

Summary

If the British administrators and Justicite politicians who had reported so proudly and complacently to Sir John Simon in 1929 had been asked to report again ten years later, they would have given a very different story. The events of the 1930s stood out in a stark contrast to those of the previous decade. There had been campaigns, widespread in the rural areas, demanding abolition of the zamindars and reduction of the government's revenue demand; there had been two waves of industrial strikes; several politicians, who were neither new to the political world nor men of such little substance that they could easily be dismissed, had preached revolution, and government had had to proscribe one revolutionary organisation and threaten others; the Congress campaign of Civil Disobedience had evoked a significant response in the south and the Madras Government had even asked Delhi for special powers of suppression; the electorate had returned a huge majority of Congress candidates in 1937 and placed a Congress ministry in power in Madras; the Justice party had declined and almost disappeared; there had been communal clashes in one or two towns, and small peasant jacqueries in parts of the countryside. Something very serious had evidently happened to Madras society.

The reasons for this hiatus between the decades must be sought in rural society and in shifts in the nature and purpose of government. The world depression in agriculture and trade bore down on Madras from 1929. It was the most severe shock delivered to the agrarian economy since the great famines of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was a shock which, unlike the famines, was entirely new in character.