Indian Economic Life (Past And Present)

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The first five chapters of the book, which deal mainly with the past, are based on material collected in Holland and India Office, London, in 1927. In the chapters dealing with Currency and Population I have made considerable use of material taken from my Essays on Indian Economic Problems (1922) and The Population of India (1925). The material has, of course, been carefully revised.

For help in the preparation of the volume I am under many obligations. My grateful thanks are due to Professor Bhupal Singh for many valuable suggestions; to Mr. Bijlsma, in charge of the colonial records in the Rijksarchief, the Hague, not only for giving me personally all facilities for the study of the valuable documents under his charge, but for his kindness in getting copies of selected documents made for the Punjab University Library; to Professor Chiranjiva Lal Mathur for reading the whole manuscript and critically reviewing it, which led to many corrections, alterations and improvements in the text; to Professor H. T. Colenbrander of the University of Leiden for more things than I can mention here; to Mrs. Durga Parshad, without whose kind help it would have been impossible for me, during my very short stay in London, to get together the material used in Chapter V; to the Editors, Indian Journal of Economics, Allahabad, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Kiel, and Wirtschaftsdienst, Hamburg, and Messrs.

The following pages contain a study of facts and problems of Indian economic life-a study of what is known in our Universities as "Indian Economics." Indian economics is a misleading term, and there would be advantage in abandoning its use altogether. It was introduced by writers who supposed that the principles of economics, as they are taught in the West, did not apply to Indian conditions. The economic organisation of an agricultural country must be different from that of an industrial country, but the motives to economic activity are the same everywhere. If economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life, as it claims to be, and if the motives which lead men to engage in the production of wealth in India are the same as in Western countries, a study of facts of Indian economic life cannot be expected to reveal the existence of entirely new laws governing the production, exchange, distribution or consumption of wealth. No such laws have been discovered. There is thus no science of "Indian economics" as apart from the science of "General economics." Indian economics is a study of Indian economic life (facts as well as problems) in the light of our knowledge of the general principles of economics.

**Contents and Sample Pages**