By the twentieth century, most such tribal (see
Glossary) groups, although constituting a
substantial minority within India, lived in
restricted areas under severe pressure from the
caste-based agricultural and trading societies
pressing from the plains. Because this evolution
took place over more than forty centuries and
encompassed a wide range of ecological niches and
peoples, the resulting social pattern is extremely
complicated and alters constantly. India had its
share of conquerors who moved in from the northwest
and overran the north or central parts of the
country. These migrations began with the Aryan
peoples of the second millennium B.C. and culminated
in the unification of the entire country for the
first time in the seventeenth century under the
Mughals. Mostly these conquerors were nomadic or
seminomadic people who adopted or expanded the
agricultural economy and contributed new cultural
forms or religions, such as Islam.
The Europeans, primarily the English, arrived in
force in the early seventeenth century and by the
eighteenth century had made a profound impact on
India. India was forced, for the first time, into a
subordinate role within a world system based on
industrial production rather than agriculture. Many
of the dynamic craft or cottage industries that had
long attracted foreigners to India suffered
extensively under competition with new modes of mass
production fostered by the British. Modern
institutions, such as universities, and
technologies, such as railroads and mass
communication, broke with Indian intellectual
traditions and served British, rather than Indian,
economic interests. A country that in the eighteenth
century was a magnet for trade was, by the twentieth
century, an underdeveloped and overpopulated land
groaning under alien domination. Even at the end of
the twentieth century, with the period of
colonialism well in the past, Indians remain
sensitive to foreign domination and are determined
to prevent the country from coming under such
domination again. |