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home industries, back to India. They became rich in the course of
this transaction. But they also brought European school education
to India, introduced the Anglo-Indian law, and built an infrastructure
to make the huge expanses of India accessible by rail and road, later
by car and aeroplane. All this has had its effects. Even greater may
have been the impetus arising from what remained inaccessible to
the native subjects, such as higher training in technology and
science, as well as all jobs requiring higher qualification. The very
fact that they were practically out of reach created an all the more
urgent desire to get that higher education and to acquire the skills
of the privileged. It was the missionaries and some private institutions
that catered to some of these needs. In addition, books were
available and widely read. Considering all these contacts with
Western education, technology, and political practice together,
perhaps the most important effect was that it prepared an indigenous
middle class intelligentsia, educated in the new Anglo-Vernacular
schools and ready to appropriate Western ideas, to step forward and
claim the right to a fair share in administration, in political decision-
making, in the economic surplus of the country, or in brief, in
power.
It was this inellectual elite which realised the explosive power
inherent in the European idea of a nation. But for using it and for
standing up against the powerful apparatus of colonial government,
something else was needed first: self-confidence. This was rare in
a people that had been subjected successively to Muslim rule and
British rule for many centuries. But here they received unexpected
support from the Western orientalists. Their discovery of, and
detailed research in, Indian history and cultural history unearthed
and publicised a long-forgotten splendid past in almost all sectors
of research: in history, religion, philosophy and art. Though pursued
by the British with the intention to gain more knowledge about the
people they were governing, and to decorate their new colonial
acquisitions and future empire with the glory of an impressive past,
this intensive research also served to make European historical
thinking accessible to the nascent Hindu national consciousness.
Not surprisingly, it was Hermann Gundert who first showed interest
in the history of Kerala and who wrote a survey of it in the native
language in order to make the people aware of their own history.
