SEMI-FEUDAL AESTHETICS 69 a strain is there, the picture need not change even though we envisage a great deal of continuity, as in Japan, from earlier modes of life. A culture which is Japanese and bourgeois, like a culture which is French and bourgeois, or German and bourgeois, is not only conceivable but is a historical reality. Capitalism, the most ruthless leveller in human history, has not succeeded in obliterating all marks of national identity. Not only the "higher" world of ideas and values, but also the organization of material life—the social realization of the mode of production—is a particular moment in a particular historical evolution.1 If there is a bourgeois culture in India, it ought to be marked by specific kind of Indianness. Nature of Indian Capitalism This is not to question the development of capitalism in India. There is the Indian bourgeoisie, and a large part of it has ceased to be comprador in the sense of being mere agents of foreign capital. But in India the development of capitalism has not followed either of the two classic routes of transition from feudalism.3 The Japanese way—a feudal ruling class transforming itself more or less rapidly into a capitalist class—or the English way-petty producers working their way up into bourgeois profits—is equally impossible to follow in the eara of monopoly capital and imperialism.3 It may be true that Indian capitalism grew not under British patronage, but in the face of British hostility;4 but feudal accumulations and merchant capital, as these went into productive investment, gave birth to a crippled undernourished capitalism. Suffered to operate mainly in the interest of British investment, confused at every step by the lure and compulsion of feudal rent, it was doomed to an abject dependence on metropolitan capitalism. Its capital goods came from Britain; techniques of production and management and the higher personnel in these areas were all from Britain. This is why till the beginning of nineteen-thirites cotton and jute textiles were the two main industries run on British machines and British lines. There was some Indian investment in sugar, paper, cement, steel and light consumer goods, especially when the benefits of "discriminating protection" were made available in the thirties under the infant industries argument.6 But even this little spurt, like the earlier one before the first world war, soon petered out. At the time of independence, modern large-scale industry, together with mines, accounted for only 7 percent of the national income, while the share of small-scale industry was 10 percent,