C/83-5 THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROFESSIONAL STRUCTURE IN MODERN INDIA: OLDER AND NEW PROFESSIONS IN A CHANGING SOCIETY Rajat Kanta Ray Professor and Head Department of History Presidency College Calcutta, India Center for International Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 August 1983 ,At Foreword This historical study by Professor Rajat Ray is one of a series which examines the development of professions as a key to understanding the different patterns in the modernization of Asia. In recent years there has been much glib talk about "technology transfers" to the Third World, as though knowledge and skills could be easily packaged and delivered. Profound historical processes were thus made analogous to shopping expeditions for selecting the "appropriate technology" for the country's resources. The MIT Center for International Studies's project on the Modernization of Asia is premised on a different sociology of knowledge. Our assumption is that the knowledge and skills inherent in the modernization processes take on meaningful historical significance only in the context of the emergence of recognizable professions, which are communities of people that share specialized knowledge and skills and seek to uphold standards. It would seem that much that is distinctive in the various ways in which the different Asian societies have modernized can be found by seeking answers to such questions as: which were the earlier professions to be established, and which ones came later? What were the political, social and economic consequences of different sequences in the emergence of professions? How well did the professions maintain standards, and how appropriate were the barriers of exclusion? What is the effect on recruitment of the political elite and on their style of politics for specific professions to have high status and others low status? How does it happen that emphasis upon the same professions for achieving the same objectives in modernization can have dramatically - i - - ii - different consequences in different societies? (For example, in both Japan and India the legal profession was encouraged early in order to produce government officials, yet India became a litigious society but Japan did not.) These are only a sample of some of the questions explored by Professor Ray in this illuminating account of the establishment of certain new professions in India and of what happened to some of the traditional professions. Although Professor Ray has with great skill maintained a steady focus on the topic of professionalization, his essay sheds light on numerous subtle aspects of India's political and economic developments. Other planned studies in the series include the experience of Japan, China, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia. The project has been made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It will also include a general book on Asia's modernization by its director. Lucian W. Pye Professor Rajat Kanta Ray is Head of the Department of History at Presidency College, Calcutta. He received his Master's and Doctor's degrees from Cambridge University, and he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian in National University, Canberra. His publications include Industrialization India, 1914-1947 (New Delhi 1979), Urban Poots of Indian Nationalism, 1875-1939 (New Delhi 1979), and several articles in academic journals. - iii - t THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROFESSIONAL STRUCTURE IN MODERN INDIA: OLDER AND NEW PROFESSIONS IN A CHANGING SOCIETY I. Urban Social Formation and the Professional Structure in India The modern professions were imported in India from Victorian Britain. Fashioned on the British model, these implanted professions had to relate to a society very different from Victorian society. That in turn affected the structure of the professions as they developed in nineteenth-century India. The process of transplantation was inevitably accompanied by disjunctions and tensions. Not only had the transplanted structure to adjust to the native soil, but the transplanting authority itself could exercise a distorting effect. In the West the professions developed originally out of urban bourgeois society. In India, where urban society was constituted differently, this was not so. Urban society in India contained two widely separated worlds: a) a highly literate and educated world of smaller gentry living partly off income from landed property and partly off salaries in administrative service from earnings from professions, and b) an indigenous world of banking, commerce, speculative marketing, and, later on, industrial and corporate venture. But these worlds functioned on a high degree of specialization, skill, literacy and urbanized ways of thought and culture. It is thus tempting to see in these two categories parallels to the bourgeois or burgher elements that gradually rose to prominence in European society. But the parallels do not run smoothly. In the first place, neither the service gentry nor the merchant communities could capture state power in India. Both under the Mughals and under the British they were effectively subordinated to a ruling group above them. Secondly, the two worlds were widely separated from each other and they did not coalesce to form an integrated bourgeois world. - 2 - In independent India, certain breakthroughs have, of course, taken place. The top elite corps of white administrators has disappeared from the scene and the British managing agencies which had so long dominated the highest level of business and industry have been one by one taken over by indigenous houses. This means that the Indian administrative, professional and business groups have risen to top positions within the country. Moreover, along with the Indian elite of IAS (Indian Administrative Service) and IFS (Indian Foreign Service) officers, a new class of highly paid business executives, mostly drawn from administrative and professional families, has appeared on the urban scene. This educated managerial cadre acts as a link between the world of business and the world of administration and professions. Yet the fundamental cleavage between the commercial-industrial and administrative-professional categories continues even today. There is an uneasy sharing of state power between these two categories. By controlling the public sector and the state machinery, the civil servants occupy a position of enormous importance, and along with lawyers, doctors, engineers, executives, accountants and various other professionals they exercise a circumscribing effect on the power of the top twenty or so business houses which, in spite of having managed to concentrate an enormous amount of industry in their hands, have to operate under extensive government restrictions and antimonopoly laws. Some Marxist scholars have been so impressed by this phenomenon as to describe India as an "intermediate regime" (a term coined by East European economist M. Kalecki), that is, a regime neither capitalist, nor socialist, but one controlled by the "lower-middle class" as distinguished from "big business." In their opinion an "intermediate class" of salaried and professional people and smaller - 3 - industrial owners have formed an alliance with the rich peasantry to rule the Indian Republic and they have promoted a public sector which gives them employment beyond the sphere of big private ownership. 1 Without entering into the dispute whether India today is an intermediate regime or not, it is possible to maintain that professionals, both salaried and self-employed, are still sharply distinguished from the top financial and industrial houses, and by their control of crucial positions in law, administration and the public sector, they serve as a check on the power of the latter. The question is why. The reason, it is suggested in this essay, is to be sought in the historical evolution of the urban social formations in India before and under the British. To understand this historical evolution, we have to keep in view the fundamental distinction between the mobile educated groups of landed smaller gentry who diversified into administration and professions, and the indigenous merchant communities. We must also bear in mind the respective roles of these two groups in the political struggle that led to the winning of India's independence in 1947. Professional men, especially lawyers, gave leadership to the nationalist movement in India. These professionals came almost invariably from families with a background in administrative service, and such families in turn came almost always from mobile literate communities of high caste gentry with some sort of landed property. The East India Company, and before it the Mughals and their successors, maintained a huge revenue bureaucracy staffed by these 1. M. Kalecki, "Social and Economic Aspects of Intermediate Regimes" in Selected Essays on the Economic Growth of the Socialist and the Mixed Econofmy (Cambridge 19T2); R.N. Raj, "The Politics and EconomicsFofIntermediate Regimes," in Economic and Political Weekly, 7 July 1973. - 4 - high caste service families. It was this revenue bureaucracy which later on sustained the growth of the professions and supplied their skilled personnel. Their rural connection, their ancestral landed property, and their high ritual status in the caste hierarchy, all combined to invest these service and professional families with the character of a gentry, or to be more specific, a literate gentlefolk. Since professional men almost invariably had