“The introduction of this type of property in land was not only a great economic change, but it went deeper and struck at the whole Indian conception of a cooperative group social structure. A new class, the owners of land, appeared; a class created by, and therefore to a large extent identified with, the British government.” (5)

Nehru pointed out, as also Gandhi pointed out, and as Amartya Sen has argued in detail in a book-length study of famines, that famines in India are not caused by lack of food, but by lack of entitlement to food. The British brought hunger to India not because they destroyed agricultural production, but because they ripped up the social fabric, what Nehru in the passage just quoted called “the cooperative system of services and functions,” which organized the sharing of food. The cash-nexus replaced the community. Those without money, no longer members of a community administering collectively the produce of communal land, starved. The British ruled different parts of India for different lengths of time, varying from 300 to 100 years. Nehru shows that in the 1940s (when he wrote his history of India while imprisoned by the British at Ahmadnagar Fort) hunger and mass poverty were worst in the parts of India that the British had governed the longest. Bengal, which had been the richest part of India, had become one of the poorest after nearly 300 years of British rule. . Punjab, having been one of the poorest areas, was governed by the British scarcely one hundred years. It kept its traditional social structures longer. It was less exploited, and it emerged as one of the relatively famine-free parts of India.

From the vantage point of the world of 2004, Gandhi’s 1909 critique of modernity, which he continued and elaborated until his assassination in 1948, and which has been in important ways corroborated by the writings of others, might be seen as a plea for what is today called “social capital.” And so it is. Like Gandhi, World Bank studies and other studies of social capital advocate dense networks of reciprocal obligations. They demonstrate empirically the role of “social capital” in coping with what is called “the crisis of governability” and in furthering “human development.” Dharma might perhaps be regarded as an early precursor of “social capital,” or perhaps “social capital” might be regarded as a late echo of dharma. I want to claim the empirical evidence showing the positive contributions to development made by social capital as a belated vindication of Gandhi. However, somewhat ungenerously, I want to suspend judgment, and to take up later in following chapters, the question whether the favor should be returned. In terms of a Venn diagram, I say that the facts brought to light by the study of social capital tend to prove Gandhi’s case, but I do not say that everything Gandhi meant by dharma is appropriately included under the conceptual umbrella today called social capital.