Which of the following industries were first established during the British Rule in India ?

Correct — A, (a) Cotton Textile Industry; and Jute Industry.

The word doing the work in the stem is FIRST. Several modern industries were established in India under British rule, but the question asks which came earliest, and the answer is decided by two dates a year apart in the 1850s.

COTTON TEXTILES, 1854. The modern Indian mechanised textile industry began when a steam-powered mill was opened in Bombay by Cowasjee Nanabhai Davar. It is the first factory industry of the modern kind in India, and it grew rapidly into a cluster around Bombay and later Ahmedabad.

JUTE, 1855. The following year George Acland, working with a Bengali financier, Babu Bysumber Sen, installed jute spinning machinery brought from Dundee at Rishra on the Hooghly, near Calcutta. The Acland Mill was India's first jute mill, and the Hooghly-side jute industry that grew from it eventually overtook the Scottish trade it had been transplanted from — by 1895 the jute industries of Bengal had passed Dundee.

WHY THESE TWO AND NOT OTHERS. Both processed a raw material that India already grew in quantity, close to where it grew: raw cotton from the Deccan and Gujarat reached Bombay easily, and raw jute from the Bengal delta reached the Hooghly mills over water. Both had an assured market, at home and abroad. And both used a technology that was mature in Britain and could be shipped out complete — machinery, engineers and overseers together. Those are the conditions under which a colonial economy acquires a factory industry, and no other sector met them in the 1850s.

The two differed sharply in one respect worth remembering. The Bombay cotton mills were largely INDIAN-OWNED, built with Parsi and Gujarati merchant capital accumulated in trade; the Hooghly jute mills were largely EUROPEAN-OWNED, financed from Britain and managed through the managing agency houses of Calcutta. So the two earliest industries represent two different routes into Indian industrialisation, and the difference shaped the politics of each for a century.

Each option pairs two industries with a semicolon followed by 'and' — 'Cotton Textile Industry; and Jute Industry' — which is an unusual punctuation, reproduced exactly as the booklet sets it. 'British Rule' is capitalised in the stem.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)Jute Industry; and Iron and Steel Industry — Jute belongs in the answer; iron and steel does not, because it came more than half a century later. Modern steelmaking in India dates from the Tata Iron and Steel Company, established in 1907 at the site that became Jamshedpur, with production beginning a few years afterwards. There had been earlier and much smaller iron ventures in colonial India, but they were limited in scale and largely unsuccessful, and none of them founded a continuing industry. Fifty years separates 1855 from 1907, and on a question asking which industries were FIRST established that gap is decisive. Iron and steel is the most tempting wrong pairing precisely because it is so important later.
• (c)Cotton Textile Industry; and Chemical Industry — Cotton textiles belongs in the answer; the chemical industry does not. Chemicals developed in India substantially later than the two nineteenth-century textile industries, and its major growth belongs to the twentieth century and particularly to the period after independence, when fertilisers, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals were built up under planned industrialisation. A chemical industry needs a scientific and engineering base, a supply of intermediates and a domestic market for industrial inputs, none of which existed in the India of the 1850s. This option gets half the answer right and pairs it with a sector from the wrong century.
• (d)Jute Industry; and Chemical Industry — The weakest of the three, since it drops cotton textiles — the earliest of them all, and the industry that actually opened the sequence in 1854 — and replaces it with chemicals, which is the latest of the four sectors named anywhere in this option set. Only jute is correctly placed. Notice the structure of the options as a whole: jute appears in three of the four, so it settles nothing, and cotton textiles appears in only two. The item is therefore decided by whether cotton textiles belongs, and it does — it is the first of all of them.

MODERN INDUSTRY IN COLONIAL INDIA arrived in a definite sequence, and the sequence is what history questions test.

1854 — the first mechanised COTTON TEXTILE mill at Bombay. 1855 — the first JUTE mill at Rishra on the Hooghly. 1907 — the TATA IRON AND STEEL COMPANY, the beginning of modern steel. Later — cement, sugar, paper, chemicals and engineering, with the fastest growth in the interwar years and after independence.

WHY TEXTILES CAME FIRST is the analytical point. A colonial economy acquires factory industry where four conditions meet: a raw material already produced locally and in surplus, a technology mature enough to be exported complete, capital willing to be committed, and a market. Cotton and jute met all four in the 1850s; iron and steel required a much larger commitment of capital, a supply of coking coal and ore together, and a domestic market for producer goods that did not yet exist.

THE TWO OWNERSHIP PATTERNS. Bombay's cotton mills were built largely by Indian merchants — Parsi and Gujarati capital that had accumulated in the China and cotton trades — and their profits stayed in India. Calcutta's jute mills were built largely by European capital, often out of Dundee, and were run through MANAGING AGENCY houses, which controlled several companies at once from a small equity base and drew commissions from all of them. The managing agency system is a recurring topic in its own right, and the jute industry is its clearest example.

THE WIDER CONTEXT is the one the paper touches elsewhere. The rise of factory industry in the second half of the nineteenth century came after, not before, the decline of India's handicraft textile exports in the first half — a sequence usually described as de-industrialisation followed by a narrow and belated re-industrialisation. The new industries were concentrated in two port cities, confined to a handful of consumer-goods sectors, and did not produce the machinery they used. That combination — some industry, in the wrong places, in the wrong sectors, without a capital-goods base — is what the economic nationalists of the period wrote about, and what planned industrialisation after 1947 set out to correct.

Key facts

• The modern Indian mechanised textile industry began in 1854, when a steam-powered mill was opened in Bombay by Cowasjee N. Davar.
• The Acland Mill at Rishra on the Hooghly, near Calcutta, was India's first jute mill, set up in 1855 by George Acland with the Bengali financier Babu Bysumber Sen, using spinning machinery brought from Dundee.
• By 1895 the jute industries of Bengal had overtaken the Scottish jute trade they had been transplanted from.
• Modern steelmaking in India dates from the Tata Iron and Steel Company, established in 1907 at the site that became Jamshedpur — more than fifty years after cotton and jute.
• The chemical industry in India developed substantially later, with its major growth in the twentieth century and especially after independence.
• Bombay's cotton mills were built largely with Indian merchant capital; the Hooghly jute mills were largely European-owned and run through the managing agency houses of Calcutta.
• Both first industries processed a raw material India already produced in surplus, close to where it was grown — cotton from the Deccan and Gujarat, jute from the Bengal delta.

Common traps

• Choosing iron and steel because of its later importance. TISCO dates from 1907, more than half a century after the first cotton and jute mills.
• Ignoring the word 'first'. Several of the industries named were established under British rule; only two were established first.
• Assuming all colonial industry was European-owned. The Bombay cotton mills were built largely with Indian merchant capital.
• Failing to count how often each industry appears across the four options. Jute is in three of them and therefore settles nothing; cotton textiles is the discriminating element.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Tata Iron and Steel Company, which began modern steelmaking in India, was established in

  • (a)1854
  • (b)1877
  • (c)1907
  • (d)1924

  Answer(c) 1907 — it was set up at the site that grew into Jamshedpur, more than fifty years after the first cotton and jute mills of the 1850s. The gap illustrates why heavy industry came late in colonial India: it required far larger capital, coking coal and ore together, and a domestic market for producer goods that did not yet exist.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The first jute mill in India was established at

  • (a)Rishra, on the Hooghly, in 1855
  • (b)Ahmedabad, in 1861
  • (c)Kanpur, in 1870
  • (d)Madras, in 1830

  Answer(a) Rishra, on the Hooghly, in 1855 — the Acland Mill, set up by George Acland with the Bengali financier Babu Bysumber Sen, using machinery brought from Dundee. Its location was determined by the raw jute of the Bengal delta and by water carriage to Calcutta, and the industry it began had overtaken the Scottish jute trade by 1895.