Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.191

c5.191

We shall presently see that India of those days had a great variety of flourishing industries. Industrial production, depending as it does on agriculture and raw materials, was never poor—either in quality or in quantity. Most of the industries were worked by hand-labour. It seems India was far ahead, in comparison with other countries of those times, in dexterity, and skill, swiftness and delicacy of touch of her artisans. The metal industries and textiles had particularly attained eminence. This traditional prosperity of India, in so far as it concerned Industries, began to be vanished only at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the West which, with machines and the capitalist *régime* all the world over, sounded the deathknell of handicrafts and small industries. India now needs not the quiet reversion to old and simple crafts, which is only an outcome of despair to reform the present system of production and distribution, but an organised, planned and well-thought-out Industrial development to the mass-benefit. With all the sneering, curses and anti-propaganda, Russia has shown the path by which an exclusively agricultural country can be converted into a full-fledged Industrial country, devoid of the evils and conflicts of a capitalistic system.