The Missing Middle: A natural progression of Indian potential?

You know like people, even states and countries have a personality. Why capitalism was a natural progression for the west, why socialism spread rife in Russia, why China developed in a communist setup? I think the study of people of any country can explain alot of these whys. Whenever I read a viewpoint on how India missed the Industrial Revolution and directly jumped from agriculture to service sector, I think to myself- why did this happen? Did we make some policy mistakes or was this a natural progression for the way Indian society is made up? 

If you look at how Industrial revolution progressed in England, the first step was labour intensive growth. Slowly as the people gained affluence, they started innovating to cut down on this dependency. The Chinese growth story also relies heavily on the labour of it's people. But I feel like such a process didn't work in India because it couldn't have. Throughout history Indians have been hard workers but never a part of a mechanised system of things. Self-employment based on skill sets is what India thrived on when it was the centre of world trade. The Indian economic system, even historically was never about selling mass produced identical goods. The uniqueness of every item is what set Indian goods apart. 

It's become common parlance to say that India was an agrarian economy. But anyone who has studied Indian economic history beyond a 100 years would know that, that's not true at all. India was always an agricultural society- a lifestyle based on land and associated culture. However economically, the subcontinent since time immemorial has thrived on the skill of the hand and the mind. So here's the thing that I wonder- a country with such immense intellectual and creative capacity, could it have ever been part of an assembly line structure of growth where it's people function as machines on a daily basis and remain employees throughout life? Was the Missing Middle a natural progression of the Indian potential? And does this mean that we will have to invest on building individual capacity more than we do on building large scale assets?

(Note: The Missing Middle in economics means that there are a few large firms, many tiny ones and nothing in between, which causes joblessness. It also explains why we missed out on building a strong industrial base or secondary sector.)