Volume I, No. 1, Winter 2001

perspectives

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In studying the history of modern India, more often than not, we are confronted by a conventional narrative that has been structured around a set of key events and dates that are associated with what are perceived to be the significant moments in India s history. For example, the year 1757 is generally cited as the beginning of British political involvement in India, in the same way that the year 1947 is usually referred to as the end of British rule there. Within this timeframe, a range of other events and dates are identified as significant moments in Indian history, including the Permanent Settlement, 1793; the Indian  Mutiny / Rebellion , 1857; the establishment of the Indian National Congress, 1885; the Partition of Bengal, 1905-11; the Amritsar Tragedy, 1919; the Non-Cooperation Movement, 1920-22; the Civil Disobedience Movement, 1930-34; the Government of India Act, 1935; the 1937 elections; the Quit India Movement, 1942; the 1946 elections; and many others. What emerges is a chronological framework that privileges certain moments as more important than others.

As historians then move from the simple process of describing events to the more difficult one of explaining them, there emerges various theoretical positions some explicit, others implicit that represent the history of India in a range of ways. In reading history then, it is important to remember that what one reads has been socially constructed and that, as historians of India, we should be familiar with these different views, insofar as our understanding of them provides the basis of a critical sense of Indian historiography. Indeed, as Ranajit Guha has so strongly reminded us, in many instances such views are much closer ideologically than they would first appear.[1]

Much of what has been written as history, of course, is determined both by what we consult as source material and by how we deconstruct that information. For example, in the case of India, the British colonisers have strongly influenced this process by their concern for maintaining detailed records on every level of rule from their operations in London down to the district level. Today there is a huge collection of such records in the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; the National and State archives in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; and other archives within Britain, South Asia and elsewhere in the world supplemented by other forms of documentation such as the Private Papers of Secretaries of State for India, Governors-General, and lesser-known figures these archives have provided generations of historians with the data upon which they have constructed their respective histories of India.[2]

While these archives remain invaluable sources of information for historians and while they represent the outcomes of a wide range of activities over a relatively long time, they are ultimately the product of the British imperial state as it developed between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries or as Guha describes it "colonialist knowledge".[3] Guided by the principles of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and those of social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, the British colonisers saw the state as the means through which the powers of "reason" could prevail and as the embodiment of the highest values of European "civilisation". It follows then that such perceptions found their way into the pages of histories of India. Certainly, when the writings on India by eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans are considered, evidence for such a view is readily available. Does this mean, therefore, that such writings have little or nothing to offer, contaminated as they are by the supreme confidence of their own ideology? It is a question that can be addressed in the first instance by case-by-case studies.

Of the many scholars who have written on the history of India one of the most influential has been Marx. As a scholar who was born relatively early in the nineteenth century (1818) and who died relatively late in the same century (1883), he was in a number of respects very much a product of his age. Yet he was more than that. As arguably as one of the great, if not the greatest social theorist/philosopher of the modern period, he shifted the explanation of the condition of man to a new level. In so doing, he ranged far and wide in his analysis of societies, including among others, India. Indeed, while he was not primarily concerned with the writing of the history of India, he produced a series of essays that dealt with a range of historical questions pertaining to India. More specifically, between 1852 and 1859, he wrote a series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune that both reflected and rejected the prevailing views of his age. In so doing, he set the pattern, in many ways, for future Marxist historical readings of India.

Yet, while Marx s Tribune articles remain important reference points in Indian historiography, they were not his only writings about India. For instance, his ongoing letters and notes, the Pre-Capitalist Economic Formation and his Critique of Political Economy, among others, contain writings that are relevant to the history of India and that have influenced historians /social theorists  views of India. What has not attracted as much attention has been Marx s references to India in his most important study, Capital. In all three volumes of this study, Marx employs examples from India to explain particular aspects of his theory of capitalism that in turn informs his theory of the history of capitalism. What follows is an analytical survey of Marx s reading of India as expressed in his Tribune articles of 1853 and his three volumes of Capital.

Marx's Historical Writings

Of the writings he produced for the Tribune, some of the more interesting were those that were published in 1853, the year in which the Charter Act was renewed. At this stage, the East India Company had lost most of its power and was basically a managing agency for the administration of India operating under the jurisdiction of the British government.[4] As a subject of discussion in parliament and in newspapers such as the Times, this Act provided a moment for reflection on Britain s position in India, with specific reference to the role of the East India Company. For Marx, it provided the means whereby he could articulate his ideas on Britain s relationship with India. Between June and August, he penned four articles that dealt with questions of governance, the history of the East India Company, finance and future outcomes.

In the first of these articles, "The British Rule In India," published on 25 June 1853, he drew on ideas outlined in a letter that he had received from Engels earlier that month, which describes India very much in conventional Eurocentric terms of that time. In outlining the "idyllic village communities," he noted that:

Inoffensive though they may appear,[the village communities] had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies....We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.[5]

By way of contrast, he went on to point out that while she was motivated by the "vilest of interests" and was "stupid" in the way she had gone about it, England was the vehicle for a "social revolution in Hindustan." Arguing that if mankind could not fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in Asia, then England was the unconscious tool of history in effecting that revolution.

While Marx may have differed from the intelligentsia of the English ruling class in his emphasis, both in terms of England's motivations and anticipated outcomes, his views were based on similar assumptions about India's past and present society. His main points in this article tend to reflect a view of India that had prevailed since the eighteenth century, when British officials saw
India as the product of a long history of ignorance and desperately in need of the tools of reason as defined by the Enlightenment philosophes. In the absence of historical sources that might suggest another view and Euro-centric in the sense that it assumed an incapacity on the part of the people of India to make their own history, his writings on this question do little to enhance our understanding of India s history other than to note the transformative nature of British rule in India. While the extent to which this position can be sustained has been the subject of ongoing debate among historians and remains a central question among historians of India today, it clearly demonstrates Guha s notion of "colonial knowledge" and highlights the limitations of Marx's historical sense of pre-colonial India.

In a subsequent article published on 11 July 1853, however, he appears to be on stronger ground in tracing the history of the East India Company. Noting, among other things, how, as a result of increasing corruption, the East India Company became what he terms "an English question" in 1784, only to remain intact with its powers gradually diminishing until 1853, when it had once more become an English question, he effectively analyses the origins of the British imperial state in India. He does so by examining the different ways in which this development had occurred.

First, he suggests that the Indian question was ignored by virtue of the fact that when the Charter Act came up for renewal in both 1813 and 1833, it was overshadowed by other more significant domestic events that occurred at the same time; the Anti-Jacobin Bill in the case of the former, and the Reform Bill in the case of the latter. As a consequence of this situation, India, and the East India Company, did not receive the attention they deserved. Or to put it another way, domestic questions were considered more significant for the state than foreign matters during this time.

Secondly, he suggests that up until 1853 the British government had been concerned to expand the limits of British influence by engaging in ongoing warfare under the company's name until 1849, when in the wake of the conquest of the Sikhs, this process of expansion reached its outer limits. By maintaining the presence of the Company, the British Government was able to conquer the sub-continent and lay the basis for imperial rule. Ultimately, it did this by dissolving the company and assuming complete political control on behalf of the crown.

Thirdly, he outlines the changing situation of the East India Company in terms of an ongoing struggle between the moneyocracy "which had converted India to its landed estates" in conjunction with the oligarchy "who had conquered it by their armies," on the one hand, and the millocracy (the emerging industrial bourgeoisie) who increasingly saw India as the most important market for its textile commodities, on the other. As the latter fraction of capital assumed ascendancy in England, it demanded the closure of the old system of government in India and the abolition of the East India Company, which it viewed as holding up the development of India as a market for British industrial commodities. Finally, he analyses the Indian question from the point of view of Indian finances from 1784 onward. In a masterly analysis, he demonstrates how an increasing debt was accrued by India as revenues decreased and how this situation was accentuated by an increase in expenditure.[6]

Clearly, this article is far more substantial than the previous one. Not only does it provide the reader with a penetrating insight into the history of the East India Company in India, but it also shows how the infrastructure for the British Imperial State was put in place there. Significantly, while his argument has been taken up by later historians, it remains as powerful today as when he wrote it. Indeed, apart from the work by Amiya Bagchi and a few others,[7] it is a question that has yet to receive the attention that it deserves. Certainly there is no study that has unravelled the struggle between money capital, the state and industrial capital in relation to India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Nor has there been a full-scale study of the development or lack of development of public works during this period.

Yet, in the ongoing debates that focus on the question of underdevelopment, de-industrialisation and the drain,[8] it is answers to these questions that would enhance our understanding of development in India. It is for this reason that a third article by Marx, published on 5 August 1853, remains essential reading for historians of India. In it he examines in more detail Indian finances, attacking, if only implicitly, the transforming capacity of the imperial state. He points to the pattern of government expenditure and the source of government revenue. In the case of the former, he highlights unproductive expenditure such as home charges, interest payments on debts, and the cost of the military as opposed to the small amount spent on productive public works. In the case of the latter, he argues that a large part of the revenues were raised through land taxes, opium or the salt tax all of which had impoverished the peasantry, weakening the productive capacity of India.[9]

In his final article on India, "The Future Results Of The British Rule in India" published on 8 August 1853, he asks the question: How did the English Come to Rule India? In answering this question, he notes how the power of the Mughals was undermined by their viceroys and how, in turn, they were undermined by the Marathas who were challenged by the Afghanis. Underlying this ongoing struggle were divisions based on religion (Muslims versus Hindus), on caste, and on tribal links.  It was in the context of this widespread conflict, he argues, that the British were able to claim power.

He then goes on to suggest that India could not avoid being conquered; it was only a question of who might fill the role of conqueror. For Marx, England had, in this respect, to fulfill a twofold mission in India: "One destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society [Oriental Despotism], and the laying of material foundations in Western society in Asia." It had, he pointed out, completed the first part of its mission by "breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society."[10] At the same time, the work of regeneration had just begun. Having established their political position and having unified India, the English were now beginning to consolidate this unity by the introduction of electric telegraphs, a free press, two distinct forms of private property in land, an educated class of English speaking Indians, a transformation of communications, steam-shipping, revamped ports, and railways.

In elaborating upon the impact of railways, he provides two powerful examples that highlight the significance of this change. First, he describes how through a lack of a modern transport system it was impossible to transport various produce from one point to another. By way of example, he notes how, in the late 1840s, grain sold for 6s to 8s a quarter in Khandesh, whereas, at the same time, it sold for 64s to 70s a quarter in Poona, where a famine prevailed and people were dying unable to access the grain from Khandesh. As he states, a rail system would have overcome such difficulties. Secondly, he describes how the introduction of railways might facilitate irrigation by the conveyance of water along the different lines. He then demonstrates how such a change would enhance the development of the region, given that irrigated lands paid three times as much in taxes, provided ten times as much employment and yielded twelve times as much profit.[11]

Noting that, while the English industrial bourgeoisie intended to endow India with railways for the selfish reason of procuring cotton and other raw commodities cheaply, once they had brought the rail system in they would not be able to contain the industrialising process necessary for the maintenance and expansion of such a system. With the emergence of this modern industry, the old division of labour that defined the caste system would disappear. Moreover, in pointing to the rapacious nature of the English bourgeoisie that was devastating in relation to India, he notes that they were only the organic results of the whole system of production as it was constituted and that production rests on the supreme rule of capitalism of which the process of centralisation is essential to its existence as an independent power.[12]

While Marx was not as vitriolic in his description of pre-colonial India as he was in his earlier article of June 10, he nonetheless continued to view it as inferior. In noting that Hindu civilisation was superior to that of the Arabs, Tartans and Moguls, who had successively overrun India but who had soon become 'Hinduised', he suggests that the British were, by way of contrast, a superior civilisation to that of Hindu society and, therefore, not susceptible to such a process. In employing this modernist view to construct a historical narrative for India, Marx also invokes the idea of progress in optimistically predicting the outcomes of what he describes as the regenerative forces such as the telegraphic system, the press, education, and the transport system, especially the railways.

In taking these four articles as a key moment in the development of Indian historiography then, it is possible to draw certain conclusions about Marx in relation to Indian history. Most obviously, it would seem that in his understanding of pre-colonial Indian society/ies, he is very much a product of his time. In this respect, he represents an important reference point for those histories that start with that assumption about India histories that, of course, have been the subject of detailed critiques, especially by more recent historians like the Subalterns. Again, Marx emphasises very strongly the idea of progress in the transformative possibilities of British rule. In this sense, while his idea of progress differs in its underling dynamic and its ultimate outcome, it shares much in common with that of enlightenment thinkers who saw the past as weighed down by the weight of religious ignorance and the future as the provenance of reason. As in the case of the first notion, he has helped shape the ideas of later historians, especially in relation to what was a largely unproductive debate about modes of production in the 1970s.[13] Equally, however, in those debates relating to development, the drain and deindustrialisation, his ideas of progress have been rejected by historians who describe themselves as Marxist.[14]

At the same time, and in a more specific sense, Marx has provided future historians with an excellent history of the East India Company in relation to India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In so doing, he has highlighted how the Company was shaped by both the development in Britain, and on the unfolding of events in India. Yet he has done more than that. Indeed, he has provided an analytical framework within which the emergence of the British Imperial State can be more fully understood. In noting the struggle between the different factions of the bourgeoisie in Britain and the relationship between this struggle and the state as well as the emphasis on sites of contestation in the domestic sphere, he demonstrates how Britain was unable to impose itself completely on India. Similarly, in describing how the East India Company engaged in an ongoing war that saw Indian territorial space fall under its flag, he demonstrates how the Indian "question" was addressed in a way that enabled the Imperial State to emerge by the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet he also demonstrates how this was achieved at great cost to India in that unproductive expenditure completely outweighed productive expenditure. In this sense then, while the arguments he takes up in the Tribune might be classified as uneven in terms of their explanatory value, they do address some very important questions.

Marx's Theory of History

Important as his Tribune pieces are, however, it is necessary to explore Marx's more substantial writings to grasp the extent to which he came to understand the historical process in India. Certainly, in the case of Capital, the second and third volumes of which were published posthumously by Engels, there is a sense that while Marx was still constrained by a lack of source material in relation to pre-British historical developments in the sub-continent, he had begun to grasp more fully the complexities of the Indian situation and to pose questions and suggest answers that would provide a better understanding of Indian history.

The extent to which he is constrained by the limitations of contemporary sources is most evident in Volume I, in his chapter on "Money or the Circulation of Commodities," in which he notes how in the beginning only the excess amounts of use-value are converted into money, which becomes a social expression for the superfluity or wealth. Such a process of hoarding, he suggests, was most commonly practiced by Indians. Why else, he asks, would Indian commodities have been so cheap. Marx's conclusions reflect views that have been long held by historians.[15] In recent years, however, such views have been strongly contested by historians like Michael Pearson and Om Prakash. Pearson, for example, argues that a large amount of gold and silver that was imported into India from the 17th century on was minted into money that underpinned commodity production.[16]

In dealing with the more recent history of precious metals and the rate of exchange, however, Marx is on much firmer ground. In Volume III, in reviewing the "Currency Principle and the Legislation of 1844," he notes how a study of the multi-lateral trading system in the mid-1850s that included India, China, Britain, France and Italy could be used to demonstrate the weakness of the argument of the so called Currency School in Britain. By reference to the silk trade that underpinned this system, he challenged its assumption about the way in which prices of commodities were affected by the import or export of money in the form of precious metals. In so doing, he demonstrates, among other things, how India was linked to the world economy at this time.

In the next chapter of Volume III, "Precious Metals and Rate of Exchange," he expands on this question of commercial and money capital by examining in a more general sense the rate of exchange with Asia. In the case of India, he shows how "excess of English exports to India over imports from India is in fact brought into being by an import from India for which England does not pay an equivalent."[18] Marx refers to this unpaid export as a "tribute extracted from India." As he notes, such a payment comprised drafts generated by the India Office in London that could be sold on the market for money to meet the so called costs of "good government", or to put it another way to meet "the London expenses of the East India Company (India Office) and for the dividends to be paid to stockholders."[19] In 1855, for example, India exported goods to England worth  12,670,000. Britain, in turn, exported to India goods worth  14,050,000.[20] Of this latter figure, however,  3,700,000 pounds was a tribute for "good government," an export which, Marx points out, cost nothing.[21] In short, when measured in this way, India s balance of trade with England moves from a deficit to a surplus. What Marx has effectively identified here is the basis of British Imperialism in India, namely the fact that Britain was able to manipulate politically the economy of a subject country. It is a question that historians have subsequently taken up and that remains a subject of ongoing debate.

At different points in Volumes I and II, he also touches on the issue of Indian famines both in a colonial and imperial sense. In a section on the "So Called Primitive Accumulation," he describes how, in the early days of the East India Company, company officials engaged in the monopoly of internal trade in India and how, by buying up rice and refusing to sell it, except at exorbitant prices, they created a famine in 1769 and 1770.[22] Again, he shows how in the 1860s, India experienced major famines as the result of extending the cultivation of cotton at the expense of rice cultivation in the eastern part of India, when the outbreak of the Civil War in the USA caused a collapse in the supply of raw cotton to British textile factories.

At the same time, he uses the latter example to explain how famines can be seen in terms of capitalist development. As he notes the "foundation of the division of labour which has attained a certain degree of development, and has been brought about by the exchange of commodities, is the separation of town from country." In this context, one of the pre-conditions for the division of labour within society is the number and density of population. In specifying what he means by this idea, he points out how a relatively thinly populated country with well-developed means of communication has a denser population than a more numerously populated country with badly developed means of communications. Thus, he points out how the northern states of the USA can be seen to be more thickly populated than India.[23]

In short, the famines of the early 1860s were, among other things, a product of a lack of development of transport facilities, whereby commodities could be readily transferred from one place to another. Yet as he goes on to argue such conditions were undergoing rapid change. In volume II, in analysing the question of circulation time, he shows how the progress of capitalist production and the consequent development of transport and communications shorten the circulation time for a given quantity of commodities, not only internally but also for the world market as a whole. Comparing the time allowed for currency bills of exchange between India and Europe in 1847 with that of 1867, he notes the impact of the telegraphic system and, subsequently, the opening of the Suez Canal on this process.[24]

Examining this issue further in volume III, in the context of the effect of turnover on the rate of profit, he describes how the process of circulation time has been transformed as a result of a revolution in communications: rail, steam-shipping, telegraphs etc. He suggests that as a consequence India, along with America, had been brought 70 to 90 per cent closer to the industrialised countries of Europe and that the efficacy of capital involved had been increased two, three or more times.[25]

He also focuses on the production process at the point of production. In volume I, for example, he notes how peasant agriculture may underpin a feudal mode of production, on the one hand, and appear alongside capitalist production after the dissolution of the feudal mode, on the other.[26] Again, in volume I, he uses India to demonstrate the distinctive characteristics of the formal subsumption of labour by capital. In so doing, he notes that while capital in India can be found in certain specific, subordinate functions, it has yet to appear as the direct purchaser of labour and as the immediate owner of the production process. In short, it has yet to emerge as "the dominant force capable of determining the form of society as a whole." Instead, the capital of the moneylender advances raw materials and tools to the peasant producer in the form of money. In return it claims exorbitant interest, which, as Marx notes, "is just another name for surplus-value." While it turns its money into capital by extorting unpaid labour from the direct producer, it does not intervene in the process of production itself. According to Marx, "in part it thrives on the withering of this mode of production, in part it is a means to make it wither away, to force it to eke out a vegetable existence in the most unfavourable conditions."[27] Yet such a situation does not represent the formal subsumption of labour under capital. It follows then that when comparing countries at different levels of development, especially countries that have developed capitalist production and those where labour, though exploited by capital, is not full subsumed by capital, the national rate of profit should not be measured by the national rate of interest.[28]

In a subsequent chapter on "Historical material on Merchant Capital," he explores the question of capitalist development further in noting the link between trade and industry. He notes how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a sudden expansion of trade and that the creation of a world market played a central role in defeating the old mode of production. In the period that followed, however, the situation was reversed, and it was not trade that revolutionised industry but industry that revolutionised trade. At the same time, the "obstacles that the internal solidity and articulation of pre-capitalist national modes of production oppose to the solvent effect of trade are apparent in English commerce with India and China." Noting how English trade had a revolutionary effect on the mode of production in India to the extent that it destroyed spinning and weaving, he underlines the very strong resistance to the products of large-scale industry. As he argues:

The history of English economic management in India is a history of futile and actually stupid (in practice, infamous) economic experiments. In Bengal they created a caricature of English large-scale landed property; in the southeast they created a caricature of peasant smallholdings. In the northwest they did all they could to transform the Indian economic community with common property in the soil into a caricature of itself.[29]

Significantly, this passage indicates that since the publication of his articles in the Tribune, Marx had become much more familiar with the operations of the different land revenue experiments in India and that, as a result, much more critical of their capacity to transform Indian agricultural production.

More generally, when his use of Indian examples to illustrate his explanation of capitalist development in his three volumes of Capital are examined collectively, not only does his theory of capital become much clearer but so too does his theory of the history of capitalist development. Indeed, his theoretical points are nearly always demonstrated by reference to specific examples. Unlike subsequent historians and theorists of India, Marx had no difficulty in locating and describing the nature of capitalist development in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if we require an example of how a historian may be constrained by the social and intellectual forces that define that period, yet may be a vehicle for enhancing the capacity of history to more fully explain the human condition, Marx is an excellent choice. In writing about pre-colonial India and the capacity of the British colonisers to transform Indian society, he articulated views that have been subsequently questioned and revised, and that demonstrate the extent to which he was a prisoner of his time. For the most part, however, his writings on India provide us with insights and an understanding of its history that were far in advance of his time. Certainly there is much to be gained from revisiting and reflecting upon his work.

Notes

1.  Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subalterns I, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981).

2.  See Martin Moir, A General Guide to the India Office Records, (London: India Office Library and Records, 1988).