The Making of Modern India: From Marx to Gandhi by Bipan Chandra

Author:Bipan Chandra
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: The Writings of Bipan Chandra: The Making of Modern India: From Marx to Gandhi
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Published: 2012-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

IV

Here, I would like to discuss the major characteristics which Marx believed at one time or the other, and especially during the 1850s when his major comments on colonialism were made, to demarcate Indian and other Asian societies from European societies. Since he put differing emphasis on these characteristics at different times, they are discussed here more or less in the order in which they made their appearance in his writings.

ORIENTAL OR ASIATIC DESPOTISM OR THE CHARACTER OF THE ASIAN STATE

The first specific feature of Asian societies to be noted by Marx was the despotic and hypertrophied character of the State. This character arose, he first suggested in 1853, primarily because of the geographical and climatic factor that the arid lands of Asia could not be brought under cultivation on a large enough scale without artificial irrigation by canals and waterworks, also on a large scale. The village communities, separately or in association, were unable to undertake such large-scale irrigation because of the vastness of territories involved and the low level of civilisation.12 The result was that this function was exercised by the Government which had to be a centralising power to be able to fulfil the task. This inevitably led to the coming into existence of the powerful and centralised despotic Asian State.13 A similar functional relationship between Asiatic despotism and irrigation is established by Marx in Capital (vol. I), and Engels in the Anti-Dühring.14

An interesting paradox in Marx’s thinking enters at this stage. While postulating a centralised, despotic State as an essential feature of Indian society, he notes in the article, ‘The British Rule in India’ that in practice India, when not under the power of the foreign ‘conqueror’s sword’ often gets ‘dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns or even villages’. He then goes on to compare India with Italy for ‘the same dismemberment in the political configuration’.15 In other words, centralisation of State power springs not from the inner needs of the economy, when it should lead to the rise of an internal centralising power, but from the need of the foreigner to conquer. It is thus imposed from outside for reasons that pertain to the foreigner’s need and not the internal needs of the peasant. In fact, Marx’s remark that the village communities do not care at all whether empires rose or fell16 would also lead to the conclusion that the peasant was not benefited from centralisation. If centralisation had an essential function in the economy of the village communities, or rather a function that alone enabled them to exist and function, they could hardly have been so unconcerned about the fate of the centralising empires.

In the Grundrisse also Marx suggests that the despotic Asiatic State ‘which is poised above the lesser communities’ acquires its legitimacy because it appears to guarantee the conditions which are absolutely necessary to the communities for carrying on productive activity through irrigation, means of communication, etc. But he makes two interesting advances here over his position of 1853.

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