Karl Marx on India and British Rule
Dialectical and historical materialist Interpretation at its best
Hindustan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the plains of Bengal for the plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, has been compressed by the conqueror's sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindustan, when not under the pressure of Mohammadan, or the Mogul, or the Britain, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, Hindustan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and Ireland, of the voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindustan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the monk, and of Bayadere...
There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before.
All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive action in Hindustan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England had broken down the entire framework of Indian society , without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain , from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.
There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government; that of finance, or the plunder of interior; that of war, or the plunder of the exterior; and finally, the department of Public works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and waterworks the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India, inundated are used for fertilising the soil of Mesopotamia, Persia, etc ; advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the occidental, drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated , in the orient where civilisation was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralising power of Government. Hence an economic function devolved upon all Asiatic governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilisation of the soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact we now find whole territories barraen and desert that wee once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, ruins in Yemen and large provinces of Egypt, Persia and Hindustan; it also explains how a single of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilisation.
Now,the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works, hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, o Laisse-faire and laissez aller..But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again some other government.. However changing the political aspect of India's past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The handloom and the spinning wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society. From immemorial times, Europe received the admirable textures of Indian labour, sending in return for them her metals, and furnishing thereby his material to the goldsmith, that indispensable member of Indian society, whose love of finery is so great that even the lowest class, those who go about nearly naked, have commonly a pair of golden ear-rings and a gold ornament of some kind hung around their necks. Rings on the fingers and toes have also been common. Women as well as children frequently wore massive bracelets and anklets of gold and silver, statuetts of divinities in gold and silver were met with in the households. It was British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning-wheel.. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole of Hindustan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.
..... Those family communities were based on domestic industry, in their peculiara combination of hand-weaving, hand spinning and hand stilling agriculture, which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilised communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.
Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrial patriarchal and inoffensive social organisation disorganised and dissolved into their units, thrown into sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilisation, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, 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 the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatary and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on other parts , in contradistinction , wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious right in Hindustan. 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 the sovereign of circumstances that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of of nation, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman the monkey and Sabala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in social state of Asia. If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was a the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:
Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure
(Marx- The British Rule in India - Marx-Engels Collected Works-Vol.12 pp.12533( 1853)
How came it that English supremacy was established in India. The paramount power of the Great Mogul was broken by the Mogul Viceroys. The power of the viceroys was broken by the Mahrattas. The power of Maharattas was broken by the Afgans, and while all were struggling against all , the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. A country not only divided between Mohammedan and Hindu, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium , resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest? If we knew nothing of the past history of Hindustan, would there not be one great and incontestable fact, that even at this moment India is held in English thralldom by an Indian army maintained at the cost of India? India, then, could not escape the fate of being conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least known history. What we call history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisiting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether weare to prefer India conquered by the Turks, by the Persians, by the Russians to India conquered by the Briton.
England has to fulfill a double mission in India. One destructive, the other regenerating - tha annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia. Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overran India, soon became Hinduised, barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilisation of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to Hindu civilisation. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by leaving all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of the rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. It has begun.
The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organised and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the first sine qua non of Indian self-emanicipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder, The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and manage principally by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The day is not fara distant when, by a combination of and steam-vessels, the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annaxed to the Western world.
( ibid.pp217/18 - July 22, 1853)
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