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D. D. Kosambi Exasperating Essays The Quality Of Renunciation In Bhartrihari's Poetry I Even the comprehensive work of Winternitz (Geschichte d. lndischen Literatur III, 137-145) gives us next to no definite information about the person of Bhartrihari, one of the greatest of all Indian poets and the first to be presented to the West. The reason is simply that no substantial information exists that would seem convincing to any critical mind. The poet could not have been a king, nor the brother of Vikramaditya, whatever the fablists narrate. That he was not a Buddhist is clear from the ardent and perhaps sincere vedantic verses in praise of Shiva that occur in his Centuries (V. 85-91 etc.). His identity with the author of the Bhaktikavya, or with the grammarian, or with the royal disciple of Gorakshanatha is very doubtful. Some of these negations need no proof, others will be justified later in passing. Only the uniformity of Indian tradition remains to assure us of the existence of a single person who wrote the Niti- shataka (N) , the Vairagyashataka (V) and the ShriIigara- shataka. Certainly, these works in their present form, whether the work of one or of many authors, succeed in creating a marked impression of a pronounced literary physiognomy. It is the Bhartrihari or the pseudo-Bhartrihari, or even the Bhartrihari syndicate of the N. and the V. that I mean to analyse here as a literary personality without further discussing the vexed question of his existence. The nature of the dissection must, therefore, deal less with the author as a historical personage than with the total mass of literary tradition handed down to us in his name; it will also affect the class of people whose extraordinary powers of appreciation enabled them to preserve a dazzling poetical treasure while completely erasing the author's biography. Well in keeping with the lopsided traditions of this uncritically appreciative class is the (sixth) edition, cited here, of the N. and the V. by M. R. Kale, still so popular as a text in our schools and colleges. Kale's own able Sanskrit commentary, with the slipshod printing of the text itself, and his positively gruesome English translation (which can be used only as a powerful argument against the employment of English as a medium of instruction in India) are all completely characteristic. In what follows N., N'. and V., V'. indicate the verses that Kale takes as authentic and as apocryphal in the two books respectively. II It must be understood at the very outset that the poet is worthy of any critic's efforts: that he is a great poet. When confronted with the lines written and the sentiments expressed by some of the world's greatest poets, the comparison will not always be in his favour. But let it be clear that at the very least he sustains the comparison, as no second-rate poet would, without fading immediately into obscurity. Many in India have tried to imitate his verses, without even approaching his success. If for nothing else, Bhartrihari would deserve a place in the front rank of world literature for his consummate handling of so difficult a language as Sanskrit. Variety , ease, facility, clarity, emphasis, and, when necessary, ornate imagery are all at his command without degenerating into the mere rank floridity of later "poet's poets". Few could exceed the force of his epigrams, the finality with which the sentiment is rounded out in many of his concluding half-lines. No ordinary versifier could possibly write such polished phrases, the translator's despair, as: "Life leaks away like water from a cracked jug" (V.39) "unsipped, at moonrise, the potion of the fair one's tender lips; our youth has passed away fruitless like a light (burning) in an empty house" (V.47: "how lovely the beloved's face stained with hot, scintiIlating tears of anger. (V .80: The senseless and sometimes revolting mannerisms such as the ever ferocious lion, the rutting elephant (N .29, 30,38), and the mythical rain-thirsty chataka bird are unhappily too discernible, but not fatal as they would have been to a lesser craftsman. It would be difficult to match the sweetness of (N. 51; apocryphal) : "O friend rain-bird, listen carefully for a moment (to my advice). There are many clouds in the sky, but they are not all alike. Some drench the earth with their downpour, and some just thunder in vain; don't beg pitifully from everyone that you see. In fact, our Bhartrihari must have been not only a poet by profession, but one fully conscious of the nobility and permanence of his calling. According to him, if a good poet went unrewarded, it was the heavy- witted king and not the poet himself who was at fault (N. 15). He speaks in the first person when matching a king's neglect with his own royal scorn (V.

He speaks in the first person when matching a king's neglect with his own royal scorn (V. 52,53). Poetry confers immortality: "Victorious are the great poets, masters of sentiments and emotions, alchemists possessed of the elixir of life; the body of their fame fears neither senility nor death." (N. 24 ). Here the poet transcends time and space to join a kindred spirit, Dante, in his reliance on fame as a second life ( cf. the seconda morte): "If I should be a timid friend to Truth, I fear to lose my life among those who will call this time antiquity" (Par. XVII, 118- 120: e s' io al vero son timido amico/temo di perder viver tra coloro/ che questo tempo chiameranno antico. ) . III Unfortunately, our hero does not always show the same fol1rsquare stance to the blows of fortune as does Dante ( "Iosto ben tetragono ai colpi della fortuna"). Both speak of the misery of enforced voyages in strange places, the bitter taste of a stranger's bread (Tu proverai si come sa di sale/lo pane altrtrl e come e duro calle/lo scendere e'l salir per l'altrui scale. Par. XVII, 58-60). But Dante's exile was due to a firm stand by his civic principles (Epistole, XII), a refusal of amnesty with even the slightest tinge of dishonour. Bhartrihari claims only the motivation of greed, and his chief lament is that there was, after all, no real gain: (V. 4) . "I wandered through difficult mountainous territory quite fruitlessly, rendered service after jettisoning proper pride of class and family-unrewarded; with a complete abandon of self- respect, I ate in strangers' houses with the timidity of a crow (picking up scraps); and thou, o sin-loving greed, waxest and art not yet satisfied." Our poet claims to have tried other trades: dug for treasure, smelted ores, crossed the ocean, served kings, slept in cemeteries to fulfil magic rites; and he begs greed to leave him because he gained never a penny (V. 3). By contrast with the divine restlessness of Dante's Ulysses (Inf. XXVI, 112-120) Bhartrihari's efforts as well as his renunciation seem ignoble, earth-bound. No sense of adventure, none of the true explorer's spirit, the exhiliration of visiting absolutely unknown territory, the joy of treading where no human foot had trod before (non vogliate negar l'esperienza/di retro al sol del mondo senza gente ) seems ever to have moved any Indian poet who has survived the passage of time. Rather than with Dante, one is led to compare Bhartrihari with that thoroughly earthy figure of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini; and here again our poet suffers by the comparison. Cellini too served princes, crossed the Alps, worked with metals-without actually smelting ores, and tried necfomancy by night ( V ita, I, xiii) .But whatever he gained or lost, he had no regrets, remained always the whole man, the typical Renaissance figure concentrating all his energies on the task in hand. And he took pleasure in the effort, whether the end was merely the satisfaction of his lust or the production of a masterpiece in the history of art. The world was always the richer for his activities; even his autobiography, with its blunt, forthright, unadorned prose remains a master- piece of its kind. Old age brings no peace of mind to our poet nor any real repentance for the misdeeds of youth: only regret for pleasures no longer accessible:- "The body is contracted, the gait totters, teeth fall out, eye sight is lost, deafness increases, and the mouth slobbers. Relatives no longer respect one's utterance, one's wife neglects her care; alas for the travails of old age when even the son becomes unfriendly (V.74). On seeing white hair on the head, the white hag of a man's surrender to old age, the girls avoid you from afar as they would a well for untouchables marked by its bundle of (bleached) bones (hung on top as a warning)" (V. 75). All these sentiments ring painfully true but, as means of inspiring renunciation, rather ignoble. Even that most thoroughgoing of rakes, Casanova, took old age more gracefully than this. We know of at least one great European poet who felt in his ripe old age the pangs of unrequited love, the mortification of having his advances repulsed by a young maiden. Further, Goethe was also dependent on a petty Court and served, in various capacities, the princeling of Weimar. He actually did the many things Bhartrihari only claims to have done, and had an excellent technical knowledge of many trades-mining and refining ores among them. Goethe had a tremendous literary store and mastery of many. verse forms some of which he was the first to introduce into his own language. From such a person, one might expect something similar to the two shlokas cited above, and yet one finds this: Ueber allen Gipfeln, Ist Rub, In allen Wipfeln Spurest du; Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde, Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. [ Over all the peaks is peace, in all the tree-tops can'st thou discern hardly the stir of a breath;

[ Over all the peaks is peace, in all the tree-tops can'st thou discern hardly the stir of a breath; the little birds fall ; silent in the woods. But wait, thou too shalt soon have thy rest. ] This famous 'Wandrers Nachtlied' conveys its message in the simplest possible language. Night must fall and with it will come rest for the wanderer, whether it be rest from the wandering of a day or the final rest from the long journey of a whole lifetime. Goethe's Faust, blind and near death, still plans with his last remaining spark of life the vast project of draining a fenland (Faust, II, Act V, 11559-11586) and thinks that the achievement of this service to his people might be the finest moment of his life. But it is to be noted that Faust hates the very idea of renunciation; for him activity is life itself; therefore he typifies the restless German ef the age of industrial expansion following Goethe, just as Dante's Ulysses foreshadows all the great trade-seeking explorers of the Renaissance. Renunciation is, after all, a form of negation; and negation is the function of Mephistopheles: Ich bin der Geist, der stets vemeintl But surely the comparison with an European poet of so recent a date is hardly fair to Bhartrihari, because of the difference in the means of production of their respective environments. So let us first look at the poetry of Sadi, also an oriental poet. one who lived in a world whose means of production could not have been unrecognizably different from those that prevailed in the time of the Indian. As both addressed essentially the same type of audience, the similarities between them are profound, Sa'di's Karimti is filled with maxims comparable to those of the N., and written with a clarity that dooms it like- wise to use as a school text, Some resemblances of phrase might even seem too close to be purely accidental (N.70): = nehad shakh pur meval. sar bar zamin, The tree or the branch loaded with fruit becomes humble, bows down to the ground. Perhaps, Sa'di's traditional visit to the court of Delhi might have something to do with this concordance, though this is not the place for tracing the origin of the particular phrase or of other resemblances between the two poems. What must interest us much more is the striking difference between the two poets. With the use of simpler language, the Persian (Gulistan ) is far more vivid and colourful, more of a human being, because of the range of his sympathies and experience. He did not wander for sordid motives. but for the love of travel and adventure. He knew the routine of courts, of camps, and of caravans. His figures of speech do not disdain even the trader.s vocabulary, Bhartrihari mentions trade and agriculture only once ( N. 107 ), and then shows about as much acquaintance with them as he does with aviation when-in the very next line-he mentions the possibility ol "passing birdlike through the broad sky, with the utmost effort. ;besides, the moral of the couplet is that the force of destiny is superior to all human endeavour. As a good Muslim, Sa'di must have believed in destiny, but the tough old man who could chide his soul for not having lost its childishness at the age of forty (chehal sal 'umre .azizat guzasht mizaje, to az hale tifli nagasht) would hardly have given up so easily. IV Comparing Bhartrihari with foreign poets can only lead to defects in the structure of his philosophy. No criticism can be called substantial that does not judge an author on the basis of his own axioms, within the frame-work of the author's own implicit universe of discourse. For this purpose, the N. is of very little value, since what maxims it does contain are of a lower middle-class outlook on life; and there is no real arrangement or unification, in spite of various efforts by commentators, that could show the full contours of a pragmatic philosophy. As a guide to action the N. is practically useless. The sensuous love-poetry of the Shringara would be better, but no one dares take it as the author's highest effort, whatever its beauty of expression. In fact, the point even of those lascivious verses is supposed to be the vanity of mere enjoyment, preparation for a final renunciation of the worldly life. I take the liberty of doubting this common assumption, because I for one find it difficult to say, in many cases, without a conscious effort of memory and on the basis of internal evidence alone, to which of the three centuries a given sloka belongs. Let us, therefore, not take any of the three centuries as characteristic, but rather look critically at Bharhihari's summum bonum: let us see with clear and unprejudiced eyes just what sort of vairaigya the poet desires: (V.99) "Fixed in the padmasana seat upon a Himalayan slab on the banks of the Ganges, lost in a yogic trance in the contem- plation of the Eternal, shall I ever see those blessed days, when old untimid stags rub their bodies against mine?" Now, clearly, this is not the utterance of a man who has actually tried the joys of yogic contemplation, but of one who feels how happy he might be if he achieved it, in the yet distant future. The composer of these lines still hankers after physical sensation, such as that of the stags rubbing themselves against him: sensation which would be completely inhibited by any really successful trance, yogic or otherwise. The perfect yogi must, as in all Indian tradition, beg his food, wear rags (V.66, V.l00); in addition, Bhartrihari wants the performance to take place at Banaras: (II v. 66, also v. 88, V'. 13). The begging and the rags are apparently an end in itself, an actual part of the final achievement.

The Buddhist almsman, on the other hand, was made to beg for entirely different reasons, at least by the founder of the religion. He was to have no attachment to any sacred place; begging was necessary to prevent the accumulation of property and the return of worldly attachmentS therewith. The Buddhist monk was originally supposed to be a wandering public teacher, one,whose function was to educate society in a new social doctrine. Bhartrihari's is a purely individual effort which could never have been adopted by the whole of society; one which does not involve any social obligations, not even a thought for that unfortunate portion of the popula. tion which has no such renunciatory yearnings and is therefore condemned to produce the grub that the yogi must beg and to weave the original cloth from which the yogi's garment of rags must be pieced together. The real nature of this renunciation becomes clearer when we look at its fruits ( V. 95, cf. V'. 31) . "The earth an attractive bed, his arm an ample pillow, the sky a canopy, the breeze a serviceable fan, the moon for a bright lamp and detachment his mistress, the peaceful ash-besmeared ascetic sleeps as happy as any king". That is, our ascetic at bed- time fairly wallows in all the pleasures of the worldly life which he claims to have renounced, down to a mistress. Only, instead of the real thing, he has substitutes. I-tsing wrote of a Bhartrihari who alternated no less than seven times between the pleasures of worldly and monastic life, and Winternitz believes the legend to be derived from the history of our poet. But the couplet just cited seems at best to indicate neither the monastic ideal nor a full share of worldly enjoyment; only the satisfaction of a man who utilised, contemplative life to find palatable substitute, for, what he he has mised during his pursuit of the vita activa. A look at the Dhammapada how the real thing should have gone: "Happily ,shall we live, those who have nothing at all; on the food of universal love, we have become like the abhassara gods." (At best V' 16, which is the only verse I can find of Buddhist type, has a very faint resemblance to this.) By contrast, Bhartrihari's can only be called "Ersatz- Entasgung". One should no longer be surprised on finding that this renunciation is not recommended for all: (V 67) "If, before you, you have the songs of accomplised southern poets and behind you tbe tinkle of ornaments worn by whisk-bearing attendant, maidens, then be a glutton for worldly pleasures; but if yon haven't these things, o mind, hasten to enter into undisturbed contemplation". That is if you are a king and can make a good thing of it, carry on; otherwise, give up the pleasures of the world which are beyond your reach. At the very least, this should dispose of the legend that Bhartrihari actully was a king; one feels that he would have taken his own advice and carried on. V Starting with praise and recognition of a high literay position, we have kicked Bhartrihari all the way down the literary ladder. Before closing this note, we have to raise him up again to his proper level, to show that whatever his failures by his own or by any other standards, he does achieve one outstanding success which explains rge survival of his poetry and which gives him an indisputable cklain to greatness. I hope that I have dismissed the superstition that the East is naturally more philosophical than the West, and in particular that it is Bhartrihari's professed philosophy that makes for his greatness. As a matter of fact, for appreciation of pure intellectual beauty, none of his verses will compare with Shelly's Ode; Keats is more of a kindred spirit. Horace shows a far deeper appreciation of the duties and of the lasting pleasures of life, pleasures that do not lead to the renunciation of satiety or of non-attainment. But then Horace knew what it meant to renounce the wide range of careers offered to any well- connected Roman by the early empire, and to achieve a proper renunciation by concentrating, not without effort, upon his poetry; so, he also knew enough to envy the "tough guts of the peasants". Virgil planned and began, if he did not live to com- plete, what would probably have been the most grandiose ')f the world's literary masterpieces; but the author of the Aeneid was still enough of a rustic to write good poetry in the Georgics. In a different medium, Holbein's dance of death (Totentanz) expresses more real philosophy than one can easily distil out of the Centuries. Sometimes, it seems to me that more philosophical content than in a dozen slokas is expressed by Holbein's single diminutive woodcut of a toil-bent peasant behind his plough, helped on by compa:osionate Death towards a shining city on the sunset horizon. Certainly, Giotto's campanile and its reliefs convey more to me of the worthiness of human life in its various possible fields of endeavour than does the whole of the N. Nevertheless, I repeat, Bhartrihari is a great poet for what he does succeed in portraying. He is unmistakably the Indian intellectual of his period, limited by caste and tradition in fields of activity and therefore limited in his real grip on life. The only alternatives open to any member of his class seem to have been the attainment of patronage at court, or retirement to the life of an almsman. The inner conflict, the contradiction latent in the very position of this class, could not have been made clearer than by the poet's verses. This also explains the "popularity" of the verses themselves in the face of far superior and more philosophically inclined doctrine available in all Indian literary forms. That is, precisely this class was, and still is, interested in the preservation of Bhartrihari's poetry.

The varying aspects of such class-life naturally render any orderly arrangement of the subject matter superfluous, and had hitherto made it impossible to do anything in the why of stripping the quasi- philosophic renunciatory guise from the writings themselves. Had the limited aspirations, the general futility of that class-life been made explicit and unmistakable, a more complete negation presented beyond the "renunciation", the poetry would have become intolerable to the class itself, and would not have survived. The poetical physiognomy of Bhartrihari is actually the physiognomy of the Indian intelligentsia of an age that has not yet passed away. We might illustrate this in detail by inspecting Bhartiihari's attitude towards women. They have a frank lustful attraction for him which he reveals with gusto. A young nymph crushed by the act of love ( N.44 , a beautiful woman's ripe breasts and thighs (V.46: devastating glances (V. 48: N. 85: : generate attraction, admiration, desire, which he can never conceal even in these two centuries. The third, of course, is devoted almost exclusively to the topic with an appetite that makes Ovid seem pale and colourless in comparison. Entrancing maidens (N. 104): are among the fine gifts of good fortune! There is no overspiced Hellenistic aberration here, and certainly no Freudian repression of the libido; not even Archilochus could have been more frank and unashamed as to his weaknesses. One can only pity the miserable pedagogue who, even in the strongly anaesthetic atmosphere of a modern Indian classroom, has the completely unenviable task of paraphrasing in an unerotic and decent manner, to a mixed class of adolescent boys and girls, such juicy bits as: By degrees, excess and satiety creep in, women become snares and temptations, (V.65, V'.9, 19, 20, 34, 38-44) to be treated with hydriotaphic avoidance (V'.19: The logical destiny of this attitude is to lead to absolute disgust for what once seemed charming-and may again become irresistible (V. 17) :etc., which should be compared for repulsive effect with Juvenal's description of the female after finishing her gladiatorial exercises. But there is always the notable distinction that the Roman wants a cure for the social evils of his time, whereas the Indian only looks to his own individual salvation. There seems in Bhartrihari to be not even the consciousness of the fact that woman is herself a human being, has her share of this world's sufferings, and might also feel the need for renunciation, for freedom from: her own peculiar sorrows and problems. Yet, the picture so far is not only incomplete, it is actually false to the poet's own sentiments. One stanza breaks with quite incredible force through the general impression hitherto produced to give the unbiassed reader a profound if brief glimpse of the truth usually missed by professional critics and litterateurs, true but not very worthy members of Bhartrihari's own class. (V.22: ) "If he did not visualize his wife as sad-faced, unfed, miserable, with her worn raiment constantly tugged at by pitiful, hungry, crying children, what man of self-respect would ever beg for the sake of his own accursed belly, in quavering, broken words that die in his very throat for fear of refusal?" ( cf. also V'.12). This betrays the real fear of the poet's life, the grim spectre of starvation that confronts him and his family unless he can beg his way into favour. No member of the modern un- propertied, technically incompetent, intelligentsia in this country can read the lines without a shudder; those who talk of the peculiar situation of the Bhadralok in Bengal might consider whether the same dread does not stalk them too. Surely.. this is not the obvious attitude for a man who shuttled between the court and the monastery, who alternately enjoyed and re- pented of his enjoyment of life. The solitary effort shows a far deeper feeling for the family tie than would be proven by a whole new Century on the virtues of a householder's life. Even in bourgeois-capitalist countries, the dread of unemployment is always the most potent factor in the maintenance of an outworn productive system; with what greater force must this motive have acted when the capitalist forms of production had not cast their shadow upon India, and no real employment existed for our intelligentsia apart from the favour of a wealthy patron or resort to the almsbowl? The promiscuity of the Centuries is not so much a characteristic of this country as of the class and of certain forms of the artistic temperament; it exists to as great an extent in the West except that no one there ever has had the courage to express it so frankly. For the rest, Bhartrihari did know something about women of pleasure, as he mentions varangana (N.47), panyangana (V.66). And he did not live in a society that professed belief in the ideal of monogamy, whatever may have been its general practice. So, his single lapse into sincere consideration for wife and children seems all the more significant, by sheer contrast. Whether or not it might seem to us a proper subject for poetry or social philosophy, the appreciation of a little wealth and the extreme dread of poverty are quite convincing in our poet's words. "All those identical limbs, the same actions, that undamaged intellect and the very speech: yet how strange, that without the warmth of wealth, the same man becomes instantaneously someone else" (N.40): (Also, N. 39, 41, 44, 49). This is even more strikingly put in an epigram which the editor relegates to the apocrypha: An exhausted penniless being rushes to the cemetery and begs a corpse to rise and take off his load of poverty for an instant, in order that he might enjoy forever its death-bom happiness;

but the corpse, knowing that death was far, far better than poverty, is silent! (V'18) : From this economic oppression, escape was possible only by the sudden accession of wealth, or renunciation of all such desire. For the first, there were no regular social paths; no success stories of the "From Log Cabin To White House" type, nothing to interest Horatio Alger. Only luck can bring a windfall; hence the general fatalistic bent, at its strongest in N . 90-108. On the other hand, renunciation too requires a strength of character not usually developed by our penurious intellectual. Either the gain of wealth or successful renunciation are impossible for the entire class as such without a complete social revolution; even the individual achieving either thereby manages to declass himself. So, we have a more practical way of escape, the purely literary expression of sensual enjoyment (which in actual practice would be impossible except for one of considerable means); or, its continuation, an equally literary expression of the joys of renunciation. Bhartrihari's verse does not express the supposed "dual personality of the Indian", forever oscillating between two extreme poles: renunciation of the senses and their voluptuous gratification. It is on the contrary, and par excellence, literature of escape. Bhartrihari's philosophical beauty is just a facade erected by the members of his class, to mask their real use of his poetry . VI Bhartrihari, then, is the poet of his class; a class that had not fulfilled its function, and a poet who, try as he might, could not but lay bare the class yearnings and weaknesses. This at once explains his success and his failure. But he is not a poet of the people. The Indian poets who made a real and lasting place for themselves in the hearts of the people came from the people themselves, and not from this narrow helpless stratum shut off from the masses by birth, training, occupation or the lack of it, language and culture. Those poets spoke the languages of the people, addressed themselves to the people and not to the court. Every child knows their names, and every peasant their songs. Even our intellectuals, as scholiasts and editors, try to suck a little of their vital blood. Kabir, Tukarama, Tulasidasa: what portion of the country does not pussess its own poet of the sort? But only one Bhartrihari sufficed, because the intelligentsia could and in fact needs must take the trouble to learn his language; and he had put their case in words that could not be matched. This class was perhaps the most convenient tool of the ruling power, whether indigenous or foreign, in the enslavement of the Indian people. To a considerable extent, it still maintains this anomalous position. One of my critics holds that all Sanskrit literature is im- personal; that neither Bhartrihari nor any other Indian poet of unknown biography can be judged by what he claims to have done, in his own verses. This would be relevant if my critique were directed towards the private life, and not the writings alone, of Bhartrihari. After all "impersonality" is a characteristic of all literature, not specially of Indian poetry. The great author need only project himself into an experience, not neces- sarily have had the experience itself; as witness so many touch- ing passages relating the thoughts and behaviour of a character on the point of death. But the mechanism of this projection, the images and phrases which the writer utilizes, must unconsciously reflect the structure of the society in which he func- tions, must inevitably bear the stamp of the class to which he belongs. That Bhartrihari must have been a brahmin seems reasonably certain. His most convincing figures of speech ~re brah- manical (N. 42,48). The king's wrath burns even those who serve him, as the fire might its officiating priest ( N. 57: (original in Sanskrit missing) When begging, the pious high caste people whose doorways are blackened with the smoke of many sacrificial fires are to be approached by preference (V. 24: (original in Sanskrit missing) What is the point of reading scriptures (V. 72: (original in Sanskrit missing) when realizing the inner joy is the proper "activity" for man? If there be wealth, all the virtues and caste itself might go to the nether world (N. 39: (original in Sanskrit missing) By con- trast with these, the rare mention of the kshatriya's profession seems ridiculous, such as "splitting elephants' heads with the sword" (V. 47: (original in Sanskrit missing) But he must have been a brahmin of a comparatively late period. Certainly, he could not have belonged to that earliest of all stages when the brahmins were yet to develop as an in- integral part.of the social system;

Certainly, he could not have belonged to that earliest of all stages when the brahmins were yet to develop as an in- integral part.of the social system; when they were still fulgitivcs in the woods, living spiritually on the exaggerated memories of a culture destroyed by fighting invaders ( later to become the kshatriya caste) and subsisting upon roots, wild fruit, cattle. This period, however, left its mark on the language in the form of two bits of wish- thinking: the cow and the vine that fulfil all desire: kamadhenu and kalpalata; these are reflected in the advice our poet gives to the king as to the best means of exploiting the earth (N. 46). Even the later ideal of retiring to a sylvan life after having enjoyed that of a householder is absent in Bhartrihari, whose renunciation hardly rises above complete aesthetic paralysis (V. 97, V'. 8, 29: N. 81). He can only have belonged to the period after the Mauryan "universal monarchy', after the brahmins had saturated all petty royal courts as ministers and advisers, had saturated the lower sociaI strata as priests, had finished their chief contribution to religious and productive organization by outmoding the age of great monasteries, and were at the beginning of their last great phase, a literary expansion of secular type. This can hardly have been much before the fourth century A.D., and might not have taken place simultaneously over the whole country. Any attempt to assign a very early date for Bhartrihari would have to cope with the reference to the ten incarnations of Vishnu (N. 100: ,and to the hermaphrodite Shiva (V. 18: (original in Sanskrit missing) The authenticity of these two stanzas can be challenged, as also of the Shringara verse , which extols the pale golden complexion of Shaka maidens. But the word samanta, originally 'neighbour', can only mean 'feudal baron' in V. 42. This usage, though current in the 6th century, would be difficult to establish before the Gupta period. Therefore, the late 3rd century A.D. would be the earliest reasonable period for the Bhartrihari who saw this beginning of Indian feudalism, but no empire of any size. At no period had the brahmin caste, whether priests or not, a position fully comparable with that of the Roman clergy. It lacked the organization, the popular recruitment that gave a possibility of close contact with the masses; it could never have performed the function of sheltering the germination of new productive forms concentrated in the free ecclesiastical cities, which meant the end of feudalism in Europe. It had never a regular and official means of livelihood. At best, the caste was like the mistletoe: a beautiful parasite regarded witll superstitious reverence by the multitude, but whose unlimited proliferation was at least a symptom if not the cause of decay. The greatness of an author does not lie in mere handling of words. Indeed, the finest craftsmanship of such manipula- tion is impossible without the expression of a new class basis. This does not mean that every writer who seeks enduring fame must express only the glory of the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is doubtful if Shakespeare could have grasped the meaning of the word (proletariat) itself except perhaps as a mass of Calibans. But in Shakespeare's day there were other classes, the new trading gentry for example, that had begun to force their way to the front and had yet to become, in their turn, obstacles to human progress. One must remember that, 'dur- ing the course of its struggle against the old, every new class tends to assimilate and identify itself with the entire oppressed section of the human race-to take its own victory as the total desideratum of the progress of civilisation. In our own day and country, we have seen the worst aspect of this phenomenon only too often. How many talk of India and its needs when they are really making a case for a little greater share of the spoils for themselves and their minute group? [This brings us, in passing, to the problem of literature for a classless society, after a socialist revolution. How is it that the new literature in those countries where such revolutions have been completed does not yet show the same relative power in the way of new authors and impressive new literary forms that may be seen with the earlier social changes? In all pre- vious cases, the new class had formed in the womb of the old, and had begun to express its new ideals, needs, and aspirations in literary form precisely because political expression was not feasible at the earliest stage. This is manifestly impossible in a true socialist revolution where the common working-class people, the vast and often illterate majority, must necessarily assume power. The transition has never been smooth, according to modern history, but on the contrary the result of the grimmest possible social and economic disasters. The urgent problem before such a post-revolutionary society is to overtake and to surpass the anti-socialist but technically more advanced countries. At the same time, there is a costly struggle with this hostile environment, which constantly attempts to crush the dangerous innovation, to strangle the new social forms. Nothing in all extant literature was composed in or for a society without division into antagonistic classes- not even the utopias that visualized such societies. The writers who continue to function in the new society bear the stamp of the old. Even the 'progressive' writers cannot help the smell of decay which they carry from the rotting away of the class that supplied their models, to which they generally belonged, and towards which they were oriented in their formative years. This inner contradiction, which leads so often to the. dismal 'boy-loves-tractor' school of literature, is not to be cured by party directives, nor by fiery resolutions at writers' conferences. The cure can only come through the fully developed literary taste of the entire new society, which means universal literacy, and full availability of the classical writing in that particular language. The development of new art forms and the changed relative position of literature has also to be considered.

The cinema, television, radio should have, at least on occasion, produced scripts that could be additions to literature. But the deadly influence of the newspaper with its advertising meant to sell any goods for private profit, its processing of news to sell shoddy ideas for class profit, and the vile sensation-mongering that sells the paper while diverting attention from serious cracks in the foundations of the social structure-all these have completely changed the function of the written word even in bourgeois society. The new society will, in some way, have to link its aesthetic problems directly to those of production. New social art forms must develop in a radically different way, just as dance, music, poetry, drama, painting, and sculpture developed out of primitive, pre-class fertility rites, initiation ceremonies, and sympathetic magic. It is difficult to imagine Plato's "music and gymnastics" in a modern factory, only because we have not yet begun to develop the units and forms of real social production that will dominate the future, and therefore not even visualized the innate harmony and the unforced natural rhythm that must accompany such production.] The great poet in a class society must not only express the position and aspirations of an important class, but must also transcend the class barriers, whether explicity or implicity .He must lay bare some portion of the structure of society, pointing the way to its future negation. (Where Bhartrihari fails to do this effectively his greatness is fictitious, loaned to him by the class itself ). This is most easily done in the period of class emergence, and explains why, in so many great literatures, the greatest names come at the beginning and not at the end of their historical development; why the Alexandrians could only gloss the Homeric epics, not create them. It also explains the power of such writing to attract readers centuries after the society that was heralded arose, flourished, and passed away. Often, the newly developing class takes so much time to assume its rightful place that the new poet has little chance of contemporary material success, and passes his life in obscurity. The Indian asks for far less. Having forgotten his petty lusts. trifling fears, vain longings, he speaks to his relations the elements, with the loving and noble humility of a St. Francis of Assisi, a gentle word in that final moment of the ultimate sublimation of personality . Fergusson & Willingdon College Magazine, (Poona), 1941. under the pseudonym "Vidydrthi". Reprinted with minor changes in Bhliratiya Vidyd, vol. IV, 1946, pp. 49-62. The critical text or Bhartrihari's stanzas is in my editio princeps: "The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartrihari" (original in Sanskrit missing) Singhi Jain Series no.23, Bombay 1948. “Exasperating Essays” Index | Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India Marxists Internet Archive Library

D. D. Kosambi Exasperating Essays Imperialism and Peace We do not have, today, the peace yearned for by millions all over the world. In Korea we see a full-scale modern war waged relentlessly against an entire nation whose one wish, for centuries, has been unity, with independence from foreign aggression. In Malaya and Indo-China two decaying imperial powers struggle desperately to maintain the privileges of an outworn colonial system over the opposition of people who will no longer be denied freedom. Military operations in Greece, Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine, have shown us for five years other facets of the same malignant activity. Yet the supporters of peace have a power which can stop this violence and bloodshed. For all these wars and acts of aggression-even the war in Korea-have been waged in the name of establishing peace. At first, we were given various mutually contradictory reasons why the Koreans were to be saved from themselves. Then we were told that General Mac-Arthur meant to supply the aggressive leadership which is all that Asiatics can appreciate. He seems to think that we Asiatics will naturally appreciate saturation bombing of peaceful villages, destruction of schools and hospitals, savage reprisals against civilians and prisoners of war. But this is an error. What we do appreciate is that his utterances show quite clearly who is the real aggressor in Korea. We Asiatics also belong to the human race; we also are made of flesh and blood; we tread the same earth, breathe the same air. The peace we want means true democracy. The experience of millennia has shown us that no other kind of peace will last. No man shall claim to be another's master whether by divine right, the right of birth, the right of armed conquest, or the right vested in accumulated private property. Such rights can only be exercised by fraud and violence against the vast majority of the people, by destroying the very foundations of peace, namely, truth and justice. The lowest in the land must raise himself to full stature as an individual member of a great society. He must exercise in full, by actual participation in governing himself and others, his right to receive according to his needs, his duty to contribute according to his ability. Formal recourse to the ballot-box for a periodic but ineffective change of masters will not suffice. The stale proclamations of all imperialisms, from Rome to the present day, have again been proved false in the British, French, and Dutch empires. The people of China rejected, in favour of democracy, the aggressive leadership of Chiang Kai- shek, who was so amply supplied with foreign arms and money. But the only lesson imperialism can draw from these rebuffs is that puppets are unreliable, that open intervention is a far better road to conquest- provided the other side is poorly armed. The Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica should now be replaced by a dollar peace, the Pax Americana. Tacitus gave a candid opinion of a contemporary Roman emperor: "He made a desert and called it peace." A modern historian might say of Hitler: "He waged total war, and called it peace. This kind of "peace" did not succeed in Europe, nor will it in any other part of the world. Let us trace this crazy logic to its source. The issue of peace or war does not depend upon a single individual who is ostensibly at the helm of a nation, but upon the dominant class which really holds the power. We are all convinced of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberalism and sincere desire for world peace. Yet in attempting to "quarantine the aggressor" in Spain, he only helped to destroy the democratic victims of fascist aggression. Hitler's advance into Czechoslovakia went unchecked, as did Mussolini's into Abyssinia, Japan's into China. We can trace this kind of aggression right back to World War I and its aftermath, to the grim intervention against the young Soviet Union which had sounded the call for peace at its very birth. There is indeed a broad continuity of policy against peace and against democracy. This undercurrent has never changed its direction, no matter what appear on the surface. Leaders like Mr. Churchill just carry out the interests of the dominant class and would get nowhere without its backing; they are merely a symptom, not the main cause. Look at another aspect of this underlying policy. Ploughing cotton back into the soil, burning up or dumping millions of tons of food into the ocean were desperation measures introduced at the beginning of Roosevelt's New Deal. Instead of changing the ownership of the means of production, or designing a better distribution mechanism, these transitional measures rapidly became a permanent feature of the American way of life. The United States government began regularly to pay subsidies to produce food which was then destroyed to keep prices up. Up to 1950, American farmers were paid by their government to destroy mountainous heaps of potatoes and to feed to livestock wheat produced by the most modern farming technique; at the same time, Canadian wheat was being imported into the United States because, even after paying the protective tariff, it was cheaper than the subsidised American product. This insane economic system shows exactly the same kind of twisted logic as that of modern imperialism which wages war in the name of peace and calls any move toward, peace an act of warlike aggression, which bombs people indiscriminately to save them from Communism. The crooked roots of imperialism lie deep in the need for profits and ever more profits- for the benefit of a few monopolists. The "American way of life" did not solve the world problem of the great depression of 1929-33. In the United States this was solved by World War II. But only for a time. Korea shows that the next step is to start a new war to stave off another depression.

Korea shows that the next step is to start a new war to stave off another depression. The one lesson of the last depression which stuck is that profits can be kept up by creating shortages where they do not and need not exist. War materials are produced for destruction. Producing them restricts consumer goods, which increases profits in double ratio. Any logic that proves the necessity of war is the correct logic for imperialism and for Big Business, which now go hand in hand. Mere contradictions do not matter for this sort of lunatic thinking where production of food is no longer the method of raising man above the animals, but merely a way of making profit while millions starve. Let us now consider the deeper fact that food is itself a weapon-a negative weapon, but no less deadly than the atom- bomb for bacteriological warfare. A bomb or a bullet shortens a man's life. The lack of proper nourishment also shortens a man's expectation of life by a calculable number of years, even when there is no actual famine or death by starvation. Deprive a man of food and you make him prey not only to hunger but to disease; do it year after year, generation after generation, and you produce a race whose minds and bodies are stunted, tortured, warped, deformed. You produce monstrous superstitions, twisted social systems. Destroying stockpiles of food is the same kind of action as building up stock-piles of atom- bombs. But the war waged by means of food is different in one very important respect from national and colonial aggression. It is war against the whole of humanity except that tiny portion to whom food is a negligibly small item of expenditure, war also against millions of American workers. In a word, it is class war, and all other wars of today stem from attempts to turn it outward. Even the Romans knew that the safest way to avoid inner conflict, to quiet the demands of their own citizens, was to attempt new conquests. Quite apart from the destructiveness of total war, the crooked logic of Big Business and warmongers is fatal to the clear thinking needed for science. The arguments that modern science originates with the bourgeoisie, that the enormous funds devoted to war research are a great stimulus to science, are vicious. The scientific outlook came into being when the bourgeoisie was a new progressive class, struggling for power against feudal and clerical reaction. Science is cumulative, as is large-scale mechanised production which congeals the result of human labour and technical skill in increasingly large and more efficient machines. But for modern capitalists, a class in decay, the "findings of science (apart from profit-making techniques) have become dangerous; and so it becomes necessary for them to coerce the scientist, to restrict his activity. That is one reason for vast expenditure on secret atomic research, for putting third- raters in control to bring big-business monopoly to the laboratory. The broad co-operation and pooling of knowledge which made scientific progress so rapid is destroyed. Finally the individual scientist is openly and brutally enslaved for political reasons. Science cannot flourish behind barbed wire, no matter how much money the war offices may pay to "loyal' mediocrities. Freedom is the recognition of necessity; science is the investigation, the analysis, the cognition of necessity. Science and freedom always march together. The war mentality which destroys freedom must necessarily destroy science. The scientist by himself can neither start nor stop a war. Modern war has to be fought by millions in uniform and greater numbers in fields and factories. But a scientific analysis of the causes of war, if convincing to the people at large, could be an effective as well as a democratic force for peace. We have to make it clear to the common people of the world that any aggression anywhere is, in the last analysis, war against them. We have to tell them not to be misled by the familiar but insidious whisper: "Things were better when we had a war". This is just like a criminal drug peddler saying to his victim: "See how much better it was for you when you had the drug than when you sobered up afterwards. Buy another dose." The real problem is how to straighten out our thinking and to change our economy, to transfer control of all production to society as a whole. Only then can we have real democracy and lasting peace. It must be understood quite clearly that the war between nations, World War III, is not inevitable and can be stopped by pressure of public opinion. The inner conflict, the class war, on the other hand, must be settled within each country without foreign armed intervention. The peace movement cannot deny to any people the right to revolution (including counter-revolution), nor even the right to wage civil war. It can only demand that no nation's armed forces should go into action upon foreign territory. That is aggression even when done under cover of "defence", restoration of law and order, or a forced vote in the United Nations: The purpose of the United Nations was to settle all international differences without war, not to provide a joint flag for the ancient imperialist "police actions". If unchecked, such an adventure is a clear invitation to the aggressor to initiate the next world war as can be seen by the history of appeasement during the 1930's. But there is one important difference between that period and the present. There were then large powers such as the British Empire and the United States which could assume a position of formal neutrality while fascism was being built up as a military and political counterpoise to Communism. Even this formal neutrality is impossible today; only mass action by the common people of the world remains as the bulwark of peace. Monthly Review, (New York) 3,1951, pp. 45-59. Colonial liberation greatly promotes world peace because it wipes out the great tension between the imperial power and the subject people, and because it does away with the outcry for colonies by the "have-not" nations of the West. The previous exploiting nation will actually profit, for it would logically be the best source of help for the liberated colony to develop its own resources on a free and equal basis.

The previous exploiting nation will actually profit, for it would logically be the best source of help for the liberated colony to develop its own resources on a free and equal basis. This is because of long' contact, cultural influences, and local knowledge. The loss to the small group of people who monopolised colonial profits and made money out of armaments would be negligible as compared to the national savings in armaments and the total profit by the new trade. The sole condition for all these mutual benefits is that liberation should take place before the colonial population is enraged beyond all limits. The British seem to have learned this lesson (except in places like Kenya where there is virtually no strong native bourgeoisie), whereas the French show by their behaviour in Algeria that the lesson of Vietnam has not yet gone home. “Exasperating Essays” Index | Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India Marxists Internet Archive Library

D. D. Kosambi Exasperating Essays The Function of Leaders in a Mass Movement To what extent do "mere agitators" determine the course of a revolution? Would it be possible to suppress all such upheavals by the judicious and timely action of a few people? Or is a change of nature inevitably the inner contradictions of a system are manifested in leadership inevitable too? Dialectical materialism leads to the latter conclusion, but the nature of this inevitability has be closely examined, even from a dialectical point of view. This view claims that a change of quantity inevitably leads to a change of quality. Water cooled indefinitely remain a fluid, but must solidify into ice when enough heat been lost; the same liquid, when it has absorbed no will be transformed into a gas, steam. Similarly, contradictions latent in any form of production develop, the form of society will inevitably change. This is simple enough, but the circumstances that prevail at the critical point need further examination. First, there is a minimum or threshold value below no transformation can possibly take place. Secondly, this threshold value can be surpassed, sometimes to a surprising extent, if certain conditions, which are otherwise insignificant do not obtain. To give an illustration: we can never get the solution of a given salt to solidify, i.e., change of a mass of crystals, unless the solution is concentrated. But supersaturated solutions can always be obtained with a 1ittle care. If a small crystal be added to such a supersaturated solution, the whole mass will crystallize, often with amazing rapidity. The small parent crystal, which does not appreciably increase percentage of supersaturation of the total solution, is necessary for the crystallization. Moreover, some substances can exist in several distinct crystalline forms; then the crystal added will determine the form of crystallization for the whole mass. I submit that this analogy explains the position of leadership in a social movement. Below the threshold level of objective conditions in the society as a whole, little can be done. But good leadership recognizes when this level has been surpassed, and can produce the desired transformation with very little supersaturation. Of course, if the social forces are strong enough, they can overcome the handicap of an indifferent or even bad leadership, but the entire process of transformation must naturally take place at a correspondingly later stage of development. It is this postulation that explains why the communist revolution was successful in Russia, but failed in Germany where Marx and Engels expected it to occur first because of greater concentration of productivity. Trotsky, in his history of the Russian revolution, says, "Lenin was not a demi- urge of the revolutionary process, ...he merely entered into a chain of objective historic forces. But he was a great link in that chain." Our present analogy seems to me more constructive than that of a chain. Lenin recognised that the war of 1914 was a purely imperialist clash; he alone insisted upon carrying out the resolution of the second international which suggested the conversion of such an outbreak into civil war. It was he, of all the socialists in Russia, who first recognised the true function of the soviets as the organ of the proletariat, and brushed aside the wobbling theorists who postulated an intermediate bourgeois-liberal democratic stage in the development of the revolution. His letter drove the communists to armed insurrection on November 7, 1917; the time was ripe for such procedure in the seizure of power, and probably no other method could then have been as effective. Not only in the beginning, but even in after years, when the revolution had to be saved by strategic retreats such as unfavourable treaties with hostile aggressors and the New Economic Policy, Lenin showed what leadership can really accomplish. The other revolutions in Europe, i.e. Hungary, Germany, Italy etc., were lost not simply because the social conditions were relatively less favourable but because the guiding spirits were less able. On the other hand, we may note that Lenin himself, in his Geneva exile, could not shake the complacent inertia of the Swiss working class. Now there is another type of leadership (that we have often seen in history) which does not itself participate in the upheaval in a manner similar to the above example. We see this in most religious movements, which gain head suddenly, become revolutionary for a while, put a new set of rulers in power, and then settle down to a parasitic routine, all without the least apparent change of ideology. Of course, the change is there in practice, if not in theory. One can hardly expect the poor of any era to understand and to fight for abstract theological problems which even learned bishops could not settle. Why should the people of one age fight for Athariasius against the Arians while, a couple of centuries after the creed was established, their descendants fought with much less vigour against Islam? The fact is not that there are periods of sudden theological understanding for the masses, but that the religious leadership knew how to stand firm on some point in a way that suddenly activated the social discontent. The analogy here is not with our supersaturated solutions, but rather with the position of catalysts in chemical reactions. Many reactions take place very slowly, or not at all unless substances like sponge-platinum or kaolin are present. These substances remain unassimilated and undiminished after the reaction has been completed, but their presence does materially accelerate the reaction. Finally, we have seen cases of leadership by dispersion as well as leadership that concentrates social forces. This often happens when a class not in power gains its predominance by uniting with a lower class which it must normally exploit. In that case, methods have to be devised for the dissipation of the excess of energy available;

In that case, methods have to be devised for the dissipation of the excess of energy available; methods that usually come with the label of "restoration of law and order." Some Marxists (of whom I am one) claim that a part of the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi must fall under this head. When the 1930 Satyagraha got out of hand and was about to be transformed into a fundamentally different movement by the no-rent and no-tax campaigns in 1932, he discovered the need for the uplift of our untouchables, and the whole movement was neatly sidetracked. At Rajkot this year, he put himself at the head of a campaign that would have lighted a fire not easily put out in the kindling of our social discontent and that too was effectively sidetracked by newer and finer points in the theory of non-violence-points of a purely theological minuteness. Both of these had a pre- cursor in the cancellation of the first civil disobedience movement after Chouri-Choura. But in the two later cases, it was quite clear that the forces of social change were scattered precisely at a stage when their continued focussing would have been dangerous to the class that wanted power, the Indian money-owners. This is not to say that the leadership was a deliberate, conscious act. That is why the Congress movement had its periods of glum depression. Its usefulness to the class mentioned was low in just those times. At least one difference exists between a social group and the solutions that we have used for the purposes of analogy: the lack of uniformity. The concentration in a social movement need not be the same throughout the whole region affected. This leads to two distinct types of development after the initial stages. Either the transformation that has taken place in a small portion will spread over the rest of the social group-which again implies the existence of a minimum threshold value over the entire aggregation, or there will be produced a deconcentration, a rarefaction as it were, over the untransformed portion. In the latter case, the transformed portion must temporarily isolate itself, or again dissolve into its surroundings. I take it that this will explain why the Marxist revolution in one part of the world did not spread with the rapidity that was expected of it. Its very occurrence in that part sharpened the contradictions that existed elsewhere; but it threw hesitant leaders back into a reactionary attitude, because they had not themselves developed to the necessary level. Fergusson and Willingdon College Magazine, (Poona) 1939, pp. 6-9. One of the obvious conclusions is that when the major, immediate objective of the mass movement has been gained, both the people and the leadership must remain vigilant against the ripening of inner contradictions by studying the needs of the next stage. Class-reaction and the cult of personality can be avoided only by the broadest active participation of the whole people in the transformed movement, e.g. after a revolution, in self-government and in national planning. On the other hand, the very success of national planning and resultant increase in the quantity of production-even socialist planning and socialist production-must inevitably lead to a change of quality in the leadership. This accounts at least in part for the 'de-Stalinization' policy of the USSR, which is now the second greatest industrial country in the whole world, with the greatest output of trained technicians, engineers, and scientists. Fergusson & Willingdon College Magazine, Poona, 1939, pp.10-12 The initial two-thirds of this story was written as an English At theme at Harvard in 1924. “Exasperating Essays” Index | Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India Marxists Internet Archive Library

D. D. Kosambi Exasperating Essays The Decline of Buddhism in India The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Chuang (630 A.D.) saw images that had sunk into the damp Indian soil, and was told local prophecies to the effect that the religion of the Teacher would vanish completely when the image had sunk out of sight altogether. Shashanka, king of Bengal, who had systematically destroyed Buddhist religious structures, cut down and burned the sacred tree at Gaya under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment twelve centuries earlier. The tree was soon nursed back to growth from a sprout discovered by Pumavarman, the last descendant of Ashoka. Harsha repulsed Shashanka, restored the devastated Buddhist foundations, and built many new ones. Monasteries by the thousand still housed and fed a vast army of monks. The richly endowed University of Nalanda was at the zenith of its fame. All seemed well. The real damage came from within, and may be discerned in the report of the same Chinese traveller, though he was perhaps not conscious of what his words signified: "(The Buddhist scholar who) can explain three classes (of sacred texts) has allotted to him different servants to attend and obey him. ...He who can explain five classes is then allotted an elephant carriage. He who can explain six classes of books is given a surrounding escort if one of the assembly distinguish himself (in disputations) by refined language, subtle investigation, deep penetration, and severe logic, then he is mounted on an elephant covered with precious ornaments, and conducted by a numerous suite to the gates of the abbey. If, on the contrary, one of the disputants breaks down in his argument, or uses poor and inelegant phrases, or if he violates a rule in logic, they proceed to disfigure his face with red and white, and cover his body with dirt and dust, and then carry him off to some deserted spot or leave him in a ditch. Thus they distinguish between the meritorious and the worthless, between the wise and the foolish." This was surely not the way merit had been judged in the days of the Buddha. The original function of the ever-wandering almsmen had been to explain the way of righteousness to all, in the simplest possible words, and the languages of the common people. The new class of disputatious residents of wealthy monasteries cared nothing for the villagers whose surplus product maintained them in luxury. The original rules laid down and followed by the Buddha had permitted only the mendicant's trifling possessions without even the touch of gold, silver or ornaments. The Buddhas of Ajanta are depicted wearing jewelled crowns, or seated upon the costliest thrones. Similarly, the old Buddhism had turned Ashoka away from war to the path of peace. His edicts state that the army would henceforth be used only for spectacles and parades. The devout emperor Harsha, on the other hand, managed to reconcile war with Buddhism just as he reconciled his worship of the Sun god and Maheshwar. Harsha's army increased during thirty years of constant, aggressive warfare to 60,000 elephants, 100,000 cavalry, and a still larger number of foot soldiers. He was Buddhist enough to forgive the assassin whom he had disarmed, when the assembled kings and nobles demanded the death punishment. The common people, who had to pay for his wars and for the triumphal pageantry, might have preferred his putting the assassin to death and killing less people on fewer battlefields. In a word, Buddhism had become uneconomic. The innumerable monasteries and their pampered inmates were a counterpart of the costly military establishment. Buddhism had, from the very beginning, favoured the growth of a universal monarchy which would stop petty warfare. The Buddha is chakravartin, spiritual counterpart of the emperor. But such great, personally administered empires had themselves become uneconomic; Harsha's was about the last of the sort in India. Thereafter, kingdoms were much smaller till feudalism from below gave the state a new basis of feudal landowners. The administration gradually drifted into the hands of a feudal hierarchy growing from below with new (feudal) property rights in land. The village defeated both the empire and the organised religion that accompanied it. The self-contained village was hereafter the norm of production. Taxes had to be collected in kind and consumed locally, for there was not enough trade to allow their conversion into c1ash. Transport of grain and raw material over long distances would have been most difficult under medieval Indian conditions. Harsha travelled constantly with court and army, through his extensive domains. The Chinese piligrim states that Indians rarely used coins for trade, which was conducted by barter. This seems confirmed by the absence of coins struck by Harsha, which contrasts with the tremendous hoards of punch-marked coins that had circu1alted under the Mauryans. Buddhism owed its initial success precisely to its fulfillment of a great social need. Society in the Gangetic basin of the 6th century B.C. was not organised into peaceful villages producing mostly for themselves. The much thinner population was divided into a set of warring semi-tribal principalities, and some tribes not yet on the level of agrarian production with the plough. Vedic Brahaminism and tribal cults were fit only for the pastoral tribe at war with all neighbours. The Vedic animal sacrifices were far too onerous for a developing agrarian economy. The thin pre-Mauryan settlement required trade in metals, salt, and cloth over long distances, which could not be conducted without the protection of a powerful state. The passage from a group of tribes to a universal society, therefore, needed a new social philosophy. That the universal monarchy and the religion of the universal society were parallel is proved by the rise of both in Magadha, at about the same time. Not only Buddhism, but numerous other contemporary Magadhan sects preached about the same thing: the Jains, Ajivikas, and others all denied the validity of Vedic sacrifice, and the need for killing.

Buddhism accompanied and protected the first traders into wild country, peopled by savage tribes. This is shown by the ancient monuments at Junnar, Karle, Nasik, Ajanta, and elsewhere on the junctions of primitive trade routes. The major civilizing function of Buddhism had ended by the seventh century A.D. The ahimsa doctrine was universally admitted, if not practised. Vedic sacrifices had been abandoned except by some rare princeling whose revivalist attempt had little effect upon the general economy. The new problem was to induce docility in the village cultivators, without an excessive use of force. This was done by religion, but not by Buddhism. The class structure in the villages appeared as caste, always scorned by the Buddhists. Primitive tribesmen were enrolled as new castes. Both tribesman and peasant relied heavily upon ritual, which the Buddhist monk was forbidden to practise; ritual remained a monopoly of the Brahmin. Moreover, the Brahmin at that time was a pioneer who could stimulate production, for he had a good working calendar for predicting the times of ploughing, sowing, harvest. He knew something of new crops, and trade possibilities. He was not a drain upon production as had been his sacrificing ancestors, or the large Buddhist monasteries. A compromise could also be effected by making the Buddha an avatara of Vishnu. So, formal Buddhism inevitably faded away. Its main lesson need never be lost: that good thoughts require cultivation and training of the mind by the individual's personal efforts, no less carefully than good singing that of the voice or craftsmanship that of the hand. The value of the thoughts, on the other hand, is to be judged by the social advance which they encourage. From the Times of India, May 24, 1956, by kind permission of the editor; the title has been changed from "Buddhism in history" and minor corrections made. The topic may be pursued further, by those interested, in my book: Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1956). “Exasperating Essays” Index | Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India Marxists Internet Archive Library

D. D. Kosambi Exasperating Essays On The Revolution In China No honest and reasonably alert visitor to China can fail to be impressed by the remarkable changes in the country and the people. The material advances shown by the new system since so recent a year as 1952 leap to the eye. New factories, mines, oil-fields, steel works, dams, co. operatives, roads, buses, hospitals, schools, cultural palaces, theatres have sprouted virtually overnight. Literacy is almost universal and the language is being reformed. The rise in the general standard of living is equally remarkable. The normal noonday meal even of the unskilled labourer now compares with his rare holiday feast in the old days. Conditions of work have improved out of all recognition. Coal mines in whose untimbered pits eight or ten famished peasant labourers dropped dead, or were killed by accident every day, have now death rates among the lowest in the world, and are decent places to work in, with excellent automatic machinery for the bulk of the production. The former, incredible stench and filth have disappeared from the workers' slums. once the most dreadful in the whole world and even the older hutments are free of vermin. But far more remarkable than all these are the changes among the people themselves. The current Chinese standard of honesty would have been astoundingly high in any country. Even in pre-war Sweden. Shanghai. once notorious for the incidence of pilfering in spite of the watchful eyes of the foreign concession police has not had a single petty crime reported for over ten months. After just two years of better living conditions, the children in the new workers, tenements show what socialism can mean; they are healthier. more cheerful and rush spontaneously to welcome the stranger without the least trace of shyness or rudeness. The unshakable calm, inner courtesy, love of culture, and fundamental good nature in all strata of Chinese society cannot be written off as 'national character which has nothing to do with the revolution.' The relaxed, well-adjusted Chinese of the People's Republic are not to be found in Hong Kong, or Formosa. Yet the mainland is under constant threat of attack from modern atomic bases scattered from Japan to Formosa, while the other two regions have a perpetual flood of foreign gold poured into them to make them happy bastions of genuine Western Democracy. The intelligentsia of Peking also show a remarkable contrast with those of great cities in other countries. Their enthusiasm and animation, particularly among the younger intellectuals, compares favourably with the lack of interest and rather fearful attitude that seems to characterize their counterparts in New York, and the rather casual, almost inert, and often lackadaisical approach to serious questions on the part of so many Muscovites. They certainly do not manifest the concentrated opportunism, thoroughgoing superficiality, and intolerable brag of the new middle-class Indian. Yet China is by no means a paradise. Serious new problems arise on every level, and have to be faced where other countries manage to ignore them or to deny their existence. Under these circumstances, why are the police so much less in evidence in new China than in most other countries, including the USA and the USSR? Why is there no counterpart to the un-American activities committee, no witch-hunting in any form? All criticism is carefully studied and sincerely welcomed if useful. People are now genuinely free to express any political opinion they like, including the belief that capitalism is superior to socialism. If they wish to study the speeches of Chiang Kai-shek, scrupulously accurate versions will be provided so that the reader can judge for himself what Chiang's ideas of democracy really meant. This freedom does not extend to certain types of action. The possible lover of "free enterprise" is not free to practice its most rapidly profitable aspects, to indulge in black-marketing, adulteration of goods, opium smuggling, and such unsocial activities. However, former Kuomintang generals are now employed in high and responsible administrative posts, as for example Fu Tso-yi, at present minister of water conservancy, in charge of important projects like the new dam construction in Sanmen gorge. Even Chiang Kai-shek will be given a similar position, if he dares to make his peace with his own countrymen. At the same time, those who fought against these two for so many bitter years are found in all ranks of the army, and at all levels of the government, but do not have to be coerced to agree to this strange return. Their position is not remotely comparable to that of the best resistance fighters in Germany, France and Italy, who see the resurgence of the most hated elements to power, and the recession of the goal for which the anti-fascists had worked so long. Many enterprises function very well under joint state and private ownership. There is no question of a surrender to capitalism; yet the capitalists have not been '1iquidated' by shooting, but converted into useful citizens. These features of contemporary Chinese society must be, in some way, traceable to the course of its revolution, which we proceed to analyse, in order to explain this extraordinary new civilisation. Ultra-Marxists find that the Chinese revolution had a peasant basis and leadership and not a proletarian;

Ultra-Marxists find that the Chinese revolution had a peasant basis and leadership and not a proletarian; hence, they conclude that the revolution cannot be socialist, or communist. A view that need not be discussed seriously is that it is just one of the periodic upheavals which begin every three centuries or so in China as peasant revolts, to settle down after a change of regime; since the last such change came in 1644, with the Manchus, one was astrologically due now! Nevertheless, serious arguments are still heard that the Chinese revolution is only a long overdue reform and modernisation of a backward semi- colonial country; that socialism in China is merely a political slogan, very far from realisation. This is the main question that will be discussed here: Is the Chinese revolution socialist or has some other description to be found for it? The discussion has to be in the context of a given world situation and the specific situation in the country. The answer will necessarily imply a great deal about imminent or necessary changes in the rest of Asia and other under-developed areas. Some tacit conclusions also follow about other methods of advance to socialism than by armed insurrection. To avoid misunderstanding, it is necessary to define the fundamental terms. By revolution is meant the overthrow of a government by a major group of the governed, by methods regarded as illegal under the system existing before the overthrow. We have to exclude the mere coup d'etat when the new group belongs essentially to the same governing class, as happens so often in South America. Changes of this nominal type are symptomatic of a large, passive, unresisting stratum among the governed. In South American countries, the real Americans (strangely called Indians) have hardly begun to figure on the political stage, and their very languages have yet to be recognised to the extent of being taught in schools. A genuine revolution, as distinguished from a change of regime, takes place only when the governed will not submit to the old way and the governing classes cannot carry on in the old way. This is the common factor to the American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Sometimes, the overthrow occurs in effect before its formal recognition, in which case the revolution appears a comparatively peaceful transfer of power. This happened in India and a few other British colonies, where local bourgeoisies had developed under British colonial rule, and it became much costlier to suppress their demand for political power than to surrender it on condition that bourgeois property rights were not to be touched. However, the struggle was, even then, regarded as illegal and the attempts to suppress it employed outright violence. Our definition excludes such developments as the Industrial Revolution, and the pseudo-revolutions by foreign intervention. Socialism is the system where means of production are owned by society as a whole, not private persons; and where opportunity and the rewards of labour are equitably proportioned under the slogan 'equal pay for equal work'. Communism is a more developed form under which each individual contributes to society according to his ability and receives a share of the social product according to his needs. Both of these imply a high degree of modern, mechanised, co-operative production before there can be more than a redistribution of poverty; but co-operative production is not by itself sufficient, for all factory production is possible only by the highest degree of social co-operation, Similarly, most societies recognise the needs of infants, the ill, and the aged even when people in these categories can add little or nothing to the social produce; but that does not suffice to make those societies communist. In the strictest sense of the word, a "pure" socialist revolution is possible only when the productive capacity (surviving after the revolution) suffices for the needs of the whole population on the level that its citizens recognise as equitable. The only country where raw materials, installed machinery, power supply, and available technicians fulfil these conditions today is the USA, which has not had a revolution since 1776, when these conditions did not prevail and socialism was unknown. However, it is clear that the Soviet revolution at least is fundamentally different from the French or the American revolutions. So, let us agree to call a revolution 'socialist' when the new regime can, and plans to, progress directly to socialism without the necessity of further violent change in the government. In abstract theory, this would be possible in the USA, while Britain and India have openly proclaimed peaceful transition to socialism as their goal, The main question is whether the class in power wishes it, and tallies its actions with political declarations, or whether the socialist aim (if professed) amounts only to a means of deceiving the electorate, by promises which cannot be fulfilled by the methods adopted. One of the necessary (though not sufficient) conditions for a revolution to be socialist is that the power thereafter should not be in the hands of a minority class. The reason is simply that such a class cannot logically be expected to usher in a classless society. The Chinese revolution satisfies this condition. However, Marx and his followers had asked for a further condition, namely that the revolution should establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This conclusion was drawn from the experience of the great French revolution, which had some hope of progressing to socialist liberty, equality, fraternity as long as Robespierre lasted. It turned into reaction and military dictatorship as soon as the new urban bourgeoisie, and their rural counterpart the peasants, had liquidated the privileges of feudal ownership and acquired control over the new forms of property. The further experience of 1848 and of the Paris Commune of 1870-71 did nothing to shake the conclusion. Nor did the Tai Ping rebellion in China, which would only have meant a change of dynasty but for foreign intervention. The Indian revolt of 1857 had nothing to offer but a renewal of feudal power. The Paris Commune was lost precisely because the peasantry was not drawn into the struggle on the side of the workers. The Russian revolution was completed by the triple alliance of workers, soldiers and peasants. The fundamental contradiction between (the essentially co-operative) modern factory production and the essentially petty-bourgeois peasant production remained.

The fundamental contradiction between (the essentially co-operative) modern factory production and the essentially petty-bourgeois peasant production remained. It could not be solved, as in the USA, by methods that led ultimately to the creation of the Dust Bowl, price supports, and wanton destruction or senseless hoarding of "surplus" food by the state. The problem had to be solved quickly in the USSR, and a regular food supply ensured which could not be shaken by famine, epidemics, or foreign intervention. The solution was found in collectivisation of the land, but under the guidance of people not themselves peasants, whose approach was generally doctrinaire, and methods often coercive. The new productive basis withstood the cordon sanitaire and the most deadly armed invasion of World War II. The very existence of the USSR was encouragement to socialist movements throughout the world, while new China could not have progressed so rapidly without its protection against foreign intervention and its capital aid. However, in conjunction with the antagonistic external pressures, Soviet methods left the aberrant legacy of unhappiness, mistrust, espionage, twisting of the national character, which has slowly to be cleared out. The Chinese revolution followed a totally different course. The workers' commune of Canton was brutally suppressed. Shanghai fell quickly to the Kuomintang forces only because of the great workers' rising planned and organised by Chon En-lai. The reward was the unparalleled blood-bath of 1921 in which about 50,000 workers and left-wing intellectuals were tortured and put to death by that pillar of Western Democracy, Chiang Kai-shek, whose latest writings bemoan his own naive trust of communists and his great leniency. Comintern theorists wrote many futile theses about the workers' revolution. The sole effective action was organised by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Deh, on the basis of armed guerrilla insurrection with peasant bands. To survive, the centre of resistance had to be shifted, by means of the famous Long March, to the extreme hinterland of China, very far from any factory or proletarians. The communists did not enforce co-operative production in the areas under their control. The land was redistributed for petty, small-scale primitive production, and not all the land, but only that portion owned by oppressive semi- feudal landlords who had run away from the vengeance of the peasantry. The complete land-reform came in 1952. From 1936-7, the communists actually put the revolution in abeyance to co-operate in a common anti-Japanese front with Chiang. Impartial observers like Stilwell and Evans Carlson have made it clear that they fought the Japanese much more effectively than the Kuomintang. Does all this not smack of reformism, of the will to abandon socialism at the slightest excuse? Actually the armed insurrection made the political work effective. The poorest peasant and landless agrarian worker had been psychologically conditioned during two thousand years of misrule to being kicked around by official, warlord, landlord, and merchant. He now learned that his destiny rested in his own hands. Re-division of landlords' property united all the peasantry, rich and poor, behind the regime. The new leaders lived a life of the utmost simplicity. Taxes were very light, and there was no speculation. As the Chinese workers were hardly a step removed from the peasants, they backed the communists solidly whenever they had the chance. The united anti-Japanese front drew all patriotic intellectuals and petty-bourgeois into the struggle, and showed them that no other leadership could be effective. During the course of the struggle, the Red Army performed a feat that exceeds even the Long March in importance. It proved that a guerrilla force starting with the poorest weapons, but correctly based upon the people as a whole, and properly led, could convert itself during the very course of the war into a full-fledged modern army, supplied with weapons and technicians taken over from the far better-equipped opponents. This, in fact, symbolises the entire course of the Chinese revolution in its uninterrupted advance towards socialism. The peasant in a capitalist environment has necessarily to be a petty-bourgeois, but not necessarily on, in an ancient, backward, pre-bourgeois country which is overpopulated relatively to the available food supply. In such a country, it is absolutely futile to wait for a full development of the bourgeois mode, the creation of a large and strong proletariat, then a strong workers' party, and finally a socialist revolution in our sense of the word. The new bourgeoisie in such a country will fall very far behind the creative role of the first bourgeoisies such as in England. Specifically, China had simultaneously the worst features of the old feudalism on land, imperialist- colonial intervention by foreign powers, and an indigenous fascism based on strong internal monopoly of weakly developed capital. The monopoly, in fact, was of the notorious Four Families (Chiang, Soong, Kung, Chen), who reduced all other private capitalists to their servants and the whole administration to their lackeys. The heaviest profits came directly from bleeding the people, without industrialisation. The essential point is very simple. No revolution (as defined above) today in a backward country has any chance of effectiveness, or even of survival, unless it is planned and carried out as a socialist revolution. Industrialisation is not a prerequisite of socialism in such countries, as so many theorists continue to believe, but the very converse is necessary. The advanced non-socialist countries (taken together) are over- producing, in the sense that their markets lack the purchasing power necessary to absorb the full-capacity product. The existence of cheap (but inefficient) labour and raw materials in the underdeveloped areas cannot but aggravate this fundamental economic contradiction. Technical advances like automation increase the stress. The strong possibility that the USSR can and will supply capital goods to all backward countries, socialist or not, to develop without the domination of foreign capital also brings the crisis nearer.

The strong possibility that the USSR can and will supply capital goods to all backward countries, socialist or not, to develop without the domination of foreign capital also brings the crisis nearer. The only solution is to begin with a socialist revolution so that effective demand rises indefinitely, and planning makes overproduction impossible. One lesson that might be drawn from China is the correct socialist approach to the cult of mere bigness in a backward country. The USSR, with its different historical background, and the urgent need to establish the first base for socialism, without external aid and in the face of a deadly, unremittingly hostile environment, had to industrialise regardless of cost. This meant human cost, in the absence of capital aid, but the viability of socialist production was proved. In China, the same pace of industrialisation would have meant intolerab1e shortage of consumer goods at a time when immediate relief had to be shown from the incredible misery into which the Kuomintang and the Four Families (with US aid), had plunged the country. It would also mean serious unemployment, at least an 'excess of manpower', in the interim period, not to speak of heavy waste of capital assets in short supply. So, their immediate plans are being modified so as to encourage co-operative handicraft production and un- mechanised agriculture in tune with basic industrialisation. They can utilise the stored experience of the remarkably successful Gung Ho industrial co-operatives set up during the anti-Japanese war in the remotest hinterland. This contrasts with the heavy opposition aroused by even the trifling, slap-dash co-operation announced by the Indian government. Certainly, the Chinese would not set up the Ambar Charkha hand-spinning scheme, had they so powerfully developed a textile industry as India and such ample foreign aid. The dam in the gorges of the Yangtse will be bigger than those in most Indian schemes. But in a country that has a monsoon, the essential is to hold the rain- water back as long as possible, to prevent quick erosion of valuable top- soil. That is, flood control and efficient food production in India would be far better served by a hundred thousand, properly coordinated, small dams rather than a few big ones costing more. The Chinese have their own schemes for atomic energy research, but for use, not empty prestige. In India, the money poured out could have been much better utilized in harnessing the decidedly more abundant solar energy which only blasts the country over eight months or more of the year. All we have achieved so far is a remarkably useless sun-cooker. Both countries have to cope with a dense population and high birth-rate, but birth control propaganda catches on quickly in China, because the people know that in old age, they will have comfortable maintenance from their co-operative group, even when there are no children. To plan the population without planning how the population is to make a reasonably decent living is as ridiculous as it is futile. Thus, when one speaks of many different paths leading to socialism, it is necessary to ask, "what sort of socialism?" Germany produced National Socialism under Hitler; the socialist government in France attacked Egypt for the sake of the Suez Canal Company, and did not hesitate to continue the brutal war of colonial repression in Algeria. The Chinese method had one advantage over all others, including the Russian, in that the confidence of the food producers, with accurate knowledge and full control of the food supply, were assured from the start over an increasingly larger area. The arts of genuine persuasion were mastered by the technique developed in the Yenan days, when not more than a third of the local councils and committees were allowed to consist of communist party members. Co-operation has caught on very well, without the least show of force on the part of the state among the peasants. For example, during the lean months at the end of winter, peasant co-operatives about Peking (which have not enough land for the necessary surplus) send many of their members out to work at transport, carpentry, and odd jobs. Till last year, the individual kept 15 out of the average monthly wages of 50 Yuan earned by such labour, and put the rest into the cooperative. Now, without any suggestion from the government, all the money is voluntarily put into the common fund, and each family assigned enough (by the co- operative) for its needs during those three hard months of the year. Contrast this with other countries in Asia. The Indian five-year plan allots about 11% of the total plan budget to heavy industry, and effectively spends less. The rest goes in services, ancillary plant, transport, power supply, irrigation and the like, which does not touch private monopoly in food production (which can be broken only by a tax in kind and efficient grain storage); nor in most consumer goods, nor some very important heavy industry. The Indian State has absolute power and uses it to settle questions like the linguistic division of Bombay state by tear gas and bullets instead of the logical, democratic plebiscite and ballot. It is openly admitted that this all-powerful state is powerless to collect evaded taxes, to curb inflation, to control food prices, or to raise money by expropriation of the primitive accumulation of money- lender, landlord, and profiteer, in place of sales and consumer taxes. This amounts to a confession that the classes in power have not the least desire for socialism, and will not allow their profits to be touched even if it means the failure of industrialisation. The remaining Asian countries, including those in the Middle East, and Turkey have found insurmountable obstacles of every type on the road to industrialisation. The moral should be reasonably clear. Monthly Review (New York), 1957. M. N. Roy, writing on Revolution and Counter-revolution In China (1946) to justify those actions of his that had led to his expulsion from the Comintern, reached the conclusion that the Chinese revolution did not follow a pattern which could be approved by Marxists. He said that the 'so-called Communist Party' of China 'preferred to base itself on the village paupers, necessarily inclined towards banditry'. 'Having learned from experience, the Communists in China today are communists only in name'.

The refusal to learn anything from experience, and the insistence upon keeping the name unsullied by effective action are characteristic of Roy's type of OM. While accusing the communist leaders in China of 'relapse into opportunism which may be justified as clever strategy', Roy had not discovered the existence of Mao Tse-tung in 1930, and even in 1946 dismissed Chairman Mao's united national front as another 'doctrinaire preoccupation.' 'The task of the revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries now (1946) is to establish Radical Democracy' -a task in which Roy himself failed dismally on his return to India while the bourgeois, colonial struggle was being fought out and won under the leadership of the Congress, without benefit of Roy. As late as 1951, the CPI portentously reserved final judgement upon the Chinese revolution, on the grounds that the whole affair might turn out to be reformist in character as compared with the purity of the struggle in India. Other Indians, formerly OM, continue to ignore China, and devote their energies to such urgent problems as the woes of Yugoslavia or Hungary. Therefore it might be of use to re- examine the content and meaning of a socialist revolution. Otherwise, it is fatally easy to slip into a form of socialism which is socialism in everything but name. It is to be feared that recent developments in India and frantic appeals for dollar aid imply this trend in the ruling class and its party. It does require a peculiar genius to undercut socialism while supposedly building it by peaceful methods, but the country might be happier if such talent were more innocuously utilised. “Exasperating Essays” Index | Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India Marxists Internet Archive Library

D. D. Kosambi Exasperating Essays On The Class Structure of India A hundred years ago, Karl Marx was a regular correspondent of the New York Tribune, one of the direct ancestors of today's New York Herald-Tribune. Among his communications was one, published on August 8, 1853, entitled "The Future Results of British Rule in India." Though he knew little of India's past, and though some of his predictions for the future have not been borne out by subsequent events, Marx nevertheless had a remarkably clear insight into the nature and potentialities of Indian society as it existed in his time. "[The British] destroyed [Hindu civilisation]," he wrote, "by uprooting native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society." Political unity was imposed by the Indo-British army, strengthened by the telegraph, the free press, the railroad, and ordinary roads that broke up village isolation-all noted by Marx as instruments of future progress. But he stated clearly: All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but of their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation? The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, ti!l in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the British yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country... A hundred years have passed, including nearly a decade of freedom from British rule. What is the situation today and the outlook for the period ahead? One frequently hears the argument that India still has a backward economy combining elements of different historic social forms, that feudalism is still powerful, that the country has not outgrown its erstwhile colonial framework, and that it is relapsing into the status of a dependency of the great imperialist powers, Great Britain and the United States. We shall comment on these various questions as we proceed. But one point needs to be made with all emphasis at the outset. There can be no doubt, it seems to me, as to who rules India today: it is the Indian bourgeoisie. True, production is still overwhelmingly petty bourgeois in character. But this cannot be more than a transitory stage, and already the nature of the class in power casts a pervasive influence over the political, intellectual, and social life of the country. THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM Feudalism's decline in India may be said to date from the inability of Indian feudalism to defend the country against British penetration. To be sure, the British conquered and held the country by means of an Indian army, paid from India's resources and under British discipline; though in this respect the feudal powers of the day were not so different as might at first appear, since their own armies, also maintained at Indian ex pense, were often staffed by European drill sergeants and artillery experts. The difference-and it was a crucial difference- was that the British paid all their soldiers regularly in cash every month, in war or peace, paying also for supplies acquired during the march or for the barracks. The contrast is pointed up by the opposing Indian factions that fought the Battle of Panipat (A.D. 1761). Ahmad Shah Durrani's soldiers mutinied after winning the battle because they had not been paid for years; while their opponents, the Marathas, maintained themselves by looting the countryside. Faced with opposition of this kind, British-led arms were bound to triumph. (The same contrast-again involving the spoils of India, though indirectly- could be observed a few years later when the British defeated Napoleon in Spain; the French army lived off the countryside while the British used their superior wealth, much of it extracted from India, to pay the very Spaniards they were defending for all supplies.) Indian feudalism tried its strength against the British bourgeoisie for the last time in the unsuccessful rebellion of 1857. Soon thereafter, the British abandoned their long-standing policy of liquidating feudal principalities and instead began to bolster up remaining regimes of this kind-provided they were weak enough to be dependent and hence compliant. Marx noted that the very same people who fought in the British Parliament against aristocratic privilege at home voted to maintain far worse rajahs and nabobs in India-as a matter of policy, for profit. Despite British support, and in a sense because of it, Indian feudalism no longer had any independent strength and vitality of its own. Its economic basis had been ruined by the construction of railroads, the decay of village industry, the establishment of a system of fixed assessment of land values and payment of taxes in cash rather than in kind, the importation of commodities from England, and the introduction of mechanised production in Indian cities. The role of the village usurer changed. Previously he had been an integral part of the village economy, but he had been legally obliged to cancel a debt on which total repayment amounted to double the original loan: there was no redress against default since land could not be alienated nor could a feudal lord be brought to court.

Previously he had been an integral part of the village economy, but he had been legally obliged to cancel a debt on which total repayment amounted to double the original loan: there was no redress against default since land could not be alienated nor could a feudal lord be brought to court. With British rule came survey and registry of land plots, cash taxes, cash crops for large-scale export to a world market (indigo, cotton, jute, tea, tobacco, opium), registration of debts and mortgages, alienability of the peasants' land-in a word, the framework within which land could gradually be converted into capitalist private property which the former usurer could acquire and rent out and exploit. How thoroughly British rule undermined Indian feudalism has been dramatically demonstrated by events of recent years. The police action undertaken in 1948 by India's central government against Hyderabad, the largest and most powerful remaining feudal state, was over in two days. Political action in Travancore and Mysore, direct intervention in Junagadh and Kashmir, indirect intervention in Nepal, the absorption of Sikkim, the jailing of Saurashtra barons as common criminals- all these events showed that feudal privilege meant nothing before the new paramount power, the Indian bourgeoisie. It should not be overlooked, however, that the decline of Indian feudalism had another side to it-the partial amalgamation of the old ruling class into the new. Just as the rise of factories and mechanised production converted primitive barter into commodity production and the usurer's hoard into capital, so too it opened a way for the feudal lord to join the capitalist class by turning his jewellery and his hoarded wealth into landed or productive capital. What the feudal lord could not do was to claim additional privileges not available to the ordinary investor, or any rights that would impede the free movement of Indian industrial or financial capital. This process of converting feudal lords into capitalists began relatively early: even before World War I, the Gaekwar of Baroda became one of the world's richest men by investing his large feudal revenues in factories, railways, and company shares. Another process involving the liquidation of feudalism is exemplified by what has been happening since independence in the Gangetic basin. There the East India Company had created the class of Zamindars, tax collectors whose function was to extract tribute in kind from the peasants and convert it into cash payments to the company. As time went on, the Zamindars acquired the status and privileges of landholders and in return provided valuable political support for British rule. In recent years, a new class of capitalist landlords and well-to-do peasants of the kulak variety has been substituted for the zamindars by legislative action (the zamindars, of course, receiving compensation for their expropriated holdings) . Everywhere in India, by one means or another, feudal wealth has already become or is rapidly becoming capital, either of the owner or of his creditors. [Every feudalism known to history rested, in the final analysis, upon primitive handicraft production, and upon a special type of land ownership. The former of these is no longer basic in India, and the latter does not exist.] Talk of fighting feudalism today is on a level with talk of fighting dinosaurs. No part of the mechanism of coercion is now in feudal hands. The legislature is bourgeois (and petty bourgeois) in composition. The armed forces, the police, the judiciary are all directly under bourgeois control, where these functions would formerly have been carried out by feudal levies, retainers, or the feudal lords themselves. Even the beginnings of capitalist production in agriculture may be seen, notably the introduction of tractor cultivation in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, but with smaller manifestations all over the country, especially where industrial crops like cotton are grown and where transport conditions are exceptionally favourable. The liquidation of Indian feudalism, then, is general and complete. But it is necessary to guard against drawing unwarranted conclusions from this undoubted fact. The older privilege is being replaced or expropriated only with the due compensation. No basic improvement has been effected in the condition of the rural population, still the overwhelming majority of the Indian nation. All agrarian reforms-community schemes, voluntary (bhoodan) redistribution of land, scaling- down of peasant indebtedness, counter-erosion measures, afforestation, and so forth-have turned out to be piddling. Hunger, unemployment, epidemic disease remain the permanent and massive features of Indian society. The sole achievements have been the elimination of older property forms (with recruitment of most former owners into the bourgeoisie) and the creation of a vast class of workers with no land and no prospect of absorption into industry as long as the social structure of India remains what it is. BOURGEOISIE AND PETTY BOURGEOISIE Except possibly in a few negligible corners of recently integrated backward areas, Indian production today is bourgeois 'in the sense that commodity production is prevalent and even a small plot of land is valued and taxed in rupees. But it is still petty production, consisting for the most part of the growing of foodstuffs from small holdings by primitive, inefficient methods; the produce is still largely consumed by the producer or in the locality of production. Nevertheless, the petty bourgeoisie, inhomogeneous as it is in all but its greed, completely dominates food production and, through middlemen, controls the supply to towns and cities. Though roads and other means of communication have increased, still the density of the transportation network i$ very low by American, British, or Japanese standards. The present national Five Year Plan estimates the annual national income at 90 billion rupees (one rupee equals 21 cents), which it proposes to increase to 100 billion by 1956. But the total value of all productive assets in private hands (excluding fields and houses for rent, but including plantations) is estimated at no more than 15 billion rupees, while the central and local governments' own facilities are worth more than 13 billion rupees in the field of transport, electricity, broadcasting and other means of communication, and so on.

These figures prove conclusively the petty-bourgeois nature of the economy as a whole and indicate clearly that the industrialisation of India under bourgeois management can proceed only through tight co-operation between government and private capital. Therefore, the fact that the government is the biggest capitalist, the main banker, the greatest employer, and the ultimate refuge or ineffable solace of the bootlicking intelligentsia makes for only a formal, superficial, difference. The main question to ask is: what special class-interest does this government serve? Whenever it seems to rise above the classes, or act against the bourgeois interests, does it go beyond regulating individual greed, or at most holding the balance between the petty and the big bourgeoisie? Do the government's ineffective food regulations and costly food imports mean anything beyond assuring the petty-bourgeois food-producer his pound of vital flesh while the cities are supplied with food cheap enough for the industrial labourer to maintain himself at subsistence level on the wages the factory owners are willing to pay? The government today is undoubtedly in the hands of the bigger bourgeoisie, a fact which is shown no less by its personnel than by its policies which favour Big Business and impose only such restraints as serve the interests of the sub-class as a whole and prevent any single capitalist group from dominating the rest. Moreover, there is no question that the big bourgeoisie wants industrialisation. In this connection, it is interesting to recall the economic plan hopefully drawn up (with the aid of tame economists) by the biggest capitalists and promulgated in 1944 (published at that time as a Penguin Special, No. S148). The scheme, to be financed from unspecified sources, called for a 500 per cent increase in industry, a 130 per cent increase in agriculture, and a 200 per cent increase in "services" within 15 years. The basic figures used by planners, however, related to the year 1932 and were hence way out of date. Not only did wartime inflation and its aftermath balloon the national income beyond the dreams of the capitalist planners, but the planned agricultural output would not have sufficed to feed the population even at starvation levels (for some years after the war, India was obliged to import a billion rupees worth of food annually and the imports still continue irregularly) . To a far greater extent than is generally realised, the big Indian bourgeoisie owes its present position to two war periods of heavy profit making. World War I gave Indian capital its first great impetus and initiated the process of Indianising the bureaucracy. World War II vastly expanded the army and Indianised the officer corps; further, it swelled the tide of Indian accumulation and enabled the capitalists, by rallying the masses behind the Congress Party, to complete the process of pushing the British out of the country. How great the accumulation was during the most recent war and postwar period of inflation is indicated by changes in the relative importance of different taxes as sources of revenue: the agricultural (land) tax now accounts for less than eight per cent of total state revenue as compared to 25 per cent in 1939, while taxes on what by Indian standards may be called luxury goods (including automobiles) rose from negligible importance to 17 per cent of the total in the same period. [The government asked in 1957 for appropriations about 100 times the central budget at the beginning of World War II. The other side of the coin as always in periods of marked inflation, has been a decline in the real income of workers and other low-income groups. It is interesting to note that the current national Five Year Plan aims to restore the general living standard of 1939-then universally recognised as totally inadequate-without, of course curtailing the immense new power and wealth that have accrued to the bourgeoisie in the intervening years. We encounter here one of the basic contradictions of the Indian economy, the decisive roadblock to rapid development under present conditions. The civilised money-makers of advanced capitalist countries are accustomed to looking on a five percent return as something akin to a law of nature, but not so their Indian counterparts. The usual rate of return on black- market operations in recent years is 150 percent, and even the most respectable capitalist's idea of a "reasonable" profit is anywhere from 9 to 20 percent. [The very same capitalists who ask for and obtain tariff. protection for their manufactures even before beginning to produce them for the market do not hesitate to hoard smuggled gold and jewellery to the tune of (a reasonably estimated) 100 million rupees per year. This not only shows their contempt for their own government, its laws, and its plans for industrialisation in the 'private sector', but further illustrates the petty bourgeois mentality even in the wealthiest Indians.] This kind of profiteering, however, is incompatible with the balanced development of India's economy as a whole. Seventy percent of the population still works on the land or lives off it, holdings being mostly less than two acres per family and cultivated by primitive methods. Wages are low and prevented from rising by the relative surplus population which is always pressing for available jobs. In the countryside, at least 50 percent of the population is made up of landless labourers. These conditions spell low mass purchasing power and restricted markets. When even these restricted markets are ruthlessly exploited by a capitalist class snatching at immediate maximum profits, the result can only be industrial stagnation and growing poverty. And indeed this is precisely what we observe in fact. Idle plant is widespread; night shifts have disappeared in most textile mills; other industries show machinery and equipment used to 50 percent of capacity or even less. It is the familiar capitalist dilemma, but in a peculiarly acute form: increase of poverty and idle resources but with no adequate incentives to invest in the expanded production which is so desperately needed.

It is the familiar capitalist dilemma, but in a peculiarly acute form: increase of poverty and idle resources but with no adequate incentives to invest in the expanded production which is so desperately needed. This is the pass to which bourgeois rule has brought India. There is no apparent escape within the framework of the bourgeois mode of production. [The situation was changed for a while by the "pump-priming" of the First Five-Year plan- a curious jump from a colonial to a pseudo-New-Deal economy; but future prospects are decidedly gloomier.] COLONIALISM AND FOREIGN DOMINATION In a sense the tragedy of the Indian bourgeoisie is that it came of age too late, at a time when the whole capitalist world was in a state of incurable crisis and when one-third of the globe had already abandoned capitalism forever. In fact, the Five Year Plans mentioned above are self-contradictory in that they are obviously inspired by the great successes of Soviet planning without, however, taking any account of the necessity of socialism to the achievement of these successes: effective planning cannot leave the private investor free to invest when and where he likes, as is done in India, nor can its main purpose be to assure him of profitable opportunities for the investment of his capital. The Indian bourgeoisie cannot be compared to that of England at the time of the Industrial Revolution, nor to that of Japan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nor again to that of Germany from the time of Bismarck. There are no great advances in science that can be taken advantage of by a country with preponderant illiteracy and no colonies to exploit. Under the circumstances, as we have already seen, rapid industrialisation runs into the insuperable obstacle of a narrowly restricted domestic market. Do all these unfavourable facts mean that capitalist India must inevitably fall under the domination of foreign industrialists and financiers with their control over the shrinking capitalist world market? Must we see signs of such a relapse into colonial status when, for example, the Indian government invites powerful foreign capitalist groups to invest in oil refineries on terms apparently more favourable than those granted to Indian capital, including guarantees against nationalisation? The bogey of a new economic colonialism can be quickly disposed of. For one thing, the Indian bourgeoisie is no longer bound to deal with one particular foreign capitalist power, and the answer to stiff terms from the United States and Britain has already been found in the drive to recovery of Germany and Japan. The Indian government has invited Krupp-Demag to set up a steel plant; the Tata combine comes to quite reasonable terms with Krauss.Maffei for locomotive works and foundries, and with Daimler-Benz for equipment to manufacture diesel-engine transport. The more advanced capitalist powers, in short, can be played off against each other (and even better against the USSR ) , as they could not be in the days of British rule. And for another thing, the guarantees against nationalisation granted to the great British and American oil monopolies are really no more than Indian Big Business itself enjoys. The only industries that have been nationalised in India are those which, in private hands, hinder the development of larger capital (for example, road transport in Bombay State, taken over without compensation) or those in which there was danger of big investors losing money (for example, the nationalisation of civil aviation, with heavy compensation to the former owners). The Indian bourgeoisie has taken its own precautions against genuine nationalisation and hardly needs to give itself the formal guarantees demanded by foreign capitalists. [Perhaps, the strongest of these, and the most crippling to the supposedly planned advance towards socialism, is the systematic creation of revenue deficits. The first deliberate step in this direction, taken as a sweeping measure in Bombay state (where the bourgeoisie is at its strongest) was the costly, wasteful, and palpably inefficient prohibition policy. Now, deficit state budgets seem quite the normal fashion, while parallel outcries against the Five Year Plan become louder]. No, the invitation to foreign capital does not mean sudden, unaccountable lunacy on the part of those now in power, those who fought so desperately only a few years ago to remove foreign capitalist control from India. Entry is not permitted in fields where Indians have investments and mastery of technique, as for example in textiles. Even in the new fields opened up to the foreigners-fields in which Indians lack both know- how and the assurance of sufficiently large and quick returns to justify heavy investment-a "patriotic" strike or two could ruin the foreign enterprises should they ever become a threat or a nuisance to the Indian bourgeoisie. Fissionable materials (uranium, monazite, ilmenite) which foreign interests wanted to buy at the price of dirt are being processed by a company financed by the government and directed by Tatas. (On the other hand, high-grade Indian manganese ore is still being exported unrefined for lack of a sufficiently strong profit incentive to Indian capital). THE ALTERNATIVE Invitations to foreign capital, however, do have one function in addition to that of giving a fillip to industrialisation (which could have been secured by inviting much more technical aid from the USSR and the People's Democracies). That additional function is to provide a measure of insurance against popular revolt. The Indian bourgeoisie shows unmistakable signs of fearing its own masses. The leading bourgeois party (the Congress) has not yet exhausted the reservoir of prestige built up during the period of its leadership in the struggle for national independence. In addition, the bourgeoisie controls the bureaucracy, the army, the police, the educational system, and the larger part of the press. And there are the opposition bourgeois parties, like the Praja-Socialists, which can be relied upon to talk Left and act Right, to win election on an anti- Congress platform and then turn around immediately after to a policy of co-operation with Congress politicians, as they did after the Travancore-Cochin elections last spring. Nevertheless, "defence" expenditures continue to take about two billion rupees a year, about half the central budget (and a half that the Five Year Plans do not even mention);

and police expenditures mount strangely and rapidly under the direction of those who took power in the name of Gandhian non-violence. Extra- legal ordinances, (against which the bourgeoisie protested so vigorously when the British first applied them to suppressing Indian nationalism), are actually strengthened now for use against the working class; the Press Acts remain in force; and on the very eve of the first general election, important civil liberties were removed from a constitution on which the ink was scarcely dry. All these factors together, however, will not prevent rapid disillusionment at promises unfulfilled, nor the inevitable mass protest against hunger, the ultimate Indian reality. There may come a time when the Indian army, officered by Indian bourgeois and aided by a transport system designed for an army of occupation, may not suffice. The Indian capitalists calculate, quite understandably, that it is safer to have foreigners interested so that they could be called upon to intervene with armed force in case of necessity. But note that neither special political rights, nor monopolies, nor military bases have been given to any foreign power, and that even those (France and Portugal, backed by the United States and Britain) which still have pockets on Indian soil are being vigorously pushed out, by popular action as well as by politico-diplomatic demands. Colonial status would mean foreign control of Indian raw materials and domination of the Indian market, both today unmistakably at the hands of the Indian capitalists themselves. And there is always the hope that a third world war will lead to even more fantastic profits for a neutral India-as the ruling class dreams of neutrality. The solution for India, of course, would, be socialism, which alone can create a demand rising with the supply, a solution which can be utilised not only by advanced countries but by backward countries ( as China is demonstrating) , and without which planning is futile. But just as the Indian bourgeoisie imports the latest foreign machinery for production, so, when all else fails, the latest capitalist developments in politics will also be imported. And this means fascism, in the long run the only possible alternative to socialism. Already the talk in circles that count is of the need for a "strong man." And models are at hand, from nearby Thailand to faraway Egypt and Guatemala. Monthly Review (New York) , vol. 6, 1954, pp. 205-213. Nationalism, and its logical extension provincialism, are manifestations of the bourgeoisie. In the feudal period, the Peshwas defeated the Nizam more than once, but saw nothing wrong in leaving Marathi-speaking regions in the Nizam's possession. The political reorganisation of India on a linguistic basis into new states was thus an index of bourgeoisie development and competition. The in- violability of private property as guaranteed by the Constitution no longer suffices. Each local bourgeoisie wants full political control over its own hinterland to safeguard investments and to exclude powerful competitors. This was seen in the bitter strife over the creation-not even by pretence of freely expressed public opinion, but by police action--of the new, enlarged, hybrid, anomalous, bi- lingual state of Bombay. The quarrel passed off as one between Gujarathi and Maharashtrian. The real fight, however, was between the veteran, entrenched capital of Bombay city, and the newer money of Ahmedabad. The Maharashtra petty-bourgeoisie remained characteristically helpless in disunity, to the end. Those who doubt that the big bourgeoisie can do what it likes with the government might give some thought to the TELCO affairs being discussed publicly (for the first time) since September 5, 1957. The chances of fascism have not been diminished by the 1957 election. These showed that the only state government able to show an honest, incorruptible, bourgeois administration, able to raise funds without deficit finance for an honest attempt to carry out the Nehru policy was led by the communists in Kerala. In addition, this regime had at least made a start towards dealing with the most serious fundamental questions: food, agrarian production, re-division of land, employment, education, yet within the bourgeoisie framework, without touching bourgeois property relations. The dangers of this example cannot have escaped the brighter minds of the ruling class, whose cleverness far outstrips their honesty. “Exasperating Essays” Index | Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India Marxists Internet Archive Library