Western Sociologists on Indian Society (Routledge Revivals)

Marx, Spencer, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto

G. R. Madan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415578707
• eBook ISBN: 9781136972751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Of the five major sociologists whose views on Indian society are assessed in this work, originally published in 1979, Marx and Weber made a special study of the subject and had something definite to say about the future of Indian society. Herbert Spencer was primarily concerned with the effects of colonial rule on India's progress, while Durkheim and Pareto tended to observe Indian society from a comparative point of view. However, as this study shows, all five sociologists touched on two special aspects of Indian society – Indian religion and the caste system. The other features of Indian society which they discussed in their various writings range widely from marriage and family structure, through village communities and the social structure of cities, to political organization, the educational system, economic conditions, and the future progress of Indian society.

Dr Madan demonstrates the correctness of Marx's contention that the political subordination of India was the one great hindrance to the future progress of Indian Society. He points out, though, that Marx failed to see clearly the effects of the caste system on economic development, and shows that this aspect was more correctly assessed by Max Weber. On the other hand, in Dr Madan's view, Weber's observation that Indian religion was 'other-worldly' and therefore a great obstacle to progress in Indian society lacked incisiveness.

By focusing on a neglected aspect of the writings of five of the great figures in sociology, the book gives a new insight into their work, and at the same time highlights many hitherto unrecognized facets of India's complex social structure.

1
Karl Marx (1818–83)

Karl Mark was, first and foremost, the sociologist and economist of the capitalist regime.¹ He was interested in historical materialism, and not only of one country but of many countries. It is generally believed that Marx and Engels’s observations on pre-capitalist epochs rest on far less thorough study than Marx’s description and analysis of capitalism. However, as Mr Hobsbawm points out, it is true that the literature available to them on pre-capitalist societies at that time was far scantier than it is at present. But this does not mean that their knowledge was insufficient for the elaboration of their theories of pre-capitalist societies.²

There are two periods in the life of Marx when his mind was intensely occupied with the history of pre-industrial or non-European societies. These periods were the 1850s, i.e. the period which preceded the drafting of the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, and the 1870s after the publication of Capital I and substantial drafting of Capital II and III. Marx’s exile in England, the political developments of the 1850s, and Marx’s interest in economic studies soon transformed his knowledge about the Orient. He read and re-read the works of classical economists in the early 1850s. Among these the most important were J.S.Mill’s Principles, Adam Smith and Richard Jones’s introductory lecture in 1851.³ He began to write articles on China and India for the New York Daily Tribune in 1853. In this year both he and Engels were deeply preoccupied with the historical problems of the Orient, and there is a lot of reference to these studies in the correspondence between the two friends during this year. Their correspondence and writings in this period refer to certain relevant books, for example, Rev. C.Foster’s A Historical Geography of Arabia, Bernier’s Voyages, Sir William Jones’s The Orientalist, G.Campbell’s Modern India (1852), J.Child’s Treatise on the East India Trade (1681), J.von Hammer’s Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches (1835), James Mill’s History of India (1826), Thomas Mun’s A Discourse on Trade, from England into the East Indies (1621), J.Pollexfen’s England and East India (1697), Soltykov’s Lettres sur l’Inde (1848) and parliamentary papers on India.

In the 1870s, apart from the agrarian orientation of his work in Capital III, there were perhaps two other reasons for the concentration of Marx’s interests on primitive communal societies. First, the development of a Russian revolutionary movement increasingly led Marx and Engels to place their hopes for a European revolution in Russia. Since the position of the village community was a matter of fundamental theoretical disagreement among Russian revolutionaries, who consulted Marx on this point, it was natural for him to investigate the subject at greater length.

Second was his growing hatred of and contempt for capitalist society in his old age. It is said that Marx, who had earlier welcomed the impact of Western capitalism as an inhuman but historically progressive force on the stagnant pre-capitalist economies, found himself increasingly appalled by this inhumanity. He had always admired the positive social values embodied, in however backward a form, in the primitive community. And so in Capital III (pp. 365–6) and in the subsequent Russian discussions with Narodnik, he increasingly stressed the viability of the primitive commune, its powers of resistance to historical disintegration and even its capacity to develop into a higher form of economy without prior destruction.⁴

Our appreciation of Marx’s observations on various aspects of Indian society during that period is mostly based on his various articles on India in the New York Daily Tribune in 1853, correspondence between Marx and Engels (Pre-capitalist Economic Foundations by Hobsbawm), Notes on Indian History (664–1858) and ‘Capital III.⁵ It may not be out of place to mention here that Karl Marx made most important observations on Indian society during the period June to August 1853, when the debate on the India Bill was going on in the British Parliament. The charter of the East India Company was to expire in 1854 and it was for the Parliament to decide whether the charter should be renewed for another twenty years as it had been in the past or if the charge should be taken over directly by the British government. Karl Marx pointed out that the responsibility for the governance of India not being fixed on any one authority was not conducive to the welfare of the people of that country. He stressed that this responsibility should be directly assumed by the Parliament itself and that more positive steps should be taken for the development of India. The princely states should also come under direct British rule and the princes be deposed, as they were an unnecessary burden on the poor people. His views on various aspects of Indian society may conveniently be discussed under the following heads:

1 India’s woes more under British rule than in the past

2 Principle of laissez faire and neglect of irrigation

3 No responsible authority to look after people’s welfare

4 Undue burden of Indian princes

5 Destruction of hand industries

6 Village communities and their role in historic development

7 Property rights in arable land

8 Indian land tenure

9 Indian revenue and taxation

10 Dual role of England-destructive and regenerative

11 Indian social structure and human progress

India’s woes more under British rule than in the past

Marx observes that Hindustan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. There is the same rich variety in the products of the soil and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has from time to time been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindustan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan or the Mogul or the British, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting states as it numbered towns or even villages. Yet, from a social point of view, Hindustan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindustan. This religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the lingam (cult of the deity Shiva widespread in southern India) and of Juggernaut (cult of the deity Vishnu); the religion of the monks and of the bayaderes.

He does not share the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindustan. Take for example the times of Aurangzebe, or the epoch when the Mogul appeared in the north, and the Portuguese in the south; or the age of Mohammedan invasion and of the Heptarchy in southern India; or if you will, go still further back to antiquity, take the mythological chronology of the Brahmin himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.

There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than anything Hindustan has had to suffer before. Marx does not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters which startle us in the temple of Salsette.

He does say that British colonial rule has been actuated solely by the spirit of gain and, viewing their subjects with less regard or consideration than a West Indies planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, not having paid the purchase money of human property which the latter had, the British have employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their last mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labour, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous government by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders. All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests and famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive action in Hindustan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution having yet appeared.⁶ This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions and from the whole of its past history.

In what ways the Britishers, solely actuated by their own desire for gain, destroyed the old traditions and social structure of India, he explains in the subsequent pages.

Principle of laissez-faire and neglect of irrigation

According to Marx there have been in Asia generally, from time immemorial, but three departments of government; that of finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of war, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of public works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic Highlands, made artificial irrigation by canals and waterworks the basis of oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India, inundations are used for fertilizing the soil in Mesopotamia, Persia, etc.; advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which in the Occident drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated, in the Orient where civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing power of government. Hence an economic function devolved upon all Asiatic governments the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the soil, dependent on a central government and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and large provinces of Egypt, Persia and Hindustan; it also explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries and to strip it of all civilization.

Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the departments of finance and of war, but have neglected entirely that of public works. Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, of laissez faire and laissez aller. But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government, as they change in Europe with good or bad seasons. Thus the oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the annals of the whole Asiatic world.

However, it may be mentioned that owing to a series of famines in different parts of the country from the 1860s onward, which sometimes led to riots, and because of the Britishers’ own self-interest, to have raw material (particularly cotton) for their own mills, some attempts were made to improve irrigation facilities through the repair of old tanks or the opening of new canals. Reference to this fact is also made by Marx at another place. But it needs to be pointed out, that the repair and maintenance of tanks in the south was the responsibility of the village local self-governments and their higher organs. These received grants from the government from time to time for this purpose. Unfortunately the British government did not recognize these organizations and took up this work through newly set up district boards, which were not so effective. Thus the initiative of people in the maintenance of such works was killed.

No responsible authority to look after people’s welfare

When the question of renewal of the charter of the East India Company came before Parliament in June 1853, Karl Marx advocated that the British government should take direct responsibility for looking after the affairs of the Indian people rather than leaving it in the Company’s hands. After dealing with the history of the East India Company in detail since 1702, and how it grew from a commercial into a military and territorial power, Marx points out that the question of India’s governance by a proper authority has been postponed for many years. But it must now be tackled earnestly as the boundaries of the British Empire have grown extensively involving a large mass of people. He observes,

It is only since 1849, that the one great Anglo-Indian Empire has existed. The British Government has been fighting under the company’s name for two centuries, till at last the natural limits of India were reached. So the position of the Indian question is altered in the present year compared with all former periods of charter renewal.⁷

Different interests, i.e. the manufacturers, the commercial class and oligarchy, have been exploiting Indian people in different ways, while since 1784 the Indian finances have got more and more deeply into difficulty. The whole question is who shall be the governing power? The question is a perplexing one and this riddle has not been solved so far. He remarks,

That there is in India a permanent financial deficit, a regular over supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable state of justice and law, that these five items constitute, as it were, the five points of the East Indian charter, was settled beyond all doubt in the debates of 1853, as it had been in the debates of 1833, and in the debates of 1813, as in all former debates on India. The only thing never found out, was the party responsible for all this.⁸

There exists, unquestionably, a Governor General of India, holding the supreme power, but that Governor is governed in his turn by a home government. Who is that home government? Is it the Indian Minister, disguised under the modest title of President of the Board of Control, or is it the twenty-four Directors of the East India Company? On the threshold of the Indian religion we find a divine trinity, and thus we find a profane trinity on the threshold of the Indian government. However, leaving the Governor General altogether on one side, we find the double government. Pitt’s Act of 1784, by entering into a compromise with the company, by subjecting it to the superintendence of the Board of Control and by making the Board of Control an appendage of the Ministry, accepted, regulated and settled that double government arose from circum...

Table of contents

• International Library of Sociology
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Karl Marx (1818–83)
• 2 Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
• 3 Max Weber (1864–1920) on general characteristics of Indian society
• 4 The Hindu social system
• 5 The main characteristics of Hinduism in early times
• 6 Jainism and Buddhism in India
• 7 Hinduism in the Middle Ages and After
• 8 General characteristics of Indian religion and other conclusions
• 9 Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
• 10 Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923)
• 11 A retrospect
• Notes
• Index
• Index