Reading Karl Marx on India

Abstract

Reading Karl Marx on India

This article tries to draw attention to the negative effect of ideological convictions on scholarship through reading Karl Marx’s views on India. The history of political ideologues points out the negative contribution any ideology of transforming the world to the minds of its adherents. This was and is the evil influence of ideology, which this article attempts to underline. Any pre-fixed ideas, howsoever great, more or less corrupts the mind of its adherents. Karl Marx’s observations about the Indian history, people, religion and culture make an interesting reading in this respect. The article shows that a lot of misreading and misrepresentation was inherent in the approach of Karl Marx about India. So far most Indian scholars have missed the point, though many of them analyzed elaborately Marx’s thoughts about India. Indian intellectuals have no adequate appreciation about what Marx thought about the Indian civilization. Another facet, of Marx’s views about India that remained largely ignored was his evaluation of the pre-British India. The article also brings to notice the view of Karl Marx that the Hindus in India were as much the exploited community under the Muslim rulers as they were under the British rule later on. This was quite contrary to what Indian Marxists propagated for decades. But Marx himself never distinguished between Mughals and the British rulers as ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ as his Indian followers did. He considered both as foreign to the native Indians. Another interesting example of the Marxist historians expurgating the ideas of Marx himself is the evaluation of the 1857 as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, not as the ‘War of Independence’. The article underlines these points to note the negative role of ideological fixation in social science scholarship.