Colonial History of India

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"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated
only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them.
But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny
without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever
may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in
bringing about that revolution."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wor.../06/25.htm

Articles by Karl Marx in the New-York Herald Tribune

The British Rule in India

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Source: MECW Volume 12, p. 125;
Written: June 10, 1853;
First published: in the New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853.

In writing this article, Marx made use of some of Engels' ideas as in his letter
to Marx of June 6, 1853.


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London, Friday, June 10, 1853
Telegraphic dispatches from Vienna announce that the pacific solution of the
Turkish, Sardinian and Swiss questions, is regarded there as a certainty.

Last night the debate on India was continued in the House of Commons, in the
usual dull manner. Mr. Blackett charged the statements of Sir Charles Wood and
Sir J. Hogg with bearing the stamp of optimist falsehood. A lot of Ministerial
and Directorial advocates rebuked the charge as well as they could, and the
inevitable Mr. Hume summed up by calling on Ministers to withdraw their bill.
Debate adjourned.

Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the
Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and
the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the
products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration.
Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror's sword
into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the
pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul[104], or the Briton, dissolved into as
many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages.
Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of
the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of
voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions
of the religion of Hindostan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist
exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the
Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the
Bayadere.[105]

I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan,
without recurring, however, like Sir Charles Wood, for the confirmation of my
view, to the authority of Khuli-Khan. But take, for example, the times of
Aurangzeb; 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[106]; or, if you will, go still more back to antiquity, take
the mythological chronology of the Brahman 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 Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more
intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do 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
startling us in the Temple of Salsette[107]. This is no distinctive feature of
British Colonial rule, but only an imitation of the Dutch, and so much so that
in order to characterise the working of the British East India Company, it is
sufficient to literally repeat what Sir Stamford Raffles, the English Governor
of Java, said of the old Dutch East India Company:

"The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their
[Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter
formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase
money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing
machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of
contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a
capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the b practised
ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders."

All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely
complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may
appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire
framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet
appearing. 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 Hindoo, and separates
Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole
of its past history.

There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments
of Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of 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, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and
water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India,
inundations are used for fertilizing the soil in Mesopotamia, Persia, &c.;
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 economical 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 Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of
devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it
of all its civilization.

Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department
of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works.
Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being
conducted on the British principle of free competition, 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. There the harvests correspond to good or bad 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 changing the political aspect of India's past must
appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest
antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The hand-loom and the
spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were
the pivots of the structure of that society. From immemorial times, Europe
received the admirable textures of Indian labor, sending in return for them her
precious metals, and furnishing thereby his material to the goldsmith, that
indispensable member of Indian society, whose love of finery is so great that
even the lowest class, those who go about nearly naked, have commonly a pair of
golden ear-rings and a gold ornament of some kind hung round their necks. Rings
on the fingers and toes have also been common. Women as well as children
frequently wore massive bracelets and anklets of gold or silver, and statuettes
of divinities in gold and silver were met with in the households. It was the
British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the
spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European
market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the
very mother country of cotton with cottons. From 1818 to 1836 the export of
twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824
the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while
in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population of
Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns
celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British
steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union
between agriculture and manufacturing industry.

These two circumstances - the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all
Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works,
the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other
hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centers by the
domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits - these two
circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of
particular features - the so-called village system, which gave to each of these
small unions their independent organization and distinct life. The peculiar
character of this system may be judged from the following description, contained
in an old official report of the British House of Commons on Indian affairs:

"A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some
hundred or thousand acres of arable and waste lands; politically viewed it
resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and
servants consists of the following descriptions: The potail, or head inhabitant,
who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the
disputes of the inhabitants attends to the police, and performs the dirty of
collecting the revenue within his village, a duty which his personal influence
and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people render him
the best qualified lot- this charge. The hurnum keeps the accounts of
cultivation, and registers everything connected with it. The tallier and the
totie, the duty of the former of which consists [...] in gaining information of
crimes and offenses, and in escorting and protecting persons travelling from one
village to another; the province of the latter appearing to be more immediately
confined to the village, consisting, among other duties, in guarding the crops
and assisting in measuring them. The boundary-man, who preserves the limits of
the village, or gives evidence respecting them in cases of dispute. The
Superintendent of Tanks and Watercourses distributes the water [ I for the
purposes of agriculture. The Brahmin, who performs the village worship. The
schoolmaster, who is seen teaching the children in a village to read and write
in the sand. The calendar-brahmin, or astrologer, etc. These officers and
servants generally constitute the establishment of a village; but in some parts
of the country it is of less extent, some of the duties and functions above
described being united in the same person; in others it exceeds the above-named
number of individuals. [...] Under this simple form of municipal government, the
inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of
the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves
have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine or disease, the
same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have
continued for ages. The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the
breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they
care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its
internal economy remains unchanged. The potail is still the head inhabitant, and
still acts as the petty judge or magistrate, and collector or renter of the
village."

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part
dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of
the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English
steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic
industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-pinning and
hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English
interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal,
or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small
semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical
basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social
revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of
industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and
dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual
members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their
hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic
village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the
solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind
within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of
superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all
grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism
which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the
ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the
population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than
on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to
notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and
vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part,
in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and
rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that
these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by
slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating
man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing
social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a
brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man,
the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the
monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated
only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them.
But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny
without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever
may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in
bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may
have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to
exclaim with Goethe:

"Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sic unsre Lust vermchrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur's Herrschaft aufgezehrt?"

["Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?"]
[From Goethe's "An Suleika", Westöstlicher Diwan]

Karl Marx

Footnotes from MECW Volume 12
104 A reference to the rule in India, mainly in the north, of the Mohammedan
invaders who came from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Persia. Early in the
thirteenth century the Delhi Sultanate became the bulwark of Moslem domination
but at the end of the fourteenth century it declined and was subsequently
conquered by the Moguls, new invaders of Turkish descent, who came to India from
the cast of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century and in 1526 founded the
Empire of the Great Moguls (named after the ruling dynasty of the Empire) in
Northern India. Contemporaries regarded them as the direct descendants of the
Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan's time, hence the name "Moguls". In the
mid-seventeenth century the Mogul Empire included the greater part of India and
part of Afghanistan. Later on, however, the Empire began to decline due to
peasant rebellions, the growing resistance of the Indian people to the
Mohammedan conquerors and increasing separatist tendencies. In the early half of
the eighteenth century the Empire of the Great Moguls practically ceased to
exist.

105 Religion of the Lingam - the cult of the God Shiva, particularly widespread
among the southern Indian sect of the Lingayat (from the word "linga" -the
emblem of Shiva), a Hindu sect which does not recognise distinctions of caste
and rejects fasts, sacrifices and pilgrimages.

Juggernaut (jagannath) - a title of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. The
cult of juggernaut was marked by sumptuous ritual and extreme religious
fanaticism which manifested itself in the self-torture and suicide of believers.
On feast days some believers threw themselves under the wheels of the chariot
bearing the idol of Vishnu-juggernaut.

106 Heptarchy (government by seven rulers) - a term used by English
historiographers to describe the political system in England from the sixth to
eighth centuries, when the country was divided into seven highly unstable
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which, in their turn, frequently split up and reunited.
Marx uses this term by analogy to describe the disunity of the Deccan (Central
and South India) before its conquest by the Mohammedans at the beginning of the
fourteenth century.

107 The island of Salsette, north of Bombay, was famous for its 109 Buddhist
cave temples.