Discuss Marxist approach to the analysis of Indian nationalism. (2015)
The Marxist approach refuses to take a movement at its own word. Instead of asking what nationalism proclaimed, it asks which classes produced it, whose interests its programme served, and which demands it was obliged to suppress. Applied to India, that question yielded a body of work as influential for what it provoked as for what it established.
The founding statements
- R. P. Dutt, in India Today (1940), read British rule as a structure of exploitation that manufactured Indian poverty, and read the Indian National Congress as an organisation in which the Indian bourgeoisie bargained with imperialism, mobilising the masses as pressure and demobilising them before pressure became revolution.
- A. R. Desai, in Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948), gave the argument a sociological form. Nationalism is a historical category: it appears only when colonial capitalism has produced a national market, modern communications, English education and the classes that go with them.
- Bipan Chandra, in The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (1966), showed how the early nationalists’ economic critique of colonialism — the drain, tariff policy, de-industrialisation — turned grievance into anti-imperialist politics.
The class character of the Congress
Desai traces how each widening of the movement’s social base was matched by a tightening of propertied control over its content: from the liberal intelligentsia, to the educated middle class and merchants, to the industrialists who financed Swadeshi and, after 1918, shaped programme and tactics. Class harmony was preached as national unity; strikes and no-rent campaigns were called off when they threatened the alliance. Where peasants and workers organised independently — the All India Kisan Sabha, the trade unions after 1926 — Congress offered a charter of rights rather than a transfer of property.
Disagreements within the camp
The approach is not one position. Desai’s India’s Path of Development (1984) attacked the communist parties’ talk of semi-feudalism, of alliance with a progressive bourgeoisie, and of a two-stage revolution. The mode of production debate in Economic and Political Weekly through the 1970s divided Utsa Patnaik, Ashok Rudra, Amit Bhaduri and Jairus Banaji over whether colonial agriculture was feudal, semi-feudal or already capitalist — a dispute about the class content of nationalism itself.
The critiques
- Ranajit Guha (Subaltern Studies I, 1982) charged that a narrative built on bourgeoisie, party and organised labour is elite historiography with the labels changed.
- B. R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) exposed nationalism’s silence on caste: a movement that postponed social revolution to political freedom secured freedom for the already free.
- Feminist scholarship — Uma Chakravarti and Partha Chatterjee in Recasting Women (1989) — showed the “woman question” being withdrawn from public contest and resolved inside the home, where nationalist patriarchy set the terms.
Conclusion
The Marxist approach remains indispensable precisely where it is most contested: it insists that independence be judged by who gained. That test still bites. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi, writing in Economic and Political Weekly in May 2024, found the top one per cent holding 22.6 per cent of income and 40.1 per cent of wealth — a concentration exceeding that of the colonial period itself.