How has the Marxist Perspective been applied to explain social background of Indian nationalism ? (2008)
The question is about application, so it is best answered in three steps: what the Marxist perspective supplies as a method, what Indian scholars obtained when they turned that method on the rise of nationalism, and where the yield fell short.
The method it supplies
From Karl Marx the perspective takes four working tools. First, historical materialism: explain consciousness by the conditions of material life, not the reverse. Second, base and superstructure, which treats politics, law and ideology as forms in which class conflict is fought out. Third, the mode of production as the unit of periodisation, so that a society is dated by how it produces, not by its dynasties. Fourth, class formation — the movement from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself — which supplies the mechanism connecting economic change to political organisation.
First application: dating and naming colonial India
- D. D. Kosambi, in An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), reconstructed Indian history from the successive forms of production rather than from texts and kings, giving Indian Marxism a usable method rather than a formula.
- Bipan Chandra, in Essays on Colonialism, distinguished successive stages of colonial exploitation — monopoly trade and plunder, free-trade commodity exploitation, and finance imperialism — each producing a different Indian class structure and therefore a different nationalist politics.
- Irfan Habib‘s work on the Mughal agrarian order established what colonialism displaced, so that the colonial transition could be specified rather than assumed.
Second application: from classes to a movement
A. R. Desai‘s Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948) is the fullest application. Because colonialism replaced customary landholding with property, destroyed the artisan, built railways and a unified market, and created an English-educated service class, it generated the social forces whose obstruction by imperialism became nationalism. Desai then read the movement’s ideology, leadership and strategy back off that class base, and in Peasant Struggles in India (1979) recovered the agrarian revolts that ran alongside it. Sumit Sarkar‘s Modern India 1885–1947 (1983) refined the application by showing regional and local variation the national frame conceals. Hamza Alavi‘s “The State in Post-Colonial Societies” (1972) extended it past 1947: the inherited apparatus is overdeveloped relative to the society it governs, which is why the colonial state outlived colonialism.
What the application missed
- Yogendra Singh judged Desai’s framework theoretically bold but empirically thin, resting on historiography that substantial data could unsettle.
- Treating caste and religion as reflections of property underestimated their autonomy; B. R. Ambedkar had already shown that the class question could not absorb the caste question.
- The nation as an imagined cultural form — language, print, sentiment — lies outside a purely economic reading.
- The peasant appears as a follower rather than an initiator, which is what the subaltern historians would seize on.
Conclusion
Applied to Indian nationalism, the Marxist perspective did what a good perspective should: it produced a testable account and provoked its own correctives. Its method has not lapsed. Reading India’s new workforce through property rather than occupation — a gig and platform labour force the NITI Aayog put at 7.7 million in 2020-21 and projected at 23.5 million by 2029-30 — remains the clearest way to see who owns and who merely works.