Marxist sociology (A R Desai)

Historical Materialism as a Perspective

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• Historical materialism functions simultaneously as a perspective and a methodology. As a perspective, it locates the causes of social development and change in a society’s material conditions — its economic structure — rather than in ideas, texts, or values taken as a starting point. As a methodology, it examines social structure and explains social change through the dialectical movement of the forces of production and the relations of production within a society’s mode of production.
• The basic causal chain runs: a change in the forces of production (technology, techniques, the organisation of labour) generates pressure on the existing relations of production (property relations — who owns and controls productive resources), which in turn reshapes the superstructure (law, politics, religion, ideology) built on that economic base.
• A.R. Desai applied this framework more consistently and more comprehensively to Indian society than any other Indian sociologist of his generation, making him the discipline’s central Marxist voice, standing alongside G.S. Ghurye’s Indology and M.N. Srinivas’s structural-functionalism as the third major perspective on Indian society (see the companion articles on both).

A.R. Desai: Life and Intellectual Formation

• Aiku Ramchandra Desai (1915–1994), born in Nadiad, Gujarat, closely studied the work of Marx and Engels and the writings of Leon Trotsky, and is regarded as one of the pioneers of applying a rigorous, empirically grounded Marxist method — combining bibliographical research with field investigation — to Indian sociology.
• He worked against the intellectual current of his own era: through the 1950s and early 1960s, American structural-functionalism and British functionalism dominated the sociological mainstream, both in general social science and in Indian sociology specifically. Desai continued to write on Indian society and the Indian state from an explicitly Marxist standpoint regardless.
• He diagnosed the discipline’s resistance to Marxism as ideological rather than intellectual: the Marxist approach, in his account, had been dismissed as “dogmatic, value-loaded, and deterministic” less because of any real methodological weakness than because it threatened the assumptions of the mainstream sociology it challenged. As he put it directly, he wished Indian social science would “break through the atmosphere of allergy” toward the approach.

Why the Marxist Approach? Desai’s Own Case

• Desai argued the Marxist approach helps a researcher raise the right questions, direct research productively, formulate adequate hypotheses, and locate the central tendencies of social transformation — a methodological claim, not just a substantive one.
• He gave property relations central analytical importance, treating the type of property relations prevailing in a society as the axial element for understanding it — because property relations determine, in his account, who gets how much, and on what grounds, shaping the purpose, control, and direction of production itself.
• Importantly, Desai denied that this focus reduces every social phenomenon crudely to economics: he explicitly did not deny the need to understand institutions like caste, religion, linguistic identity, or tribal organisation in their own right — the Marxist approach, for him, aims to locate the role and transformation of these institutions within the wider matrix of underlying property relations, not to explain them away entirely.
• The approach’s larger analytical payoff, for Desai, was exposing the class character of the post-independence Indian state: he argued the state’s own self-presentation as a neutral, welfare-oriented institution obscured its real function protecting propertied-class interests, and that a rigorous Marxist reading was necessary to see past that self-presentation.

The Pre-Colonial Village: Feudalism, Not Primitive Communism

• Desai’s account of Indian history divides into three broad phases, tracked through changes in property relations: a pre-colonial (feudal) stage, a colonial stage, and a post-colonial stage.
• The pre-British Indian village, in his reading, was a largely self-sufficient economic unit: peasant families held hereditary, generation-to-generation rights to cultivate their land; the village council functioned as the de facto owner of village land on the community’s behalf; artisans and service castes were paid in kind through relations of economic reciprocity, stabilised by the caste system’s hereditary allocation of occupation; and exchange with the outside world was minimal.
• Desai was careful to specify that this was feudalism, not primitive communism — a genuinely stratified, unequal social order, even though the reciprocal, non-monetised structure of exchange kept overt conflict comparatively muted. Sir Charles Metcalfe’s famous description of Indian villages as “little republics,” persisting through changes of ruler, captures the same underlying continuity Desai is describing, though Desai reads that continuity as structurally stagnant rather than admirable: family, caste, and the village panchayat together subordinated the individual so thoroughly that they smothered initiative and experimentation for centuries, and the resulting villages became, in his account, “citadels of economic stagnation, social reaction, and cultural blindness.”
• Pre-British towns existed too, but served a narrow function — political, religious, or commercial centres producing luxury goods, temples, forts, and monuments for aristocratic and mercantile elites (the Taj Mahal and Qutub Minar among them), rather than goods for mass consumption, which kept urban markets structurally limited.

The Colonial Transformation of the Mode of Production

• British colonialism, in Desai’s account, achieved something no prior conqueror had: while earlier Muslim rule had altered India’s political superstructure, the British fundamentally restructured its economic base — introducing centralised administration, direct land taxation through district collectors, and land that could be bought, sold, and auctioned as private property for the first time.
• New rural classes emerged directly from this restructuring: zamindars created by British land settlement, absentee landlords, tenants under both, peasant proprietors stratified into upper, middle, and lower strata, agricultural labourers, and new classes of merchants and moneylenders.
• New urban classes emerged alongside them: industrial, commercial, and financial capitalists; a modern industrial working class; petty traders and shopkeepers tied to the new capitalist economy; and a professional, educated middle class — technicians, doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, clerks.
• Desai draws out a genuine irony in this process: British colonial policy pursued Indian unification unintentionally, as a byproduct of consolidating its own rule — railways, the postal system, a uniform centralised legal code, and English-language education knit together previously scattered, disconnected Indian communities, and this same new infrastructure of connection became the material basis for social movements, collective political representation, and the growth of national consciousness.
• Desai is equally clear-eyed about the trade-off: he judged that from the standpoint of building a single national economy, this transformation was a genuine “step forward,” even though it was achieved through the destruction of self-sufficient village communities and considerable economic misery — a historically necessary, but not therefore benign, transformation.

Social Background of Indian Nationalism

• Desai’s first major and most influential work, The Social Background of Indian Nationalism, applied historical-dialectical materialism directly to the emergence of Indian nationalism, and in doing so cross-fertilised sociology with history in a way that set the template for later Marxist sociological writing on India.
• His central thesis: Indian nationalism was the product of the material conditions colonialism itself created, not primarily the product of ideas, culture, or elite leadership taken in isolation. British economic restructuring generated new social classes and forces, and it was the conflict of interest between those new forces and British imperial rule that supplied nationalism’s actual motive power.
• Crucially, different classes opposed British rule for different, sometimes conflicting, material reasons, not out of a single unified national sentiment: industrialists wanted freedom to industrialise without British restriction and protection for native industry; the educated middle class wanted Indianisation of the civil services, which the British monopolised at senior levels; agriculturists wanted a lower land tax; workers wanted better wages and conditions. Indian nationalism, on this reading, grew directly out of these specific, material contradictions between British and Indian interests, only later consolidating into a shared national demand for independence.
• Desai’s treatment of tradition follows the same logic and marks a real departure from both Ghurye’s and Srinivas’s accounts: he located tradition’s roots not in religion, ritual, or festival, but in economic and production relations — a secular, materially grounded account rather than a scriptural or culturally continuous one. Because tradition is rooted in economic relations on this account, Desai predicted that as those relations changed, traditional institutions like caste would themselves eventually disintegrate under the pressure of industrialisation, economic growth, and education.

The Post-Independence State: A Capitalist State in Socialist Language

• Desai’s analysis of independent India centres on a blunt claim: the post-independence Indian state is fundamentally a capitalist state, and its constitution is, correspondingly, a bourgeois constitution — regardless of the socialist rhetoric used to describe India’s development model.
• He periodised the post-independence decades in stark terms: 1950–64 as a “decade of hope,” 1968–78 as a “decade of despair,” and 1980–90 as a “decade of discontent” — a trajectory of steadily disappointed expectations about what independence would deliver for India’s working and agrarian poor.
• On his reading, the “socialistic pattern of society” India officially pursued functioned largely as an ideological hoax, obscuring a development path actually oriented toward capitalist consolidation; the administrative apparatus of the state, in this account, performs the twin function of protecting propertied-class interests while managing and containing the resistance of the exploited classes.
• Desai extended this argument to civil liberties directly in Violation of Democratic Rights in India, documenting the state’s role in curbing the rights of minorities, women, urban slum-dwellers, and the press.
• He was equally critical of orthodox Communist Party positions that spoke of an alliance with a “progressive bourgeoisie,” of India as “semi-feudal,” or that accepted a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism — in India’s Path of Development, he argued each of these positions underestimated how thoroughly capitalist India’s post-independence trajectory actually was.
• His later writing tracked the same framework into the contemporary period: globalisation, for Desai and the Marxist scholars who followed him, represents a new, transnational form of capitalism imposing itself on Indian society — visible in land alienation for Special Economic Zones, forced market liberalisation, and the cultivation of a new consumer culture through advertising.

Peasant Struggles

• In two companion volumes, Peasant Struggles in India and Agrarian Struggles in India After Independence, Desai compiled and analysed material on agrarian conflict across both the colonial and post-colonial periods, and drew a sharp distinction between the two eras.
• Colonial-era peasant struggles, in his account, were substantially about resisting immediate exploitation and survival pressure under an extractive colonial land-revenue system.
• Post-independence agrarian struggles, by contrast, are waged by two distinct groups with different stakes: newly propertied classes fighting for a larger share of development’s fruits, and the genuinely poor — pauperised peasants, agricultural labourers, disproportionately from low-caste and tribal communities — fighting simply for survival. Desai concluded that real progress for this second group required not incremental reform but a radical transformation of India’s exploitative capitalist structure.

Later Marxist Sociology: Post-Desai Extensions

• Desai’s framework was carried forward by later scholars working in a broadly Marxist idiom on Indian society, including Kathleen Gough, Gail Omvedt, and Rajendra Singh, each extending class analysis into new empirical domains — agrarian class relations, caste-class intersections, and rural social movements respectively.

Assessment and Critique

• The most persistent methodological criticism, from Yogendra Singh among others, is that Desai’s dialectical-historical claims, while theoretically sophisticated, are not well supported by empirical data — his arguments often read as historiography rather than as claims tested against systematic field evidence, which leaves his theoretical framework vulnerable to challenge on exactly the empirical grounds Srinivas’s field-based method was built to satisfy.
• S.C. Dubey argued Desai’s rigidly two-class (bourgeoisie/proletariat) framework overlooks the historical proliferation of the middle class in India, a group whose growth substantially shaped Indian class structure in ways a simple bourgeois-proletarian model cannot capture.
• T.N. Madan argued Desai’s framework underweights the genuine, independent force of modernity and cultural change, and specifically that it ignores the real integrative and solidarity-producing function of institutions like the jajmani system — treating them merely as instruments of economic exploitation rather than also as functioning systems of mutual obligation.
• Romila Thapar challenged the nationalist framing underlying Desai’s account of Indian unity at its root: in her view, India was historically not one nation but multiple nations, which came together primarily in the shared act of resisting colonial rule, not because of any pre-existing, singular national identity that colonialism merely activated.
• B.R. Ambedkar’s critique cuts differently again: he argued Desai’s class-centred framework misreads where the real fault line in Indian society lies, since caste conflict, not class conflict in the Western industrial sense, remains the more salient axis of division in a society where class structure itself remains comparatively underdeveloped.
• M.N. Srinivas offered perhaps the most economical summary of the three-way debate this article, its companion Ghurye article, and its companion Srinivas article together describe: Desai’s Marxism was economically deterministic, just as the Indological perspective was culturally deterministic — each perspective, on this reading, correctly identifies a real causal force in Indian society while overstating that force’s power to explain everything else.

Contemporary Relevance

• Desai’s central analytical move — asking who owns and controls productive resources, and how that shapes law, politics, and ideology — remains directly applicable to reading contemporary Indian political economy: land acquisition for Special Economic Zones, the politics of agricultural market liberalisation, and the growth of a platform and gig economy can all be approached through the same property-relations lens Desai applied to zamindari settlement and early industrial capitalism.
• His argument that “internal colonialism” by an educated middle class replaced external colonialism after 1947 remains a live, if contested, reference point in debates over whether independence changed India’s underlying economic structure as much as it changed its formal political status.

Key Terms at a Glance

• Historical materialism — the view that a society’s material/economic conditions, not its ideas, are the primary driver of social change.
• Forces and relations of production — a society’s technology and productive capacity, and the property relations that govern control over them.
• Base and superstructure — the economic foundation of a society, and the legal, political, and ideological structures built upon it.
• Bourgeois state — Desai’s characterisation of the post-independence Indian state as fundamentally serving propertied-class interests despite its socialist rhetoric.
• Internal colonialism — the idea that an Indian educated middle class replaced British colonial control after independence without fundamentally altering exploitative economic structures.