Analyze the Marxist perspective of the nature of Indian National Movement. (150 words) (2013, 2021, 10 Marks)
The Marxist perspective judges the national movement by its class content: which class led it, which classes followed, and whose interests 1947 served. Its classical answer is a bourgeois-democratic, anti-imperialist struggle; its later exponents revised that answer from within.
The Classical Thesis
- M. N. Roy‘s India in Transition (1922) first argued that the Indian bourgeoisie, tied to empire, would compromise once mass action threatened property.
- R. Palme Dutt‘s India To-day (1940) made the Congress the political vehicle of Indian capital, marked by a dual character: real conflict with imperialism over markets and tariffs, and real fear of the masses it needed. Retreats such as Bardoli (1922) and the Gandhi–Irwin Pact (1931) become class decisions, and 1947 a transfer of power to the same class.
- A. R. Desai‘s Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948) grounded nationalism in colonialism’s own products, namely a national market, railways, print and new classes. He periodised it by a steadily widening social base, with leadership staying under capitalist influence.
Workers and Peasants in the Frame
The masses appear as a force, not the directing centre. The AITUC (1920), S. A. Dange‘s Bombay textile unions and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936) pressed demands the leadership accommodated only partly. Irfan Habib credits the Left as the one stream opposing colonial and domestic exploitation together, while conceding the Communist Party’s costly isolation in 1942.
Revisions from Within
- Bipan Chandra, trained in the tradition, drew on Antonio Gramsci instead. He read the movement as a war of position that built counter-hegemony over decades, puncturing the myth of benevolent British rule, with the Congress an all-class movement rather than a bourgeois party. Quit India (1942) was the final assault after that long preparation.
- Sumit Sarkar called the Dutt–Desai reading simplistic: the Congress did not serve the masses well, but had no conscious anti-mass plan, and M. K. Gandhi was no mere tool of business.
Limits
- Economic determinism cannot explain why Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru chose so differently.
- Caste and religion are reduced to class, and Ranajit Guha‘s subaltern critique finds popular politics autonomous of every elite, Marxist leadership included.
Conclusion
The Marxist lens rightly exposes the movement’s class ceiling, the advance-and-retreat rhythm and the propertied leadership. Yet its best practitioners abandoned crude reductionism. Its central question, how the state arbitrates between capital and labour, remains live: the contest over the four Labour Codes, in force since 21 November 2025 and consolidating 29 central laws, is that question restated.