Was India feudal?

Part - I

The main aim of this article is to examine the social formation that developed in India before the advent of British rule. It seeks to understand the social, economic and political aspects of pre-colonial society in the Subcontinent.

The basic intention behind explaining the pre- and post-colonial past is to understand the social structure that developed during colonial and post-colonial periods of the Subcontinent’s history. The development of capitalism and class structures in Pakistan is directly linked with this question. The primary purpose is to critically examine the manner in which Marx develops a theoretical basis for the analysis of complex pre-capitalist, non-feudal social forms.

Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the specificity of Indian society before colonialism. Important among them are the notions of the Asiatic mode of production, the petty mode of production and Indian feudalism. Many Indian historians rejected Marx’s notion of the Asiatic mode of production and developed the alternative thesis of Indian feudalism. Some used other formulations to explain class relations in the pre-capitalist India.

What we are saying is that: in India, the caste system was the basis of the Indian variant of the Asiatic mode of production and it is thus necessary that it precluded feudalism. India did not have a feudal mode of production. In this sense, the Indian left was wrong in ascribing feudalism to India. And since the incorrect social formation was ascribed to India, the analysis of classes could only be problematic.

For Marx, the Asiatic mode of production is not a normative discourse. As a result, it was unlike Karl Wittfogel’s oriental despotism –which drew a fictitious line of demarcation between the apparent ‘free’ societies of the West and an allegedly totalitarian Eastern world – but was a specific concrete mode of production that could not be reduced to the same mechanisms of slave, feudal and capitalist societies of Western Europe. It is a concrete mode of production that follows its own internal mechanism. There were three different structures: the centralised state, village communities and the classless communes.

Any claims that Marx was a Eurocentric thinker in theorising on the Asiatic mode of production would be completely wrong as he differentiated between a “materialist and rational West” and an “idealist East”.

The repercussions of ignoring the Asiatic mode of production is that history was made to look like the infamous march-past of iron laws. According to this thesis, capitalism could only emerge from feudalism while socialism could only grow from capitalism. And since Pakistan is not capitalist (or not a “fully developed” capitalist state), socialism would have to wait like the missing messiah.

But as we shall see, the Asiatic mode is a complex genre and cannot be reduced to a Unitarian mode of production. In Iran, it takes a certain kind of form while in China and India, it takes different forms. In India, it is caste and the peculiar type of social stratification that forms the basis of the critique of the political economy of India.

Keeping this articulation of the communes along with the caste-based village communities and the despotic state, one can begin an articulation on the nature of what the established left calls the basic classes. These basic classes do not spring from the air. They emerge from a long history – a history that is constituted within the political economy of South Asia. We can bracket neither the communes nor the caste-based communities. Nor does the Indian proletariat emerge like the missing messiah, free from its pre-history. One has to take this real history. And, of course, the Indian communist cannot manufacture a class consciousness in the cranium of the central committee, a class consciousness that somehow would be imposed onto the people “from the outside”.

Whilst feudalism involves the landlord as the lord and master, the owner of land and the sovereign who has absolute power and controls the bureaucracy and the armed forces, the Asiatic mode has the state as the sovereign and the owner of property that is confronted by the village communities. The erroneous theory of Indian feudalism does not take the extreme complex dialectic of the communes, village communities and the authoritarian Asiatic state as the dialectic of combined and uneven social formation.

The discourse on pre-capitalism cannot be reduced to the discourses on European feudalism. A clear-cut line of demarcation must be drawn between the caste-based village communities (which Marx abhorred) and the classless communes (which Marx supported).

For Marx, Asiatic despotism is directly related to the caste question and the nature of power emanating thereon. This entails both the power at the village level as well as political powers that reside in the infamous oriental despotic state. Caste, as Marx puts it, is not only the “solid foundation for Asiatic despotism” but also of its legendary stagnation. Two features emerge from this. First, Marx does not generalise on Asia as despotic and stagnant and claims that the caste element served this very same stagnation and despotism. Second, in India, one does not talk of feudal landed property and thus there is no feudalism in India. Instead, we speak about caste at the level of “completely independent”, “idyllic republics” as well as the level of government. One cannot graft the concept of serfs on the idea of caste and reduce the caste equation to landlord-serf relations. Pre-capitalist relations of production in Western Europe and India are entirely different.

We will look into the impacts of British colonialism and imperialist occupation in the next article.

To be continued

The writer is a freelance journalist.