Marx linked resolving India’s class question to dismantling its caste system

Evidence

Three things need to be said about this judgement. First, no influential nineteenth-century Indian reformer, from Rammohun to Syed Ahmed Khan to the founders of the Indian National Congress, was to take so clear-cut a position on the issue of Indian Independence; indeed, Gandhi himself was to spend the years during World War I recruiting soldiers for the British Army. Second, every shade of Indian nationalist opinion as it developed after 1919 – from the Gandhian to the communist, and excluding only the most obscurantist – would accept the truth of that statement, including the idea that colonial capitalism did contribute ‘new elements of society’ in India, some of which have a very great need to be preserved. Finally, it should be of some interest to us here that Marx speaks of the ‘proletariat’ in the English context but of the ‘Hindus’ (by which he simply means the inhabitants of the country) in the context of India. In other words, only five years after his hopes for a European revolution had been dashed, Marx is hoping for three things in the short run: a socialist revolution in Britain, a nationalist revolution in India, and the break-up of the caste system. Those, he thought, would be the preconditions for the masses of people’ even to start reaping any sort of ‘benefit from the new elements of society’. Now, much later, India has of course become independent, but those two other issues – of class in Britain and caste in India (‘the hereditary division of labour’, as Marx puts it) – are yet to be resolved; and the resolution of the class question in India doubtless passes, even today, through the caste question. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 468

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Marx on British Rule in India (the source paragraph being discussed) and to Ambedkar’s caste/class analysis mentioned here. — connects to: Marx’s dispatches on India require contextual scholarship, not summary dismissal — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1036

Related

• Marx’s dispatches on India require contextual scholarship, not summary dismissal (similarity 0.79)
• Marxist theory imported from Europe left Indian communists unequipped to analyze caste (similarity 0.79)
• Marxism lacked tools to grasp caste, leaving Indian communist leadership Brahmin-dominated. (similarity 0.78)