by Nandita Chaturvedi. When you look at Indian society with the aim of understanding it, at first sight you are confronted with intimidating complexity. There seems to be no way to systematically understand the emergence of a society with hundreds of languages, an ever more complex web of caste relations, religious practices and varied production under a single framework. It is easy then, to collapse into postmodern thinking, where rather than struggling to find the underlying rhythm and logic to societal phenomena, the particular becomes the focus. The only thing one can do then is to cite particular and special cases, as is often the case in Indian intellectual discourse and middle class dinner table talk alike. The Indian people, in this view of things, then become passive and docile, primitive, happy to live millenia in unchanging ways. Yet, there is a logic to the development of Indian history, and indeed, India does have a history. This was the assertion behind D.D. Kosambi’s life’s work. Kosambi’s work on ancient Indian history is full of concepts and new patterns of thought that make the variations in Indian society fall into place, and there emerges an illustration of a people and society that has continued to have certain special characteristics and features since antiquity. Kosambi had written, “In modern science it has been recognized that the variation is a very important characteristic of the material, particularly when dealing with living organisms.(..)But I have yet to see any recognition of the philosophical principle, let alone use of delicate statistical tests, in Indology.” These features can be taken to be hallmarks of Indian Civilization. Caste, Acculturation, and Synthesis Kosambi studied Indian society without the prejudices of the colonial framework. Thus, he sought to understand scientifically the emergence and evolution of caste as an organizational form in Indian society. He rejected the claim that caste had been a static and oppressive form for 5000 years. Instead, he tied it to the process of acculturation, the introduction of new tribes into the mainstream of Hindu society. Through anthropology and sociology, he sought to recreate the ancient history of the inclusion of different tribes into a more advanced agricultural society. Thus, at its inception, caste was a progressive form of the synthesis of alien peoples and cultures into a societal structure defined by a more advanced means of production, with minimal use of violence. The basis of caste was, then, tribal. Further, as society moved forward to more advanced stages, different castes would resemble classes as society became more economically stratified. He formulated, thus, that caste was class in its nascent form. He contrasted the Indian institution of caste to the Greek and Roman forms of slavery which also accompanied the subjugation of alien peoples to the mainstream of ancient society. India, he claimed, had no ancient history of slavery. Instead, ideas and mythology played a more emphasized role. Thus, gods of different tribes would marry Hindu gods, or find other relationships with them. This is why Hindu mythology did not have a consistent narrative throughout the subcontinent. Further, not only was acculturation a way for new peoples to be included in society, but that the tribes also in turn affected the beliefs, culture and traditions of the mainstream. Thus, Indian civilization came into being through a process of mutual acculturation. This repetitive process of synthesis was encoded into the logic, ideology and thought of the Indian people. Thus, non-violence had a basis even in ancient Indian society before its articulation in philosophy by Buddhism, Jainism and other religious traditions. Kosambi saw that this was in part because of the richness of Indian land, where ancient societies could exist and subsist even through foraging off the land, making violent conflict over resources unnecessary. Of course, this abundance did not guarantee the evolution of a non-violent stream in civilization, it is human action and thought that made that eventually possible. Kosambi’s analysis of caste should inspire us to investigate the logic of Indian thought and societal movement. Instead, it has become fashionable in intellectual circles of our time to deem the people backwards, communalist, and ignorant for their political and social choices. How were caste groupings and institutions changed by colonial distortions, the freedom struggle and by the progress after independence? Further, how do the Indian people self conceptualize their caste relations in this time? State and Civilization In attempting to understand the past and the present, Kosambi discovered aspects of the continuity of Indian civilization. He asserted that India was a civilization of long survivals where older modes of production and thought existed alongside new innovations. Civilizational continuity has also been maintained through the process of acculturation, which led to the absorption of alien forms into the main body of Indian thought and identity. Kosambi’s study of the Magadhan state takes on renewed importance in our time. The nations of Asia and Africa are witnessing the collapse of American liberal democracy and the European welfare state. The last decade has seen an acute crisis in the American political machine, fractures in the EU and NATO, and widespread popular protests in Europe. On the other hand, the Chinese state, which enjoys 90% approval ratings among the Chinese people, has demonstrated that different paths to democracy are possible. The time is ripe for India to re-examine the foundations of its own state, its continuity from ancient times, as well as its re-establishment under Nehru after the freedom movement. The question naturally arises, what will be our path to democracy? Is India suited to be a nation state, or a civilizational state, with characteristics emerging from its history? Kosambi wrote about the beginnings of the Magadhan state, the ruthless statecraft, written about by Chanakya, that was geared towards primitive accumulation and the cultivation of virgin lands. He framed the Magadhan state as a state outside of the Marxist conceptualization, in that it was not the instrument of a particular class. Rather, the state preceded rigid classes in society and so the employees of the state became, after its formation, a class in themselves. Yet, it was with the emergence of Ashok, he asserted, that the Magadhan state reached its full flowering. With the reign of Ashok, the religious and philosophical ferment of the previous century, which had so far been kept separate from the workings of the state, penetrated state ideology. Further, Ashok’s conversion to Buddhism did not result in the formation of a Buddhist state or a formalized Buddhist church. Rather, Ashok patronized and supported a variety of religious thinkers. Kosambi saw this marriage of morality, Buddhist morality in the case of Ashok, and politics as a hallmark of Indian statecraft and civilization. Kosambi says, “it can even be said that the Indian national character received the stamp of Dhamma from the time of Ashok.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can extend Kosambi’s analysis to understand what had emerged from the Indian freedom struggle in the state under Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru himself argued that there was no break between the freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi, and the running of the Indian state post independence. Although weighed down by mechanisms and bureaucracy of the British imperial government, Nehru’s government sought to bring about the ‘authentic Gandhian era’. This is perhaps seen most clearly in the spearheading role of the Indian government in the non aligned and world peace movement. Thus, the analysis of independence as a ‘transfer of power’ from British to Indian hands is hollow and superficial. Nehru thought deeply of the example of Ashok and others in Indian history, and sought to inject back the life of morality into the veins of governance. The question for this time is what form this continuity will take in a new emerging multipolar and BRICS driven world order? The answer cannot be a narrow cultural nationalism that adopts Indianization in language and form for Western ideas and paths to development. Rather, Indian civilization, and the forms in which it exists among the Indian people must be taken seriously, and its implications for our path to democracy, development and foreign policy thought about creatively. The adoption of ‘realpolitik’ and ‘self interest’ as the basis of foreign policy, for example, while claiming ‘vasudeva kutumbakam’ is too shallow a treatment of our tradition. As Nehru says, we are a country which produces atomic energy as well as our villages use cow dung. Development has to be thought of in terms of civilization. When the methods have a civilizational basis, ordinary people can take up these methods and ideas, making these methods democratic. For future development, understanding the Indian thought would allow us to think of ways rooted in our civilization, distinct from the Western ideas. Methodology What allowed Kosambi to arrive at the concepts outlined above was a revolutionary scientific methodology. Kosambi would talk about combined methods to study Indian history, which included sociology, statistics, anthropology and archaeology. He asserted that since India had a living prehistory, i.e. the coexistence of ancient and medieval forms alongside modern ones, the people of India, their ways of being and rituals were material for the study of ancient Indian society. We may even assert the opposite, that in order to understand the people of modern India, one needs to understand the civilizational currents and foundation that has shaped them. In other words, liberal theory is not sufficient, we need an understanding of the trajectory of Indian civilization as a whole. Thus Kosambi went to the people. He studied them with compassion and understanding, seeking to determine the modes and logics of their thought. He studied Indian religion, seeking to determine the material foundations that had shaped and guided it, as well as its role as a motive force in shaping material reality. Several historians would dismiss Indian religious beliefs as superstitious mythology. Others argued that Indian history was nothing but these myths, the Indian people were not interested in the real material world, but solely in otherworldly, spiritual matters. Kosambi went against both these colonial attitudes, connecting Indian mythology in a dialectic with the mode of production in Indian history. In all of his work, Kosambi never moved away from the foundational principle that the people made their own history, by acting upon material conditions, and by being shaped by them. He was ahead of his time, and indeed ahead of ours in understanding that the people are themselves also shaped by ideology and belief. Thus, Kosambi extended the Marxist method of dialectical materialism by studying India in the concrete. He extended the theoretical foundations of Marxism not by abstract machinations of an armchair intellectual, but by engaging with the Indian people and seeking out ways in which their life worlds were defined. He broke from several Indian communist intellectuals of the time who relied perhaps too much on the Soviet intellectuals for theoretical advances, lapsing into intellectual stagnation. Indeed, we can understand Marxism as a powerful method that had been at the vanguard of revolutionary thought in its time, and a new time (and society) requires new innovations. Lastly, Kosambi was scientific. His methods in studying Indian history are perhaps unparalleled by any other Indian historian. Kosambi understood that Indian history could not be written or explained simply with a list of successive rulers, communities, castes or races. In order to cut through the complexity that the material presented, one had to struggle to find the underlying trends and processes that gave rise to the complexity in the first place. By studying the changes in means, modes and relations of production in society, alongside innovations in religion and ideology, Kosambi was able to hit upon the foundational processes that have made Indian history. Nandita Chaturvedi is an editor of Vishwabandhu, a member of the Intercivilizational Dialogue Project and of the Gandhi Global Family.
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January 2025
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