Understanding Marxist historiography: Where India is not a nation and Gandhi a mere British collaborator

The British ruled India for close to 200 years. The Raj was so dominating, powerful and entrenched that many historians have started questioning the role of the Indians in supporting the Raj and helping the Britishers perpetuate their control over India. As per this perspective, this mighty Raj could not have survived for so long had a section of Indians not collaborated with the British. This small yet powerful and influential section of the Indian people are given various terms like Raj supporters, loyalists, collaborators and many such derogatory adjectives.

In Peace, Poverty and Betrayal, Roderick Matthews writes that the initial strategy of the British in India was “oblige and rule” and many Indians collaborated with the English. This section of collaborators included the princely states, a few Indians who joined the British coveted bureaucracy, and a section of Indian society whose interests merged with the Britishers.

Surprisingly, this historical perspective of the “collaborators of the Empire” was given a definite theory and shape by the Marxist historians. It is interesting to note that the Marxist-historiography has an altogether different narrative of the Indian freedom struggle. The main proponents of the Marxist historiography of the Indian freedom struggle are R Palme Dutt (India Today), AR Desai (Social Background of Indian Nationalism), Bipan Chandra (Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India), Romila Thapar, KN Panikkar, DD Kosambi, Sumit Sarkar and a few others.

Groomed and cultured in the ideological framework of the now discarded worldview of communism, these Marxist historians start with the basic assumption that the moving force of growth — be it human or socio-political — is ‘matter’ or material forces. The growth in society is the result of basic contradictions in the economic relationship which invariably divides the society into two economic classes of ‘haves’ and ‘haves-not’. Haves control the material forces which they call as sub-structure. The superstructure of society, culture, religion, and politics is based on and reflects the sub-structure of material economic forces. Any ‘idea’ is just a reflection of the prevailing material economic relationship. So, ideas, ideology, religion, nationalism or culture are nothing but the ideas of the ruling class and tools of the economically rich class to subjugate the minds of economically poor class. This irreconcilable conflict will pass through five definite stages till the society surpasses the nation-state and evolves into a classless stateless society. For them, class is real while nation is ephemeral, transitory and unreal.

With this perspective, which is at the most a hypothesis, they try to explain the Indian freedom struggle, which was neither ‘Indian’ nor ‘national’ nor a ‘freedom struggle’. It was a class movement and had a class character. They claim colonialism-imperialism to be a ‘regenerative’ force which instilled class consciousness in the people. For them, the First War of Independence of 1857 was a revolt of the old conservative and feudal forces and dethroned potentates, and not a war of independence.

For them, the emergence of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was never a people’s choice but was in fact brought into being through the initiative and under the guidance of the direct British governmental policy, on a plan secretly pre-arranged with the Viceroy as an intended weapon for safeguarding British rule against the rising forces of popular unrest and anti-British feeling (Dutt). Interestingly, they call the earlier era of the Congress from 1885 to 1920 as an era of “collaborators” and “loyalists”. For them, the Congress collaborated with the British empire even in the subsequent years which helped the Britishers perpetuate their Empire. The Congress remained loyal to the Britishers.

The Congress was led by the Indian dominant class of bourgeoisie and capitalist with the aim of promoting and enhancing their class-dominance. Though after the 1920s, people got involved and participated in the freedom struggle but their ‘choice’ in the Indian bourgeoisie-led struggle was of no consequence. For them, Gandhi was never a leader of nation or people but was representing the class interests of the propertied classes; he was a ‘Jonah of revolution’, ‘the general of unbroken disasters’, ‘the mascot of the bourgeoisie’.

Out of a ‘choice’ between the Indian people and the Britishers, the Congress led by Gandhi chose to collaborate with the imperialist-colonialists to protect their own property-related position. In a nutshell, Gandhi collaborated with the British empire just to save the interests of the entrenched privileges of the Indian bourgeoisie and protect them from the ‘menace’ of the mass movement which would have threatened their own selfish propertied interests. His method of non-violence was not based on any principles but on the exigencies to stop the masses from getting radicalised. They interpret the “peaceful and bloodless” approach of struggle adopted by the nationalist leadership as “a basic guarantee to the propertied classes that they would at no time be faced with a situation in which their interests might be put in jeopardy even temporarily”. Gandhi was never a leader of the nation but he was a leader of the bourgeoisie.

The Indian propertied classes were fighting its own vested class struggle against the Raj; and were against any radicalisation of the freedom movement and, therefore, tried to scuttle it before it could become dangerous to their own interests. The leaders of the struggle led by Gandhi cooperated, colluded and collaborated with the imperialists just to protect their own property-related interests! Thus the Non-Cooperation Movement was called off by Gandhi because the masses were becoming too militant and a threat to the propertied classes within and outside the Congress. A similar fate befell the Civil Disobedience Movement which was suddenly and mysteriously called off.

It is surprising that the communists never participated in the freedom struggle, collaborated with the British in 1942, and gave the Adhikari Thesis for dividing India. Yet, they give us lessons on nationalism, and questioning the sacrifices made by patriots like Savarkar and Gandhi.

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