Was India feudal? - Khalid Bhatti

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.

Part – II

In India, slavery was never the dominant mode of production. Even though, there were some eight million slaves in India in the middle of the 19th century, most of them were domestic and debt slaves during that era and in earlier historical periods. India never had a classical slave economy the way Greece and Rome did.

India was not a classical feudal economy in the same sense as England, France and other European powers before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, it was different in this sense. It was possible for India to develop a unique form of capitalism or even socialism in the process of the modernisation of its productive forces.

But British intervention cut across this natural process of the development of productive forces and stopped the rise and emergence of the indigenous and independent mercantile and, later, capitalist class. The economic exploitation of India by British imperialism cut across the process of accumulating wealth in the hands of the local ruling class. The imperialist policies led to the stagnation of both agriculture and industry in India.

The process of capitalist development in India occurred in a peculiar manner – first under the aegis of the British and then under the compromises and conditions that evolved out of British military, political and economic needs that drained capital from India and enforced deindustrialisation. This was followed by controlled partial industrialisation, heavily adverse terms of trade and the non-transfer of technology.

Imperial rule destroyed India’s local handloom industry to fund its own industrialisation. India became one of the major cotton exporters to England. Raw material from India were taken to Britain and the finished products were sent back to Indian markets and other parts of the world, leaving the Indian handloom industry in a shambles and taking jobs away from local weavers.

The characteristic process of imperialism and the expropriation of the colonial population from the land were carried out by the British under the cover of legal forms. This, in effect, transformed the ‘eternal’ land system of the Indian village commune into an inextricable amalgam of feudal and semi-feudal rights and tenures. The British introduced in India “the great desideratum of Asiatic society – private property in the land”, making in this connection a series of “unsuccessful and really absurd (and in effect really infamous) experiments in economics”.

In Bengal, they created a caricature of English landed property on a large scale. In south-eastern India, a caricature of small allotment properties was introduced. In the northwest, they transformed the Indian commune with the common ownership of land into a caricature of itself.

Britain relegated to India the role of an agricultural appendage to imperialism. The destruction of Indian industries, which was carried out in the 19th century, at once drove the population of the ruined industrial centres back to the land and ruined the livelihood of millions of artisans in the villages.

The overcrowding of agriculture forced three-fourths of the entire Indian population to become solely dependent on the land. The proportion of land available for cultivation fell to less than 1.25 acres per head of the agrarian population. The effect of this exaggerated disequilibrium in the company is further aggravated by the stagnation and deterioration of agriculture itself.

The British are directly responsible for this through their disruption of the village economy, their iniquitous efforts to exact land revenue and their expropriation of the peasantry. Their attempts to create parasitic forces in semi-feudal landlordism and their notorious neglect of public works on the land – which have, since time immemorial, been the function of the government and without which the cultivation of the soil cannot be carried on – also contributed to this.

The criminal indifference of the government and the suffocating parasitism of the landlords were responsible for the incredibly low productivity and the exhaustion of the soil. This also resulted in the use of primitive agricultural techniques and the waste of labour on fragmented holdings. Cultivable soil (of which 35 percent was wasted in India) was also neglected and areas under cultivation shrank while the population was on the rise. Those conditions that had pulled a vast majority of the rural population to a level of unspeakable poverty and chronic semi-starvation led to a permanent agricultural crisis that both India and Pakistan failed to resolve even after Independence.

The Indian capitalist class, despite its expansion, remains essentially dependent on an agency of British finance capital and performs a subsidiary role in the exploitation of India. Despite its dreams of industrialisation and a broadened base of exploitation for itself, the Indian bourgeoisie – shackled as it is to imperialism – cannot play the historic role of the West European bourgeoisie in liberating and developing the productive forces. But the colonial situation slowed down the development of an indigenous, progressive and independent industrial bourgeoisie and its development was different from other independent countries.

India, which was one of the major exporters of finished products, became an importer of British goods as its world share of exports fell from 27 percent to two percent. At the beginning of the 18th century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent – as large as all of Europe put together. But by the time the British were kicked out of India in 1947, it had dropped to less than four percent, according to the BBC.

Part – III

The introduction of railways and the telegraph was a big step forward, and paved the way for a commercial revolution in India. However, it failed to usher in an industrial revolution. Railways, roads, postal services and the telegraph unleashed a commercial revolution that was never seen before in the Subcontinent.

The internal trade between different provinces and regions increased manifold. This helped to develop new layers of mercantile classes and petty capitalists. But both classes emerged in the epoch of imperialist domination. So, they failed to play an independent role in bringing an industrial revolution.

The growth in trade and domestic market increased the size and influence of the mercantile class. Traders emerged as a new political force in the cities. The continued commercialisation and deep penetration of the market forces in society in both modern-day India and Pakistan are a legacy of that commercial revolution. The British made every attempt to ensure that the commercial transformation of India never resulted in an industrial revolution.

The commercial revolution further colonised the Indian economy. It increased the pace of the imperialist exploitation of raw materials and natural resources.

We have heard a great deal about foreign investment in India during that time. The fact is that it was far too little and aimed to serve the external market instead of the home market. Tsarist Russia received a large amount of foreign investment from European powers during the last decades of the 19th century while India received nominal foreign investment. The British imperialists focused mainly on protecting and furthering their own interests in India. In this process, they dealt severe blows to the Indian economy, society and the ruling class, which never fully recovered even after 70 years of independence.

Despite the increase of Indian capital, British capital remained in effectively monopolist domination in the banking, commerce, exchange and insurance and shipping sectors as well as the tea, coffee, rubber plantations and jute industries. In the iron and steel sectors, Indian capital was forced to come to terms with British capital. Even in the cotton industry – which is the home of Indian capital – the control of British capital was dominant through the managing agency system.

In 1928 (before the Great Depression), British managing agents controlled a majority of the capital of cotton companies (50.3 percent). The economic depression – which affected Indian industries after 1929 – and the bankruptcy liquidations and difficulties of many Indian firms – which had arisen in the post-war period – were utilised by British capital to strengthen its hold on India’s industry.

The most decisive factor for the controlling power of British finance capital was the role of the foreign banking system that worked in conjunction with the government’s financial and exchange policies. Financial power remained monopolised in British hands through the Reserve Bank of India, the Imperial Bank and the big exchange banks. The Indian joint-stock banks held less than one-third of the bank deposits in India and were also invaded by British capital.

The main changes that the British made in Indian society were at the top. They replaced the repressive old state order and retrogressive aristocracy with an even more repressive bureaucratic-military establishment that was carefully designed by utilitarian technocrats. This establishment was quite efficient in defending and furthering the interest of the British.

British imperialism had the power to transform the Subcontinent from a medieval social and economic structure to a modern capitalist one. But they forged an alliance with same forces that had kept India socially and economically backward. The British failed to develop a progressive attitude and instead played a retrogressive role to keep India backward.

The British imperialists created economic, social and political conditions that made it impossible for the emergence and development of an indigenous and independent capitalist class which was free from the influence of imperialism and the crushing domination of British capital. Nearly 90 percent of British capital investment in India before the First World War was directed towards administration, transport, plantations and finance. The basic motive behind this investment and policy was the colonial construction of the Indian state and the commercial penetration of India, its exploitation as a source of raw materials and a market for British manufactures.

This was, in fact, one of the principal contradictions of the British imperialist policy in India. It is true that some sort of internal development was necessary to carry on with colonial exploitation. But the process involved in the crafty policy of colonial exploitation slackened the pace of development and thereby put the Indian economy in a state of perpetual underdevelopment. Colonial dependence had dealt a mortal blow to Indian agriculture, industry, trade and then to the socio-cultural fabric of the country.

The colonial factor also produced structural and institutional changes. This resulted in a lopsided industrial development rather than an industrial revolution. The British government did not make any effort to develop a heavy, basic and capital goods industries, which is the sound basis of industrialisation.

Modern industries, like the engineering and metallurgical industries, were almost non-existent. In the field of technology, it had to depend completely on the imperialist world. The British encouraged agro-based industries in India. This trend has continued in both India and Pakistan. Both countries have failed to develop heavy engineering steel industries.

The Indian comprador bourgeoisie created its class organisations considerably earlier than the proletariat. Therefore, headed by the comprador bourgeoisie and the landlords, the Indian National Congress captured the leadership of the national liberation movement.

In the struggle against British imperialism, the bourgeoisie were nothing but an unreliable and vacillating member that was always ready for compromise and betrayal. They have failed to play a progressive role and complete the tasks of national democratic revolutions after independence in both India and Pakistan. They have never been able to come out of the shadows of imperialism.