People's Democracy

A TRIBUTE TO D D KOSAMBI

Irfan Habib

31 JULY this year would have been Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi�s 100^th birthday; his birth centenary is, therefore, a fitting occasion to recall his great contributions to Marxist historiography. D D Kosambi�s father Dharmanand Kosambi was an eminent Sanskritist and a scholar of Buddhism, with a critical bent of mind. D D Kosambi himself chose mathematics for his discipline and, after graduating from Harvard with distinction, returned to India in 1929 to begin a distinguished teaching and research career. He carved a place for himself by his contributions to his field in mathematics; but in the late 1930s his main direction of studies began fundamentally to change as he turned to Marxism and History.

To understand this turn it is important to look beyond the mere facts of Kosambi�s professional biography. By the mid-thirties the ideas of Marxism and socialism had obtained considerable influence in the ranks of the national movement. The anti-colonial struggle was seen more and more as part of an international struggle for revolution and liberation. The elected provincial governments of 1937 relaxed the rigid ban on Marxist literature, and the first selection of Marx�s articles on India was now published from Allahabad. A reading of this volume led to an innocently titled article (�The Emergence of National Chraracteristics Among three Indo-European Peoples�) from Kosambi�s pen, published in an eminently academic journal of Pune, in 1939. This was an announcement of Kosambi�s adoption of Marxism as his basic intellectual standpoint. The class-struggle, he now asserted, was as much a feature of Indian history as of other civilisations. In a trenchant sentence, Kosambi displays his equal hostility to the exploitation of oppressed classes in India�s past and the current despotism of British rule:

�The caste system corresponds to our modern censorship and the Indian Arms Act together� (italics in the original).

To Kosambi, history in its essential features appeared as universal in the academic world as was the struggle for liberation and socialism in the public sphere. He was a consistent opponent of colonial rule before 1947. Greatly shocked by the US atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 and the subsequent imperialist drive towards war, he became a notable figure in the World Peace Movement. Today it is becoming the fashion, with Post-modernists in the van, to treat history and, indeed, humankind as a subject to be studied in fragments and to decry any �universalist� tendency as a �meta-narrative� (for such a critique of Kosambi, see a recent article by the American scholar, Sheldon Pollock). This is happening exactly at the time when the most powerful capitalist nations themselves are packaging their control over the world under the brand of �Globalisation.� The conditions of the world that made Kosambi turn to Marxism as the great ideology of international solidarity have not really changed; only the terrain of imperialist slaughter of peoples has shifted from East Asia to the Middle East.

It is, therefore, all the more necessary to endorse and underline Kosambi�s basic starting point (adopted by him from 1939 onwards), namely, the acceptance of the universality of class struggle. To him, the broad picture of historical change with succeeding modes of production that Marx drew in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), represented the core of Marxist historiography, and that passage naturally became a favourite quotation with him. Today many academics seek to dilute the theme of class struggle in past societies by laying the entire emphasis on issues of multi-class �subaltern� communities or �marginal� groups, or different value systems of various cultures. Louis Dumont, in his Homo Hierarchicus (1970) has been an eminent exponent of the last view. This amounts in essence to a recycling of hoary assertions such as the one by the anti-Communist propagandist Karl Wittfogel (1957) that �class-struggle far from being a chronic disease of mankind is the luxury of multi-centred and open (i.e. Western) societies.� This view, in turn, goes back to the pre-World War I theorists of �Social Imperialism� who used Marx�s reference to the �unchangeableness� of Asiatic societies to justify a long period of control over them by the Western colonial powers. As against this, the Leningrad discussions of the late 1920s, which endorsed the universality of a unilinear scheme of Slavery�Feudalism�Capitalism, represented a challenge to the Euro-centred view of historical development, since it took class-struggle to be an equally universal phenomenon. The rigid scheme of periodisation, however, put Marxist historiography in such a strait-jacket that it became a fetter on its development.

One major contribution of D D Kosambi was to reject the straitjacket while espousing the dictum of the Communist Manifesto (1848) that �the history of all hitherto existing society has been the history of class-struggles.� (He, of course, accepted the subsequent qualification by Marx and Engels that this did not apply to pre-history when �primitive communism� prevailed). To Kosambi the essential class-institution in India that needed explaining was caste. He had written on this in the American Marxist journal Science and Society as early as 1944. In an article in the Indo-Soviet journal ISCUS in 1954, he gave his mature explanation of the caste system as follows:

�Caste is class at a primitive level of production, a religious method of forming social consciousness in such a manner that the primary producer is deprived of his surplus with the minimum coercion.�

Kosambi denied that India at any recognisable time had slavery on a scale extensive enough to merit the characterisation of slave mode of production. Rather, the caste system served as a substitute to secure the same ends for the dominant classes.

While putting forward this view, Kosambi made his second major contribution through his insistence that Marxists must follow the most rigorous methods of research. In 1949 he sharply censured S A Dange who had written India from Primitive Communism to Slavey (1949) for his gross errors of fact and misreading of the texts, issuing the memorable caution that �Marxism is no substitute for thinking, but a tool of analysis.�

In his own works, Kosambi was a true heir to �Orientalist� rigour at its best. This was seen in the care which he lavished on the critical edition of the compositions of Bhatrihari, Sanskrit poet and grammarian, over the years 1945-48. Kosambi acknowledged the debt Indian history owed to Orientalist scholarship in that �most of our source material was first collected, analysed and arranged by foreign scholars�, while he also recognised the fact that British scholars� views had been coloured by their �national and class prejudices�. It is important to stress this element of Kosambi�s intellectual legacy, because after Edward Said�s influential book Orientalis (1978), it has become a fashion to disregard critical rigour and make national glorification or post-modernist subversions of rational history a part of the grand rejection of �Orientalism�. One must remember that Orientalism was influenced consistently by an ever-improving scientific methodology, which countered and modified the influences of colonial hegemony. Kosambi also reminds us what Edward Said and his supporters often forget, that not only national but class influences are also at play in all historical explanations, whether Orientalist or anti-Orientalist. The critical rigour with which Kosambi approached History made him reject national self-glorification, so frequently indulged in, (�against all commonsense�) with as much firmness, as the colonial attitudes of condescension.

When Kosambi�s first major work on history, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History came out in 1956, it was not only held to be a landmark for Marxist historiography but initiated debates among historians in general. Many were struck by its open espousal of the Marxist method. The British historian A L Basham in a review of the book, questioned Kosambi�s application of Marx�s concept of �negation of negation� to explain stages in evolution, claiming that it would just mean zero. He forgot, of course, that here varying qualities, not absolute quantities, are involved. But many Indian historians were proud that a towering figure had joined their ranks; and in 1964 the Indian History Congress invited Kosambi to address its annual session. In 1965 even a leading British publishing house published his next major work, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline.

No one would argue that all the hypotheses and conclusions that Kosambi put forward must be uncritically accepted. Some of these have been made obsolete by evidence, others have provoked different responses from even Marxist historians. On some assumptions like that of the absence of plough in the Indus civilization or of a strictly Mauryan date for the Arthashastra, Kosambi seemed to make a whole range of hypotheses which would not stand if these assumptions proved untenable. Whether the caste system came first and its religious codification later, or vice versa (as Kosambi in essence argued) is a problem still to be settled. Though his characterisation of the early medieval period as �Indian Feudalism� is accepted by many, his delineation of its �from-below� and �from-above� phases, has not received as wide an acceptance. There have been criticisms too (as recently in a rather one-sided way, by Shereen Ratnagar) of some elements of his archaeology and ethnography. But much of this should have been expected. Kosambi was a pioneer, exploring yet uncharted terrains; and those who have followed him at leisure have naturally seen many things differently. What is of the utmost significance is the method that Kosambi bequeathed to us: a refusal to accept standard �from-times-immemorial� kinds of assumptions, an insistence that changes in all aspects of life from technology to religion must always be looked for, and an identification with the oppressed and the exploited.

As a final word, let us not forget Kosambi�s strong rejection of any form of communal prejudice. While criticising the Vidya Bhawan series of volumes, on History and Culture of the Indian People, edited by K M Munshi and R C Majumdar, for their heavily ingrained prejudice against Muslims, Kosambi reminded the two editors of the Muslim backgrounds of their own surnames. Islam�s chief contribution to India, he wrote, was to increase commodity production in the feudal period, and so this was the period �when Munshis and Majumdars (Arabic and Persian names of functionaries) were created� � but not, he dryly added, �their [current] mentality�.

Kosambi passed away in 1966, when he was not even sixty. As we read his writings today we are constantly made aware of a brilliant combination of scholarship and vision, placed at the service of a great cause. While offering our tributes to him, let us also renew our pledge to carry forward his legacy still more resolutely.