1

Marxism in translation:
critical reflections on Indian radical thought
Sudipta Kaviraj
Columbia University.
February 2007
Paper for collection on
Political Judgement: Essays in Honour of John Dunn,
edited by
Raymond Geuss and Richard Bourke.
2
the transnational is always translational
-Homi Bhabha
Among political theorists working today, J ohn Dunn has a special claim to distinctiveness he is a
theorist of the uncertain, the provisional, unfinal, indecisive. After studying how theorists have
interpreted political life, he has come to the conclusion that there is a lack of symmetry between nature
of the activity called politics and the manner in which theorists insist on reducing to cognitive order.
Political theory insistently demands reduction of this refractory, messy, unsystematic activity to some
theoretical symmetry; but the activity most of time escapes such aspirations of imposing intellectual
control.
1
His effort, in a sense, has been to seek a different kind of theory which has given up the
ambition of systematicity and symmetry , which resists the aesthetics of theoretical tranquillity
altogether. One way of doing this has been his remarkable attempt to return to an Aristotelian
conception of politics as a phronetic activity, rather than a systematic one something that requires
subtle and skilful thinking, but not of the grand systematizing nature. Dunn has also been exceptional
in having an acute sense of both the imaginative dominance and historical provinciality of Europe.
Although concentrating on European ideas and events, his broad peripheral vision could see a large
part of the non-Western continents. Before postcolonial theorists began to assert that Europe was a
province of the world, not the world itself, Dunn, with characteristic civility, pointed out a strange
paradox of modern political life.
Any observer of the modern world of politics would notice an interesting and puzzling fact to which
social scientists and political theorists have not given sufficient attention. Todays world shows a
bewildering variety of actual political institutions from tribal chieftainships, to monarchies of various
degrees of seriousness, to the diverse range of modern democracies, and the actual political experience
of people living under those institutions are equally diverse. Yet, the language deployed in describing,
evaluating and analysing them is remarkably undiverse drawn primarily from the range of judgements
that emerged from analyses of the political history of modern Europe. To misuse Mills phrase, human
beings language about politics is much narrower than the actual diversity of their experience.
2
This
leads to an interesting implication for the study of political ideas. This suggests that although in other
locations of the world people are purportedly running socialist parties or liberal governments and
working democratic systems, these qualifying adjectives frequently mean something appreciably
different from their original Western contexts.
3
The study of political language becomes a dark and
exciting discipline its task is to stalk and capture strange practices masquerading under familiar
names. It is true that Dunns short book
4
was not primarily or exclusively directed at this problem: its
central concern was to convey a deeply felt concern that the resources of contemporary Western
political theory were inadequate for an understanding of the world in which the West lived unless
they insisted, with decreasing validity, that that world simply ended at the borders of the Western
world. Much before the current realization that we live in a globalized world, in which causalities and
influences swirl uninterruptedly across vast spaces of the earth, the fates of Western and other cultures
were entwined through complex relations of compulsion and emulation, of hard and soft power,
through European colonialism and native resistance. For a considerably longer time than the last fifty
years has the world been unified in the use of anincreasingly single language of politics learnt by the
rest of the world from the history of the Enlightenment. Terms like liberal, democratic, socialist,
communist, Marxist acquired a strangely untroubled currency in describing the political institutions,
movements and aspirations of people in vastly different cultures. To understand what Western

1
For a good, and typical example of this constant scepticism, see his intriguingly unorthodox
assessment of the theoretical scene after the comprehensive collapse of socialist economies. J ohn
Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1993, Canto Edition, chapter 5.
2
J ohn Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government,
3
Although contextualist study of political theory, for which Dunn argued stringently in his early works,
was primarily confined to the analysis of the Western canon, this is an obvious extension of its
methodological principles if we begin to study political ideas in other cultural settings.
4
Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1979.
3
political theory in its varying forms did in the world, is therefore to move beyond the local history
of Western societies.
There is a second reasonwhy it is appropriate to enquire into the uncharted world of modern Indias
political languages. India has been arguably one of the success stories of the export of Western ideas of
organising political life.
5
Despite the existence and the easy accessibility of an ancient civilisation, an
astonishingly successful mixture of the Hindu and Islamic cultural traditions, Indias modern political
life has been resolutely untraditional. After the collapse of the revolt of 1857 against British colonial
power, there was no serious attempt to revive traditional political imaginaries.
6
The Congress, the
primary vehicle of Indias national struggle against British rule, and the strands which contested its
dominance like the Muslim League, or the Hindu nationalist movement all drew the fundamental
elements of their political imagination from modern European political ideals of nationalism,
constitutionalism and representative government.
7
None of them seriously contemplated a return to a
traditional political organisation. The Indian story is also peculiarly apt for a discussion of J ohn Dunns
ideas, because he has, at least since the decisive decline of communist states in the 1980s, tried to make
sense of the reasons why a democratic imaginary slowly emerged triumphant over a contesting vision
of a more egalitarian modern society without falling into a simplistic, morally triumphalist
explanation.
8
While being deeply curious about this undeniable historical fact, he has avoided three
common forms of thinking about it: to view a capitalist economy as embodying in some sense a
natural form of human economic organisation which was bound to flower whenever artificial
traditional controls were lifted, or to attribute this fall to the incontestable moral superiority of the
capitalist economy, or to conclude fromthe present that the current dominance of capitalist economy
and liberal democracy would continue, on an historical cruise control, into an the indefinite future.
What makes his thinking about the current situation interesting and complex is his attribution of this
historic event partly to contingencies of political life, and his conviction that despite the current
absence of serious imaginative contenders to liberalism, it is hard to deny the truth of one constituent of
the socialist critique: that given the levels of productivity contemporary economies can achieve, it is
hard to justify the capitalist unconcern for the distributive inequalities in the present world.
9
In his
view, the classic socialist criticism of the fact of poverty in the midst of plenty - or to correct it
somewhat the persistence of poverty in the face of an evident potential for plenty remains a
fundamental cause for political anxiety. It is essential, on this view, to see the premature deaths of
thousands of children in Africa due to preventable or reducible disease as completely unnecessary,
rather than a regrettably necessary part of the proper functioning of an uncontrollable vast machine. For
Dunn, the failure of socialism is primarily not due to the implausibility of its objections to capitalist

5
I do not find the presently revived fashion of colonial nostalgia a compelling political form of
political thinking. Its success relies rather heavily on the ambition of the current US administration to
succeed to the mantle of British dominion of the world in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, British
political commentary has fallen for this enticement, and there is a tendency to portray British imperial
domination as a rather early combination of the functions of the Department of International
Development and the British Council intent only on spreading the knowledge of Shakespeare and
democracy. So this idea is not the same as the celebratory thought that Indian democracy has succeeded
obviously because of the long Britishtutorship which failed rather spectacularly in the neighbouring
areas of Burma, and Pakistan.
6
It appears justified, against some nationalist revisionism suggesting that 1857 was the first stirrings of
Indian nationalism, to see it as the last stirrings of a more traditional conception of political rule
though it was certainly fuelled by a resentment against the government by alien rulers. Some of these
controversies have been revived again in a rather unilluminating fashion in the controversies regarding
William Dalrymples study of the rebellion.
7
I do not mean they were equally impelled by nationalist and democratic ideals; but they were all
equally involved in working out different positions on questions like: what was a nation, what kind of
representation was justified, whether democracy was an acceptable form of government which are all
modern, if not equally pleasant positions.
8
See particularly his very insightful comments on Marxism as a theory of modern politics, where,
against usual trends, he suggests that its critique of modern capitalism remains deeply compelling, but
its failure was mainly in successfully conceiving an alternative economic form of modern life. Western
Political Theory.
9
For a lucid, and powerfully persuasive argument from an economic point of view on global economic
iniquities, see J oseph Stiglitz, Globalisation and its discontents, ,, and his more recent, Making
Globalization Work, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2006.
4
economies, but the failure to devise an institutional form to supplant them with something reasonably
superior.
Interestingly, the historical trajectory of Indian politics parallels this process unfolding on a world
scale. In the fifties, after independence, actors in the Indian political universe spoke a predominantly
Western language, and main political parties and individual agents defined their positions in terms of
the modern language of politics coming from Europe liberal supporters of unrestricted capitalism
10
,
socialist advocates of a mixed economy
11
, communist projects for a radical overthrow of what they
rather gratuitously called the bourgeois state in favour of a utopian egalitarian economic order
12
, even
some admirers of the power and impressive discipline of German Fascism
13
. It is interesting that even
the rulers of the princely states, delicately supported by British rule, did not produce a credible
advocacy of a returnto monarchical government.
14
It is true that the democratic alternative eventually
won out in India in fact, somewhat earlier than the fall of international communism. By the late
sixties, Indian radical politics was already conceding defeat to liberal democracy in two rather peculiar
ways. Form the mid 1960s, the organised communist movement, which could emerge as a serious
challenger to Nehrus government, was already fragmenting into smaller and fractious pieces who
shifted their political energies to mutual destruction rather than opposition to bourgeois parties.
Secondly, in a more subtle process of imaginative defeat, the most effective sections of the fragmenting
radical movement secretly accepted a complete absorption into ordinary electoral politics banishing
serious social change to the level of pure rhetoric.
15
The most effective section of the Indian left
became a party which was impeccably Stalinist in its ideology and impeccably electoralist in its
political practice. It has confessed itsimaginative exhaustion in recent years by simply accepting the
current confusion between establishment of shopping malls and achievement of economic growth.
Dunns powerful diagnosis of the current situation in Western political theory applies with equal force
to the Indian situation as well. The recent spurt in the Indian economy after liberalisation has retained
the conventional problem of plenty in the midst of poverty (to turn the phrase to fit Indian conditions)
of American-style condominiums rising froma sea of slums; but socialists have not been able to
provide an answer to the seduction of either economic institutions of capitalism or the political
structures of liberal democracy. This paper does not concern itself with an explanation of this entire
history. It offers some observations on the nature of translation
16
of radical socialist ideas into the
Indian context which might contribute to an explanation of the baffling failure of egalitarian politics
in a society of deep and degrading inequality.
Two approaches in the history of ideas
There is a fundamental distinction between what could be called the Kantian humanistic approach to
the spread of ideas and the Marxist critical view.
17
In the Althusserian tradition, this distinction is often

10
The Swatantra Party, literally meaning, the Free Party.
11
This position is represented, strictly speaking by the Nehruvian centre of the Congress Party, though
Congress included people who subscribed to a large variety of ideological stances.
12
The Communist Party of India.
13
Hindu nationalists often openly spoke in admiration of German Nazism drawn presumably by their
discipline, which in their view Indian chronically lacked, and the ethnic conception of a nation united
by a language, religion and culture which they desired for India. Such admiration for German
discipline and defiance of British domination of the world is more widely shared in colonial India, and
the Hindu nationalists admiration for the Nazis comes from the pre-war era.
14
For an interesting analysis of the grounds of British admiration for these natural rulers see, David
Cannadine, Ornamentalism.
15
It was a rather badly kept secret, as the evidence of their electoral character was writ large on every
aspect of their practice; in annual conferences however they continued to indulge in a strange ceremony
of declaration of distantly Stalinist principles.
16
Translation, in this case, is vague term, indicating a resemblance to the activity of literary writers of
converting a text from language to another. In case of political theory, the conversion has to negotiate
many layers of complexity of two conceptual languages, two cultures, historical trajectories. To call
the process a translation is a preliminary notice of the difficulties, not an entirely clear programme. It is
necessary to understand more clearly what exactly is involved in the process of this translation.
17
In a sense, it is wrong to attribute this notion to closely to Marx: elements of such a view are fairly
common in earlier social thought for example, in the sardonic reference to conditions of
5
seen as the one between Feuerbach and Marx, but in fact, the true originator of the first tradition is
Kant, and his way of thinking about intellectual persuasion informs much of liberal theory. The basis of
that tradition of thinking is the assumptionof the presence of a universally available apparatus of
rational thinking in all human beings, such that moral principles, if they are correctly enunciated,
would be clear in their meaning and compelling in their practical implication to all human beings
independently of their position in social structures or specificity of culture.
18
Against this, as Althusser
shows persuasively in his For Marx essays, Marx, as early as the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, offered a theory that persuasiveness of ideas depended on historical and situational
factors like class.
19
The conclusion fromthe intellectually intricate and emotionally intense analyses in
the crucial fragment in the Manuscripts, Estranged Labour suggests that rational acceptability of
abstract ideas are mediated by an apparatus of reflection that is deeply anchored in social experience of
thinking subjects.
20
Social experience in Marxs Europe was fundamentally decided by class; but we
can read this proposition more generally, and emphasise the social mediation of rational plausibility,
rather than the historically specific form it takes in mid-19
th
century Europe. This means that rational
plausibility of a political idea is much more mired in social ecologies of thinking than Kant supposed.
This distinction is reflected in the way in which liberals and Marxists have thought about the manner in
which their ideas might be applied to /spread to societies outside the modern West. Liberal theory is
usually less worried about cultural and historical differences; Marxist theory, on the other hand, has
been seriously concerned about historical differences in social structures, the consequent problem of
whether and how various social groups might find social ideals plausible. Interestingly, whenever
Marxist groups have successfully extended egalitarian principles to a very different context from the
West European one as in the case of Russia or China, there was a prior attempt to tackle the complex
of questions raised by the historicity of this theory. Broadly, these two conceptions of theory can be
labelled an acontextual-universal and a contextual theory of political persuasion.
Principles in history: universalisms in Indian Marxism
Marxs movement away from an abstract egalitarianism in earlier socialist thought to a more historical
understanding of egalitarian principles what egalitarian politics would mean, and the shape in which
it would make sense to its potential constituents is based on the need to undertsnad precisely the
historical character of social conflicts (the structure of contradictions). Equality can make sense to
people, and produce effectual politics only if two conditions are met: if the abstract principle is
translated into a register of historical sociology, and if it can be linked to the everyday self-
interpretation of political agents. If these are viewed as specific methodological demands of Marxs
social thought, the way Indian Marxists thought and acted would appear surprising.
Strong and weak universalism
Marxist analyses of politics proceed from a description of a mode of production or a social
formation due to this methodological imperative. Radical politics means take part in conflict in favour
of egalitarianism; and consequential conflicts occur around fundamental divides between social groups
internal to a social form. To get the geography of groups right is to get a correct picture of the social
form. Indian Marxists were alive to this methodological requirement ; but proceeded to makethis
analysis in a strangely fashion. Understanding political possibilities required an accurate picture of two
social forms the one that prevailed before the arrival of modern processes and institutions, and the
form into which Indian society might evolve in future. Indian Marxists assumed that fromMarxs
picture of Western European capitalist economies they possessed a reliable picture of what the future
society would look like. Two other pressing considerations came up for their attention. If egalitarian
political action meant acting on existing lines of social cleavage and conflict on the side of the
disadvantaged, it was necessary to understand what, given the specific nature of the social formation,
these groups were and how they acted in the social world.

persuasiveness of theories in Hobbess closing remarks in the Leviathan: For such Truth, as opposeth
no mans profit nor pleasure, is to all men welcome. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (ed.
C.B.Macpherson) Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1968, A Review and Conclusion, 729.
18
Immaneul Kant, Moral Law: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals,
19
Louis Althusser, On the Young Marx, For Marx, Allen Lane, Penguin, 1969.
20
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Estranged labour,
6
In deciding on the social form, Indian Marxists followed two lines of reasoning both of which were
universalist. Marxist intellectuals drew an inventory of possible social formations in human history
from the three stages of Marxs historical reflections when he was seriously engaged in thinking
about the possible range of social forms in the early texts like German Ideology and the Communist
Manifesto, the middle period texts like the famous introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy and the Grudrisse, and the late period correspondence with Engels and Zasulich
which speculated about Germanic and Slavonic social forms.
21
Indian Marxist thinking engaged with
these questions vigorously in the 1940s 1960s, whenthe late period letters were not well known, and
their readings mined the suggestions fromthe early and middle period writings of Marxs corpus.
Two main lines of reasoning emerged fromthis search of Marxs texts about the definition of the social
form in India that preceded the entry of European modernity, and international capitalism.
22
The
boldest, but also probably an unsophisticated version of the first conception, typified by S A Danges
India: from Primitive Communism to Slavery,
23
assumed that the series of social forms outlined in the
Communist Manifesto not merely provided the list of all possible social forms in human history;
Marxist historians were committed to a demonstration that each society went through every single one
of these forms. Dange, therefore, persevered to prove that Indian history obediently passed from a
primitive communist phase of classless early settlements to a slave society, before its evolution into
feudalism. Because of the conjunction of these two beliefs, I call thisdesign a strong universalism. In
subsequent periods, particularly after Marxism began to influence serious academic historical
scholarship, the evident awkwardness of this formulation led Marxist scholars to search for alternative
ways of characterising the Indian social formation.
24
Still reluctant to place caste at the centre of their
historical sociology, historians of a later generation softened the universalism by abandoning Danges
doctrinaire insistence that Marxist historians were committed to showing that the history of all societies
passed through all of the European stages. In its place, Marxists began thinking about possible ways of
refining the historical category of feudalism, probably for two different logical reasons: first, if
capitalism wasto arise in modern India, the social formation that preceded capitalism in the
conventional Marxian sequence must be designated feudalism; secondly, the social form deserved to be
called feudalism because of the similarities between the extant features of the Indian form and those of
European feudal society. That naming of Indian feudalism was not quite straightforward. Eventually,
for a long period, a sort of consensus emerged among Marxist historians to call the previous social
form by the name Indianfeudalism.
25
Conceptual strategies of weak universalism however did not solve the central problem of figuring out a
relation between the categories of caste and class and treating them as exclusive to each other. Yet,
interestingly, Indian communists ignored a possible second move fromMarx. Clearly, Marxs use of
class uses the term multivocally, at least in a double sense, as commentators have known for long.
Class is used in Marxs writings on the capitalist economy of the modern West in a specific, narrow
sense to refer to the form of social stratification that is specific to capitalist societies. Quite evidently,
then, there is a wider, more general, and consequently empty conception of class a placeholder
which works in Marxs more general statements about history. If class always meant the stratification

21
Marx and Engels, German Ideology, , The Communist Manifesto, ; the passages dealing with
Marxs speculations about various social forms in Grundrisse, Contributions and later correspondence
were collected with an influential introduction by Eric Hobsbawm, Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic
Formations, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 197
22
A more detailed examination of these arguments can be found in my On the status of Marxs
writings on India, Social Scientist, No 124, 1983, .
23
S.A.Dange, India: FromPrimitive Communism to Slavery, Peoples Publishing House, Bombay, 195
24
For a detailed examination of the Indian Marxist historical debates, see Diptandra Banerjee, , in
Diptendra Banerjee (ed) Marxismand Asiatic Societies, Sage Publishers, New Delhi, 19 ; Banerjees
essay is focused on the neglect of the hypothesis of an Asiatic mode of production, and reaches a
different conclusion.
25
For a classic statement of the case, see R.S.Sharma, Indian Feudalism, . Notably, a range of
distinguished historians who use Marxist theory is different ways from Irfan Habib to Ranajit Guha
concurred in using the category feudalism. For a more general analysis of this trend and the difficulty
thisproduced for Marxist historical theory as feudalism became alarmingly capacious, and bore the
burden of describing nearly all forms of pre-capitalist societies in the world, see Victor Kiernans
essay, History in David McLellan (ed) Marxism: a 100 Years,
7
system specific to capitalism, to claim all history is the history of class struggle would then imply that
all history was the history of capitalism. If, then, there are two conceptions of class in Marx a general
and a capitalist one it follows that the general category must have the character of an empty concept
a place to keep a specific category. The few contrastive discussions in Marxs works which
compare class in capitalism with class in feudal or slave society shows clear indications of this
difference at times Marx says that it would be more appropriate to use the concept of estates, the
term Hegel prefers in the Philosophy of Right, precisely to avoid this confusion. Estates would avoid
some of the defining characteristics of class in a capitalist society, and could become one of the
concepts which could fit into the more abstract and general conception of class. It was possible, if the
logic of conceptualisation in Marx was viewed in this fashion, to make room for a theorisation of caste
as a specific, historically located system of social stratification within a general theory of class, an
option Indian communists, by and large, ignored.
26
The strange disappearance of caste
Conceptual difficulties of this kind made Indian socialist discourse a rather awkward way of thinking
about the question of equality. On the one hand, leftists were most deeply committed to an end of
inequality in India society: on the other, their sociological writings, which had the function of
understanding the bases of social power, and consequently, of inequality was strangely forgetful about
the primary form of the experience of actual social inequality in Indian history. Except for some
unusual and marginal strands of thought, Indian Marxists rarely sought to engage with the problem of
viewing caste as the primary stratificational structure of the traditional Indian social form. In the
eighties, Arun Bose, made an untypical call for a combination of the resources of Marxism and an
anthropological study of caste on the lines of Louis Dumont.
27
Even academic strands of Marxism,
which were far more scrupulous about the systematic collection and analysis of stratificational facts,
often unaccountably neglected caste relations in societies which were turning to a distinctive and often
violent form of caste politics. One of the most interesting features of the well known debate about the
development of capitalism in agriculture in the seventies, while paying far closer attention to the
recent changes in patterns of agricultural production and sources of economic power in rural India,
gave relatively little attention to the operation of caste.
28
Consequently, the sociological analysis of Indian society determined, in a rather interesting fashion, the
political efficacy of radical political movements. To anticipate later arguments, one of the primary
features of Indias political sociology is that there is no sufficiently single India to analyse:
sociologically and politically, the idea of India has a second-order quality. Political agents do not
inhabit a space called India directly, they must inhabit more local spaces with their peculiar
historical, sociological and cultural attributes in order to inhabit the space called India. Due to this
segmented quality of Indian sociology, the primacy of class analysis drew radical sociology and radical
politics inevitably towards those parts of India where this sociology could apply with some felicity; and

26
Of course, Indian Marxists did not think exactly identically on the issue of basic social stratification, and some
authors attempted to bring caste into a broadly Marxist analysis of society. An early example of such an attempt is
Bhupendra Nath Duttas, Studies in Indias Social Polity. D D Kosambi, continued to use the historical category of
fedualism but brought in interesting conceptual inflections and refinements, for instance in his . In the fifties,
the immense practical initiatives of J . Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar were influenced by their reading of a literature
which stressed class inequality; and in more recent analysis of social conflict some analysts, like Gail Omvedt,
have stubbornly insisted on the reality of caste. But the continuingdifficulty of Marxist thinking in negotiating the
problem of caste epistemically is shown by the conversion of many former Naxalite activists to a dalit political
platform. It is necessary for those who are interested in a theoretical understanding of Indian politics to shown
more interest and explore what is involved in such political transitions. After all, both as naxalite and dalit
activists, these individuals would have served the interests of roughly the same groups of constituents. Why is it
impossible to serve one set of their interests as Naxalites? Ambedkar, the most insistent critic of the caste
system, and its most impalacable enemy, showed a deep distance and hostility to Marxism as a general theory, and
particularly towards Indian socialists precisely because of their neglect of the fact of caste. Interestingly,
Ambedkar did not characterise himself in Europic descriptions likesocialist or communist , but kept to a more
abstract and general affiliation to egalitarianism, recognising both his fundmanetal commitment to a liberal
political equality, and a strong sense that in a society like the Indian, a Tocquevillesque extension of egalitarianism
from one sphere to another was highly likely. See his valedictory address to the Constituent Assembly of India.
27
Arun Bose, Indias Social Crisis, OUP, Delhi, 1985.
28
For a selection of essays from the long-running debate, see Utsa Patnaik (ed), Development of
Capitalism in Agriculture, Oxford University Press, Delhi, .
8
it was hardly surprising that these were in the industrialised metropolitan regions. Of course,
communist politics acquired a secure base in these areas for a more directly political, less epistemic
reason. Trade union organisations were initially established by communist activists, and consequently,
communists possessed both wide electoral support and street presence in these cities. It is likely
however that the epistemic inclination towards class analysis gave them a sharper understanding and
consequently practical purchase for their activities.
The reverse side of this, or rather the cost radical politics had to pay for this inability to see any other
kind of stratificational facts than class, was an attenuated epistemic grasp and political presence in
Indias vast countryside. This meant that communist social analysts were committed to either of two
awkward positions: first, that class stratification existed in all social settings, without the agents
themslves being aware of that fact an argument that could be rationalised by drawing upon a long
tradition of modern social theory, and one to which Marx himself was often powerfully attracted. If
confronted with the factual ubiquity of caste- structures, Marxists could easily take recourse to a form
of a false consciousness argument. Social agents did indeed believe, and act, that argument would
run, in terms of caste; but class represented a deeper, more fundamental grid of underlying social
relations underlying in both senses in which Marxists would use this phrase. It was underlying in
the sense of exerting a deeper, more irresistible causal pressure; and secondly, it was underlying in the
sense of not being immediately accessible to the agents themselves. In analysing Indian social reality,
Indian Marxists often used all the resources of the kind of depth ontology common to nineteenth
century social science. Caste consciousness thus turned into something epiphenomenal, present to the
consciousness of the agents, but superceded by the superior analytical vision of Marxist social
scientists, exactly like natural science inversions of common-sense pictures of natural phenomena. This
led to a curious transposition of the real and unreal: while ordinary Indians could persistently complain
of the oppressive everyday reality of caste, radical commentators could deplore their inability to see
through the appearance of caste to the reality of classes, with the doubtless caused a double
gratification being intellectually subtler than the common peasant, yet lending this higher rationality
to the service of their social emancipation a rare conjunction of cognitive and moral superiority.
Oddly, the substitution of class as a hyper-real, underlying reality led to another astonishing result. In
effect, Marxism was an incisive, deeply insightful theory about modern capitalism. Applying its
explanatory and descriptive categories of a different social formation transposed the real and the unreal,
and it revealed an epistemic malaise that afflicts much of modern social science thinking. Marxism, as
part of modern social science, uses categories which are produced out of a distillation of historical
experience of Western modernity the particular economic history of capitalism. This is not surprising
in view of the intimate connection between experience and cognition particularly in the social sphere.
But this meant that that historical experience works frominside the categories themselves to pull
analyses in the direction of European history elevating European experience and historical precedents
to a status of normalcy. An implicit European reference works from the heart of the conceptual
apparatus of modern social sciences, turning it naturally towards Euronormal thinking, as the
magneticproperties of a compass needle always points north. European history is the natural north of
modern social science thinking. It was this which made this transposition possible turning the
European condition of class into the natural form of stratification, turning caste into something strange.
Retrospectively, this is a strange kind of strangeness, created by an epistemic property built into the
apparatus of fundamental concepts, as if a kind of self-relation to Europe was buried deep in the
ordinarily inaccessible core of its very categories; a kind of ineffaceable/ineradicable conceptual
unconscious, a subtle, silent history sitting inside the concepts and pulling explanations in that
direction.
Serious reflection on this Marxist difficulty illustrates several important issues of political theory and
agency. It could be argued that Marxists did not entirely neglect factual properties of the caste system
on the ground at least its economic characteristics. Characterising these pre-capitalist relations as
feudalism evidently sought to capture in their conceptual net precisely those characteristics like the
existence of non-market compulsions.
29
But despite such partial similarities, caste, is stubbornly
different from the structure of feudal estates, and the substitution of feudal social relations for a caste
order worked as a strange substitution of social ontology. At most, an approach through categories of
European feudalism gave communists something partially caste-like to analyse, not caste itself. This

29
For examples of such analysis of feudalism, see the essays in the development of capitalism debate,
Utsa Patnaik, Development of Capitalism in Indian Agriculture.
9
theoretical slippage became even more problematic when arrival of independence inaugurated an era of
serious liberal-democratic politics. Marxs political sociology was based, at least on the reading offered
earlier, on a strong requirement of political realism. Effective politics required that political initiatives
reflected or connected to the real social cleavages in society. Democratic political institutions
introduced an even more stringent requirement of political intelligibility into this scene. Political ideals
needed to link up with the intentionalities of ordinary political agents; and to link up with their
intentions in the political world, ideals had to connect to their existing patterns of self-interpretation. If
ordinary agents in Indian society interpreted their location in society in terms of caste, to ignore that
central fact was to miss entirely any potential connection with their intentions. By applauding their own
acuity, their ability to penetrate to the underlying depth ontology of social relations, which ordinary
political agents could not grasp in their pre-scientific commonsense, Marxists in fact alienated their
politics fromthe ordinary peoples sense of what real cleavages in Indian society were.
Textualisation of the world
This does not imply that the historical analyses of Indian Marxism did not involve serious intellectual
labour; but this labour assumed a strange form, reminiscent of techniques of traditional Brahminical
learning. One of the major drawbacks of Brahminical learning could called a textualization of the
world. Some types of Brahminical education was obsessively textual: learning in any particular field
required mastery over often arcane and difficult textual material. Eventually, in many fields of
knowledge, the textual took over from the referential world to which the texts related often producing
systems of meaning which simply could not be breached. Learning came to be regarded not as a
mastery of the world outside, but the shadowy, wordy world insidethe texts, a world that the texts
instead of making available, actually fundamentally obscured. If a peasant asked a learned Brahmin for
advice about planting seeds for the propitious growth of crops in the next season, the Brahmin will take
this request seriously as a cognitive question. Usually, he would immerse himself in treatises which are
complex, internally consistent, with demanding internal rules of procedure: and he might produce a
precise conclusion at the end, suggesting the sowing should occur between 3.17 and 4.53 on a
particular day of the month because there is a conjunction of the relevant planets, producing
particularly propitious conditions for the flourishing of a specific crop. What is remarkable in this
procedure is that this involves mastery of a science in the true sense an interconnected, structured
body of knowledge, which requires genuine effort to master. The labour of the Brahmin is not delusive:
it is real intellectual labour, and it is not easy to acquire the necessary skills; and often this additionally
requires mastery of esoteric languages like Sanskrit. Its only fault is that it bears little connection to the
real process of agricultural production. There can be parallel examples drawn from the Brahminical
practices of advising families about the future prospects of harmony and happiness in a projected
matrimony.
The procedure followed by the early Indian Marxists was often strangely similar. Certainly, detailed
grasp of the events and processes often to be perfectly pedantic, the dates of distant European
history was an immense intellectual challenge: first, because that history itself was accessible only
through the grasp of an erudite literature written in English; and secondly, fluency in Marxist
historiography required mastery of a difficult, unfamiliar conceptual language made additionally
difficult by the strangeness of Hegelian terminology and vagaries of translation. Although Marxism
claimed, on the one side, to be the conceptual language of the downtrodden, since the proletariat in
the strict sense, was in short supply, in actual fact, it became a cognitive formwhich contained
forbidding elements of erudition and esotericism. Marxist intellectual debates had a way of turning
eventually into fractious, ill-tempered contests of textual erudition. Arguments were supposed to be
won or lost by deep familiarity and exegetic facility about Marxs or later Lenins texts. A late example
of this textualisation can be found in a contribution by the economist Paresh Chattopdhyay,
characteristically titled in wholly gratuitous German, Anti-Kritik which sought to discomfit the
judgements of another economist, Utsa Patnaik, - not by referring to economic facts of agricultural
production in Haryana or Bihar, or other regions in which the green revolution has taken place, but by
incontestable evidence fromMarxs writings on capitalism preferably from more obscure, less
accessible, later editions of his texts.
30
Historical practices are known to be deeply resilient; and it
might be an interesting project to apply the Marxists own mistrust of transparency of intellectual
practice to their collective work. Marxists certainly did not wish to emulate or to continue

30
It is interesting to note the title, because it was before an article written in English, for a
predominantlyIndian audience: the purpose of the use of German was exactly similar to the
Brahminical use of Sanskrit for addition of emphasis to perfectly ordinary ideas.
10
brahminical traditions of cognitive practice: but if we disregard what they thought about the way they
thought, some of these deep patterns of behaviour might appear to be strangely brahminical.
On the peculiar singleness of India
I return to Marxs political sociology to make another critical point about Indian Marxist political
thought. If we read Marxs theoretical works along with his political writings, it becomes clear that he
is suggesting a complex and composite political sociology for Europe: with two apparently contrary
movements. His very early commentary on German politics assert that increasingly German politics,
the formation of social groups and their likely directions of their political activity would be determined
by a global European process of capitalist development.
31
To understand the prospects of German
politics, it was necessary to think not on a German, but on a European scale.
32
In his later writings, this
reminder of a single process working its way through Europe is modified by an increasingly complex
picture of segmentation -of differential speeds of capitalist development and class formation, and
consequently, of quite different configurations of classes and parties in different regions of the
continent. Political economy of capitalism must preserve the unitary picture of an unfolding process of
capitalist transformation, but political sociology must correspondingly produce reliable pictures of its
internal segmentation. Political initiatives, to be successful, must follow closely and respond to the
segmentary sociologies of power and discontent in Europes various parts.
33
It is true that on occasion
Marx made some general, often somewhat metaphorical, claims about the primacy of the central
contradiction between capital and labour in the panorama of social relations. But in detailed political
commentaries, his political sociology, as Louis Althusser explicated forcefully, produces an irreducibly
complex structure of contradictions
34
an always complex architecture of social cleavages that
shaped and formed political intentions. Reality of European political economy therefore existed as a
stratified field of reality: the reality of late capitalism determined the movements of political action in
Germany and Italy; but that did not take away from the reality of a superordinant process of general
capitalist development all over Europe. Capitalist development was thus an internally complex process,
yielding an internally stratified and complex unity.
Indian communist politics faced a question similar in nature, a difficulty that is encountered by any
attempt to act politically in Indias vast, intricately diverse social landscape. Is there a sufficiently
single India in which to act according to a single political programme? The problem with communist
political action can be illustrated most graphically through the history of the years immediately after
independence when the highly organised and regionally effective CPI decided to lead a violent
uprising against Nehrus government on the ground that the freedom it had gained, and Nehru lyrically
applauded, was a sham.
35
After its second Congress in Calcutta, the CPI leadership decided that the
primary contradiction in Indian society was the conflict between capital and labour which was the
most intense in the industrialised metropolitan cities like Bombay and Calcutta. B T Ranadive, the
partys new leader declared that the model of revolution which Indian communists should follow was
that of the Russian revolution starting with the revolution in St Petersburg, with its effects slowly
penetrating and transforming a resistant rural society.
36
After February 1948, the communist political
organisations and the powerful trade unions in crucial industries like the railways engaged in a militant
struggle to translate the Russian revolution into Indian history. A railway strike on vast scale, across
Indias entire railway network, was put down ruthlessly by the new national government; and before
the year had passed, it was clear that the attempted urban revolution had failed. The communists
regrouped and decided to employ their political resources in a massive second wave of revolutionary
initiative. After the intellectual group that advocated an urban armed revolution were discredited, the
party again came together around a second group, based in the relatively remote agrarian region of
Telengana in south India where communists had built up a successful militant peasant movement
against particularly exploitative land relations. After the middle of 1948, the party accepted their
advocacy of a peasant-based, Chinese style armed uprising, first creating a revolutionary liberated

31
K. Marx, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
32
See, for instance, The J ewish Question, or
33
The famous distinction between the first and the second ways of capitalist development, see K. Marx,
34
L. Althusser, Contradictions and overdetermination, For Marx, Allen Lane, Penguin, 1969.
35
One of the most popular slogans of this period was: yeh azadi jhutha hai (this independence is false).
36
B.T.Ranadive, in G. Adhikary (ed), Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India,
Peoples Publishing House, Delhi, 1968.
11
zone in Telengana, expected to slowly radiate from those bases to other parts of India, eventually
seizing the encircled cities a fundamentally different conception of the class-structure, social
cleavages, political conflicts and revolutionary path for India. What is remarkable in this story is less
the narrative of political initiatives than the theoretical form in which this argument was set. Radical
theorists saw the failure of the agenda of an urban revolution in scientistic terms, as a result of a
cognitive failure to devise a correct line for the Indian revolution. Secondly, the correct strategy had
to be found between the two models of a city-based Russian style revolution, or a rural, agrarian
revolutionary strategy in the Chinese style. The radical denial of even the reality of Indian
independence was a way of denying the historical peculiarities of the Indian situation with de-
colonialization, an experiment with liberal-democratic institutions and assimilating it into the
textually familiar historical situations in Russia and China where liberal institutions were entirely
absent. This intellectual move reinforced the textualist form of thinking, but with a strange twist. In
the intense debates about the correct revolutionary strategy, between 1948 and 1951, when Indian
communists formally abandoned their violent revolutionary strategy, a surprisingly large part of the
debate again involved textual familiarity with the works of Lenin and Mao and questions of exegetic
authority who had read more of Lenin and Mao, and more carefully. Since the works of Lenin and
Mao were entangled at every step with the historical events of the Russian and Chinese political
history, this concern with correct textual exegesis involved great familiarity of the history of these
societies which were available only as relatively esoteric knowledge. Although this phase of intense
militant activism in the history of Indian radicalism shifted its vision, to an extent, away from Western
Europe to Russia and China, the internal procedures of its intellectual style were quite similar.
37
The remarkable feature of this debate however was the single-minded pursuit of a single correct line
that would miraculously work for the immense diversity of Indias segmented regional sociology. Yet
Marxs injunction that effective politics required a sensitivity to the real boundaries of historical and
economic sociology had produced a theoretical concept meant to capture precisely such stratifications
of social reality. The insight that large historical processes like development of capitalism in a vast
territory like the European continent required a converse capacity for registering internal differences
formally captured in ideas about uneven and combined development. From one angle, therefore,
Marxists could have been peculiarly sensitive to these facts of unevenness, and indeed, they were,
when analysing economic structures. On the other hand, probably the seduction of a misleading
conception of scientific resolution of political issues drew them towards the perpetually misdirected
search for a single correct line for the whole country. The eventual evolution of the radical movement
in India corroborated this view rather tragically at the cost of utter fragmentation of its original
promise. After more than a decade of bitter internal conflict, the communist movement became divided
into at least three different parties, each following a different political line which has assisted each
segment to enjoy durable influence in specific parts of the Indian subcontinent. It is hardly surprising
that the CPI(M) which emphasises class analysis inherited the large trade union organisations of the
united communist party, and established influence in industrialised urban centres. The CPI, the old
party which adapted to a less ambitious programme of working class action, found stable influence in
more rural regions like Bihar; and the militant Maoist groups of the CPI(ML) continues to retain
serious influence in interior areas with large tribal populations which were objects of particularly
severe indignity and economic exploitation. In a sense, the subsequent history of the communist
movement in India showed that there were at least three distinct political strategies that suited various
economic ecologies, and were the correct lines in each context, rather than a single correct line for
all. Communist adaptation to democratic politics in the last four decades has also established two other
significant facts about Indias political life that liberal democratic political institutions are not an
illusion, and their operation for six decades has produced real Tocquevillian effects. Secondly, in recent
times communists were so struck by the rise of assertive lower caste electoral politics, that they have
simply adjusted to caste politics rather passively without offering a critical judgement about its likely
historical effects. The reality of democracy and the undeniability of caste have taken a strange revenge
on the Eurocentric history of Indian Marxist thinking.
Generalisation, average and composition(collocation?).

37
In the 1970s, the Naxalites the Maoist fragment of the Communist movement in India extended
this form of thinking a step further in a strange combination of idolatry and internationalism their
slogan Chinas chairman is also our chairman. The underlying intellectual move was similar to
avoid engaging with the peculiarities of Indian democracy, the system of castes, the peculiar features of
its economic development, and applying a Chinese model straightforwardly.
12
The strange singularity of India poses a challenge to all kinds of political imagination , and demands a
general solution. A complex and stratified reality in political life requires some intellectual resolution
which can be attempted in three different ways - generalization, average, and composition. In a
complex, internally segmented field of political relations, composed of say five sub-fields of A,B,C,D,
and E, the first, and often most tempting intellectual move is of generalisation
38
to claim the
properties of one segment to be the common properties of all. This is particularly easy in cases where
observation of political trends and sociological facts are themselves limited within that horizon. Indian
political analysis has often been plagued by the force of such illicit generalization. A famous
controversy about caste or class, waged by Marxists and academic sociologists in the sixties and
seventies often demonstrated generalising arguments from both sides of the debate claiming that
either caste or class could explain all segments of Indian politics without any recalcitrant residue.
Optimistic generalisations of this kind came apart very quickly in the face of reality. Certainly,
inattention to caste politics cost radical partiesdearly in their attempt to spread to major parts of the
Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, the success of a predominantly class-oriented politics can
hardly be denied in cases like Kerala and West Bengal, despite attempts by some academic political
sociologists to reduce communist success in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, in a manner precisely
reminiscent of communist analysis, to an underlying causal effectivity of caste.
39
In others disciplines
and cognitive contexts where qualitative analysis is apt, scholars can capture some aspects of a
complex reality through an average, which has an advantage of a yielding a singular judgement that is
not misleading. But, here the distinction between politics and other disciplines like economics stands
out clearly. Economists, faced with two regions with significantly different rates of income, can resolve
this into a serviceable truth of averages. The average, though distinct fromthe real income of either
region, will indicate something meaningful, in specific contexts, about both regions. Interestingly,
political analysis cannot use of the serviceability of averaging. Politics in West Bengal is primarily
driven by a class-oriented ideology of the CPI(M) and its coalition partners. In the contiguous state of
Bihar, political initiatives both electoral and violent are primarily essayed in terms of deep hostility
between caste groups and their historically shifting coalitions. It is impossible to do an exercise like
producing an average to create a composite picture of this reality of eastern India. The truth about
East Indian politics is the cognitively inconvenient fact that the two states experience politics of
irreducibly different types.
What I want to call composition/collocation is not exhausted by a simple registration of diversity,
which would imply the non-existence of the broader framework which holds the segments together.
Some arguments suggest a similar simplification of the political reality of India by asserting that
political life and the underlying social structures are so different in its regions, that there is no sense in
thinking in terms of any form of singleness, however indirect or attenuated. Yet that would be an
evident mistake. To take a simple, and startling example, if many of the Indian states were independent
states, there is a great likelihood that these would have turned into non-democratic regimes. West
Bengal, under overwhelming communist power, would probably have become closer to a peoples
democracy, instead of a bourgeois one, with its citizens enjoying the vastly different rights of the
populations of former Soviet Union or contemporary China. Similarly, it is probable that the politics of
various other states, at particular historical periods of overwhelming dominance of single leaders, or
because of the statistically unbeatable dominance of particular social groups, would have turned to
other forms of non-democratic rule. Indeed, sometimes, it is possible identify trends within Indian
federalism of precisely such entirely one-sided social or political dominance. There is a common
argument in political theory running through a long and distinguished Western tradition from
Montesquieu to Guizot that one of the conditions of successful democracy is an underlying sociology
in which no fundamental social group or a principle acquires incontestable supremacy.
40
In Indian
democracy, the presence of countervailing power sometimes works extra-regionally. Indias deeply
segmented sociology ensured, in different ways in its sixty-year democratic history, to retain a balance
of countervailing power between various groups. In the early period of wall to wall dominance of the
Congress party, internal representation of different regions, social groups, religious communities, and
ideological strands ensured that none of these groups became overwhelmingly dominant, and all

38
This is not the strict meaning of generalisation in inductive logic, but what I mean here should be
sufficiently clear, and sufficiently common to students of politics.
39
Donald Zagoria,
40
Francois Guizots History of the European Civilisation offers an argument of this kind in explaining
the development of modern European democracy.
13
sections retained an interest in democratic procedures. If seen closely, the overwhelming dominance of
the Congress party, a cause of much reproachful commentary by Western observers, was a thin screen
for a bustling, highly competitive system of social groups which opposed, restricted and balanced each
other. Subsequently, after Congress dominance was fractured progressively fromthe late 1960s, either
opposition state governments have served to balance the power of the central governments, or vice
versa; such that political groups were never, except in some persistently difficult cases,
41
entirely
recourseless against the power of incumbent electorally irremovable regimes. Sometimes this is
reflected in a comic spectacle: political leaders who evidently enjoyed dictatorial control of their
parties or states have acted as entirely undisingenuous defenders of democracy, because the only way
in which several dictators can collaborate is on the basis of strict equality, because each would dread
falling under the control of the others. All these instances imply that the fact that these segmented
regions are parts of an overarching frame of Indian political institutions is a consideration of some
importance. To state this more abstractly, the politics of state A is of course partially determined by its
internal political sociology and political economy, but its being part of India is an important relational
property of its politics. Politics in any state or sociological segment
42
is thus a product of the internal
characteristics of its sociology and the relational properties derived from the fact of their being part of a
vast, intricate but causally significant Indian political system. In political terms, the singleness of India
has a second-order quality that ought not to be confused with the more insistent, immediate causal
impulsions of regional and local sociologies of power, but it would be a significant error to discount it
as distant and therefore causally ineffectual.
Why did no revolution happen in India?
Lenins political reputation has suffered irretrievably in recent years unjustifiably in some ways.
Making a revolution refers to two rather different activities which are linked, but require quite different
capacities. The larger and historically more consequential meaning of making a revolution of course
refers to an understanding of feasible institutional alternatives to whatever social form against which
the revolution is effected. But this is a second social revolution, because it can only come after a
first political revolution.
43
There can be hardly any doubt today that the entire Marxist tradition of
political and economic theory have performed particularly inadequately on this score. Attempts by
occasional theorists like Gramsci were generally ignored, and in the construction of socialism, Marxists
showed a surprising lack of any, except some negative, ideas, and consequently, under historical
pressure, tended to slide back into conventionally available state forms and practices of the Russian
past. But that should not impugn Lenins reputation for making a revolution in the first sense: the
necessary, and impressively difficult act of undermining the power of established state institutions and
dominant social classes, with remarkably meagre resources at his commanda highly disciplined but
small party and an extraordinary sense of timing.
44
It is true that his revolution in the larger, second
sense, failed. But no amount of later failure, or ideological interpretation can obliterate the astonishing
historical event of a Russian revolution an improbable destruction of a vast, immensely powerful and
brutally oppressive state structure in an astonishingly short time. It is true that the second revolution,
which failed, was more important than the first, which went through; but the analysis of the first,
political revolution offers highly significant lessons about the nature of social power and the conative
aspects of political life.

41
The case of the state of Punjab during the period of violent militancy illustrates some of these
difficulties.
42
Obviously, the boundaries of these sociological and political-economic segments do not coincide
with the boundaries of states of the Indian federation; and also, in the nature of things, these segments
often end in frontiers rather than linear boundaries.
43
On this issue, J ohn Dunn has advanced a particularly lively critique of Marxist political theory.
Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, chapter 4.
44
His famous quip about the timing of starting the uprising in St Petersburg, the sixth would be too
early, the eighth will be too late though probably apocryphal, can be read as a metaphor for a larger,
more intricate, but fundamental operation with time that was the heart of the revolutionary act. See,
Louis Althusser, Contradicttion and overdetermination in For Marx, Allen Lane, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1969. We could probably say that the first is an event-timing, and second is a
process-timing which requires the same sense of precision of judgement.
14
Louis Althusser provided a fascinating gloss on Lenins theory of the first Russian revolution that
could yield interesting inferences about the failed revolution in India.
45
First, Lenin
46
obviously saw a
connection between scale and complexity: the vast extension of space occupied by imperial Russia
made it highly likely that the political economy and sociology of that space was segmented in our
sense. Scale implied the possibility that the structure of power wouldbe complex, because there were
several societies incorporated in that imperial system which went through constant territorial
expansion. The diversity of societies within the vast carapace of the Russian imperial system meant
that the resources of power of the imperial state were equally diverse.
47
It could be depicted as an
interconnected system of the social power of an industrial bourgeoisie, a landed aristocracy, local
feudal magnates in collusion with and acting through the institutions of imperial power. This meant
that the state could, if one of its bases of power was undermined, bring to sustain its state, the power of
all the other kinds. Scale implied complexity, which implied, in turn a great diversity of resources of
social power of the state that could be used to cover for each other in case of a threat to its existence.
The remarkable feature of Lenins political analysis was his perception of a temporal concatenation of
crisis, a temporal point at which all these different sources of power werein simultaneous crisis, with
the result that none of the elements of this power coalition could act and come to the relief of another.
In Althussers translation into a Freudian language, this meant a coincidence of all the contradictions in
Russian imperial society to produce a general crisis that could be exploited by a relative small, well
organised political party to undermine the Tsarist state. On this reading, the first revolution happened
not because of inevitable slow-moving glacial social tendencies, but because of an extraordinary sense
of political timing; and the second failed because that could not be accomplished by this set of
techniques. Lenin grasped a unique structure of contradictions, which made the revolution possible. It
was, to put it in less Hegelian terms, a triumph of clear-headed political thinking about scale,
complexity and timing.
A similar analysis of overdetermination of contradictions, I suggest, can help produce an explanation
of why a revolution again in the first sense did not happen in India. Although Indian communists
judged that Nehrus new government had little legitimacy immediately after independence, that turned
out to be gross political misjudgement, and political realism forced them to rejoin electoral politics in
1951 as surly, reluctant participants. If there was a time in the history of Indian democracy, when the
state came close to serious crisis, losing its legitimacy at an alarming rate, it was during the period of
the Emergency(1975-1977) the awkward interlude of Indira Gandhis authoritarianism within the
otherwise tranquil history of Indian democracy. Translated into the language of Marxist state theory,
this was a time when the state leadership, under Indira Gandhi, had lost legitimacy sufficiently for
significant constituents of the coalition of ruling classes to lose faith in her leadership. Business leaders
resented the arbitrary uses of executive power in economic decisions; leaders of farmers were
dissatisfied by what they viewed as the pro-urban bias of Congress economic policies; organised
labour, under Communist trades unions, began a country-wide railway strike; and the petty bourgeoisie
were disillusioned by the suspension of civil rights in what they thought could be a fatal strike against
democratic government. What happened in those few decisive years was the opposite of the events of
the Russian revolution, but amenable to a very similar explanatory exercise with a contrary outcome.
Indian society was similarly segmented as pre-revolutionary Russian society, and showed a similar
relation between scale and internal complexity. The social support of the democratic Indian state came
similarly froma wide variety of resources of power the solid support of the business classes, the
general satisfaction of the upper strata of the peasantry at an enormous expansion of their income and
political influence through the green revolution of the sixties and seventies, the upper middle classes
contentment at the constant expansion of managerial employment in both the state and the capitalist
sectors of the economy, and a corresponding expansion of lower-level employment for the lower
middle classes. Organised workers were relatively content with higher pay, a legal regime of job
security and often generous welfare arrangements; the unorganised labouring class was too ill-paid, ill
organised and fragmented to pose any serious political threat.

45
Louis Althusser, Contradiction and overdetermination, in For Marx. Though his silence about
parlous thinking about the first revolution is odd, and a major weakness of Marxist critical reflection on
the health of the revolution in the 1960s.
46
I think this is true of Leninsthinking, not just of the Lenin we meet briefly in Althussers essay.
47
Imperial states typically worked through a system of coalitions with regional and local elites, and
these elites in sense lent their social power to the empire-state.
15
By the late sixties, this complex consensus of support for the Congress party was clearly fraying; and
despite a brief interlude when she appeared utterly invincible after the war about Bangladesh, this
social coalition of support was in disarray by the mid-seventies. However, the timing of political
conflicts favoured the Indian state. From the latesixties, starting with a resounding defeat for the
Congress in the 1967 elections, Leftist parties began a serious challenge to the power of the Congress
which threatened to spill into far more serious consequences. However, in the late sixties, other parts of
India, particularly the northern and Western states remained relatively quiet, and loyal to the Congress
government. Thus, although its power inside the state of West Bengal was deeply imperilled, the
Congress government used the relative tranquillity of other regions to concentrate its resources of both
political repression and electoral mobilisation in West Bengal, and successfully crushed the emerging
Leftist challenge to its authority. It was assisted of course by the leftists tendency towards internal
fights which reduced their collective capacity to fight against the Congress. In the mid-seventies, large
scale discontent with Congress power began to erupt in other regions, starting with Gujarat in 1974,
spreading to Bihar and UP in the early next year leading eventually to the most serious challenge to
Congress power in independent India. By that time, the serious opposition in West Bengal was already
put down and dispersed. But, the residues of the organised left did not see the opposition to Indira
Gandhi as connected to their own defiance of her power a few years back. The disjunction of the
opposition both in time and in political action made it possible for Indira Gandhis state, despite
increasing loss of legitimacy and of effective power, to turn against each of its opponents and destroy
their politics of defiance. What happened in a revolutionary crisis in India was just the reverse of the
outcome that occurred in the Russian case. The logic of overdetermination of contradictions resulted
in an unrevolutinary outcome; but the process can be illuminated by a substantially similar political
analysis.
Judgement and political efficacy
In retrospect, there can be hardly any doubt that radical politics in India, driven by the considerable
resources of Marxist political theory, assisted by intense political idealism and skilful organisation,
failed to be particularly efficacious when compared to the messier and less elevated politics of the
Congress. Nehrus political initiatives, after independence not when he was a proper Marxist, but
when he has ceased to be one were, in the long run, surprisingly successful in making possible an
unpredictable, unprecedented but at the same time undeniable transformation of some primary relations
of Indian society.
48
In a broad sense, these two forms of politics Communist radicalism and
Nehruvian reformism can be viewed as the two major strands of egalitarian politics in recent Indian
history. Whatever the polemical exchanges between them at critical points of conflict, there is no doubt
that these two political formations were marked by serious conative aspirations towards egalitarianism
a serious translation of modern Western ideals of equality into the very different Indian historical
context.
49
Both could be said to have made an attempt to translate an abstract principle of equality into
the language of Indian history. There is hardly any doubt now that the more ambitious, radical Marxist
version was far less successful than the liberal one represented by Nehru and Ambedkar.
50
This is a
fascinating and crucial contrast essential for understanding the prospects of translational attempts for
modern Western political imaginaries across the world a cognitive project J ohn Dunns work has
done a lot to clarify. What was common between communists and the radical liberals was the
Enlightenment ideal of equality, and a shared belief that the instrumentality of the modern state was the
primary and the only historically adequate instrument toachieve this end. What was different between
them was their difference in moral optimism and cognitive techniques. Often these techniques were

48
There is a considerable political literature on historical interpretations of Indian democracy, see,
Rajeev Bhargava, Democratic republic, in Francine Frankel et.al. Eds. Transforming India, Oxford
University Press, Delhi, 2002, Sunil Khilnani, , in J ohn Dunn (ed), Democracy: The Unfinished
Journey, , Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1997, Pratap B Mehta, The
Burden of Democracy, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2004.
49
This is not meant to deny that there were traditions of social reform and thinking about social
inequality in the Indian tradition; but it seems to me undeniable that the primary inspiration for a
politics of equality came from Indias absorption of European political ideals.
50
It is essential, for political realism, to stress the unpopular point that Ambedkar, undoubtedly the pre-
eminent leader of the dalits in modern India, was critically reliant on Congress support and Nehrus
dominance inside the Congress. A gathering impulse of hagiographic exaggeration of Ambedkars
single-handed impact on Indian society through its constitution does serious damage to an unexcited
assessment of causes and consequences in political history.
16
opposite: for instance, both strands of egalitarian initiatives sought to use the concepts of caste and
class but in opposite ways. The Marxist tradition had to note the factual existence of caste as social
practice, but subsumed it as a relatively minor part of a general class analysis.
51
Ambedkar, the pre-
eminent intellectual of caste liberation in modern India, subsumed class into an analysis which asserted
the analytical primacy of caste structures.
52
The difference in historical efficacy of these two types of
politics appears to be connected to the differential directions of their historical judgements. Radical
political theorists appeared to believe that class analysis was a universal tool of social explanation, and
further narrowed down their reflections by ignoring the more general conception of class in Marxs
theory in favour of the specific form internal to a capitalist economy. This obliged Marxists to interpret
egalitarian politics in terms of class equality obviating, in a sense, the primary need for a translational
view of political theory. Transfer of political theory became too straightforward in one sense, and from
the angle of social experience of rural Indian society, less intelligible. By contrast, the really interesting
case is Nehrus shifting position on the meanings of equality in India. His early writings, symbolically
condensed into the famous speech to the Indian National Congress in its annual session of 1936,
closely followed the more orthodox Marxist understanding of Indian politics with an exclusive
emphasis on class inequalities.
53
After he acquired office, there is quite a startlingchange in Nehrus
thinking, reflected in the gradual fading of emphasis on purely class oriented issues in the most
significant institutional arena the detailed discussions and debates of the Constituent Assembly.
54
Equally remarkable is the crucial decision to rescue Ambedkar from obscurity/ineffectivity and to
install him in a position of authority in the constitution-making process. At the time, Ambedkar was a
relative outsider to the Congress, having alienated Congress opinion for a long time by his strenuous
hostility to Gandhis ideas and personality. Inclusion of Ambedkar inside the intellectual elite that had
the rarest of historical opportunities to shape the contours of fundamental institutions of Indian politics
was a critical move. Through the work of Nehru and Ambedkar, liberal reformist politics in
independent India offered a different translation of the ideal of equality: by implication, suggesting that
political ideals had to first go through a process of abstraction from their specific European historical
form into a general principle, to be adapted or translated into the relevant form demanded by a
different, non-European history. There is no doubt that this rendering of the principle of equality was
less radical than the communist version: it accepted its restriction of the principle of equality to the
political sphere, and avoided, at least for a time, the more morally magnificent ambition of ending all
inequality in society. Two crucial judgements were involved in this translation a sociological
judgement that caste was the primary experiential form of social inequality, and an historical
judgement that this needed to be tackled immediately by the new state. Both Nehru and Ambedkar
entertained an historical expectation, similar to Tocquevilles, that the general principle of equality
would tend to extend from the political to other spheres, particularly, the economic.
55
In the shorter
term, however, their translation of the modern ideal of political equality into Indian history appears to
have been more effective. This success in political transformation of Indian society seems to have
something to do with a successful translation of political theory. In political theory, as in literature,
translation remains a partially obscure process. It is hard to reduce it to rules, it remains substantially a
matter of judgement . But in literature as much as in political theory, the consequences of successful
translation are easy to read - in texts or in history.

51
Reducing it often, and unhelpfully, to a form of false consciousness.
52
See, Ambedkars essays on Indian society generally in Valerian Rodriguez(ed), The Essential
Writings of B.R.Ambedkar, Oxford University Press, Delhi,
53
I emphasise this side of his thinking for the sake of the present argument: after the Moscow trials,
Nehru was clearly troubled by the emerging nature of the Soviet regime and started rethinking his
position on the indispensability of democratic political regimes which set him apart increasingly from
communists.
54
For an excellent general analysis of its debates, Granville Austin, Indias Constitution: The
Cornerstone of a Nation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964.
55
This connection is more evident in case of Nehru, see, for instance, his Basic Approach, 1956; but
there is a remarkably similar reading of the historical future in Ambedkars valedictory speech to the
Constituent Assembly of India.