D.D. Kosambi: Revisiting the Historian and his Legacy—Shashi Singh

Aijaz Ahmad, the legendary Marxist theorist who passed away recently, was of the opinion that universities have been transmogrified into markets and malls selling enticing theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism to students. He was a fervent critic of these theories since he felt that their chief tenet was the repudiation of Marxism. Contending that these ideologies ‘seek to shift the locus of determination from the field of political economy to that of culture’, he concluded that post-Marxism was merely a return to the idealism that Marx had transcended. This ‘Cultural Turn’, as Aijaz Ahmad called it, entailed the relegation of economic, social, and political considerations to an ancillary position, with culture acquiring precedence over everything.

The walls of universities—particularly those where everyone put a premium on ‘liberal arts’—were once thought to be impervious to the hateful ideology of Hindutva. However, of late, along with these fanciful theories, Hindutva has also started to resonate among the students. Consequently, the Hindu Right’s brand of pseudo-history, pandering to communal prejudices, has started to threaten the discipline of history. As Romila Thapar argues, Hindutva requires its own version of the past to vindicate its actions in the present. When scholars first began to apply the Marxist method to explain historical phenomena in India, the postmodernist insistence on assigning primacy to culture over other considerations had not been heard of. Furthermore, Hindutva’s version of the past had not captured the popular imagination as strongly as it has been able to in the present. An honest and dispassionate approach to reconstructing the past was undertaken by Marxist historians after independence, led by their doyen, Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi. This essay is an attempt to briefly revisit his life and works, in search of inspiration and an alternative to the order of things at present.

D.D. Kosambi’s interest in the interpretation of India’s past was sparked by his ideological inclination towards Marxism. He was drawn towards Marxism as a student at Harvard University, where he had been subjected to various racist attacks. Deeply afflicted by problems of hunger, poverty, malnutrition, and backwardness that plagued India, he felt compelled to undertake the study of Indian history to explain their causes. He believed that to eradicate the ‘passive suffering that has perpetuated Indian life from generation to generation’, it was important to critically analyze the Indian past through a materialist lens and rescue it from the conventional ‘drums and trumpets history’. By ‘drums and trumpets history’, he meant history-writing preoccupied with accounts of kings and their conquests. Kosambi’s intervention, in the words of Rajan Gurukkal, brought about ‘a hermeneutic turn that shook Indian historiography.’  For him, history was ‘the presentation in chronological order of successive developments in the means and relations of production.’ As D.N. Jha has argued, ‘The more important question according to Kosambi was not who was the King or whether a given region had a king, but whether its people used a plough, light or heavy, at that time.’  

Kosambi was greatly influenced by Marx’s idea of history as espoused in the ‘Introduction’ to A Critique of Political Economy, which emphasized the interlinked roles of economic bases and all-encompassing political superstructures in the realm of social production. Enamoured as much as he was with Marxism, he did not subscribe blindly to everything that was put forth by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The uniqueness of Kosambi’s method can be best understood by his non-deterministic approach towards history:

‘Economic determinism will not do. It is not inevitable, nor even true, that a given amount of wealth will lead to a given type of development. The complete historical process through which the social form has been reached is also of prime importance…If the superstructure can’t be adjusted during growth, then there is eventual conflict. Sometimes the old form is broken by a revolution in the guise of a reformation. Sometimes the class that gains by preserving the older form wins, in which case there is stagnation, degeneracy, or atrophy. The early maturity and peculiar helplessness of Indian society against later foreign invasions bear testimony to this general scheme.’

It is a testimony to the scholarly rigour of Kosambi that he challenged Marx’s own proposition on the causes of transformation of the modes of production. In his A Critique of Political Economy, Marx tried to explain transformation by emphasizing the incompatibility between productive forces and relations of production. According to Rajan Gurukkal, even though Kosambi assigned primacy to productive forces, the incompatibility between productive forces and relations of production did not constitute a sine qua non condition for ‘transformation’ in his analysis. He adhered to the Marxist school of history-writing, but also significantly, he often departed from it. Kosambi’s method was different, since for him historical materialism did not necessarily entail the precedence of theoretical truth over empirical evidence. In his pioneering book, An Introduction to The Study of Indian History, elaborating on this methodological difference, he writes:

‘We shall at times have to reconstruct the material changes from what survives as marks upon the ideological superstructure, but let it be noted that Marxism is far from the economic determinism which its opponents so often take it to be. For that matter, any intelligent determinist must discuss “conditions” rather than “causes” and take full cognizance of the course of historical development.’

As Kosambi was initiated into the craft of history-writing out of his deep concern for the problems faced by countless Indians, it was only natural that his works were imbued with a strong sense of justice and empathy. In An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Kosambi highlighted the importance of what he termed ‘the living pre-history in India’. He argued that faced with a paucity of historical evidence, a historian must at times draw parallels with living people whose culture and lifestyle can be insightful for understanding prehistorical societies. He believed that this ‘living pre-history’ would enable archaeologists and historians to reconstruct the past with greater empathy. However, while identifying the importance of corroborating literary sources with archaeological evidence, he opined that the very existence of ‘classical’ literature was indicative of a society stratified along class—where the majority produced and other groups expropriated the surplus produced by the subjugated classes. Those who produced simply lacked the ‘leisure’ required for engaging in literary pursuits. One of the gravest repercussions of such a setting was that historians, while reconstructing the past, dealt only with the written records left behind by those who lived off the surplus of the producing class. Kosambi believed that to properly investigate the intricacies of pre-literate societies, a historian needed to interpret literary and archaeological sources in conjunction with ethnographic data. One of the most fascinating aspects of his method was the importance he attached to what he called ‘long survivals’—the continuous but by no means unaltered existence of certain rituals since early historic times. Kosambi believed that significant historical information could be gleaned from studying these practices. 

Usually, a scientist is sceptical of any scholarly work invoking the ideals of justice and empathy. He is inclined to castigate such works as ‘unscientific’. Notwithstanding Kosambi’s emphasis on writing history with empathy, it would be naïve to pigeonhole his work as ‘unscientific; because it was empathetic to the plight of the people. Ruminating on this dichotomy of ‘scientific/ unscientific’ as well as ‘subjective/objective’, Rajan Gurukkal writes: 

‘To be scientific for social scientists means to be truthful to and self-reflexive about their ways and means of knowing the social. The central reason is the epistemological distinction they make between the objects of knowledge of science and non-science. The objects of science are ontologically objective and those of social sciences, subjective.’ 

Orthodox Marxism seeks to locate objectivity in the realm of theoretical statements thereby precluding a humanist perception. Kosambi’s approach to writing history, however, was more humanist than what an uncritical deployment of the Marxist method would entail.

Kosambi’s profound humanism, coupled with his own unique Marxist method, had enabled him to present a critical reading of caste formations in early India. He believed that religion served as a perfect means for keeping the exploited populace pegged at their social position. Believing their exploitation to be religiously ordained, the exploited masses would, without coercion, remain subservient to the exploiter. Kosambi applied this train of argument in his analysis of caste. Like many other Indologists, he believed that the Shudra class had emerged from the subjugated ‘Dasas’ from the period when the Rigveda was being composed.  Kosambi’s intervention rested in locating the emergence and the subsequent rise of the caste system in the evolution of the priestly class of Brahmins. Kosambi boldly asserted that the Brahmins created the model of exploitation, which was uncritically followed by other castes, thereby hinting at the process of Brahminization. He also traced the origin of the caste system to ‘tribal elements being fused into a general society’. Emphasizing the economic significance of caste—a system generally considered to be purely social, he argued that ‘caste is class at a primitive level of production, a religious model of forming social consciousness in such a manner that the primary producer is deprived of his surplus with the minimum coercion.’

Kosambi was not the only one interpreting Indian history using the methods of historical materialism. His contemporaries like S.A. Dange had attempted to do the same too. Kosambi’s insistence on treating Marxism as ‘a method, a tool of analysis’ rather than as a ‘substitute for thinking’ is what has set him apart from thinkers like Dange. Kosambi, contemptuous of the mechanical application of historical materialism, criticized Dange’s India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery as ‘painfully disappointing’ and based on ‘facile pseudo-Marxism’. 

During the period leading up to the Chinese revolution, some Comintern China experts had began to emphasize how China should be treated differently from Europe in terms of its history because it was essentially an ‘Asiatic society’. However, this viewpoint was repudiated by the Chinese communists themselves. The status of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ had been the subject of an intense debate since this conflict came out in the open, until a special conference was held in Leningrad in 1931 to discuss this issue. The conference ended up formally rejecting the Marxist shibboleth of ‘Asiatic society’ as a ‘social organization’ in its own right. The classical Marxist evolutionary framework was thoroughly re-examined. The mechanistic, unilinear framework of ‘Primitive Communism – Slavery – Feudalism – Capitalism’, however, was upheld in the Leningrad discussions. 

Kosambi, unlike earlier Marxist historians, did not subscribe to this ‘teleological evolutionary schema’. Rejecting the universality of this unilinear scheme, he argued: 

‘[…] no single mode prevailed uniformly over the whole country at any one time; so it is necessary to select for treatment that particular mode which, at any period was the most vigorous, most likely to dominate production, and which inevitably spread over the greater parts of the country, no matter how many of the older forms survived in outward appearance.” 

Although this standard model of periodization had been important in explaining historical phenomena across the world, it had, over time, as Irfan Habib argues, ‘begun to gravely shackle Marxist historiography’. Reckless use of ‘Slavery’ and ‘Feudalism’ to describe completely different forms of social organizations had become commonplace. Marxist historians, as they transcended such historiography, found greater autonomy in explaining divergent forms of social organizations, without having to necessarily designate them as either ‘slavery’ or ‘feudalism’. Kosambi’s repudiation of the mechanically unilinear scheme of historical progress played a crucial role in the development of a more holistic method of history-writing in the subcontinent. D.D. Kosambi’s career was scintillatingly multidisciplinary. Initially trained as a Mathematician, he made significant contributions to the varied fields of Mathematics, Genetics, Statistics, History, Archaeology, and Numismatics. His intellectual integrity, scholastic rigour, and deep reverence for facts won him admiration from people across the political spectrum. Annoyed as much as he was with the colonial interpretations of Indian history, he never entertained communal or nationalist prejudices. D.N. Jha, a prominent historian of ancient India, had described D.D. Kosambi as the ‘progenitor of scientific inquiry in history in India’. In June 1966, the celebrated polymath prematurely succumbed to myocardial infarction. At a time when the very discipline of history is under serious threat from both the Hindutva brigade, who peddle false versions of the past at the service of heinous political ends, and the post-modernists, who mystify more than they explain, it becomes ever more imperative to think with and find succour in the works of D.D. Kosambi.