8 Approaches to the study if Indian society

Poulomi Ghosh

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Indian Nationalism

3. Path of development

4. Peasant movements

5. State and society: democratic rights Critique Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

Akshay Ramanlal Desai (1915-1994) is considered as one of the pioneers in introducing the modern Marxist approach to empirical investigations in social sciences. In his early years he was influenced by his father Ramanlal Vasantlal Desai, a well known litterateur who inspired the youth in Gujarat in the thirties to undertake developmental work for social transformation. A.R. Desai took part in student movements in Baroda, Surat and Bombay. He graduated from the University of Bombay, and also obtained a law degree and PhD in Sociology under G.S. Ghurye from the same university in 1946.

Desai’s studies did not deter him from taking part in political activities. Even in Bombay, he got involved in the labour front and organized a trade union of Bombay Electricity supply and transport workers, dock workers and glass workers. It is during this period that he met with Neera desai, an eminent sociologist, herself having done pioneering work in the field of feminist studies. They married in 1947.

A.R Desai has advocated the use of dialectical-historical model in his sociological studies. Desai closely studied the works of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, and the writings of Leon Trotsky. Desai has been one of the only sociologists who has consistently applied Marxist methods in his treatment of Indian social structure and its processes. He rejected any interpretations of traditions with reference to religion, rituals, and festivities. His sociology is essentially a secular phenomenon where he relies on economics to understand and analyze social structures. He has studied topics like Nationalism and its social configuration (1966), examined community development programmes for economic development in villages, treatment of urban slums and their demographic problems (1972), and finally peasant movements (1979). All of these studies are based on a Marxist method of historical-dialectical materialism. For A.R. Desai, contradictions emerging in the Indian process of social transformation arise mainly from the growing nexus among the capitalist bourgeoisie, rural petty- bourgeoisie and the state apparatus. This nexus thwarts the ambitions and aspirations of the rural and industrial working class population. For Desai, this contradiction is not resolved but rather, takes on new cumulative forms and methods and re -emerges as social movements and protests. Social unrest for him is thus rooted in the capitalist path of development followed by India, following the legacy of the national movement.

Desai began his academic career as a lecturer in Sociology at Siddharth College in Bombay in 1946, and officially joined the Department of Sociology of Bombay University as a lecturer in 1951. He became Professor and Head of the Department in 1969, and retired from the same in 1976. Desai was also appointed as a senior fellow and a National Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) from 1973-75 and 1981-85 respectively. He was also the President of the Indian Sociological Society (1980-81) and the Gujarat Sociological Society (1988-90).

Desai’s major writings can be clubbed into four broad categories:

Indian Nationalism Path of development

Peasant movements and

State and Society: Democratic rights

1. INDIAN NATIONALISM:

Question of how and why nationalism developed in India led him towards his doctoral work, completed in the early forties. Social background of Indian Nationalism (1948) and its companion volume Recent Trends in Indian Nationalism (1960) realize the need for a comprehensive study of the structural transformation of Indian society during the British period. His concerns with understanding feudal production relations, their role and transformation, emergence of capitalist relationships and nationalist forces are presented in these volumes, out of which the first has been translated into various languages and run into more than ten editions (Shah, 1990).

According to Desai’s understanding, Nationalism is a historical category. Its development has to be understood in the context of the social and cultural history of a country. Indian nationalism is an outcome of a number of objective and subjective forces which have evolved since the beginning of the 19th century. It has emerged amongst the social and religious diversities of the country, territorial vastness and powerful traditions and institutions. The central thesis of both the above mentioned volumes is that British rule destroyed the pre-capitalist forms of production relations and introduced modern capitalist property relations, which paved the way for Indian Nationalism (Shah, 1990).

Desai puts forth that Indian nationalism emerged under the conditions of political subjugation of the Indian people under the British rule. The British Empire introduced modern capitalism for their own economic advancement, radically changing the existing economic structures of the Indian society, introducing a centralized state, modern education and modern means of communications and other institutions. This in turn led to the creation of new social classes who achieved their own political and social power. These social forces, because of their very nature came into conflict with British imperialism and thus became the basis of and provided the motive for the rise and development of Indian Nationalism (Desai, 1948).

Desai traces the growth of the national movement in five phases, each phase based on particular social classes which supported and sustained it. Thus, in the first phase, ‘Indian nationalism had a very narrow social basis’. It was pioneered by the intelligentsia who were the product of the modern system of education. Desai considers Raja Rammohan Roy and his followers as the ‘pioneers of Indian nationalism’. This phase continued till 1885 when the Indian National Congress was founded. It heralded a new phase which extended till 1905. The national movement now represented ‘the interests of the development of the new bourgeois society in India’. The development in the modern education had created an educated middle class and the development of the Indian and international trade had given rise to a merchant class. The modern industries had created a class of industrialists. In its new phase, according to Desai (1948), Indian national movement ‘voiced the demands of the educated classes and the trading bourgeoisie such as the Indianization of Services, the association of the Indians with the administrative machinery of the state, the stoppage of economic drain, and others formulated in the resolutions of the Indian National Congress’. The third phase of the national movement covered the period from 1905 to 1918. During this phase ‘the Indian national movement became militant and challenging and acquired a wider social basis by the inclusion of sections of the lower -middle class’. In the fourth phase, which began from 1918 and continued till the end of the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1934, the social base of the national movement was enormously enlarged. The movement ‘which was hitherto restricted mainly to upper and middle classes, further extended to sections of the Indian masses.’ However, according to Desai, the leadership of the Congress remained in the hands of those who were under the strong influence of the Indian capitalist class: ‘It was from 1918 that the Indian industrial bourgeoisie began to exert a powerful influence in determining the programme, policies, strategies, tactics and forms of struggle of the Indian national movement led by the Congress, of which Gandhi was the leader.’ Two other significant developments during this period were the rise of the socialist and communist groups since the late 1920s, which tried to introduce pro-people agenda in the national movement, and the consolidation of communalist forces which sought to divide the society. The fifth phase (1934-39) was characterized by growing disenchantment with the Gandhi-an ideology within the Congress and further rise of the Socialists who represented the petty bourgeois elements. Outside the Congress various movements were taking place. The peasants, the workers, the depressed classes and various linguistic nationalities started agitations for their demands. Moreover, there was further growth of communalism. However, according to Desai, all these stirrings were not of much consequence and the mainstream was still solidly occupied by the Gandhi-an Congress which represented the interests of the dominant classes.

2. PATH OF DEVELOPMENT:

Desai’s State and Society in India (1975) and India’s Path of Development: A Marxist Approach (1984) is a conceptualization of India’s capitalist development paradigm. He focuses his attention on the state and its role in social transformation of the society. His Marxist perspective leads him to observe that the state apparatus in the Third World take various economic and social measures to protect the interests of its propertied classes. Thus, the legal and administrative frameworks are evolved to promote the path of capitalist development. He deems that the public sector, mixed economy, and social welfare programmes are nothing but strategies adopted by the ruling classes to cater to the interest of the capitalist classes and prevent the rising struggles of the exploited classes in the state. His conclusion, based on his gathered data is that the bourgeoisie class of the Indian state is incapacitated because it has not been able to foster enough of a capitalist growth rate to overcome the backwardness of the country (Desai, 1984).

The central thrust of his volumes on rural sociology as well as agrarian struggles has been to show how the Indian state has planned and transformed the agrarian structure from pre-capitalist to capitalist relationships (Shah, 1990). Agrarian relationships have been transformed substantially, as a result of state intervention through various land legislations and ‘development’ programmes. Starting from the interventions of the British government, their introduction of the new economic reforms disrupted the old economic system by decaying the old land relations and artisans with the emergence of new land relations and modern industries. The old village commune was eroded by the appearance of new peasant proprietors or zamindars, as private owners of the land. The class of artisans disappeared with the introduction of modern industry, to be replaced by new classes like the capitalist, industrial workers,  agricultural laborers, tenants, merchants, etc. Further, the land revenue system, commercialization of agriculture, fragmentation of land etc. also led to the transformation of the Indian village.

Therefore the British reforms impacted not only the economic outlook of the country but also altered the social physiology of the society. It brought in new classes and therefore created new and different types of social relations. At a higher level, this structural change brought about the polarization of classes in agrarian areas, poverty in rural areas and exploitation by those who owned land. It gave rise to a new class structure among agrarian society with categories like Zamindars, absentee landlords (who might own land somewhere but be settled elsewhere, like in cities), tenants, peasant proprietors, moneylenders, etc. Similarly, in urban society, there were capitalist industrial working class, petty traders, and professional classes like doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. The introduction of railways, postal services, centralized uniform laws, English education, modern industry, and so on, brought about qualitative changes and unintentionally led to the unification of the Indian society, in spite of being introduced as mechanisms of exploitation. For Desai, the role of the railways and the press was especially significant in this direction. It brought together the scattered population into the mainstream and the implication was social movements, collective representations, national sentiments and consciousness at a wider level. This social -infrastructural set-up gave rise to the nationalist freedom movement and the awakening of Indian nationalism.

3. PEASANT MOVEMENTS:

A.R. Desai’s Peasant Struggles in India (1979) and Agrarian Struggles in India after Independence (1986) immediately became and continue to be a major source of reference on agrarian social movements in India and the sociology of agrarian society in India. In Desai’s view, agrarian relationships have been altered substantially as a result of state intervention through various land legislations and development programmes. According to him, “the overall thrust of the agrarian policy of the ruler has been to eliminate parasitic, absentee intermediaries in the form of various categories of zamindars and absentee landlords and to create in their place classes of agricultural capitalists, rich farmers and viable middle peasant proprietors directly linked to the state’ (Desai, 1986). As a result of this, there have been created sharp differentiations among the peasants, and the condition of small and marginal farmers and agricultural laborers has deteriorated. Desai was extremely critical of the way land reforms, that were being carried out, created a class of private entrepreneurs in the form of agricultural capitalists who had surplus resources to invest in agricultural improvements for profiteering. Likewise, he also critically analyzed the policy and practice of promoting cooperatives and The Green Revolution which created a further divide between the rich and poor and led to the enhancement of economic and socio-political power of the rich. He strongly argued for the adoption of alternative development models that involved social transformation through basic structural changes in agrarian relations and institutions like the control of cooperatives and industrial production. From the seventies onwards, Desai undertook projects to understand new movements and trends taking place across India like the growth of contradictions in rural India (growth of the Naxalite movement) and in urban areas as well (railway strikes, women’s movements and protests against slum demolition). For him, the working class, the traditional revolutionary force, was in the midst of changes both in the context of its structure and its changing political consciousness (Patel, 2011). His study of the working class movement was especially noteworthy because he did not restrict himself to the industrial working class alone but encompassed the entire oppressed sections in society who were selling their labour power in the market. He also made visible the definition of worker and working class in his study and was the first to notice the ‘informal sector’ and the struggles of the unorganized sector workers, later to be theorized by economists and anthropologists (Patel, 2011).

Desai puts forth that post-independence agrarian struggles are waged by the newly emerged propertied classes as well as the agrarian poor, especially the agrarian proletariat, where the former fight for greater share of the fruits of development while the latter struggle for survival or subsistence requirements for a better life. Desai maintained that progress could be achieved only by radically transforming the exploitative capitalist system in India.

4. STATE AND SOCIETY: DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS :

In State and Society in India (1975), Desai puts forth a critique of the theories of modernization accepted by a large number of academicians. In all his works, he puts the state at the centre and throws light on its role as facilitator of social transformation and the role it could play in abridging the rights of the oppressed. He analyzed how the state, in its pursuit of modernization on a capitalist path, was playing a repressive role and the growing resistance to the same. Desai classified democratic rights into three categories (Shah, 1990): One, the rights of the bourgeoisie property relations; which include the right to hold property, right to employ wage labour etc.

Second, the rights which are also termed civil liberties and are the product of the bourgeoisie revolution. They include freedom of speech, habeas corpus petition, freedom of press, public secular education, etc. Desai maintains that though these rights are manipulated by the ruling classes to serve their interests, the oppressed classes also use them to protect their class interests and accelerate their struggles.

Third, like the bourgeoisie rights, there are the rights of the proletariat which include the right to picket, strike and organize. These are important for developing the struggle of the proletariat against the ruling classes.

The second and third categories of rights are increasingly repudiated by the state to intensify the generation of surplus value and capital accumulation. Desai holds that the increased policing of the second and third rights are a result of the deteriorating socio-economic value of the capitalist framework which makes it open to the criticism of the sub-standard and exploited life and labour of people.

CRITIQUE OF THE MARXIST APPROACH:

• For a large number of sociologists including Marxists, Desai’s project of Sociology remained largely ideological and political, and oriented to the debates within the mainstream communist movement and particularly to the question of how to bring about a capitalist or socialist revolution. There are Marxist scholars who argue that Desai’s analysis lacked depth and was too simplistic and thus wasn’t capable of understanding the complexities that structure the Indian experience of capitalism and the nature of protests against it (Patel,).
• His work is also criticized for not having a theoretical perspective to assess and examine the intersection of class and caste nor its interactions with gender, ethnicity or language. It also does not conceptualize any theoretical foundation for examining the complexities inherent in identity formation within the sub-continent. His theory of identity was based on the simple proposition that exploitative experiences need to be made visible in order to understand the exploitative processes.
• Marxist scholar, K. Balgopal (1986), questioned Desai’s triangular classification of the agrarian classes (rich peasants, middle farmers, and landlords). He also questions the division of struggle into pre-Green revolution and Post-Green revolution periods, considering that the Green Revolution was not introduced in many parts of the country. These arguments put forth by Desai do not have enough corresponding empirical evidence to support them.
• In Social Background of Indian nationalism, Desai argues that pre-colonial India did not have private property and that the village was self-sufficient, autocratic and unprogressive. This builds a very static and stagnant view of society that existed in pre-colonial India.
• According to eminent sociologist Sujata Patel, Desai’s theories have not paved the way for new theoretical articulations on themes that he explored such as class and the labouring poor, nation and nationalism, development, state policies, etc. His theories could not engage with the complexities that modernity brought up in the context of the Indian sub-continent. (Patel, 2011)

CONCLUSION:

A.R. Desai was a Marxist and a Sociologist who did not see the difference between the two (Patel, 2011). Desai analyzed contemporary social change in order to assess how it benefitted the few, and thus his work was a critique of mainstream nationalism and its political projects. Its focus was on the nature of the ruling class, their control of the state institutions and their constant efforts to use developmental projects to aid their own reproduction. Apart from being an academic scholar, Desai also wrote pamphlets and booklets in regional languages for those in the struggles and outside the purview of academia. Desai’s area of sociological investigation was extremely wide which began with a discussion of nation and class in the colonial period and moved to assess the state in the post independent era. This analysis led him to assess planning and development in India together with the rise of new classes in agriculture and within urban-industrial structure and consecutively the contradictions and struggles that occurred because of this. The growth of social movements and the increasing communalization of the state led him to analyze the nature of state-society crisis in contemporary India which in turn led him to discuss the contemporary rights movements by new social actors. His perspective was a revolutionary departure from the earlier understandings of mainstream nationalism and earlier conceptualizations of politics in India. Desai argued that colonial capitalism destroyed the institutions that could have generated capitalism in India indigenously, and at the same time also mentions that colonialism had the positive effect of making possible the growth of new social classes which helped to create the conditions for the emergence of the nationalist movement.

During a time when American structural- functionalism and British functionalism dominated social sciences, Desai continued to write on the Indian state and society from a drastically different Marxist perspective. In his presidential address to the XV All India Sociological Conference, Desai narrated that the dominant sociological approaches in India are basically non-Marxist and that Marxism is rejected on the pretext of it being deterministic, and value -loaded in nature. He stresses on the importance of using the Marxist approach in the discipline because he believed that it can help study government policies and the classes entrenched into the state apparatus and India’s political economy.

Desai highlighted certain aspects of the Marxist approach to the study of Indian society. It helps to understand social reality through the means of production, division of the labour involved, and the social relations of productions that it brings about. This approach can help trace the social and class structure that was there before Independence and how and what the development paradigm has been since then. For Desai property relations are crucial because they shape the purpose, nature, control, direction and objectives underlying the production. It also shapes the hierarchy and division in the society since it decides who gets how much and on what grounds. It also helps in locating the dialectics that exist.

DID YOU KNOW?

• A.R. Desai actively participated in student movements in Baroda, Surat and Bombay, where he pursued his college education. In fact, he was suspended from Baroda College for organizing a strike. He then graduated with economics and politics from the University of Bombay.
• While working in the student and trade union movements in the thirties, A.R. Desai realized, not only the need to study the Indian situation but also, for writing in a widely known regional language to influence the masses. His first pamphlet was on agrarian indebtedness, published in 1938. He had edited and published numerous booklets regularly, both in Gujarati and English, often tapping into his own meager financial resources to fund them.
• Desai became a member of the communist party of India in 1934, but the inner bureaucratic structure of the party suffocated him. He opposed the change in the stand of the Party towards supporting the British war effort in India when the Soviet Union was attacked by German Nazi forces. He resigned from the Party in 1939.
• He became a member of the Revolutionary Socialist party in 1953 and regularly contributed to The Call, the party’s journal where he tried to expound on Trotskyist ideas in the Indian context. But slowly, his writings were ‘censored’ by the editor when they were inconvenient to the Party leadership. Having realized that the RSP was moving away from its ‘revolutionary’ stance to a ‘reformist parliamentary’ politics objective, he resigned from the Party in 1981.

Web links

• http://www.jstor.org/stable/23620433
• http://www.jstor.org/stable/23619186
• http://www.jstor.org/stable/23619207

REFERENCES:

• Shah, Ghanshyam, and Akshayakumar Ramanlal Desai. “Capitalist Development: Critical Essays.” Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1990.
• Patel, Sujata. “Social Anthropology or Marxist Sociology: Assessing the Contesting Sociological Visions of M.N. Srinivas and A.R. Desai” in ‘Doing Sociology in India: Genealogy, Location and Practices’, Sujata Patel (ed). New delhi. Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp72-99 Nagla, B.K. Indian Sociological Thought. Jaipur. Rawat Publications, 2008.
• Dhanagare, D.N. “Social Policy Concerns in Indian Sociology”. Sociological Bulletin. Indian Sociological Society. Vol. 53, No. 1, (January-April 2004), pp4-30.
• Y.B Damle. “Problems and Perspectives in the Study of Sociology”. Sociological Bulletin. Indian Sociological Society. Vol. 36, No. 2(September, 1987), pp 1-14.
• Desai, A.R. “Relevance of the Marxist Approach to the Study of Indian Society”. Sociological Bulletin. Indian Sociological Society. Vol. 30, No.1, (March 1981), pp1-20