Karl Marx: On The Great Indian Revolt of 1857

Marx's observations on the Revolt of 1857 are a distinctive component to the study of modern Indian history. Marx was almost the very first to grasp the true nature of the revolt. Karl Marx wrote 31 articles about the 1857 Indian revolt from July to Oct 1857 for the American newspaper 'New York Daily Tribune (NYDT)’. Although the British called it a mutiny/uprising, Marx called 1857 'a national revolt'.

When Marx began writing articles about India in the New York Times in 1853, he saw the British as India's saviours. He regarded British colonialism as a necessary evil to break Asia's sluggish economy by investing in the forces required for capitalist expansion. Marx characterized British colonization in India as the "Double Mission of the British". In the puberty, they were contributing positively by breaking down India's Asiatic mode of production, which was hampering its path to capitalism. Second, they were rejuvenating the economy in order to promote capitalist development, which would allow for social change and progress towards a more equal society.’

As Marx said,

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution”. [NYDT, 25^th June, 1853]

Marx asserted that, the Introduction of railways and private property in India by the british was a path toward emancipation of society from its backwardness. And he calculated that the Private property created classes which in turn led to a class struggle, which in turn would lead to socialism.

“We know that the municipal organization and the economical basis of the village communities has been broken up, but their worst feature, the dissolution of society into stereotype and disconnected atoms, has survived their vitality. The village isolation produced the absence of roads in India, and the absence of roads perpetuated the village isolation. On this plan a community existed with a given scale of low conveniences, almost without intercourse with other villages, without the desires and efforts indispensable to social advance. The British having broken up this self-sufficient inertia of the villages, railways will provide the new want of communication and intercourse”

“Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.” [NYDT, 8th August, 1853]

According to Marx,

"The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to that end, it is necessary, above all, to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication."

[The Future Results of the British Rule in India, Karl Marx, The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p 30-31]

At the same time he was also doubtful that the colonial rule would not allow India to achieve it:

Hence Marx did warn: "The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus (Marx meant the Indians) themselves shall have been grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke all together.”

The revolt of 1857 played a major role in the pathbreak in Marx. Marx was truly Eurocentric before 1857. He was so centered on the European proletariat as a challenge to capitalism that he could not focus on any other struggles or movemets. The revolt of 1857 influened Marx, in his outlook towards class struggle. The revolt brought the British colonial forces into direct conflict with the classes in India.

Marx viewed the movement as a struggle between the capitalist and the oppressed not as the capitalist bourgeoisie oppressing the proletariat but as the British colonizers oppressing the colonized. Marx viewed the social revolution as being linked to the struggle for freedom. Marx was so inspired by the rebellion, and he called it as the “national revolt”.

“the present Indian disturbance is not a military mutiny, but a national revolt of which the Sepoy are the acting instruments only.” [NYDT, 14^th August, 1857]

Marx had put forward a radically different revolutionary perspective. For Indians to “reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie”, said Marx, either of two conditions had to be fulfilled: a proletarian revolution in England or the overthrow of British rule by the Indians themselves. Marx observed that the British press was trivializing the conflict by characterizing it as a race war between the stagnant east and the advancing west, where the Asians were barbarians opposing the modern civilized west.

The British media distorted the revolution by ignoring the British crimes and emphasizing the native response. In his article "Torture in India" from September 1857, Marx expressed sympathy for the movement. 

“Whether a people are not justified to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects. And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindoos (Marx meant the Indians) should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of the crimes and cruelties alleged against them?” [NYDT, 17^th September, 1857]

On June 30, 1857, Marx was writing: “Mussulmans and Hindus—have combined against their common masters; the mutiny has not been confined to a few localities;—the revolt has coincided with a general disaffection—on the part of the great Asiatic nations.”

On June 30, 1857: he explained the fact that the sepoys were the first to rise by the pertinent observation that the Indian Army happened to be ‘the first general centre of resistance which the Indian people were ever possessed of’. On July 28, 1857, he quoted with approval Disraeli’s remark on the previous day: “the Indian disturbance is not a military mutiny, but a national revolt”. On July 31 1857, Marx asserted that what John Bull considers to be a military mutiny ‘is in truth a national revolt’.

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), only two pre-capitalist categories of social orders could be offered, those respectively of Ancient Rome and of Europe in the 'Middle Ages'. Now Marx encountered in India another kind of social order, based on neither slavery nor serfdom. As he also underlined in his manuscript notes prepared in 1857-58, now known as Grundrisse, this order was based on two institutions, viz., 'village community', minus communal cultivation, and a 'despotic' state which took in tax what amounted practically to landlord's rent.

Anticipating recent historians, Marx acutely observed that after all ‘the first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants’. In a similar fashion, the Indian Revolt started not with the ‘dishonored riots’ but with the sepoys ‘clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered’ by the British (September 4, 1857). Marx saw correctly that the British posts were like ‘insulated rocks amid a sea of revolution’.