Then came the famous India-related despatches to the New-York Daily Tribune (NYDT). India figures in the rough drafts and clean copies of the various volumes of the Capital, in various letters of Marx and Engels, in The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, in Marx’s notes on ethnology, history of land relations, and Indian history. The possibility of some more references to India in the remaining volumes of MEGA cannot be ruled out, in view of such long drawn out interest of Marx and Engels in India.

The published works of Marx and Engels arrived in India in various stages, mainly in their English rendering, via England, the USA and Soviet Russia. Subsequently, some of these have been translated and written about in a number of codified literary languages of the sub-continent. A survey of the entire Indian output in the field is beyond the scope of a single article. In what follows, I shall first attempt to provide an outline of the background of arrival of the writings of Marx and Engels ,then a chronology of the arrival of their India-related writings (II) and finally, some notes towards a Rezeptionsgeschichte of these writings (III), in India. The present effort is mainly based on publications in Bengali and Indian English, within my reach.

Some capitalist-type enterprises were established in some pockets of British ruled India by the 1830s. A colonial working class was born. Its members came mainly from the traditionally labouring ‘lower’ castes and tribes of India. Colonial commerce and education produced a ‘fresh class’ of Indians, ‘‘endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science.’’ Its members came from the traditionally literate and socially dominant ‘upper’ castes of India.

In Bengal they are called bhadralok, well-mannered people with education.. They had irregular and episodic exposure to some of the current European ideas. In the course of their development a conflict arose, between those of them who took a more active, rational and future-oriented approach towards the internal problems of development but were more loyal to the foreign rulers, and those who took up a militant fight against colonialism and imperialism but were passive, past-oriented and negative in their approach to the problems of internal social transformation. At times a single person changed his/her approach at different phases of his/her life.

Raja Rammohun Roy, a contemporary of Hegel, and the first prominent Indian exposed to some aspects of European Enlightenment, espoused the cause of religious, social and educational reform, since his youth. He thought that though the British rule in India was a foreign yoke, yet it ‘‘would lead more speedily and surely to the amelioration of the native inhabitants’’ of India. He was also the first Indian to be exposed to some of the current socialist ideas of Europe. In the year 1833, he came in contact with Robert Owen in England. A couple of decades later Marx expressed the opinion, that in spite of all its barbarism, the British rule was creating and would create the material preconditions for the future regeneration of India.

At a time when Marx was sending his first India-related dispatches to the NYDT, the first railway lines were being laid in India. Within a decade the railway workers began resorting to collective action. In 1862, some 1200 workers of the East Indian Railway struck work at the Howrah station, near Calcutta, demanding 8 hour working days, which was already granted to their colleagues in the locomotive department.

In the same decade, some persons of Indian and European origin jointly established the Bengal Social Science Association. The proceedings of this Association contain some papers pertaining to the conditions and interests of the toiling people of India. Marx’s excerpts from Kovalevskij’s book on communal land ownership contain a reference to a paper read at one of the sessions of this Association. Marx also took notes from a book by a member of the same Association. These notes contain a reference to another paper read at another session of the Association.

A member of the ‘fresh class’ of Indians, Shashipada Banerji, organised a Shramajibi Samiti (Labour Union), at Baranagore, near Calcutta, in 1870. In 1871, some people from Calcutta wrote to the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, expressing their desire to start an Indian Section of the IWMA. The GC of the IWMA advised them to make their section self-reliant and, to include local people in it. The fate of this initiative and, the identity of the people associated with it still remain unknown.

Shashipada Banerji brought out the first journal for the working class of colonial India, the illustrated monthly Bharat Shramajibi, in 1874. At around the same time, a pioneer of the Romantic trend in Bengali prose, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya wrote a series of articles under the title ‘‘Samya’’(‘‘Equality’’). Bankim had some acquaintance with the socialist literature of Europe, prior to Marx. He wrote:

‘‘The great tree which Rousseau had planted, through his theory that ‘the land belongs to the common people’, bore ever newer fruits. Europe is full of the fruits of that theory till date. ‘Communism’ is a fruit of that tree. The ‘International’ is a fruit of that tree.’’

The question of common ownership of land engaged the attention of 19th century scholars in a big way. Marx also dealt with the question a number of times, between the 1850s and 1880s. It is an interesting coincidence, that the name of Marx first appeared in the Indian press, in an article by Jogendra Chandra Ghosh on communal land ownership. It dealt with the bhaiachara (caste / clan brotherhood) land tenures and, gotra (gens) relationships — topics that figured in Marx’s excerpts from Kovalevskij (1879).27 It contains references to the reports of the Collector of Azimgarh, James Thomason — also studied by Kovalevskij and excerpted by Marx. Ghosh compared the land relations within the Russian mir and, the German clans at the time of Tacitus, with the same amidst the Indian gotras, and wrote:

‘‘An attempt to trace the social history of a time anterior to the formation of the village communities, and that, too, in a country where historical records are almost unknown, may, I fear, provoke ridicule if not contempt. And I shall not meddle with antiquarian researches of this description, but certain vital questions of our own day, seem to be connected with the subject. I would not, however, press the point more than to observe, that there is every possibility of a Gotra community having once existed in the country and before the days of some of the most widely prevalent laws of our society . . . And we may thus come, in fact, to obtain a faint glimpse of a probable historical connection between the communism of Russia and Germany, of Lassalle and Marx, on the one hand, and on the other, the communism of our own society — a communism which has become so much like the atmosphere we breathe, that it is my own countrymen who are most incredulous even about the logical identity of the two social phenomena.’’

Ghosh was, of course, unaware of the fact that Marx had underscored these historical connections, a clear quarter of a century before him, when he wrote: ‘‘Communal property has recently been rediscovered as a peculiarly Slavic curiosity. But in fact India offers us a pattern card of the most diverse forms of such an economic community, more or less decomposed, but still entirely recognisable; and more thorough historical study finds it as the starting point of all cultured people.’’

Throughout the 19th century, a series of efforts were undertaken to stimulate the rising political aspirations of the ‘fresh class’ of Indians. These efforts culminated in the founding of the Indian National Congress, in 1885. A part of this ‘fresh class’ was taking interest in the questions of socialism. The young poet Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore),wrote an article titled “Socialism’’. It was based on a treatise on socialism by the British socialist Earnest Belfort Bax (possibly his Religion of Socialism, 1886).

Swami Vivekananda (original name Narendranath Datta), the Hindu reformer, declared that he was a socialist. Vivekananda thought of socialism in India as the rule of the Sudras, the people of the labouring Varna, out of which grew the labouring castes of India. The problems of emancipation of the castes and tribes and those of capitalism and socialism remain inter-twined in this sub-continent till date.

Prominent Indian political figures like Dadabhai Naoroji and Madame Bhikhaji Rustom Kama came in contact with the British socialist Henry Mayers Hyndman, in the first decade of the 20th century. Though there was no socialist party in India, Dadabhai Naoroji attended the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam in 1904. Madame Kama and Sardar Singhji Rana attended the next Congress at Stuttgart in 1907. The name and teachings of Karl Marx began to draw the attention of sensitive Indians residing in Europe.

In 1910, Naginlal H. Setalvad, then residing at London, wrote an article on socialism in an influential Indian journal. It was based on a book by Werner Sombart. It contained the first major reference to the ideas of Marx and Engels in the Indian press. It mentioned the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), and suggested that a study of the teachings of Karl Marx can provide a vivid idea of the special characteristics of the new socialism of Europe.

Exactly two years later, the same journal published a biographical sketch of Karl Marx, wherein he was called a Rishi — a sage, a seer. Its author Lala Hardayal was a prominent emigrant Indian political activist and scholar, then teaching Indian Philosophy at the Stanford University. He was personally acquainted with Marx’s grandson Jean Longuet, and had read the American admirer of Charles Fourier and social reformer, Albert Brisbane on Marx, as well as a biography of Marx by John Spargo.

In his sketch, Hardayal referred to some letters of Marx’s wife Jenny and, to the Capital. The first Indian monograph on Marx was also published the same year, in the Malayalam language. Its author K. Ramakrishna Pillai was a democratically oriented journalist. Both Hardayal and Pillai knew that Marx wrote for the NYDT, yet they were not aware of the fact that some of these dispatches were about India.

After the Russian revolution of October (November) 1917, the ideas of Marx and Engels began to appear in the Indian press together with the news of Bolshevism and its progress. The All India Trade Union Congress was established in 1921. The Communist Party of India was founded in December 1925. The first Indian monograph contrasting the politics of Gandhi with that of Lenin, contained references to Marx. The first émigré Indian communist analysis of the Indian situation appeared next. From 1920 onwards, a new interest was shown by the educated people of India, especially amongst Bengalis, Malayalis and Marathis in the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. But those who brought to India in 19th century Marx’s teachings and socialist ideas were the pioneers. (IPA Service)