Sunday, March 13, 2005

Of what Marx thought on India

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes (referring to the British), and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism (referring to the natives, the Indians) which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny. - Karl Marx: The British Rule in India, New-York Herald Tribune 1853

Allowing no social mobility, even when the individual is capable? What a ruthless society this is? Even the thought of it can prove to be so fatalistic in nature. The British meanwhile, had not done anything useful to tackle the social injustices tactfully. To be honest, they have used the divide and conquer strategy to their advantage to falsely claim superiority over the natives.

I sincerely hope, all these shit, (yes shit) can be completely removed from the minds of the natives at least during our children's children time.

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