Marxist Historiography/ Approach

The beginning of the Marxist approach in India was heralded by two classic books—Rajni Palme Dutt’s India Today and

A.R. Desai’s Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Originally written for the famous Left Book Club in England, India Today, first published in 1940 in England, was later published in India in 1947. A.R. Desai’s Social Background of Indian Nationalism, was first published in 1948.

Unlike the imperialist/colonial approach, the Marxist historians clearly see the primary contradiction between the interests of the colonial masters and the subject people, as well as the process of the nation-in-the-making. Unlike the nationalists, they also take full note of the inner contradictions between the different sections of the people of the Indian society. However, some of them, particularly Rajni Palme

Dutt, were unable to fully integrate their treatment of the primary anti-imperialist contradiction and the secondary inner contradictions and tended to counterbalance the anti- imperialist struggle with the class or social struggle. They tend to see the national movement as a structured bourgeois movement, if not the bourgeoisie’s movement, and miss its open ended and all-class character. Another noted Marxist historian, who made a critique of R.P. Dutt’s paradigm, is Sumit Sarkar; he considers Dutt’s paradigm as a “simplistic version of the Marxian class approach”. He looks at the nationalist leaders in the light of intelligentsia which acts as a “kind of proxy for as yet passive social forces with which it had little organic connection”.

A.R. Desai traces the growth of the national movement in five phases, each phase based on particular social classes which supported and sustained it.