A reader who opens this book expecting a tract will be disarmed within a few pages. A History of India, Volume One is a work of real learning. It carries the ancient and medieval history of the subcontinent — the Stone Age, the Harappan cities, the Vedic age, the rise of Magadha, the Mauryan and Gupta empires, the long medieval centuries down through the Delhi Sultanate, Vijayanagar and the Mughals — and it carries them with a command of the archaeology, the epigraphy and the Sanskrit and Pali sources that few single-volume histories in any language could match in 1973. Its first part is the work of Grigory Bongard-Levin, one of the Soviet Union's most distinguished Indologists and Sanskritists; the medieval sections are K. Antonova's, the modern ones (in the companion volume) Grigory Kotovsky's. Behind them stood the four-volume Soviet History of India compiled between 1959 and 1969, "some of whose authors and editors have contributed to the present study as well." This is not apparatus-committee prose. It is scholarship, and it deserves to be read as such before it is read against the grain.
It also deserves to be dated correctly. The catalogue calls it 1973, and the Russian original — issued by Mysl in Moscow — does carry that year. But the English text in front of us is something later. Its copyright page reads "First printing 1979," with the Russian imprint given twice: Mysl 1973 and Progress 1979, the second marked c izmeneniyami — "with changes." The English translation, by Katharine Judelson, is © Progress Publishers 1979. So the book we hold is a revised English edition prepared at the end of the decade from a text first written in the early 1970s. Nothing in a history of the Guptas turns on six years, and I will speak of it as a book of the 1970s; but the distinction matters for placing it, because the 1970s were the years in which Soviet writing about India was doing a very particular kind of work.
The Preface says so without embarrassment. The book's stated purpose is to "provide the reader with a deeper knowledge of India and the history and culture of its peoples, and thus promote friendly relations between India and the Soviet Union." It speaks of "a deep affection for the peoples of India and a sense of international solidarity," of "the broad political, economic and cultural ties which have grown up between the USSR and India." This was written in the wake of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971 — the treaty that anchored Soviet policy in South Asia for two decades and that framed the USSR's alignment with New Delhi against Pakistan, China and, behind them, the United States. Soviet Indology in these years was, among other things, an instrument of that alignment. A generous, respectful, deeply researched history of India was a diplomatic good, and everyone involved understood it as one. The Preface's warmth is genuine, and it is also policy. Both things are true at once, and the book is more interesting when they are held together than when either is denied.
So let us begin with what is genuinely good, because there is a great deal of it and because the criticism that follows depends on the credit being honest. Bongard-Levin's chapters on the deep past are the strongest thing here. The account of the Palaeolithic and the Harappan civilisation is careful, current for its date, and — this is the tell of a real scholar — repeatedly willing to say that the evidence does not settle the question. On the vexed matter of who ruled the Indus cities and how, the book lays out the competing hypotheses (V. V. Struve and Walter Ruben's guess that the Harappan order rested on slave-ownership; the priestly-landlord analogy with Mesopotamia; a republican-oligarchic reading) and then declines to choose: "as yet the data and evidence in support of this theory are inadequate," "again evidence is inconclusive." That restraint runs through the ancient sections. The treatment of Vedic society, of the varna order, of the Mauryan state and its administration, of Ashoka's edicts and the spread of Buddhism, is sober and source-anchored; where the sources are thin the book says so. On the slavery of the Magadha–Mauryan age it draws on specialised Soviet work — G. F. Ilyin's — and reconstructs the categories of bondage, the manumission rules of the Arthashastra, and the price of a slave from the Buddhist texts, with genuine philological care. The medieval chapters carry the political narrative of the Sultanate and the Mughals, the revenue systems, Akbar's religious experiment, the Maratha ascent, with the same competence. None of this is propaganda, and a reader will come away from it knowing more about ancient India than most Western textbooks of the period would have taught.
The book is also, in one important respect, ahead of much of the scholarship of its day. On caste, it refuses the racial theory that European Indology had built into the very word. It notes that caste is a Portuguese import — "in Portuguese means race or lineage" — laid over the Sanskrit jati, and it carefully separates jati from varna, treating the four varnas as social estates that hardened only gradually into caste-like rigidity. Above all it rejects the old colonial fable that caste encodes the conquest of dark-skinned natives by fair Aryans: the idea "of Aryan superiority, their racial purity, of suppression by the Aryans of coloured natives" is set out and then dismantled, with the plain observation that "the word varna is not used to designate skin colour." To have written that in 1973 was to be on the right side of an argument that still had defenders. The book's instinct — to read caste as a social and economic institution rather than a racial one — is sound, and it is Marxist in the best, most usable sense.
And here we reach the seam where the scholarship meets the doctrine, because the way this book handles the shape of Indian history — its periodisation — is where a Soviet text of this vintage cannot be neutral, and where its silences are loudest.
Begin with an irony that the book never acknowledges and perhaps could not. The single most influential Marxist analysis of India ever written was Marx's own — the articles on British rule in India he sent the New York Daily Tribune in the summer of 1853, and the letters he exchanged with Engels that June. And the concept Marx built that analysis on was the one this book never uses. Marx read India through what he came to call the Asiatic mode of production: a society of self-sufficient, inward-looking village communities; an absence of private property in landed property, with the state as universal landlord standing above the villages; land-rent and state-tax merged into a single levy; and, resting on all this, the centralised "Oriental despotism" that Marx thought had made Indian history so strangely static. In their letters of that June, Marx and Engels agreed that the absence of private property in land was the key to the whole of the East. Whatever one thinks of that framework today — and it has been criticised, from within Marxism and outside it, as an Orientalist residue that mistook colonial disruption for timeless changelessness — it was Marx's, it was specifically about India, and it is the natural theoretical home for exactly the phenomena this book spends its central chapters describing.
Now search this history for the term. "Asiatic mode of production" does not appear in it. Neither does "Asiatic" in any cognate sense; the word is simply absent from 117,000 words on the very civilisation for which Marx coined it. That absence is not an oversight. It is the fingerprint of a decision taken far above the authors' heads and decades before they wrote. In the theoretical debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s — the Leningrad discussion of 1931 was the decisive moment — the Asiatic mode was condemned and effectively banned in Soviet scholarship. It implied that a large part of humanity had followed a distinct, non-European, and above all non-progressive road, and that offended both the universal five-stage scheme then being canonised (primitive-communal → slave-owning → feudal → capitalist → socialist) and, not incidentally, the political needs of a state that wished to tell the colonial world its future was open. Stalin's 1938 codification, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, fixed the five stages as the universal ladder every society climbs. After that, Soviet historians of Asia had one permitted task: to find slavery and feudalism where Marx had found something he thought was neither.
Watch this book perform that task, and watch how honestly it strains against it. For ancient India the required category is the slave-owning formation, and the book duly supplies the verdict: in Magadha, "the most advanced part of the country," "it was evidently the socio-economic formation based on slave-ownership that was dominant in the complex social structure." But read the sentence that immediately follows. "Although the labour of free members of village communities, tenant farmers and hired labourers played a dominant role in the main spheres of production," the book concedes, slavery "was not the only form of exploitation, yet at the same time it was the most important one." The evidence the authors themselves have assembled says the opposite of their conclusion: by their own account, free and hired labour, not slave labour, dominated production. Elsewhere they are franker still. The "specific features of slavery as found in ancient Indian society were first and foremost its immaturity and its patriarchal character. Slave labour came very close to the labour of free hired labourers." Vedic slavery is "undeveloped, patriarchal"; the Arthashastra brackets slaves and hired men together; Megasthenes' report that "all Indians were free and not one of them was a slave" is dismissed as a mistake, but it is the kind of mistake an outsider makes about a society where slavery is real but marginal. A scholar reading the evidence without the ladder would conclude that ancient India was not a slave society in any strong sense. The ladder requires that it be one, so the label is applied and the evidence quietly filed under "specific features."
The medieval half of the book contains the sharpest instance of all — sharp because here the authors come to the very edge of naming what they are forbidden to name. Under the heading "Indian Feudalism," the book records that "most Soviet Indologists regard the period from the seventh to the eighteenth century as the age of Indian history dominated by feudalism," and then, with striking candour, notes that "this assertion is questioned by a number of scholars in view of the fact that the socio-economic order of medieval India differed from that of medieval Europe." It then lists the differences — and the list is, point for point, Marx's description of the Asiatic mode. In India "the hierarchical structure of the ruling class was weakly developed, and at certain periods was lacking altogether." "Rent was usually exacted from the peasants in the form of a fixed state tax." "There was also no serfdom in India." And, most tellingly: "One of the specific factors distinguishing the Indian form of feudalism from the European variety was the predominance of state-owned land." No private property in land; rent and tax fused; no serfdom; a state that is the universal landlord — this is the Asiatic mode, enumerated feature by feature. The authors even devote a paragraph to "the state ownership of land in India" as a distinct object of Soviet debate. And having assembled the entire case, they close it thus: "This explains why the term feudalism is used with reference to India although it must be emphasised that certain of its features were quite distinct from the European model." The concept is present in all but name. The word is the one thing that cannot be written.
The village community completes the picture. Marx's Asiatic society was, above all, a mosaic of self-sufficient villages, and the book describes exactly that — the grama with its combination of handicraft and cultivation, its "inward-looking, patriarchal character," its long isolation: "for a long period the village communities were isolated one from the other, remaining self-sufficient institutions." This is Marx's village community to the letter. What is missing is only the name Marx gave to the whole formation it belonged to. The scholarship reaches the Asiatic mode from every direction and stops just short of the word, like a compass needle held away from north by a magnet under the table.
None of this makes the book worthless; it makes it a document of constrained intelligence, which is more valuable. The reader who knows the constraint can read straight through it. Where the book insists on feudalism while itemising the predominance of state-owned land, the absence of serfdom and the missing hierarchy, the reader may supply the category the authors were not allowed to use, and lose nothing. The forced periodisation is a tax levied on the prose, not a corruption of the underlying research — which is precisely why it can be detected: the evidence keeps contradicting the label, in the authors' own sentences.
The cost is subtler on caste. Here the book's Marxism is mostly an asset — the rejection of the racial theory, the insistence on social and economic explanation — but the same stage-ladder flattens what it illuminates. Caste is subordinated to property differentiation and to a developmental sequence: varna arises from "the break-up of primitive communal relations and the development of inequality based on differences in property ownership," and caste itself is glossed, on Marx's authority, as "a vestigial form of tribal organisation." (The book attributes the phrase to Marx; I have not been able to verify Marx's exact wording against a text I hold, and flag it as the authors' citation rather than a checked quotation.) Read caste as a vestige and a by-product of class formation and you explain a great deal — but you also explain away the thing that most needs explaining: why a ritual order of purity and pollution, endogamy and hereditary occupation, should have proved so durable, so productive of its own hierarchy, so resistant to the levelling that "mere" property relations undergo. The living structure gets absorbed into the sequence. This is not falsification; it is the characteristic thinness of an analysis that must make every society tell the same story.
What the book cannot do, the tradition this series writes from could and did. The anti-Stalinist Marxists never accepted that history was a single staircase every nation must climb in the same order. Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development — that backward societies do not repeat the advanced ones' path but fuse archaic and modern forms into something new — was formulated precisely against the unilinear stagism that Stalinism turned into dogma, and it is a far better instrument for a subcontinent where, on this book's own showing, "archaic institutions and features of primitive communal organisation endured for a long period" alongside empire, coinage and long-distance trade. The Asiatic mode itself was kept alive as a live question in the West and among independent Marxists long after Moscow had closed the file; the debate the book cannot join was flourishing elsewhere throughout the years it was written.
And there is a second, blunter irony, one that reaches past method into politics. This is a history published to "promote friendly relations between India and the Soviet Union" — a book of the 1971 treaty, of state-to-state solidarity with the government of India. It is worth remembering what Soviet solidarity with India had meant a generation earlier, when the object was not a friendly government but a colonial revolution. In his Open Letter to the Workers of India of July 1939, Trotsky charged that Stalin's Comintern "has completely renounced revolutionary struggle for India's independence," reduced to demanding on its knees that British imperialism grant "democratic liberties" — that "as regards the colonies of England and France the Comintern has completely gone over to Gandhi's position." Moscow subordinated the Indian masses to its diplomacy then, courting the imperial powers; it subordinated them again in the 1970s, courting the Indian bourgeois state that Trotsky had said could never lead the struggle because it was "closely bound up with and dependent upon" capital and stood "in fear of the masses." A warm history of India's glorious antiquity is the friendly face of a policy whose consistent content, across four decades, was raison d'état. The book flatters India's past; the tradition it comes out of had, in living memory, declined to fight for India's future.
That is the frame to bring to it, and it takes nothing away from the learning. A History of India, Volume One is the work of serious scholars doing serious work inside a cage they did not build and could not name. The archaeology is real; the philology is real; the refusal of the racial theory of caste is a genuine and creditable act of Marxist good sense. Read it for the Harappan cities and the Mauryan state and the Sultanate's revenue and you will be well repaid. Read the periodisation as what it is — an ideological fingerprint pressed into an otherwise honest text, the place where a banned idea leaves its outline in the shape of its own absence — and the book teaches something its authors could not say: that Marx's India would not fit into Stalin's staircase, and that the men and women who knew India best kept discovering the fact, sentence by sentence, even as they were obliged to deny it.