The spine and the catalogue say 1973. The book in your hands is later than that, and it matters. The copyright page carries two dates: the Russian original, © Mysl, 1973, and beneath it a second line — "English translation of revised Russian text. © Progress Publishers 1979," first printing 1978. This is not the 1973 book put into English. It is a revised and extended text, and the revision runs a long way. Its final chapters carry India through Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–77, the lifting of that Emergency, the Congress rout of March 1977 and the swearing-in of Morarji Desai's Janata government, closing on the thirtieth anniversary of independence and the sixtieth of the October Revolution in the autumn of 1977. When you read its judgements, date them to the end of the 1970s, not to 1973.
This is the second of the two volumes — India in modern times, from the collapse of the Moghul empire and the British conquest through to the mid-1970s. The eighteenth-century chapters are by K. A. Antonova; everything from the 1860s forward — which is to say the whole of the national movement, independence, partition and the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years — is signed by G. G. Kotovsky. Grigory Kotovsky headed the India department at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and he was among the most substantial of Soviet Indologists. That is worth saying at the outset, because this is not a hack's compilation. It is a serious work of scholarship, and it is also, in its later chapters, a work of Soviet foreign policy. Both things are true, and the interest of the book lies in watching where the first turns into the second.
Begin with what should be conceded plainly, because the book earns it. The account of British colonial exploitation is real history, carefully sourced, and often powerful. Antonova's chapters on the conquest of Bengal are unsentimental about what the East India Company did. The plunder of the Bengal treasury after Plassey is called what it was: "the beginning of shameless pumping of India's riches over to Britain," and the figure is given — "between 1757 and 1780 Britain drained from India commodities and coins amounting to a total value of 38 million pounds." This is the "drain of wealth" that Indian nationalist economists — Dadabhai Naoroji, R. C. Dutt — spent their lives documenting, and the book puts it at the centre where it belongs.
So too the destruction of Indian manufacture. The book traces the ruin of the Dacca weavers, the deindustrialisation of Bengal, and the tariff regime that engineered it: a duty of two to three and a half per cent on British cloth entering India against twenty to thirty per cent on Indian cloth entering Britain, "as a result [of which] India was forced to start importing cloth instead of exporting it as before." And it does not flinch from the famines. On the Bengal famine of 1770 it writes that "millions of people died of hunger, food prices rose to astronomic heights, while the gentlemen of London would not even hear of a reduction in taxes." On the far greater Bengal famine of 1943 it records over five million dead, and identifies the cause precisely — not a shortfall in the harvest but "the poor distribution machinery of the British administration and the continuing export of cereals despite the harvest failure: when India herself was short of four million tons, a million tons of food grain was exported."
None of this is Soviet invention. It is the ground Marx himself worked in his 1853 articles for the New-York Daily Tribune — "The British Rule in India" and "The Future Results of British Rule in India" — where he set down both the drain and the smashing of the handloom, and where he argued, with a dialectician's ambivalence that the nationalist schools never quite forgave him, that British imperialism was at once wrecking the old India and, against its own will, laying the material foundations on which a new one might be built. The revolutionary tradition against which this series measures Progress does not dispute the record of colonial exploitation; it insists on it. When Kotovsky's chapters reach the twentieth century they are on the same ground: the Fourth International's own analysts, writing in 1944, described the 1943 Bengal famine in almost the same terms as the book does — as the point at which "British imperialism transferred onto the backs of the always poverty-stricken Indian masses an intolerable proportion of the burden of its war effort." On the crime of colonialism the book and its critics are not far apart. The parting of the ways comes over who was to end it, and how.
Here is the doctrine that organises the whole second half of the book. In the Soviet reading, the Indian National Congress was the political expression of a national bourgeoisie — a bourgeoisie whose interests, because it was itself oppressed by imperialism, pointed it in an objectively anti-imperialist and therefore progressive direction. Gandhi is handled with striking gentleness; Nehru is very nearly a hero. And Nehru's India — the expanding state sector, the Planning Commission and the five-year plans, the "society on the socialist pattern" adopted at Avadi in 1955, non-alignment, panchsheel and Bandung — is presented as a genuinely progressive road, one that might even open onto something beyond capitalism. The book says so almost explicitly. It describes the state sector as being "of an undeniably anti-imperialist character," reports that the "progressive aspects of Indian economic policy … were welcomed by the peoples of the Soviet Union and the entire socialist community," and, most tellingly, notes that the Indian big bourgeoisie feared the state sector precisely because it "might in the future become the economic base for a shift in the direction of non-capitalist development."
That phrase — "non-capitalist development" — is the tell. It is the same doctrine of "socialist orientation" that runs through the other national-liberation volumes in this series, the theory that a state led by radical nationalists, leaning on a state economic sector and allied to Moscow, could bypass a capitalist stage of development altogether. The reader who wants to see the machinery running elsewhere should look at the companion Progress titles on Kaysone Phomvihane's Laos (Revolution in Laos, 1981) and the collective USSR and Countries of Africa (1980), where the same categories — the progressive national bourgeoisie, the non-capitalist path, the state sector as anti-imperialist lever — are applied to societies with far less industry and far less of a proletariat than India ever had. In each case the theory did the same political work: it identified a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist regime as an ally, and it counselled the local Communists to support it.
To the book's credit, Kotovsky is too good an economist to pretend the results were what the theory promised. He records that the creation of the state sector "did not change the socio-economic character of Indian society, on the contrary, it stimulated the expansion of private capitalist enterprise"; he watches the Birla, Tata and Mafatlal groups swell under the protection of the plans; he notes that a handful of monopoly houses ended up owning three-quarters of the assets of India's private joint-stock companies. The facts are all there. What survives them, unchanged, is the political valuation: Congress remains progressive, its bourgeoisie national, its road one that Soviet readers should applaud.
The revolutionary answer to this was old, and it was specifically about India. In his Open Letter to the Workers of India of July 1939 — published in the New International that September, on the very eve of the war — Trotsky wrote flatly that "the Indian bourgeoisie is incapable of leading a revolutionary struggle. They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism. They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses." Of the figure this book treats so tenderly he was merciless: "The leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false prophet!" The theory of permanent revolution — which the Soviet volumes attack by name and never state — held that in a belated colonial country the bourgeoisie could not carry through even its own democratic tasks, that only the proletariat, drawing the peasant masses behind it, could complete the national and agrarian revolution, and that it could not stop at the bourgeois stage once it had taken power. The book's own hero, M. N. Roy, learned this the hard way and is punished for it in these pages: Roy's "sectarian" error, we are told, lay in "his rejection of any role for the national bourgeoisie in the freedom movement," and for it he was expelled from the Comintern in 1929. The category that convicts Roy is the same one that acquits Nehru.
Now to the sharpest matter, and the place where a scholar's candour and a state's requirements pull hardest against each other.
In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the war the world's Communist parties had been calling an imperialist war became, overnight, a just war of anti-fascist defence. In India the Communist Party followed Moscow into a line it called "People's War." What that meant in practice the book states without appearing to notice what it has stated. The CPI, it writes, began "advocating turning the war against the Axis powers into a people's war," which "led it to oppose any interruption of arms production." When the Congress launched the Quit India movement in August 1942 — the largest anti-colonial upsurge of the war, met by the Raj with more than two thousand killed and some sixty thousand arrested — the CPI's Central Committee, the book concedes, "took a negative view of the 'August Revolution'." The British authorities legalised the Party in July 1942, and the book explains why with devastating frankness: legalisation "undeniably promoted the consolidation of the Asian rear for the Allies," and "represented a positive gesture towards the Soviet Union." "Unlike the Congress," it adds, "the CPI had not made its support of the British war effort conditional upon the establishment of a responsible government." Its newspaper, People's War, "continued to spread the ideas of scientific communism among the masses of the working people."
Read those sentences again. A Communist party opposed the interruption of arms production, opposed the mass movement for independence, was legalised by the colonial state as a reward, and gave the British war effort a support more unconditional than the bourgeois Congress would offer — and the book records every fact and calls the sum of them "certain mistakes … as was later acknowledged by the Communist Party of India." The word doing the work there is "acknowledged": the judgement is subcontracted to the CPI's own later self-criticism, so that the author never has to make it himself. And note what is missing. The whole reversal is attributed to the changed character of the war after June 1941; its author is never named. Stalin does not appear once in this book, in 148,000 words; the words "Comintern" and "Moscow" carry the weight, and the decision that turned the Indian Communists against India's own rebellion is presented as a spontaneous response to events rather than a line handed down.
The contemporaneous verdict of the revolutionary movement is on the record, and it is not gentle. In October 1944 the Fourth International's journal published the assessment of its Indian co-thinkers: "The Communist Party of India, pursuant to its policy of unconditional support of the British imperialist war effort, openly and actively opposed the mass struggle, thus making themselves the tool of British imperialism in India." It spoke of "the traitorous support of the trade union bureaucracy and the Stalinists, who everywhere act openly as British imperialism's agencies within the working class." One may think that harsh; one cannot think it uninformed, for it was written in the moment, by people being jailed in the same country. And it was not hindsight: Trotsky had forecast the whole thing in 1939, warning that on Stalin's instructions "the Indian people must support their present slave owners, the British imperialists." The book's own facts confirm the prediction. It simply declines to draw the conclusion.
Who were these co-thinkers? The book will not quite say. In its single glancing reference, the fierce ideological struggle over the People's War line ran "between the Communists and various other Left groups, mainly those of Trotskyite leanings." That half-clause is the only trace in the whole volume of a real current in Indian politics. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Burma and Ceylon was founded at a conference in May 1942 — the very month the crisis broke — fusing Trotskyist groups from Bengal, the United Provinces and Bihar with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party of Ceylon. It was small, it was hunted, and it took the theory of permanent revolution directly to the Indian question. Crucially, on the decisive issue it stood where the CPI did not: the BLPI supported the August 1942 rising, and by its own account emerged from it as "the recognized extreme left-wing of the Indian labor movement," while its members were rounded up in police raids set off, they charged, by a "Stalinist stool-pigeon." Its programmatic documents — a class analysis of India, a transitional programme — were published in the pages of the Fourth International in 1942 and after.
This is why the book cannot name them. To name the BLPI would be to record that there existed, in 1942, an Indian Marxist current that backed the anti-colonial upsurge which the official Communist Party opposed — and that this current called itself Trotskyist. The silence is not an oversight in a work this thorough. It is structural. A history written to vindicate the CPI's alliance with Moscow cannot afford to let the reader meet the Marxists who broke with Moscow over precisely the moment the CPI is least able to defend.
The other great silence concerns Telangana. Here the book is more forthcoming than one might expect — and then stops one step short. It describes the Telangana peasant uprising vividly and sympathetically: begun in 1946 against the Nizam of Hyderabad, spreading across a huge area, throwing up village councils (panchayats) and self-defence detachments, redistributing over 1,200,000 acres. It even records, without apparent discomfort, that when Hyderabad was absorbed into the Indian Union in September 1948 the army of independent India turned on the peasants: "Regular Indian troops not only wiped out the razakar detachments, but also embarked on action against the insurgent peasants in Telengana." "In 1949 units of the regular Indian army, sent to Telengana to put down the uprising, entered Hyderabad. After that the uprising developed into a guerilla war, which lasted until 1951."
What ended it? The book's answer is sociological: "a split within the insurgents' camp took place," as the more prosperous peasants, satisfied by land reform, abandoned a movement increasingly led by the poor. That is part of the truth. The part the book omits is political. The Telangana armed struggle was called off in October 1951 by decision of the Communist Party of India — a decision taken after the Party's leaders had consulted Moscow, and in line with the turn away from insurrection that Soviet counsel then favoured. The largest armed peasant movement in modern Indian history, the nearest thing the subcontinent produced to a rural red base, was wound up on advice from abroad. A book that can describe the Indian army crushing the peasants cannot bring itself to describe the Communist Party ordering them to lay down their arms. Once again the silence falls exactly where Soviet direction of the Indian movement would have to be admitted.
The same optic governs the book's treatment of everything to its left thereafter. When the Communist Party split in 1964, the book writes from the standpoint of the pro-Moscow CPI: the breakaway Communist Party of India (Marxist) is the "parallel" party, guilty of "splitting tactics," which had the temerity of "accusing the leadership of the CPI of revisionism." And the peasant revolt that erupted at Naxalbari in 1967 and gave the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) its name appears only as the work of "the Naxalites (Left extremists)" — a phrase that lumps armed landless peasants together, a few pages later, with the RSS and the Ananda Marg as "extremist organisations" of left and right to be banned. A reader would never guess from these pages that the Naxalite revolt was a Communist rising against exactly the Congress order the book spends its final chapters praising.
Why this shape? Because of when and for what the revised text was made. By 1978 the Soviet Union and India were bound by the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation of August 1971; the alliance had been sealed in blood in the Bangladesh war of that December, and consecrated by Brezhnev's state visit to Delhi in November 1973, which the book recounts at reverent length. India's "underground nuclear explosion for peaceful purposes" of 1974 is noted with approval; the Bhilai and Bokaro steel plants, built with Soviet aid, are a recurring point of pride. The last twenty-odd pages are, frankly, a hymn to Soviet-Indian friendship, culminating in Morarji Desai's Moscow visit of October 1977. This is Soviet Indology working in the service of the alliance, and the alliance required a particular history: one in which Congress is a friend, Nehru's road is progressive, and the Communist Party of India is a loyal supporting player whose worst moments — 1942, 1951 — can be recorded in fragments but never judged, because to judge them would be to admit that the CPI's compass pointed to Moscow rather than to the Indian revolution.
That is the book's limit, and it is a real one. But a serious reader is not told to throw it away. Kotovsky and Antonova have given us a colonial economic history of India that holds up — on the drain, the deindustrialisation, the famines, the agrarian structure, the mechanics of the plans — and that remains, in places, among the fuller Marxist treatments available in English of its period. Take the economic history and use it. Read the political narrative of the twentieth century against the grain, watching for the sentences that state a fact and withhold its meaning, and for the two or three names — the Bolshevik-Leninist Party, Stalin, the CPI's decision of October 1951 — that a book this thorough could only have left out on purpose.