66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Marx summed up this rejection as follows: "It is not the consciousness of men which determines their being, but on the contrary their social being which determines their consciousness."4 At the same time, he vehemently rejected all types of historical determinism. The view of Marx and Engels on the validity of historical abstractions is instructive: "Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or a schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement—the real depiction—of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present."5 This outlook is of enormous importance as the scientific foundation for a study of India, insofar as it focussed on an enquiry into the social being of the Indian people, the conditions it has developed in, the struggles it has unleashed, and the possible course of future development. In short, the incisive understanding of Marx, for the first time in human history, opened the door for an objective analysis of colonialism and put an end to the racist theories of the colonial masters that hinged on the supposed level of consciousness of the Indian people as the sole basis of their misery and stagnation. However, the fact that even after nearly a century and half, the study of India on Marxist lines is still in its infant stage bears testimony to the continuing domination of our academic establishment by the forces of mystification and obscurantism and the continuing hold of the exploiting classes over our economic, social and cultural lives. Marx's Approach to India The essence of this approach is captured in one sweep in the following statement in an ariticle on "British Rule in India" (June 10, 1853): "Hindustan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the plains of Bengal for the plains of Lombardy, the Deccanfor the Appenines, and the isle of Ceylon for the island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror's sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindustan, when not under the pressure of the Mahommedan or Mogul, or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting states as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, 4 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1971, p 21. 5 Marx-Engels, "The German Ideology", in Selected Works, 1965, Vol II, p 38.