68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST India had a limited objective and scope. He began his well-known articles in 1853 when the British parliament was debating the question of revising the charter given to the East India Company. British politicians themselves being divided on the issue, the Bill under discussion in parliament became a matter of public ccontroversy. Marx was naturally interested in the questions raised on India, as he was interested in every other question connected with the development of British capitalism. He was therefore trying to relate the development of British colonialism in India against the background of capitalist development in the home country. These debates in the British parliament and Marx's articles on them coincided in time with the gathering storm of people's discontent which was to break out in the form of a two-year war of independence in May 1857. In all these writings (which have now been brought out in Moscow in a collection under the title First War of Indian Independence, Marx analyzed the forces that were released by the activities and final victory of the British East India Company. The founder of the theory of Historical Materialism that he was, Marx could not confine himself to the analysis of the questions raised in the British parliament in the form in which they were raised. He had to go behind them and unravel the socio-economic forces which, by a combination of circumstances, led to the break-up of a stagnant precapitalist Indian society—caste-ridden, very much under the influence of religious obscurantism and with large elements of tribal society still continuing—that too by a foreign power, rather than the indigenous forces of social revolution. He asked himself the question whether the break-up of this stagnant society was from a historical point of view progressive. Properties of the Transformation The revolutionary theoretician and the organizer of revolutionary political action in Marx discerned in this destruction of the old its two aspects: firstly, that the destruction of the stagnant Indian society was from a historical point of view a progressive development, the British overlords being the "unconscious tools of history" in bringing about a veritable revolution in Indian society; secondly, this revolution being carried out by a foreign power which, furthermore, is interested in making only such changes in Indian society as serve their (the Britishers') narrow self interest, the destruction of the stagnant society would not be accompanied by the construction of a new and vigorous society. In bringing about this dual character of the "revolution" in Indian society, Marx of course had his limitations arising out of the fact that he was relying on such sources as are interested in particular "stereotypes" created by imperialist scholars and administrators. One need not therefore look upon the remarks made by Marx on "oriental despotism", "unchanging character of Indian society", "absence of private property in land and so on as the last word in historical materialism in relation to India. The science of history as it pertains to India should go forward