4 - SOCIAL SCIENTIST
ded facilities for the British colonizers to occupy and exploit its resources for the development of capitalism in their own country and its expansion throughout the world.
2) The source material on which he had to depend consisted mainly of the works of scholars, administrators and publicists drawn from the ruling class of the occupying country. Marx, the revolutionary, could, of course, see through the ruling class orientation of this material and expose the class interests hidden behind the researches of these scholars, administrators and publicists. He, however, was handicapped by the fact that no other material was available to him.
3) Arising out of the second, he saw India as one country with one social system, rather than as a multinational country which we can today appreciate more clearly, using the Marxist method developed by Lenin, Stalin and their followers.
Two Aspects of Decadent Indian Society
It will, therefore, be rash on the part of the present-day Indologists to consider the writings of Marx on India as the last word of wisdom which historical materialism can provide on India. It is, on the other hand, the bounden duty of all Indologists basing themselves on historical materialism to make a painstaking study of the massive material accumulated by a host of scholars, administrators and publicists in India and abroad during the century and a quarter that have elapsed since Marx's well-known works on India were written. Such material is even now being collected in abundance and will no doubt be collected in the future too. It will be contrary to the spirit of Marxism to neglect this enormous wealth of knowledge, as if the present-day Indologists can safely confine themselves to the writings of Marx. This, however, would not invalidate the kernel of truth concerning Indian society revealed by Marx in his well-known articles in the American paper. This truth may be divided into two parts:
1) Indian society had, for several centuries, remained in a stage of stagnation and decay; its destruction had come as the order of the day. However, since there were no internal forces which could destory the stagnant and decaying old society, the external force that appeared on the scene, the European trading bourgeoisie who came to India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly the most modern and" powerful of them, the Britih trading-cum-industrial bourgeoisie, were the "unconscious tools of history". Marx, the revolutionary, therefore did not shed a single drop of tear at this destruction, though with his deep humanism