..."There can be no doubt, it seems to me, as to who rules India today : it is the Indian bourgeoisie. True, production is still overwhelmingly petty bourgeois in character (written in 1953. My note). But this cannot be more than a transitory stage, and already the nature of the class in power casts a pervasive influence over the political, intellectual and social life of the country.
THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM
Feudalism's decline in India may be said to date from the inability of Indian feudalism to defend the country against British penetration. To be sure, The British conquered and held the country by means of an Indian army, paid from India's resources and under British discipline; though in this respect the feudal powers of the day were not so different as might at first appear, since their own armies, also maintained at Indian expense, were often staffed by European drill sergeants and artillery experts. The difference - and it was a crucial difference - was that the British paid all their soldiers regularly in cash every month, in war or peace, paying also for supplies acquired during the march or for the barracks. The contrast is pointed out by the opposing Indian factions that fought the Battle of Panipat (A.D. 1761). Ahmad Shah Durrani's soldiers mutinied after winning the battle because they had not been paid for years; while their opponents the Marathas, maintained themselves by looting the countryside. Faced with opposition of this kind, the British-led arms were bound to triumph...........
Indian feudalism tried its strength against the British bourgeoisie for the last time in the unsuccessful rebellion of 1857. Soon thereafter, the British abandoned their long-standing policy of liquidating feudal principalities and instead began to bolster up remaining regimes of this kind - provided they were weak enough to be dependent and hence compliant. Marx noted that the very same people who fought in the British Parliament against aristocratic privilege at home voted to maintain far worse rajahs and nabobs in India - as a matter of policy, for profit.
Despite British support, and in a sense because of it, Indian feudalism no longer had any independent strength and vitality of its own. Its economic basis had been ruined by the construction of railroads, the decay of village industry, the establishment of a system of fixed assessment of land values and payment of taxes in cash rather than in kind, the importation of commodities from England, and the introduction of mechanised production in Indian cities...............................................................With British rule came survey and registry of land plots, cash taxes, cash crops for large-scale export to a world market (indigo, cotton, jute, tea, tobacco, opium), registration of debts and mortgages, alienability of the peasant's land - in a word the framework within which land could gradually be converted into capitalist private property which the former usurer could acquire and rent out and exploit...................
How thoroughly British rule undermined Indian feudalism has been dramatically demonstrated by events of recent years. The police action undertaken in 1948 by India's central government against Hyderabad, the largest and most powerful remaining feudal state, was over in two days. Political action in Travancore and Mysore, direct intervention in Junagadh and Kashmir, indirect intervention in Nepal, the absorption of Sikkim, the jailing of Saurashtra barons as common criminals - all these events showed that feudal privilege meant nothing before the new paramount power, the Indian bourgeoisie........
Another process involved in the liquidation of feudalism is exemplified by what has been happening since independence in the Gangetic basin. There the East India Company had created the class of Zamindars, tax collectors whose function was to extract tribute in kind from the peasant and convert it into cash payment to the company. As times went on, the Zamindars acquired the status and privileges of landholders and in return provided valuable political support for British rule. In recent years, a new class of capitalist landlords and well-to-do peasants of the kulak variety has been substituted for the zamindars by legislative action (the zamindars, of course receiving compensation for their expropriated holdings).
Everywhere in India, by one means or another, feudal wealth has already become capital, either of the owner or his creditors. [ Every feudalism known to history rested, in the final analysis, upon primitive handicraft production, and upon a special type of land ownership. The former of these is no longer basic in India, and the latter does not exist. ] Talk of fighting feudalism today is on a level with talk of fighting dinosaurs...................................
( On The Class Structure of India; Exasperating Essays, 1954).
From Marxist Internet Archive Library
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