“Rather than London, what if Marx had been in Lahore or Ludhiana in the mid-nineteenth century, and had to explain accumulation from that vantage point?” (62). This is one of the questions that animate a chapter in my book Labors of division: Global capitalism and the emergence of the peasant in colonial Panjab (Stanford University Press, 2024). The reason I pose such a speculative counterfactual is to bring to the fore an ongoing tension between the immense value of Marx’s insights for the study of historical change alongside the inescapable boundaries, contexts and conditions that made it possible. It is from within this apparent contradiction that I seek to draw on Marx differently. On the one hand, I reject the charge of Eurocentrism against his oeuvre as largely rhetorical and anachronistic. The suppleness of Marx’s writings gives opportunity to make a range of arguments without relying on a false expectation of omniscience from what could only be an itinerant German radical of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, nor do I accept that his ideas are automatically universal, and that all historical phenomena inexorably follow certain propositions elevated to the status of logics derived from his texts. The world is vast, and it would be mechanical as well as ahistorical (and thus un-Marxist) to contort Marx into a set of portable prescriptions to be applied to every situation. While this sort of double-sided critique might seem impertinent, it does not rely on condemning straw men and paper tigers. Making sense of Marx beyond a deny-or-apply binary was an active concern as I grappled with writing a history of labor, caste and capital in colonial Panjab.
There are at least three areas of my book that engage closely with elements of Marx. In Chapter 1, I examine the peculiar history of the land revenue settlement in mid-nineteenth century Panjab. British officials used the idioms of caste, tribe and religion to identify certain groups as peasants, giving them exclusive ownership of parcels of land along with a responsibility to pay taxes in cash to the state. This inaugurated a new form of accumulation distinct from the standard narrative of Western Europe. Here I analyze the last few chapters of Marx’s 1867 Capital: Volume 1, where he provides an account of the tremendous violence used to dispossess and displace peasants from the countryside into cities. Creating a group of people who owned nothing yet were desperate to work for wages was a pre-condition to industrial capitalism in places like England. Marx’s narrative of accumulation has been expanded upon by Rosa Luxemburg as an ongoing and uneven global process, and by David Harvey who coined the phrase “accumulation by dispossession.”
In Panjab, however, peasants were entrenched rather than separated from their villages, engaging in new technologies of cultivation under colonialism while becoming dominant over other groups relegated to the status of landless laborers. Usually scholars have interpreted the relative power of the Punjabi peasant as a sign of the persistence of semi-feudalism, or an incomplete transition to capitalism proper. But I argue that what Marx witnessed in Europe was circumstantial and reliant on a partial archive, and thus not intended to be used as a blueprint for the rest of the world. “[W]e must say,” insists Louis Althusser, “that Marx did not give us any theory of the transition from one mode of production to another” (59). It is our task to take up such lines of inquiry wherever they may lead. In this way, I provincialize the narrative of accumulation to provide an alternative history of the operations capital and culture in colonial Panjab.
The next invocation of Marx in the book is from a discussion of the struggle for caste emancipation in Chapter 4. It is a departure from the usual focus on economic change to instead examine the possibilities and limitations of social mobility in early twentieth century Panjabi society. I begin with B.R. Ambedkar’s 1936 aborted speech on annihilating caste where he calls on Dalits to leave Hinduism in order to finally achieve equality. By this time in Panjab, however, these groups had already converted in large numbers to other faiths such as Sikhi, Islam and Christianity, and even created their own called Ad Dharm. From 1881 to 1931, the percentage of Hindu Dalits (mainly of the Chamar and Churha castes) dropped from 68% to 47% and 58% to 24%, respectively. Nonetheless, they still experienced myriad forms of subordination and exclusion as a result of being exploited as menial laborers in the new agrarian economy.
In order to explicate the contradiction between social status and material wellbeing—or, equal citizen and unequal individual—I invoke Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.” He lays bare the shallowness of a politics that can proclaim equality in one domain of life while leaving all sorts of inequalities intact and even naturalized in the other. The “political suppression of private property,” Marx points out, “not only does not abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence” (215). Indeed, liberal modernity reaches its apogee with the bifurcation of the subject into public and private selves. Yet I demonstrate how a person’s dignity, status and value were inextricable from the economic conditions that shaped their everyday lives. Landless laborers professing a different faith from landowning peasants nonetheless remained without land, and therefore confined to the bottom rungs of a new rural hierarchy. What this reveals, then, is that the struggle for full emancipation has a different horizon for transcending rather than overturning the modern configuration of caste.
In the last chapter of the book, I chart a global intellectual history of the category peasant. How did it come to be invested with notions of deficiency and an expectation to change, and what did this mean for its trajectory in South Asia apparently diverging from Europe? I begin with the turn-of-the-century debate between Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky. Despite holding conflicting views on the specific dynamics of rural society, they concurred on the necessity of peasant dissolution for the eventual transition to capitalism. The sense of mutability, I argue, was based on the foundational claims made in Adam Smith’s 1776 An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. He deployed a series of comparisons, assertions and extrapolations to assemble the raw materials of “a theory of peasant inadequacy” (222). The rural peasantry served as the deprived opposite of urban workers in order to valorize the superiority of manufacturing over agriculture, which became the true measure of wealth. To challenge this formulation, I then adapt Marx’s approach from two of his less prominent texts, namely Theories of surplus-value and the Grundrisse. Rather than simplistically denouncing Smith outright, Marx interrogates his arguments by “posing questions, uncovering assumptions, and bringing contradictions to the fore” (249) to expose conventional political economy as a discipline of normalizing bourgeois dominance.
Nevertheless, Smith’s ideas about the archaic and inferior nature of the peasantry travelled to the colony, where British officials regarded regions like Panjab as backward and its people as innate peasants in need of tutelage and upliftment. Such depictions became embedded in the social and material structures of Panjabi society through the juridical, fiscal and racial instruments of colonial rule. For instance, The Punjab Alienation of Land Act (XIII of 1900) epitomizes the use of new cultural categories such as “member of an agricultural tribe” to inform special legislation that redefined access to the land market. Crucially, Marx offers a way to excavate the production of knowledge alongside expectations about the past without providing a ready-made universal formula. It thus becomes clear that the modern Panjabi peasant emerged in the nineteenth century as a singular, masculine, caste-based and hereditary figure intrinsically different from its putative counterpart in Europe.
My engagement with Marx in this book is ultimately an act of critical dialogue—of thinking with as well as across and through his texts toward multiple unforeseen destinations. Just as he cannot have all of the answers, nor should we expect him to either. Instead, the creative challenge of asking questions and making arguments by drawing on aspects of Marx remains abundantly productive for those invested in the practice of modern history-writing. This is why I say “repoliticizing political economy” (252) is our unique burden, to be shouldered in the spirit of critiquing the current dogmas, both overt and insidious, that have shaped the way we understand the making of our world. To follow a path in parallel is not a sign of mimicry. At the same time, recognizing the limits of Marx might open up other kinds of archives and forms of expression. Attending to the specificity of the languages, lived experiences and locations we study is of utmost urgency—hence an insistence on considering the view from Lahore. Indeed, to understand places like Panjab, perhaps we must embrace Guru Nanak, Baba Farid and Bhagat Kabir at least as much as Marx or any other European figure. If a fictitious universal differs little from a move to the generic, our imaginations need to derive their fertility from spaces beyond.
Navyug Gill is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, postcolonial critique and global capitalism. His first book is Labors of division: Global capitalism and the emergence of the peasant in colonial Panjab (Stanford University Press, 2024).