Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi was a towering figure in the field of history-writing in India. His works on various aspects of ancient Indian history brought about a paradigm shift in the scholarly understanding of the period.
Kosambi’s creative employment of Marxist methods in the Indian context cleared away earlier misconceptions about Indian society being static and unchanging, and established history as an important social-scientific discipline in the country. Eminent figures in the field of Indian Marxist historiography like Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar have spoken about the importance of his pioneering work.
D. D. Kosambi was born on July 31, 1907, in Goa in an upper-caste Konkani family. His father, Dharmanand Kosambi, was a renowned scholar of Buddhist studies who taught Pali at Pune’s Fergusson College. He later went on to Harvard University to teach as a visiting faculty member and to work on a number of Pali texts.
D. D. accompanied him and grew up in the United States, eventually going on to study mathematics at Harvard. According to his daughter Meera, a leading sociologist, Kosambi was drawn toward the subject because of its rigorous, logical nature. During his time in the United States, he dived deep into the study of Marxist political thought, an interest that he had picked at an early stage.
He came back to India and subsequently taught mathematics at the Banaras Hindu University, the Aligarh Muslim University, and Fergusson College, Pune. Later he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai in 1946.
However, he had to leave the institute after a few years due to his differences with Homi Bhabha, the well-known atomic scientist who was its director, on the issue of Jawaharlal Nehru’s atomic policy. His Marxist sensibilities brought him close to peace activism in the 1950s. He passed away in 1966 at the age of fifty-eight due to myocardial infarction.
His interest in ancient Indian history stemmed from his zeal to solve a statistical problem. He studied punch-marked coins, especially from the hoard of coins found at the ancient Indian city of Taxila.
After having weighed the ancient coins against a control group of modern coins, he put forward important observations about the socioeconomic histories of the Mauryan and Gupta dynasties. This marked the beginning of a long intellectual journey through the annals of Indian historiography.
To emphasize Kosambi’s contribution, it is important to briefly discuss how Indian history was reconstructed during British colonial rule. The British colonial officials sanctioned histories that justified and facilitated British rule by presenting Indian society as static and ahistorical, creating different myths of civilizational decline in the past. There were two dominant ideologies that shaped the writing of these histories: Orientalism and utilitarianism.
The Orientalists created the myth of a Sanskrit “golden age” fueled by a romantic idea of India as a “spiritual” society, in contrast with the European self-perception of their own society as being “materialist.” The utilitarians, on the other hand, denigrated India as a static society, characterized by the absolute rule of despotic rulers and the lack of individualism, rational thought, and private property.
James Mill divided Indian history into three periods: Hindu, Muslim, and British. This tripartite categorization, which was a gross distortion of the different historical processes that were actually at work, paved the way for later communal and sectarian histories.
These administrative histories primarily dealt with the rise and fall of empires and featured kings as the protagonists. Indian nationalist historians in the early twentieth century like R. C. Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhuri, R. K. Mookerjee, and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri made ambitious attempts to counter the colonial narratives.
Thapar observes that the nationalist historians wrote long dynastic histories that drew heavily upon the colonial interpretations of India’s past while rejecting their unfavorable characterizations. This school of thought depicted the Indian ancient past as a golden age of unchanging prosperity under Hindu rulers. It highlighted civilizational glory in terms of achievements in the fields of arts and sciences.
However, both colonial and nationalist historians sought to interpret history in terms of monolithic religious identities. They presented “Hindu” and “Muslim” as unchanging communitarian identities that had always been fighting each other in the ancient and medieval times.
In reality, historical inquiry suggests that identities in the precolonial period were much more contingent, overlapping with factors such as caste or sect belonging, language, and occupation, and were far from being monolithic blocks. Both strands of history-writing were thus insufficient and would go on to fuel sectarian political movements in the future.
Kosambi’s unique entry point into the discipline of history and his immense hunger to acquire knowledge is probably what enabled him to break away from all the previously established ways of writing about India’s ancient past. For him, history was “the presentation, in chronological order, of successive developments in the means and relations of production.”
Thus, the more important question is not who was king, nor whether the given region had a king, but whether its people used a plough, light or heavy, at the time. The type of kingship, as a function of the property relations and surplus produced, depends upon the method of agriculture, not conversely.
What was the role of caste in breaking up tribal groups to annex them to society? Where did the metals come from? When did commodity-exchange crops like the coconut become important; what relation did they have to communal and private landholdings? What is the reason for survival holdings? Why have we no large-scale chattel slavery in the classical period, no proper serfdom in the feudal? What is the reason for the survival of mesolithic rites, continued worship of stone-age gods even today among all classes?
These questions have at least to be raised, their answers worked out as far as possible, if one adopts the new approach. Dynastic changes of importance, vast religious upheavals, are generally indicative of powerful changes in the productive basis, hence must be studied as such, not dismissed as senseless flickers on the surface of an unchanging substratum.
While conducting historical research, he earnestly adhered to the methods of historical materialism as highlighted by Karl Marx in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). However, he understood Marxism as a tool of analysis that was far removed from economic determinism and recognized the importance of the inter-relationship between material conditions and ideas in history:
Ideas (including superstition) become a force, once they have gripped the masses; they supply the forms in which men become conscious of their conflicts and fight them out. No historian may dismiss or ignore such ideas nor can he be regarded as having fulfilled his task unless he shows why, how, and when the grip was secured. The adoption of Marx’s thesis does not mean blind repetition of all his conclusions (and even less, those of the official, party-line Marxists) at all times.
His clinical approach to Marxism led him to criticize Marx’s own ideas about India, which were mostly derived from contemporary European narratives about Indian society that presented it as static and unchanging — this was a line of argument that Edward Said later took up in his work Orientalism. He also vehemently opposed the schematic periodization of India’s history according to European ideas by the Indian communist leader S. A. Dange and the Soviet historian D. A. Suleikin.
Kosambi added much-needed historical depth to contemporary debates about what was the dominant mode of production in India:
He (the reader) will have to remember that no single mode prevailed uniformly over the whole country at any one time; so it is necessary to select for treatment that particular mode which, at any period, was the most vigorous, most likely to dominate production, and which inevitably spread over the greater part of the country, no matter how many of the older forms survived in outward appearance.
Kosambi stressed the need for meticulous use of archaeological methods to judge the historicity of the textual sources from ancient India. He probed the political-economic origins of every Indian social institution (tribe, caste, gotra, and so on) through a variety of approaches, borrowing methods from numismatics, anthropology, textual analysis, and other fields.
Historian B. D. Chattopadhyay argues that Kosambi’s shift toward conducting in-depth study of Indian society and culture in its entirety caused him to move away from conventional historical sources like state-centered records and literary sources, arriving at what he would go on to call “combined methods.”
Caste was a central concern for Kosambi. In the words of Kumkum Roy, he saw it as an important category “through which to understand socio-economic difference.” Caste divisions were vital for his periodization of Indian history, as facilitators of different socioeconomic changes. He sought to equate caste with class, mediated through religion:
India has a unique social division, the (endogamous) caste system. Caste is class at a primitive level of production, a religious method of forming social consciousness in such a manner that the primary producer is deprived of his surplus with the minimum coercion. This is done with the adoption of local usages into religion and ritual, being thus the negation of history by giving fictitious sanction from times immemorial to any new development, the actual change being denied altogether.
He went on to explain caste as a socioeconomic institution of domination:
The Indian method reduced the need for violence to a minimum by substitution of religion; caste and the smrtis adopted or replaced totem and taboo with more power than the sword or bow. This avoided large-scale chattel slavery, never important in Indian relations of production as it was in Greece and Rome.
For Kosambi, caste was an institution that created a class — the Shudras — who were “more or less dependent labourers with virtually no independent access to productive resources.” Although later historians have questioned his ideas on caste as a driver of socioeconomic change, especially highlighting his lack of attention to the doctrines of purity and pollution inherent in the system, his nuanced perspective opened up many critical pathways of analysis for future historians of caste.
Tribes also formed an important part of Kosambi’s historical inquiry. One of the best-known statements attributed to him is the following remark: “The entire course of Indian history shows tribal elements being fused into a general society.”
A very influential historical method inaugurated by Kosambi is the idea of “living prehistory.” He argued that many Indian tribal communities have kept the prehistoric ways of life alive in “fossilized forms” through their practices and rituals. The explanation for such “long survivals” was the abundant availability of food through hunting and gathering. He studied caste names and drew conclusions about the tribal origins of these communities.
Kosambi understood that many present-day caste rituals, such as prohibitions on inter-caste marriage, were originally rules governing food-gathering societies. He reached his conclusions through years of sustained ethnography of communities like the Dhangar and Pardhi in the Deccan Plateau.
Finding parallels between contemporary plow cultivation and “ancient” slash-and-burn techniques, he blurred the disciplinary boundaries between history, archaeology, and anthropology. His commitment to unearthing authentic facts derived from his masterful grasp of not merely Marxist theory and praxis, but also Indian religions, languages, and ritual practices. His theorization of the nature of feudalism in early medieval India was also a product of his rigorous employment of “combined methods.”
It is impossible to cover all the contours of a life as illustrious as Kosambi’s within the confines of a short introductory essay. He read widely and voraciously, contributing to the breadth and depth of his knowledge alike. He wrote prodigiously on various aspects of ancient Indian history.
His range seems to testify to a passion for exploring an alternative past of India, one that was not marred by colonial racial stereotypes or nationalist narrowness. As Rajan Gurukkal has shown, Kosambi’s interest in ancient Indian history stemmed from his desire to understand the roots of contemporary socioeconomic problems.
People and their everyday lives were at the center of all his intellectual inquiries. Without the study of religion and culture along with that of economy and politics, he realized, it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct the lives of the most marginalized and oppressed peoples in ancient India.
He rejected all kinds of determinism associated with orthodox Marxist histories and gave primacy to the role of people in shaping their own destinies. His scholarship was steeped in his commitment to change the world instead of merely interpreting it.
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