Indian Samajvad in the History of Twentieth-Century Socialism

As one of the most widely influential political ideas and movements of the twentieth century, socialism had a history that was at once global and had various regional forms depending on the national contexts in which it took shape. In the years after the revolution in industrially backward Russia, socialism appeared to many—especially in colonized countries—not only as the way to challenge imperialist rule but also as a means to effect widespread socio-economic transformation in their countries. Such was the case in India, where socialists began articulating visions of an independent India free from colonialism, capitalism, and existing forms of exploitation. Socialism promised real freedom—not just political self-determination and sovereignty, but also economic freedom for the masses.¹

But in non-Western countries like India that were confronted with colonial modernity and an incipient industrial capitalism under colonial conditions, the inevitable question came up about whether socialism could work there, given the nineteenth-century industrial European context from which it had emerged. Socialists in such colonized countries not only had to grapple with the class structure of their own societies in conjunction with the impacts of global capitalism and imperialism, but also had to conceptualize a socialism that could speak to the specificities of the social and cultural conditions around them.² This involved conceptual translations, engagement with anti-colonial nationalism, and a critical dialogue with tradition and ‘indigenous’ systems of thought. These processes resulted in productive social and intellectual ferment and the emergence of specific ‘kinds’ of socialism in non-Western contexts. In India, socialism was conceptualized as samajvad.

My PhD investigates the social and intellectual dimensions of Indian socialism or samajvad between the 1930s and the 1970s.

A Brief History

While local communist groups had begun emerging in India from around the 1920s—a Communist Party of India was formed in 1920 in Tashkent by emigrant revolutionaries and another founded in Kanpur in India in 1925 by various local communist groups coming together—the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) was established in 1934.³ Unlike the Communist Party, which was formed independently of the Indian National Congress (INC) and often operated underground, although its members also often worked from within the Congress, the CSP was established explicitly as a party within the INC. Founded by young radical intellectuals dissatisfied with the trajectory of the national movement at the time and desirous of pushing the Congress towards a more socialist orientation, the CSP tasked itself with the twin aims of securing complete independence from the British Empire and establishing a socialist society.⁴ It described itself as a Marxist party, although it included a large diversity of opinion among its ranks and even within its main leadership. The CSP can hence be described as the first organized formation from which later Indian socialists continued to trace their lineage. In 1948, a year after India’s independence, the CSP broke away from the Congress, and across various splits and mergers, the socialists continued to play a strong role, mainly from the opposition benches. In coalitions and alliances with others, socialist parties were instrumental in defeating the Congress in multiple state elections in 1967 and then nationally in 1977, ending the INC’s three-decade pan-India electoral dominance for the first time.

Focus of My Work

My dissertation, however, is not the history of a party. While scholars have studied the history of the CSP and its later iterations, as well as the political thought of some of its key leaders, in studies of the ‘socialist movement’ in India,⁵ less extensive historiographical work has been done on socialism as a distinct ideological concept and political current. The approach I take in my dissertation is to study socialism from the perspective of its changing social character. One key element here is to analyse the process by which a changing social base (along with wider material and political conditions) drove socialist ideas and ideology. While this approach does not argue in a reductive way for any unilateral or deterministic influence of socio-economic factors on ideas, it does ground socialist thought as something more than just discursive and shaped by leaders. How did the character of Indian socialism evolve historically as varying social groups, castes, and communities attached themselves to this current of politics and produced their own political ideas and priorities ‘from below’?

With this framework and perspective, I focus on two core aspects. The first of these is the way in which socialists addressed questions of caste. This is crucial because in contemporary political understanding, samajvadis (socialists) tend to be strongly associated with the mobilization and politicization of ‘lower-caste’ groups in North India, especially those classified as Other Backward Classes. This is a process that needs to be traced and explained historically, especially given that this focus on caste was not present among the socialists in the same way during their CSP days, and that caste movements had their own political and intellectual genealogy during the 1920s–40s. Second, I focus on socialists’ interactions with the Hindu Right, the adherents of the politics of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, in India. The two seemingly opposed political forces came together in coalition governments and oppositional movements in the 1960s and 1970s—a phenomenon which tends to be explained through the electoral arithmetic of smaller opposition parties coming together against the dominant national party. While this is part of the explanation, it does not tell us how socialists stitched together and rationalized these alliances socially and intellectually. What ideological compromises did these alliances entail? What conditions created the possibilities for such interactions, and what does this tell us about the meaning of samajvad? These are questions that need more than an electoral explanation.

Archival Work in the UK

The grant from the GHIL allowed me to conduct research for a month at the British Library, London, and at the Centre of South Asian Studies (CSAS), Cambridge. The extensive collections of the India Office Records at the British Library are a significant source for anyone working on colonial Indian and South Asian history. The catalogue includes papers from various government departments concerning political affairs, correspondence and intelligence and police files maintained by different levels of the colonial state, as well as the private collections of government bureaucrats and administrators. The colonial government set up commissions tasked with consulting with various parties and organizations and making recommendations about constitutional arrangements for India as a colony. The records produced by these commissions give us great insight into not only the constitutional negotiations ongoing at the time but, more relevant to my research, the political world-views of various associations concerned with the mobilization and educational, political, and socio-economic uplift of lower-caste groups. This allows me to trace and reconstruct this sphere of political action, as well as the movements of lower-caste groups, in whose many phases of mobilization and assertion the socialists also played an important part. I was also able to access exciting sources at CSAS, especially their large collection of Indian political pamphlets and newspapers published in English and Hindi.

I have already used much of this archival material, especially concerning political demands of caste organisations and associations, in my chapter drafts, which tentatively form the early sections of my dissertation. Some of the other sources, specifically those collected from the CSAS, will go into the writing of my chapters covering the period from the 1950s onwards.

Conclusion

I shall conclude with a reflection. In various discussions and research trips in Europe and India, I have found there to be somewhat of a disconnect in how people receive my topic when I explain it to them, depending on their location and background. Generally, audiences in Europe with a theoretical understanding of socialism, especially its European history, have some initial trouble grasping some of the ideological content of Indian samajvadis. They ask whether I am looking at figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru as socialists, or at states like Kerala or West Bengal, where communist parties have historically been strong. The answer is neither; the samajvadis that I am studying were somewhere between Nehru and the communists. Their focus on caste-based mobilization and their interactions with Hindutva parties sometimes also seem odd to this audience. ‘Were they really socialists?’, I am often asked. By contrast, audiences in India, even those without an academic background, such as my grandmother, understand more intuitively who and what the samajvadis were. They generally do not confuse them with communists or Nehruvians. The mental image of the samajvadis as linked with caste-based social justice politics also comes a lot more naturally to them.

This has revealed to me that beyond their region-specific knowledge, my two audiences also operate with different conceptual categories. What ‘socialism’ meant in Europe was not always the same as what samajvad meant in India.⁶ And what samajvad meant, and how it came to mean it, requires deeper examination of the contested histories of this political concept in India. Doing so tells us more not only about Indian history of this period, but also about the history of socialism in the twentieth century, and goes towards unsettling and redefining seemingly established concepts from the perspective of the Global South.

Feature image: General Election Scenes in Delhi (Jan. 1952). A poster of the Socialist Party posted on a gate of a New Delhi residence. Photo Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India.

1. Jayaprakash Narayan, a leading member of the Congress Socialist Party, sought to present this case at length in his Why Socialism? (Benares, 1936), a key ideological document of the Congress Socialists. [↩]
2. On how Marxism and Marxists engaged with questions of nationalism in colonial contexts, see Sanjay Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (New Delhi, 1995). A more recent example is Simin Fadaee, Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester, 2024). [↩]
3. For an overview of the broader Indian Left situated within the anticolonial movement, see Irfan Habib, ‘The Left and the National Movement’, Social Scientist, 26/5–6 (1998), 3–33. [↩]
4. This aim was expressed in various CSP documents, including its founding constitution of 1934. See O. P. Ralhan (ed.), Documents on Socialist Movements in India, vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1988), 11. [↩]
5. Girja Shankar, Socialist Trends in Indian National Movement: Being a Study of the Congress Socialist Party (Meerut, 1987); Girish Mishra and Braj Kumar Pandey, Rammanohar Lohia: The Man and His Ism (New Delhi, 1992); Daniel Kent-Carrasco, ‘A Battle Over Meanings: Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and the Trajectories of Socialism in Early Independent India’, Global Intellectual History, 2/3 (2017), 370–88. [↩]
6. As Margrit Pernau observes, ‘Equivalence between concepts in different languages is not a given’. See, Margrit Pernau, ‘Provincializing Concepts: The Language of Transnational History’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36/3 (2016), 483–99, at 486. [↩]

Prateek Pankaj

Prateek Pankaj is a PhD candidate in history at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. His dissertation focuses on the… Read more

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