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MARXIST THOUGHT IN
SOUTH ASIA
POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL
THEORY
Series Editor: Julian Go
Political Power and Social Theory is a peer-reviewed journal committed to advancing
the interdisciplinary understanding of the linkages between political power, social
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please see the journal website at www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/tk/ppst.
Recent Volumes:
Volume 22: Rethinking Obama, 2011
Volume 23: Political Power and Social Theory, 2012
Volume 24: Postcolonial Sociology, 2013
Volume 25: Decentering Social Theory, 2013
Volume 26: The United States in Decline, 2014
Volume 27: Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neolib-
eral Age, 2014
Volume 28: Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire, 2015
Volume 29: Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics,
2015
Volume 30: Perverse Politics? Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, Multiplicity, 2016
Volume 31: Postcolonial Sociologies: A Reader, 2016
Volume 32: International Origins of Social and Political Theory, 2017
Volume 33: Rethinking the Colonial State, 2017
Volume 34: Critical Realism, History and Philosophy in the Social Sciences,
2018
Volume 35: Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work, 2018
Volume 36: Religion, Humility, and Democracy in a Divided America, 2019
Volume 37: Rethinking Class and Social Difference, 2020
Volume 38: Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism, 2021
Volume 39: Trump and the Deeper Crisis, 2022
SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD
Ronald Aminzade Eiko Ikegami

University of Minnesota, USA New School University Graduate
Faculty, USA
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Duke University, USA Howard Kimeldorf
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor,
Michael Burawoy
USA
University of California-Berkeley,
USA George Lawson
London School of Economics, UK
Nitsan Chorev
Brown University, USA Daniel Slater
University of Michigan, USA
Diane E. Davis
Harvard University, USA George Steinmetz
University of Michigan, USA
Peter Evans
University of California-Berkeley, Maurice Zeitlin
USA University of California-Los Angeles,
USA
Julian Go
The University of Chicago, USA
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POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 40
MARXIST THOUGHT IN
SOUTH ASIA
EDITED BY
KRISTIN PLYS
University of Toronto, Canada
PRIYANSH
AND
KANISHKA GOONEWARDENA
United Kingdom – North America – Japan

India – Malaysia – China
Emerald Publishing Limited
Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL
First edition 2024
Editorial matter and selection © 2024 Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena.
Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.
Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.
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implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any
warranties, express or implied, to their use.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-83797-183-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-182-4 (Online)
ISBN: 978-1-83797-184-8 (Epub)
ISSN: 0198-8719 (Series)

CONTENTS
About the Editors ix
About the Contributors xi
Chapter 1 Marxist Theory Unbound: Global Perspectives From

South Asia 1
Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena
Chapter 2 The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of SBD de Silva and

GVS de Silva 19
Kanishka Goonewardena
Chapter 3 Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural

Awareness 29
Ayyaz Mallick
Chapter 4 Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial Critique in

Pakistan Through the Writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1958–1972) 47
Muhammad Azeem
Chapter 5 Murder as Praxis? Theorizing Marxist Feminism in

Pakistan Through Akhtar Baloch’s Prison Narratives 75
Umaima Miraj
Chapter 6 Mohammad Azharuddin as a Theorist of Shock: The

Life of an Indian Muslim Cricket Captain in the Time of Hindu
Nationalism 99
Priyansh
Chapter 7 Crisis and Revolt in Sri Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon

of Possibilities Amid the Unravelling of the Global Order 121
Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar
vii
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 8 Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese

India Compared: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de
Bragança’s Theories of Colonial Independence 153
Kristin Plys
Chapter 9 Interview With Professor Himani Bannerji 181

Himani Bannerji, Kanishka Goonewardena, Kristin Plys and
Priyansh
Chapter 10 Poems of Resistance 189

Salman Haider
Index 197
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Kristin Plys is an Associate Professor in the History and Sociology Departments

at the University of Toronto. For 2023–2024, she is the J. Clawson Mills Scholar
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Brewing Resistance
(2020), winner of the global sociology book award from the Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-author, with Charles Lemert, of Capi-
talism and Its Uncertain Future (2022).
Priyansh is a PhD Student in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of

Toronto. His research broadly focuses on the relationship between sport and
politics today, with particular attention devoted to the neoliberal Indian state’s
interventions in sport policy.
Kanishka Goonewardena is a Professor of Geography and Planning at the Uni-

versity of Toronto and co-editor of Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading
Henri Lefebre. His recent writings on critical theory, urban studies, and imperi-
alism have appeared in various academic and popular journals such as Historical
Materialism, Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
Progressive Planning, Jacobin, and Spectre.
ix
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Muhammad Azeem is an Associate Professor at LUMS University Lahore and

teaches Labour Law, Critical Legal Theory, and International law from the
perspective of the South. He published his book titled Law, State and Inequality
in Pakistan with Springer in 2017. Some of his notable publications are in Third
World Quarterly, Law and Development Review, and Comparative Labour Law
and Policy Journal.
Himani Bannerji is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at York

University, Toronto, Canada. Her research and writing life extends between Canada
and India, with interests encompassing anti-racist feminism, Marxism, critical cul-
tural theories, and historical sociology. Her publications include The Ideological
Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender (2020), Demography and
Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology (2011), Inventing Subjects:
Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (2001), The Dark Side of the
Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism (2000), and Thinking
Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (1995). Her most recent
research on Marx has appeared in Marcello Musto (ed), Rethinking Alternatives with
Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration (2021), Marcello Musto (ed), Marx’s
Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism (2019), A. K. Bagchi
and A. Chatterjee (eds), Marxism: With and Beyond Marx (2014), E. Dua and A. B.
Bakan, Theorizing Anti-Racism (2014), and S. Mojab (ed), Marxism and Feminism
(2015). Her forthcoming book, Decolonization and Humanism: The Postcolonial
Vision of Rabindranath Tagore (Tulika) examines the modernity and radical
humanism of Rabindranath Tagore.
Devaka Gunawardena is a political economist and independent researcher. He

holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of California – Los
Angeles and a BA in Postcolonial Studies from Wesleyan University. He is a
frequent contributor to the Sri Lankan publications the DailyFT and Polity. His
research interests include Marxism and agrarian studies, and he regularly writes
and co-writes on the political economy of Sri Lanka in forums such as The Wire
and the Economic and Political Weekly in India.
Salman Haider is a poet, theatre artist, and playwright from Pakistan currently
living in exile in Canada.
Ahilan Kadirgamar is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of

Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center,
City University of New York, an MA in Economics from the New School for
xi
xii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Social Research and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of

Technology. He is a fortnightly columnist in the Daily Mirror, an Editorial Board
Member of the Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences, and a Board Member of
Himal Southasian Magazine. His research interests include agrarian change,
co-operatives, and economic alternatives, and he regularly writes on the political
economy of Sri Lanka in forums such as The Hindu and the Economic and
Political Weekly in India. He is currently the Honorary Chair of the Northern
Co-operative Development Bank and served on the Central Bank of Sri Lanka
appointed committee to draft the Economic Development Framework for a
Northern Province Master Plan (August 2018).
Ayyaz Mallick is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Department of

Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool (UK). His research interests
include Marxist and postcolonial theory, with a focus on labour, social move-
ments, and urban politics in Pakistan. His publications in English and Urdu have
explored issues of state theory, urban development and restructuring, and the
relationship between “particular” and “universal” in social theory and political
practice. His academic work has appeared in Antipode, Studies in Political
Economy, Urban Geography, and Tarikh [History]. He has also written for
newspapers and other popular outlets such as Jacobin, The News, Novara Media,
and Socialist Project.
Umaima Miraj is a PhD Student of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her

research focuses on understanding women’s revolutions in anti-colonial move-
ments through a revolutionary feminist world-systems perspective.
CHAPTER 1
MARXIST THEORY UNBOUND:

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES FROM
SOUTH ASIA
Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena
ABSTRACT
In this introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxist Thought in South Asia’, we
detail the long history of Marxist politics and theorizing in South Asia and
highlight the unique contributions and perspectives of South Asian Marxists to
global Marxism. Three contributions we find particularly significant are (1)
South Asian Marxists’ approach to thinking about questions of capitalism,
colonialism and imperialism, (2) the treatment of agrarian and feudal conti-
nuities in Marxist theories from South Asia and (3) unique South Asian
contributions to theorizing caste from a Marxist perspective.
Keywords: Marxism; South Asia; capitalism; imperialism; agrarian relations;
caste
Marxism is not just a European preoccupation. It has, perhaps, had even more
vibrant articulations in Latin America, Africa and among the Black diaspora.
But South Asia has been relatively neglected in efforts to highlight Global South
revolutionary theoretical traditions. Our goal in this issue is to demonstrate the
historical and continued relevance of Marxist thought in South Asia by both
highlighting lesser known thinkers as well as promoting anti-imperialist Marxist
approaches to revolutionary thought more broadly. Our efforts are not solely to
make Marxism relevant to South Asia again, but to demonstrate how South
Asian Marxisms can contribute to global Marxist theory. In other words, our
effort is to recover the South Asian revolutionary tradition for the rest of the
world. In so doing, this special issue interrogates the nexus of anti-colonialism
Marxist Thought in South Asia

Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 1–17
Copyright © 2024 Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena
Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040002
1
2 Marxist Theory Unbound
and Marxism. Together, these essays are forging an anti-imperialist Marxism

based on empirical work in South Asia and beyond by unsettling the propensity
within various discourses (including certain strands of Marxism) to dispropor-
tionately fixate on white male theorists. Our essays contribute to anti-imperialist
Marxism through dialectical and historical approaches to theorizing. While we
are doing anti-imperialist Marxism in the South Asian context, we see this as
being in the service of a global Marxism that is both anti-imperialist and non-
Eurocentric.
Across the social sciences and humanities of late, both capitalism and the
post-colonial have been central objectives of inquiry. But these parallel trends are
often at loggerheads. The extremes of the post-colonial position assert the cen-
trality of race and colonialism in shaping modernity while disavowing the role of
class and capitalism, while the return to capitalism that has been central in history
but other disciplines as well has brought about a vibrant revival of work in labour
history and histories of capitalism. However, unlike the Eurocentric work of
some influential Marxists, these new histories of labour and capitalism are more
global in scope and focused on the political economy of the Global South. In
bringing these two positions together, many in the humanities and social sciences
have turned to concepts of racial capitalism and post-colonial political economy
which has meant recovering the theories and voices of racialized Marxists living
and working in the Global South. This is a development we welcome and cele-
brate. While African, Black diaspora, Latin American Marxists have been central
to this endeavour, and while to a lesser extent East Asian Marxists such as Ho
Chi Minh and Sukarno have also been a part of this conversation, South Asian
Marxist voices who theorize race, coloniality and the historical development of
global capitalism have been relatively neglected in this effort to revisit the work of
Global South and diaspora Marxists of the 20th century.
MARXISM DURING BRITISH RULE

While Marxist academics of the Global North have disproportionately focused
on the work of African and Latin American Marxists in recovering anti-colonial
and anti-racist Marxist perspectives, Marxism has long flourished in Asia. The
South Asian Marxist tradition has a long history dating back to the early 19th
century. With the formal end of the global slave trade in the 1830s, labour from
South Asia was mobilized by the British and French Empires to replace enslaved
workers in British and French territories in Africa and in the British West Indies
(Mohapatra, 2007, p. 178; Sharma, 1982, p. 17; File no. 7237/91, PSA). As a
colonial working class in formation, one of the unique features of the develop-
ment of the South Asian working class was that from the start, it was created by
European Empires to be a global working class. Because of British and French
strategies for class formation in South Asia, Left responses against these condi-
tions eventually assumed an internationalist orientation. The plantation was the
primary enterprise for most of the colonial period. Labour conditions on colonial
plantations were a merger of slavery with a modern rational corporate labour
KRISTIN PLYS ET AL. 3
regime (Behal, 2007, p. 158; 2010, p. 32; Behal & Mohapatra, 2008, p. 143;
Mehta, 1991, p. 5). Desertion was a common recourse for workers to ‘escape
physical coercion and torture’, but they would often be caught and returned to
the plantation by chowkidars (security guards) (Behal, 2007, p. 159; Behal &
Mohapatra, 2008, p. 161). In some cases, labour uprisings occurred, including the
Bengal Indigo Disturbances of 1859, the Blue Mutiny of Champaran in 1917 in
Bihar (Mehta, 1991, p. 5) and Rowmari Garden Uprising in 1903 (Behal &
Mohapatra, 2008, p. 165), typically in reaction against violent assaults by
European plantation staff (Behal, 2007, p. 166).
In the latter half of the 19th century, peasant uprisings and labour revolts were
the most common form of dissent against colonial capital. These uprisings were
mostly ‘scattered and unorganised’ (Sen, 1997, p. 65), generally consisting of
informal actions directed at gaining control over the work process or of spon-
taneous outbursts and rioting (Veeraraghavan, 2013, p. 65). The first known
strike in British India was a weavers’ strike in Empress Mills, Nagpur in 1877
(Meyers, 1958, p. 56; Sharma, 1982, p. 65). By the first decade of the 20th cen-
tury, strikes became more organized. In 1903, a strike over unpaid overtime in the
Government Press in Madras lasted six months (Veeraraghavan, 2013, pp.
69–72). In 1905, mill workers in Bombay organized strikes against the intro-
duction of electric light in factories, refusing to work past dusk and before dawn.
In 1907, an India-wide railway worker’s strike lasted one week and garnered key
concessions. In 1908, workers in various sectors in Bombay organized a political
strike against British rule (Saxena, 1990, p. 61). During the 1910s, industry,
especially heavy industry such as steel and iron, intensified. Likewise, strikes
proliferated from 1917 on. The year 1920 saw at least 51 major strikes in South
Asia, each strike involving as many as 70 to 135,000 workers (Saxena, 1990, p.
78; Sen, 1997, pp. 120–4).
The first two formal trade union organizations were the Madras Labour
Union founded in 1918 by BP Wadia and Majoor Mahajan (Ahmedabad Textile
Labour Association) founded in 1918 by Mohandas Gandhi. The Madras
Labour Union was created by a group of textile workers in the B and C Mills in
Madras, and with the help of BP Wadia, it became a citywide organization
consisting of workers from various industries – including textile workers,
rickshaw-pullers, railway workers, printing press workers, kerosene oil distribu-
tors, aluminium vessel workers, barbers, scavengers, policemen, postmen and
domestic workers (Mathur & Mathur, 1957, pp. 16–17; Veeraraghavan, 2013, p.
88). MLU’s first tasks were to ameliorate the economic condition of workers by
raising wages and ensuring timely and accurate payment of wages (Karnik, 1978,
pp. 24–25; Mehta, 1991, pp. 44–46; Ramanujam, 1986, p. 14; Veeraraghavan,
2013, p. 91). But of far greater concern to the union was the violence inflicted
upon workers by British managers in workplaces across the city (Jha, 1970, p. 89;
Mathur, 1964, p. 19; Rao, 1938, p. 14).
Majoor Mahajan, on the other hand, was ‘abnormal’ for a trade union, in that
the goal of the union was to create class-cooperation between owners and
workers. If a worker was ‘victimized’ by management, the union would pay the
aggrieved worker a token sum to prevent labour unrest (Rao, 1938, p. 159). MM
was staunchly opposed to strikes, and from 1918–1939, workers in Ahmedabad

struck only once, during a general strike in 1924, and that too without the support
of trade union leadership (Chandavarkar, 1998, p. 86; Jha, 1970, p. 100; Meyers,
1958, pp. 57–60; Rao, 1938, p. 160). Majoor Mahajan was also an exclusively
Hindu trade union. As a result of this communal discrimination, Muslim textile
workers in Ahmedabad were non-unionized until the 1930s when they created
Mill Mazdoor Sangh affiliated with the Communist Party of India (CPI)
(Chandavarkar, 1998, p. 77).
By 1920, 125 formal trade unions were founded across South Asia – in Bengal
(mostly in Calcutta), Punjab, Madras, Jamshedpur, Ahmedabad, Burma, Oriya
and Bombay (Mathur, 1964, p. 21; Mehta, 1991, pp. 40–42; Saxena, 1990, pp.
83–88; Sen, 1997, pp. 138–139; Sharma, 1982, p. 77). The period of 1919–1922
saw the greatest growth of political consciousness of the working class, which
coincided with a growing nationalist movement and worsening economic con-
ditions (Roy, 1990, p. 6). As a result, the 1920s were characterized by unprece-
dented workers’ unrest. The colonial state responded by spying on unionized
workers, imprisoning them and subjecting them to police search and harassment,
but also developed special Labour Advisory Boards in Madras, Bengal, Bombay
and Punjab (File no. 5629/69, PSA) as a legal forum through which to settle
labour disputes. While most of the rulings of these boards were in favour of
employers, the Labour Advisory Boards did recommend establishing a minimum
wage along with the legal recognition of trade unions in order to prevent disputes
(Sen, 1997, p. 140).
In 1920, the All Indian Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed. This was
the first working class organization in South Asia that encompassed all of British
India. Its platform was generally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist but was also
cautious not to stoke the ire of the British Empire or of the Gandhian Congress
Party (Adhikari, 1972, p. 206; Karnik, 1978, p. 33; Sharma, 1982, p. 151). In its
founding address to its members, it took a stand against the Gandhian inde-
pendence movement, ‘Your nation’s leaders ask for SWARAJ, you may not let
them leave you out of the reckoning. Political freedom to you is of no worth
without economic freedom’. (As quoted in Amjad, 2001, p. 34; As quoted in Sen,
1997, p. 158). In their founding year, the AITUC had 107 member unions,
representing a total of 20,994 workers. Most of these unions were based in
Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore and Jamshedpur. Notably, Majoor Mahajan, con-
sisting of 6 unions and 16,450 workers, refused to join the AITUC because of the
AITUC’s anti-Gandhian line (Mehta, 1991, pp. 54–55; Ramanujam, 1986, p. 15;
Saxena, 1990, p. 91).
The CPI was formed later that same year, on 17 October 1920 in Tashkent
(Adhikari, 1972, p. 215; Ahmad, 1962, p. 57; Singh, 1994, p. 37; Sen, 1997, p. 170)
headed by MN Roy, Mohammed Shafiq and MPBT Acharya. In 1921, the CPI
founded four regional groups in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Lahore. The
Bombay group, led by SA Dange, focused on the student movement and trade union
activities (Sen & Ghosh, 1991, pp. 52–53). In Calcutta, Muzaffar Ahmad and poet
Nazrul Islam started the Communist literary journal Navyug in 1922, and began
organizing workers in and around Calcutta (Sen & Ghosh, 1991, p. 53). The Madras
group was adopted by the existing labour movement and led by labour organiser,
Singaravelu M Chettiar. In Lahore, the party was led by Ghulam Hussain, who left
his job as an economics professor at Peshawar College to found the Inquilab Group
(Josh, 1979, p. 46), which produced the Urdu-language newspaper, Inquilab (Josh,
1979, p. 47), and to work in concert with the Railway Workers Union.
The aims of this burgeoning party were, as stated by Singaravelu Chettiar, ‘to
win Swaraj for the masses in India, to prevent exploitation of the workers and
peasant by suitable land and industrial legislation, to secure to the bread winner, a
minimum wage by which he and his children shall have the necessaries of a decent
life and to end all distinctions of caste, creed or sect in all political and economic
relationships’ (First Communist Conference Papers, Subfile No. 4, NMML). Their
method to reach these aims was to strengthen the working class through unioni-
zation, strategic strikes and striking with ‘full force and effect’. From its origins,
Marxism in South Asia was anti-colonial, and primarily dedicated to opposing an
international labour regime in which racialized workers from the Global South
were placed at the bottom of racial and economic hierarchies.
MARXISM AFTER INDEPENDENCE

While political and trade union movements inspired by Marxism played a deci-
sive role in South Asia’s movements for independence in the 1940s, after Inde-
pendence was won, Marxism thrived in some regions within South Asia, while in
others, political and social conditions threatened Marxist intellectual develop-
ment and politics.
In Punjab, where Marxism was well established before partition, the labour
movement, along with the radical Left, was decimated. Istiaq Ahmed contends
that the demobilization of soldiers contributed to creating a more violent parti-
tion in Punjab, as unemployed soldiers stoked by communal tension (and many
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from their participation in the
World Wars) took it upon themselves to rid their towns and villages of the
religious ‘other’ (Ahmed, 2011). The violence was not only communal in nature
but also inflicted against the Left. The genocide that took place in Punjab
debilitated Punjab’s labour movement, trade union movement and the
Communist Party. Though dealt a difficult hand, which was exacerbated by the
mass departure of Sikhs who comprised a majority of the Communist Party in
Punjab (Ali, 2015, p. 64), Sajjad Zaheer and other communists consolidated the
Communist Party of Pakistan in the aftermath of partition. While the most
well-known Communists of Pakistan’s early years remain better known for their
literary works, they were also committed to resurrecting and building the
Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Faiz Ahmed Faiz contended that without
addressing the more radical aims of the Communists in their support for national
independence, national liberation in Pakistan remained incomplete. In response
to this stalled revolution, Sajjad Zaheer pushed for an even harder Communist
line, purging all Islamists, nationalists, liberals and even Freudians who ‘dis-
respected love as a pure desire’ (Ali, 2011, p. 517; See also Jalil, 2014, p. 356). The
CPP organized labour unions under the Pakistan Trade Union Federation
(PTUF) even though only 0.8% of the population were industrial workers and
only 0.25% were unionized (Ali, 2015, p. 74). Most of these unionized workers
worked in government, railways and tea plantations. Though small in number,
the PTUF organized key events in Karachi and Lahore which put forth an
anti-imperialist agenda and united communist workers, peasants and intellectuals
to work together to fight back against the rollback of labour standards and rights
after independence along with Pakistan’s cooperation with US hegemony (Ali,
2015, p. 75). The CPP encompassed many broadly Left movements, including the
Democratic Women’s Association, a women’s labour association, Democratic
Students’ Federation, the CPP student wing and the Progressive Writers’ Asso-
ciation, for writers and other artists (Malik, 2016, pp. 107–108).
But social dislocation in the aftermath of partition made political organizing
particularly challenging for the Pakistani Left, and relentless state persecution
and repression eventually led to the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951. Faiz
and Zaheer were accused by Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan of meeting with
disaffected army officers in Rawalpindi to plan a coup (Jalil, 2014, p. 372). The
actual events remain unclear; some contend that there was actually a discussion
about a possible coup, while others present evidence that the arrests were made to
suppress opposition in the upcoming elections (Malik, 2016, p. 119). As a result
of the Conspiracy Case, many prominent Communist leaders, and leaders of the
Progressive Writers’ Association, including Faiz and Zaheer themselves, were
imprisoned. In 1954, the PCC and other leftist parties were, then, officially
banned (Ali, 2013, p. 484; Mir & Mir, 2006, p. 16; Raza, 2013, p. 513). During his
imprisonment, during which he spent most of his time in solitary confinement,
Faiz wrote some of his most critically acclaimed poetry (Dryland, 1992, p. 180).
The development of Marxism in Sri Lanka, while echoing the Indian experi-
ence in several ways, divides into three phases. The first one begins with the
formative engagement of the pioneering generation of radical Sri Lankan stu-
dents with communist internationalism in the late 1920s and culminates with their
achievement of some post-colonial parliamentary political power in 1956. It was
during this period that the major Marxist parties in Sri Lanka were formed – the
Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1935, and its breakaway group
that became the Communist Party of Ceylon (now CPSL) in 1943. In these years,
they transformed themselves into mass organizations of national scale, with
remarkable influence and success in parliamentary politics as well. The second
period goes from 1956 to 1977, the heyday of Sri Lanka’s pursuit of post-colonial
national development, during which time leaders of Marxist parties occupied a
few key ministerial positions in several leftist coalition governments. It was in
these years that Marxist literature became available for the masses, in English,
Sinhala and Tamil, although Marx’s own writings in this impressive Left literary
production and circulation remained a small fraction. The ongoing third phase
can be dated from 1977, the beginning of neoliberalism in Sri Lanka and the
decline of Marxist parties as effective political forces within or without parlia-
ment. It is mostly in this post-1977 period, after the virtual elimination of Marxist
parties from parliamentary political power, that substantive readings of Marx
and Marxism were undertaken in Sri Lanka – in various attempts to make sense
of the country’s history and politics – whereas in earlier phases, Marxism was
mostly a matter of political strategy (Jayawardena, 1974).
Back in post-independent India, the Left ran into a number of strategic ten-
sions even as it functioned as the main opposition to the Congress Party that had
assumed power following the Partition (Namboodiripad, 1986). Towards the end
of colonial rule, the CPI developed different approaches for political action in
urban and rural areas. Within a year of independence, major urban centres like
Bombay, Madras and Calcutta saw a rise in insurrectionist activities guided by
the ‘Ranadive line’ that took its name from the then general secretary B.K.
Ranadive. As it were, the Ranadive Line quickly pivoted from targeting the
British Empire to the Congress government following independence by arguing
that the independence earned did not amount to actual freedom (Bidwai, 2015).
The objective of such action was to delegitimize the bourgeois regime, and to
create separate platforms for a popular assertion.
For rural India, a different strategy was devised. As opposed to spontaneous
strike actions in the cities, the Communists in rural areas emphasized an extended
agrarian struggle, with Telangana serving as the prime example. The Telangana
region was part of the princely state of Hyderabad where a network of landlords
served the Nizam through a systematic exploitation of debt-ridden and unpaid
labourers (Bidwai, 2015). Even as India gained freedom from colonial rule, the
peasants waged their own armed struggle and managed to liberate around 4,000
villages. This was done by violent actions carried out on the landlords with the
intention of weakening the semi-feudal structure. But catastrophe beckoned here
for Left politics. With the Nizam’s hold on Hyderabad loosening, the
Congress-led government at the Centre exploited the situation to get him to
accede to the Indian state.
In 1964, the strategic confusion manifested into a split of CPI. A new force
emerged in the form of CPI (Marxist), a trend that was to be repeated multiple
times in the future as internal factions became more confident of a separate
existence while still staking their claim under the broad umbrella of Left politics.
Three years later, a strident faction of the CPI (M) took charge of a peasants
uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal. Taking its inspiration from Mao Zedong’s
ideas of a protracted people’s war (Shah, 2010), this group was led by the
ideologue Charu Mazumdar. Subsequently, the Mazumdar faction engineered
another split by forming the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), and they came to be
popularly known as Naxalites. The split was as much a result of internal conflicts
among the Indian Communists as it was representative of tensions within the
Communist movement internationally that were epitomized by the ‘Sino-Soviet
split’ (Vanaik, 1986). The movement soon spread beyond West Bengal into
nearby states, and it was characterized by a model of guerrilla warfare. It has
since undergone multiple shifts in strategy and organization, but it remains a
thorn in the side of the Indian state to this day.
The Naxalites’ objective of creating a crisis of legitimacy for the Indian state
received greater fuel following the embrace of neoliberal shock therapy in 1991.
As the state leveraged its position to facilitate capitalist accumulation, the broad
Left was presented with an opportunity to present a new politics in the face of
economic stagnation. However, a combination of hedged bets in face of the
embrace of neoliberalism by other bourgeois parties, a withering organizational
structure and calculated assaults on Left groups by the rising force of Hindu
nationalism meant that this historic opportunity has not yet been grasped in the
Indian context.
MARXIST THEORIZING FROM SOUTH ASIA

This rich history of Marxist political parties and social movements has produced
a vibrant critical intellectual culture in South Asia that goes well beyond its
influence in local politics. Perhaps the most significant product of Marxism in
South Asia has been its unique contributions to Marxist theory. The many ways
in which South Asian Marxists have applied and refashioned global Marxism to
fit the local context has led to important innovations and interestingly unique
themes and debates. Three contributions we find particularly significant are (1)
South Asian Marxists’ approach to thinking about questions of capitalism,
colonialism and imperialism, (2) the treatment of agrarian and feudal continuities
in Marxist theories of South Asia and (3) unique South Asian contributions to
theorizing caste from a Marxist perspective.
South Asian Marxisms, which grew out of late colonial labour struggles before
organizing themselves into various mass political parties, cannot be understood in
isolation from the subcontinent’s history of colonialism and anti-colonial strug-
gles followed by projects of national development and neoliberal globalization in
the post-colonial era. In both colonial and post-colonial times, the persistence of
imperialism in the world economy too remained a constant and immediate
reference point for South Asian Marxists, which cannot be said for all varieties of
post-colonial theory emerging from that part of the world or elsewhere. South
Asian Marxists’ contribution to a global revolutionary political tradition,
therefore, bears the marks of their confrontation with imperialism and colo-
nialism in addition to capitalism, which also sets them apart from their Euro-
peans comrades as well as kindred spirits in settler colonial societies.
Negotiating the relationship between national liberation and socialist revo-
lution, in other words, was a formative theoretical and practical task for Marxists
of South Asia, and the experience of undertaking it was constitutive of their
political being. It was one which inserted them, moreover, into the heart of
political debates among leading international Marxists and the revolutionary
movements they represented, as exemplified in M. N. Roy’s famous Comintern
exchanges with Lenin on ‘national liberation movements in the East’. Of course,
not all Marxists – South Asian or not – agreed on the key issues debated in the
Comintern and beyond, especially on revolutionary strategy in the colonies. The
long-standing divisions between the various Marxist political parties of the sub-
continent emerged precisely on the basis of such strategic disagreements on
revolutionary politics as much as their theoretical implications.
On the theoretical front, South Asians Marxists are distinguished by their

original assessments of the nature of class struggles and alliances in the projected
transition of the subcontinent from feudalism to socialism, mediated as it was by
forms of capitalist development and underdevelopment installed by European
colonialism and imperialism, not without support from indigenous ruling classes
profoundly invested in preserving caste privileges. The gravity of such political
inquiry into real and possible transitions from one mode of production to another
is reflected in the depth of subcontinental Marxist theorizations on modes of
production and social formations. These involved vigorous debate on peripheral
and semi-peripheral spaces in world economies, their mutations under colonial
and imperialist rule and the prospects of their transition to socialism. Indeed, few
‘transition debates’ in the world can match the nuance and insight of the South
Asian Marxist deliberation on class relations and modes of production (Thorner,
1982).
As we briefly detailed in our capsule history above, colonial political economy
in South Asia first centred on the plantation as the primary means of capital
accumulation and extraction. As in other colonial contexts, this strategy neces-
sitated the centrality of agrarian production for the modern economy, which in
practice meant continuities of feudal class relations were reconfigured to serve the
profit motive of the capitalist world-system along with its colonial imperatives.
These feudal continuities repurposed to serve a capitalist logic have led to new
insights in agrarian Marxism based on a careful consideration of the particu-
larities of agrarian political economy in South Asia. Several of the articles in this
volume continue in the legacy of preeminent South Asian Marxist scholars
including Irfan Habib (2002), EMS Namboodiripad (1984), Hamza Alavi (1973),
Utsa Patnaik (1986), Jairus Banaji (1972), G.V.S. de Silva (1988), S.B.D. de Silva
(1982), Gail Omvedt (1981) and recent scholars like Michael Levien (2018), Alpa
Shah (2013) and Prasannan Parthasarthi (2001) who through their innovative
work have enriched our understanding of the feudal and the agrarian. Kanishka
Goonewardena’s contribution to this volume critically assesses Sri Lanka’s ‘two
de Silvas’ and their focus on the plantation economy and relations between town
and country as a means to theorize development in mid-20th century Sri Lanka.
Muhammad Azeem’s article assess the distinct trajectories of Pakistan’s
post-colonial political economy showing how it diverged from the most popular
critical theories of the 20th century and how local Marxist thinker, Aziz-ul-Haq,
grappled with these inconsistences. Ayyaz Mallick’s article assesses Hamza
Alavi’s contributions to Marxist understandings of class and rural society in
Pakistan, while Umaima Miraj’s contribution focuses on feudal legacies and their
role in structuring capitalist patriarchy in Pakistan.
Certainly, a discussion of feudal and agrarian political economy is incomplete
without also theorizing caste. In terms of a theoretical standpoint, taking cue
from Teltumbde (2016), we seek to push against the delinking of caste and class.
This is not a position of mere scholarly import, but it has huge political ramifi-
cations as well. As Teltumbde argues, the overlooking of anti-caste struggles by
early Indian communists caused fissures in Left politics that continue to simmer
to this day. Yet, the questions of caste-class remain germane to any foundational
understanding of South Asian society.
While the early communists who predominantly belonged to the upper castes
failed to pay adequate attention to the caste-class question, B.R. Ambedkar
deftly addressed the problem through his leadership of organized protests against
landlords who ran an oppressive system called Khoti which targeted Dalit
peasants and other farmer castes in the Konkan region. This was one among the
many attempts made by Ambedkar to resolve the caste-class question. Eventu-
ally, as we find in his landmark essay ‘Buddha or Karl Marx’, Ambedkar’s
disenchantment with communist politics pushed him away from providing a
political answer to the caste-class problem. Interestingly, it was not until the
Naxals began to organize in rural areas that communists in India began to refine
their position on caste (Teltumbde, 2016).
The historical costs of this belated attempt can be seen in politics today where
the Left movement and anti-caste struggles do not always overlap, even though
people’s struggles become intelligible only when we think with class and caste. As
a question of politics, it is not about placing caste alongside class. Rather, for
Marxists, the challenge is to think with caste when they speak of class. While the
papers in this collection do not directly tackle this problem, the questions of caste
and class breathe fervently as we think, for instance, of cricket in India. To date,
there have been only four cricketers who identify as Dalit who have represented
the national team in the Test format (Bhawnani & Jain, 2018). As the question of
race and caste itself has attracted public attention lately (Wilkerson, 2020), it is
worth thinking with C.L.R. James’ pronouncement on race and class with
regards to cricket. Certainly, the discussion on racial discrimination in cricket in
Priyansh’s essay becomes richer when we pay attention to Indian cricket and
caste oppression. One can bring a similar frame of mind to Umaima Miraj’s
paper as well, where the false splintering of class, gender and caste comes undone
in a searing analysis of the living feudal structures and patriarchy in Pakistan. In
Kristin Plys’ article, the caste-class question comes together through V. Subbiah’s
theories of caste which he developed in order to be a more effective labour
organizer in the context of early 20th century Pondicherry.
We recognize that this is just scratching the surface of South Asian Marxists’
contribution to global Marxism. And in addition to more work that highlights
unique contributions from South Asia, there is also more theoretical work to be
done within Marxist theorizing from and about South Asia. We see this special
issue as merely a launching point, and we encourage theorists to continue to push
the boundaries of Marxist theorizing in the South Asian context and beyond.
While reinforcing the importance of thinking with Marxist thought in the
context of South Asia, this special issue emerged with another concern. The set of
papers here broadly offer new ways of thinking with theory. It remains its explicit
objective to make theoretical contributions that challenge the notion of a canon
per se. The papers do not only engage with the canon, however broadly defined it
may be. Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar, for example, provide us
with an excellent template of how we can build a theory of the present, drawing
the global Marxist tradition while centring South Asia.
Other articles similarly show how one can do Marxist theory rooted in South
Asia, and in so doing, explore what we understand by theory and who can be
considered a theorist. Umaima Miraj’s paper in this issue is an exemplary
contribution to this effect as the reading of a Marxist-feminist politician Akhtar
Baloch’s diary leads to broader questions about the commodification of women’s
bodies, lovelessness and alienation in marriages of force, and the subversive
working out of this predicament through murder. The diary is read by Miraj as a
rich source of archival information, and it helps construct a feminist investigation
into love and revolution. The theoretical approach here is novel and immensely
productive, as it explicitly states that thinking about women’s liberation is an
inevitable necessity for a revolutionary politics. For Marxist-feminist theory, in
general, this study of incarcerated women in Sindh raises major theoretical
concerns as it locates resistance and its limits in unanticipated spaces.
Another paper in this issue that deals with the question of theory is Priyansh’s
work on cricket, aesthetic appreciation and Marxism and the theoretical value of
treating sporting praxis as political. Through an engagement with C.L.R. James’
(1963) early forays into thinking about cricket as an art, Priyansh looks to extend
James’ theoretical formulation by examining the sport aesthetically. After out-
lining a code of aesthetic appreciation of cricket on Jamesian terms, Priyansh
goes on to push it further by encouraging us to consider the political implications
of such a theoretical intervention. By looking at the life of a former Indian cricket
captain Mohammad Azharuddin, the author is keen to argue that thinking with
an individual could be more productive if we were not to just see them as a
sportsperson who symbolized the social energies of their time. Instead, we can go
beyond an athlete’s political proclamations to think with the playing of sport, and
whether it can be construed as political praxis.
Both papers, as noted above, are keen to devise new ways of thinking about
theory. Whether it is the question of love and revolution, or the politics of playing
sport, these papers are overtly concerned with redrawing the boundaries of the-
ory. They go about this task by narrating their arguments in a fashion that cannot
be contained within the otherwise strict parameters of academic writing.
Furthermore, by looking at the lives of numerous women who find themselves
jailed for murder, and that of a male cricketer whose name is popularly stained
with the charge of match-fixing, Miraj and Priyansh unsettle bourgeois notions of
morality by unravelling the conditions in which the people studied here made
history.
OVERVIEW OF THE ISSUE

This collection of articles begins with Kanishka Goonewardena’s ‘Development
and Socialism in Sri Lanka: The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of G.V.S. de Silva
and S.B.D. de Silva’. It offers a critical reflection on two leading Sri Lankan
Marxist economists firmly committed to socialist development. Goonewardena’s
encounter with the works of the two de Silvas, barely known outside of Sri Lanka
and mostly forgotten at home as well, focuses on their accounts of how
colonialism and imperialism fatefully undermined the prospects of socialist

post-colonial development in Sri Lanka, mostly because of the plantation econ-
omy set up by British colonialism. While S.B.D. de Silva’s magnum opus The
Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982) presents an incriminating survey
of the plantations and their debilitating effect on national economic development,
Goonewardena’s chapter highlights his theorization of the ‘colonial mode of
production’, so that he may be read in dialogue with other critics of imperialism
and advocates of socialism such as Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and
Andre Gunder Frank. In his reading of G.V.S. de Silva, Goonewardena under-
lines the novelty of his prescriptions for socialist development in iconoclastic
essays such as ‘Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development’ and ‘Social
Change’. Goonewardena’s article concludes with an assessment of the actuality of
the writings of both de Silvas, especially in the light of the unprecedented eco-
nomic and political crisis confronting Sri Lanka today.
Ayyaz Mallick’s ‘Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural Awareness’
explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the
post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. Mallick demon-
strates both the strengths and pitfalls of his theorization of the post-colonial state
and ethnicity and suggests how Alavi’s other work (on the peasantry and kinship
relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by
reading Alavi contra Alavi, he develops an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations
between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of
mediations between the same and their imbrications with differentiated relations
of class, gender, ethnicity and kinship.
In Muhammed Azeem’s ‘Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial Critique in
Pakistan through the Writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1968–1972)’, he shows us that
Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation
of politics of post-colonial critique. Pakistan lacked a continuity of economic,
political and cultural dependency that many newly independent countries (NICs)
exhibited and as theorized by many of the critical paradigms for understanding
post-colonial political economy such as neocolonialism, dependency theory and
post-colonial theory. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic
literature as a ‘failed nation’ and a state dominated by the military and plagued
by religious extremism. In opposition to these liberal views on Pakistan’s
post-colonial development, this chapter examines how cultural contestation of
Pakistan’s nation-building project post-independence from British rule was far
more complex and unique. Azeem contends that because the nation-building
project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian,
Arab, Indian and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other
hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constit-
uent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in
ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the margin-
alized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical and literary
insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan,
which parallelled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early subaltern
studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and
confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan’s literary and cultural
sphere. Through the writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, Azeem’s article reads the nuances
of these contestations and juxtapose them with the extant literature to complicate
the latter’s conclusions and, in doing so, to indicate the possibility of a different
post-colonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan.
Umaima Miraj’s ‘Murder as Praxis? Theorising Marxist Feminism in
Pakistan Through Akhtar Baloch’s Prison Narratives’ grapples with how
women in revolutionary history are often relegated to the sidelines or subsumed
under the larger goals of the movements. In order to negate the liberal notions
of the oppressed women of the Global South, and also to historicize women’s
participation in anti-systemic revolutionary movements, Miraj shows why it is
important to recover the silenced or forgotten voices of revolutionary women
whose stories and politics highlight that women’s presence in the sphere of
dissent is neither a new nor a bygone phenomenon. In this chapter, Miraj
highlights one such woman: Akhtar Baloch, daughter of the activist and folk
singer Jiji Zarina Baloch, one of the founders of Sindhiani Tehreek, and the
stepdaughter of the founder of the progressive and leftist party, Awami Teh-
reek, Rasul Bux Palijo. In 1970, 18-year-old Akhtar Baloch began a hunger
strike against Yahya Khan’s military regime, protesting the One Unit Scheme
and for the electoral lists of the upcoming elections to be published in Sindhi.
She was arrested thrice over these protests in the next few years. Based on her
jail diaries, translated into English in 2017 as Prison Narratives, and an
in-depth interview, Miraj explores how Akhtar situated her struggles and
protests against the state-sponsored One Unit Scheme, electoral lists and the
feudal economy of Sindh, in the larger sphere of struggle against global capi-
talism and domination. By also analyzing the importance of revolutionary
poetry and friendships formed in her jail time, Miraj argues that uncovering her
important contribution adds to our understanding of Marxist- feminist theories
of the Global South.
Priyansh’s ‘Mohammad Azharuddin as a Figure of Shock: The life of an
Indian Muslim cricket captain in the time of Hindu nationalism’ begins with an
analysis of how Mohammad Azharuddin’s arrival in professional cricket served,
to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from
its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of
human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among
observers. In this paper, Priyansh examines Azharuddin’s life in cricket and
public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aes-
thetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis,
as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for
theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and C.L.R. James,
Priyansh theorizes the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his
wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men’s
cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin’s
presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed
on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was
exposed at the turn of the 21st century, not to mention the lurid attention that
was devoted to his multiple marriages, Azhar (the name by which he was
popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasized Victorian
notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, Priyansh
discusses how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our
very notions of art and aesthetics.
Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar’s ‘Crisis and Revolt in Sri
Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon of Alternatives amidst an Unravelling Global
Order’ analyzes the popular uprising in Sri Lanka on 9 July 2022 that led to
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country. It represented a stunning
culmination of a wave of protests during the recent past. The proximate cause of
the uprising, they contend, was the worst economic crisis that Sri Lanka had
experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet the breakdown was long
in the making as the island nation became the first country in South Asia to take a
neoliberal turn in the late 1970s. The dramatic collapse was catalyzed by a
sovereign debt crisis with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in
Ukraine. Nevertheless, like all great revolts, it has led to a counter revolution by
the ruling class, including the reconfiguration of the old regime. Gunawardena
and Kadirgamar take a Marxist approach to examine the tremendous conse-
quences of recent events, both in terms of Sri Lanka’s long history of struggles
involving working people and the global unravelling underway. They assess
whether Sri Lanka is a harbinger of more global political economic changes to
come. The process includes the possibility of systemic resistance to financializa-
tion in the scores of countries in the Global South experiencing tremendous debt
distress. In this regard, they interrogate whether Sri Lanka’s revolt could yet
become a revolution. This chapter provides a template for scholars to levy
Marxist thought to better understand contemporary events in South Asia as they
unfold.
Kristin Plys’ ‘Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese India
Compared: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de Bragança’s Theories of
Colonial Independence’ examines how two Marxist anti-colonial intellectuals
from Portuguese India and French India – Aquino de Bragança and V. Subbiah –
differentially theorized movements for independence from colonial rule. Through
the analysis of primary source documents in French, Portuguese, Italian and
English, Plys compares V. Subbiah’s Dalit, anti-fascist anti-colonial Marxism to
Aquino de Bragança’s internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. Both theorists’
approaches have similarities in (1) theorizing the relationship between fascism
and colonialism, given that the Portuguese Empire was administered by Salazar’s
Estado Novo and the French Empire was under Vichy rule, (2) rethinking
Marxism to better fit the Global South context and (3) intellectual and political
connections to Algeria were critically important for theory and praxis. Despite
the distinct geographic and social spaces in which they lived and worked, both
produced remarkably similar theories of anti-imperialism.
The essays included in this volume do anti-imperialist Marxism in the South
Asian context in the service of a global Marxism that is anti-imperialist and
non-Eurocentric. They accomplish this objective through different perspectives
and methodological approaches. Kanishka Goonewardena’s ‘Development and
Socialism in Sri Lanka: The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of G.V.S. de Silva and

S.B.D. de Silva’, Ayyaz Mallick’s ‘Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural
Awareness’ and Muhammad Azeem’s ‘Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial
Critique in Pakistan through the Writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1968–1972)’ have a
shared endeavour of recovering South Asian theorists of development and
assessing the continued utility of their work, but also accounting for the limits to
their theoretical paradigms and praxis. Umaima Miraj’s ‘Murder as Praxis?
Theorising Marxist Feminism in Pakistan Through Akhtar Baloch’s Prison
Narratives’ and Priyansh’s ‘Mohammad Azharuddin as a Figure of Shock: The
life of an Indian Muslim cricket captain in the time of Hindu nationalism’ both
question who can theorize and what is a valid object of theoretical analysis. In
Umaima’s article, she looks to women involved in revolutionary anti-colonial
movements, reading their praxis as Marxist-feminist theory, while Priyansh
examines one Indian cricket captain’s athletic style and media performance
through a cultural Marxist lens. As both articles demonstrate, theory is not
limited to writings of white European men. Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan
Kadirgamar’s ‘Crisis and Revolt in Sri Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon of Alter-
natives amidst an Unravelling Global Order’ levies Marxist theories from South
Asia and elsewhere to analyze the world-historical significance of contemporary
events in Sri Lanka as they unfold. Kristin Plys’s ‘Anti-colonial Marxism in
French and Portuguese India Compared: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de
Bragança’s Theories of Colonial Independence’ uses comparative historical
methods to show how Marxist thought in South Asia differed by region, but these
two essays also situate these comparisons in the global context by drawing on
Global South connections made by South Asian theorists to open up Marxist
thought in South Asia as part of the broader Global South. The editors’ interview
with Himani Banerjee similarly gestures to global connections through reflection
on Banerjee’s life and work.
This volume closes with several poems of resistance by Marxist poet, Salman
Haider. Haider is one of Pakistan’s most celebrated and well-known contem-
porary poets. In 2017, he was disappeared by the Pakistani state for expressing
solidarity with those exploited, oppressed and on the margins of Pakistani soci-
ety. He now lives in exile in Canada. Haider’s poems, some in translation for the
first time, bring together the themes of the intellectual work presented in this
volume. Themes of development, who can theorize, Marxist aesthetics and the
global and comparative imagination of the Left are present in his poems along
with his central themes of state violence. While his poems expose state and
structural violence in the context of Pakistan’s past and present, his poems of
resistance also have global resonance.
Haider’s poetry reminds us of the urgency to place Marxist concerns old and
new, in forms familiar and novel. To unbind Marxist theory, as the title of this
introduction suggests, we need to reopen the frayed packaging and see whether
we can arrange the old contents in newer arrangements. The two de Silvas,
Hamza Alavi, V. Subbiah, Aquino de Bragança and others may exist as figments
of a history foreclosed, but we rang the alarm bells here so that we could hear
them speak again. They remind us of the continued relevance of anti-imperialist
thought, and their uplifting contributions to questions that still animate the minds
of Marxists. The mode of expression that was adopted by Akhtar Baloch,
Mohammad Azharuddin and Salman Haider perhaps makes them unlikely
guests in this gathering. But the contributions to the special issue stimulate this
very incongruity. Through diary writing and treatises on political economy,
searing critique and sport-making, we think, write and sketch out a poetic
Marxism.
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh.
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
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CHAPTER 2
THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST MARXISMS

OF SBD DE SILVA AND GVS DE
SILVA
Kanishka Goonewardena
ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an introduction to two leading Sri Lankan Marxist political
economists, S. B. D. de Silva and G. V. S. de Silva. By surveying their most
influential writings – the 645-page book The Political Economy of Underde-
velopment by S. B. D. de Silva and the pungent essays ‘Heretical Thoughts’ and
‘Social Change’ by G. V. S. de Silva – -it traces the distinctive and provocative
qualities of these two thinkers, especially concerning problems of development
and underdevelopment. In doing so, it is argued that S. B. D. de Silva is best
understood as a leading anti-imperialist political economist alongside Samir
Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, distinguished by a classical
Marxist focus on class struggle and relations of production in his narration of the
‘colonial mode of production’ in Sri Lanka. As for G. V. S. de Silva’s erudite
reflections on the trajectories of transition to capitalism and socialism as well as
the prospects of social and economic development in countries emerging from
pre-capitalist social formations in the wake of colonization, his remarkable
attention to spatial questions at multiple scales – between country and city, colony
and metropole – receives special attention. The conclusion underlines the sus-
tained relevance of both de Silvas to making sense of the origins of the present
crisis in Sri Lanka.
Keywords: Marxism; imperialism; plantations; city; country; development
In the Marxist political tradition of Sri Lanka, two de Silvas – SBD and GVS –
occupy special places. Both distinguished themselves in the field of economics, by

Copyright © 2024 Kanishka Goonewardena
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040003
19
20 The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms
prevailing against the neoclassical orthodoxies of the dismal science, with devout
attention to the prospects of development in so-called post-colonial countries
aspiring to socialism. In so doing, they drew creatively from Marx’s conception of
capitalism and revolutionary Marxisms after Marx to formulate searching critiques
of Sri Lanka’s unfinished struggle with colonialism and imperialism, which has
lasted for over 500 years. These de Silvas sought not merely to write about colo-
nialism and imperialism, and the steady complicity of diverse local elites in these
lucrative enterprises, but above all to transcend all that in a socialist project of
development, as engaged intellectuals with exemplary careers in public and political
offices.
SBD, who was born in 1926 and studied economists as much as economics
until his death at the age of 92, is fondly remembered by Sri Lankan leftists as a
dedicated lecturer at the University of Peradeniya and a spirited participant in
political–economic debates. He launched his oeuvre, however, not as an aca-
demic but as Deputy Director of the Research Department of the Central Bank,
in the immediate aftermath of Sri Lanka’s independence from the British in 1948,
before being removed from that position by his red-baiting seniors. He persisted,
nonetheless, in a series of other government appointments to become Secretary to
the Ministry of Industries in the 1970–1977 government led by Sirimavo Ban-
daranaike and was Assistant Director of the Agrarian Research and Training
Institute when his magnum opus finally appeared in 1982. The Political Economy
of Underdevelopment is a 645-page treatise on Sri Lanka’s ‘colonial mode of
production’ dominated by the plantation economy of tea, rubber and coconut.1 It
offers a striking contribution to the world literature on capitalist development
and underdevelopment (Personal conversation with SBD de Silva).
SBD’s Underdevelopment grew out of his doctoral dissertation entitled
‘Investment and Economic Growth in Ceylon’, submitted to the University of
London in 1962. Unconcerned with ‘considerations of professional survival or
advancement’, he declined an invitation from Oxford University Press to publish
the manuscript immediately as a monograph and set about ‘revising’ it – for the
better part of two decades (viii). In that process, he became the first Sri Lankan
academic to reject his own PhD thesis, according to the avid reader of SBD,
Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta (2020, 2018). Whereas the dissertation had sought
‘to analyse the backwardness of Sri Lanka’s peasant sector in terms of its failure
to absorb growth impulses that were thought to emanate from the plantation
sector’, further research revealed to SBD that ‘the plantations themselves were
merely another backward sector with no impulses to spread’ or initiatives to uplift
the peasantry, contrary to commonplace contemporaneous economic opinion on
development in the former colonies (1). The book, therefore, refutes the disser-
tation as well as the regnant orthodoxy on development: Underdevelopment is
SBD’s ‘attempt to place in the world context what was essentially a
1
Parenthetical page references to this book will be given in the main text without repeatedly
indicating the author’s name and date of publication (De Silva, SBD, 1982). Similar page
references will be given to the main texts of GVS de Silva (1988) as well.
KANISHKA GOONEWARDENA 21
country-based study . . . and to examine the problems of underdevelopment in

terms of more generalised analytical categories’ obtained from Marxian rather
than neoclassical economics (1).
SBD’s claim to have sketched a worldwide perspective on Sri Lanka’s travails
of underdevelopment is both true and false. True, because the scope of Under-
development is indeed global, studded as it is with poignant examinations of
various other countries facing their own problems underdevelopment, on account
of comparable experiences of colonialism and imperialism; false, because this
book, though focused on Sri Lanka, cannot but aspire to be a general theory of
capitalism and colonialism, in the most internationalist and anti-imperialist
accents of Marxism. In terms of scope, depth and intellectual force, Underde-
velopment ranks alongside better known works on the subject of capitalism and
development by more renowned writers such as Andre Gunder Frank and Samir
Amin, who (among other kindred spirits) are in fact generously and critically
appraised by SBD. It is to be regretted, therefore, that this magisterial work by
SBD is rarely registered in contemporary discussions on colonialism and impe-
rialism, either in Sri Lanka or the rest of the world – except in the irreverent
weekly blog on ‘economists and economics’ (e-Con e-News) curated by the said
Sri Bhaggiyadatta.2
What does the reader find in Underdevelopment? Following a settling of
accounts with the inadequacy of neoclassical economics to the problem of
underdevelopment at hand, and a contrasting appreciation of it in SBD’s Marxist
perspective, the first of the three parts of this 17-chapter book delves into a richly
detailed consideration of two types of colonialism in relation to metropolitan
capital: settler colonialism and non-settler colonialism. This typological distinc-
tion firmly underlines SBD’s theorization of the divergent fortunes of settler and
non-settler societies with respect to the prospects of capitalist development,
especially their quite different capacities to industrialize in the mould of the
metropole, revered for its rapid and qualitative growth of productive forces,
especially in high value-added and capital-intensive sectors of the economy. The
exhaustively documented second part then deals with the discontents of the
plantation system that lay at the heart of both types of colonial economies, with
special attention to their forces of production, class relations and labour regimes
ranging from chattel slavery to forms of indenture characteristic in European
colonies of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
It is in this middle part that we find the most thoroughgoing study of the Sri
Lankan economy under British rule, generously sprinkled with comparative
references to plantation economies throughout the colonial world; it is here too
that we see SBD’s central argument concerning the fateful plantations most
amply spelt out. To wit: in spite their veritable profitability for the metropolitan
ruling classes and a relatively smaller band of local elites in both colonial and
post-colonial times, plantations did not develop forces of production or
2
Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, E-Con, E-News, 1 June 2019-15 May 2022: https://
eesrilanka.wordpress.com.
opportunities for indigenous industrialization in the non-settler colonial parts of

the world; on the contrary, they retarded development. SBD’s account of the
pioneering role played by plantations in the ‘development of underdevelopment’
(Frank, 1966) of countries such as Sri Lanka rests on classical Marxist class
analysis, highlighting the preponderance in these economies of metropolitan
rentiers, merchants and bankers, alongside their obsequious local agents, who
accumulated vast surpluses in the sphere of exchange rather than production,
without developing productive forces as did the classical industrial bourgeoisie
praised by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto.
In the third and final part of Underdevelopment, the long arc of SBD’s argu-
ment bends towards a general theory of peripheral underdevelopment, as he
stretches Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production into colonized
spaces. This includes a close analysis of the ‘mechanisms of metropolitan control’
in non-settler colonies, with a clear emphasis on their domination by merchant
rather than productive capital. SBD is unequivocal here about the role played by
merchant capital in the relationship between capitalism and underdevelopment,
that is, ‘mediating between precapitalist forms of production in the periphery and
capitalism in the metropolis’ (426). Merchant capital in the metropolis is,
therefore, different from merchant capital in the periphery, where it functions as a
reactionary rather than progressive force with respect to the development of
productive forces and production relations. Accordingly, SBD is insistent that
plantations – the lynchpin of the ‘colonial mode of production’ – are not capitalist
but pre-capitalist. In his own words (447):
Imperialism, as the agency by which capitalism expanded its sphere of influence, has had little
or no transformative effect on the periphery; rather than developing capitalist social relations
and productive forces, imperialism stifled them and intensified unevenness of development on a
world scale. In countries that came under the hegemony of the established capitalist centres
there was for the most part merely a reorganization of their precapitalist structures, retarding a
real transformation of these structures. . . . [T]hese countries were transfixed in a twilight world
which is neither feudalism nor capitalism.
How, then, is Underdevelopment to be assessed? SBD’s pioneering work is best

read as an answer to the question: why does underdevelopment, fundamentally
marked by shackled forces of production, persist in the periphery? It is his
remarkably erudite enquiry into it that yields an original theoretical concept: the
‘colonial mode of production’. This productive concept demands to be studied
alongside those proposed for related purposes by Frank, Amin, Giovanni Arrighi
and Immanuel Wallerstein (dependency, unequal exchange, hegemony, world
system), with close reference to the array of theories of imperialism in the Marxist
tradition, from Lenin and Luxemburg to Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral,
Amiya Bagchi and Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik. For it is in the company of these
thinkers that SBD’s own contribution becomes clearest in its insistence on
theorizing underdevelopment in terms of production and class relations, rather
demarcations of centre from periphery with primary reference to the sphere of
exchange. Theoretically, two related features of his critique of underdevelopment
are particularly striking: first, the degree of agency attributed to merchant capital
in the ‘development of underdevelopment’; second, the Manichean line he draws

between capitalist and pre-capitalist production relations. At stake in Underde-
velopment, therefore, is nothing less than the meaning of capitalism; the nature of
the interaction between capitalist and non- or pre-capitalist social relations under
the influence of European colonialism and imperialism and our understanding of
historical transitions, from feudalism to capitalism as well as from feudalism and
capitalism to socialism.
Readers of SBD are of course also obliged to ask: what is to be done with
underdevelopment? Given the analytical rather than prescriptive nature of Under-
development, SBD lies open to misinterpretation by critics and acolytes alike.3 The
worst possible travesty would be to regard him as an advocate of peripheral capitalist
development or industrialization by any means necessary, along the lines of Deng
Xiaoping’s notorious parable of the cat and the mouse. Merely because Underde-
velopment is on occasion liable to be misread as a lament of the lack of capitalist
development in the colonized periphery, no one should be misled to imagine that the
kind of industrialization achieved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie could simply be
replicated in the periphery under the auspices of a so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’.
Frantz Fanon (1963/1961) questioned that temptation in the famous ‘Pitfalls of
National Consciousness’ chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, by demonstrating
the futility of nationalism without socialism, locally and globally. Moreover, as Utsa
Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2021) have shown in their latest book Capital and
Imperialism, ‘capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasise itself in the practice of
imperialism and the immiseration of countless people’, precisely because it is not by
its nature a ‘self-contained and self-generating system’.4 For the Patnaiks – and for
SBD too – capitalism as a self-sustaining system exists neither in theory nor in his-
tory; it feeds on its other like Deng’s proverbial cat needs its mouse. So deserves
SBD’s case a hearing devoid of the familiar fetishisms of technological fixes, fan-
tasies of modernization theorists, utopias of national bourgeoisies and theoretical
misconceptions of capitalism in hothouses. Those seeking a way out of underde-
velopment bequeathed by the ‘colonial mode of production’ are rather forced to ask:
socialism and barbarism?
‘Socialism or Barbarism?’ is unsurprisingly the title chosen for a book of his by
GVS de Silva – the Sri Lankan Marxist who grappled with Lenin’s ‘what is to be
done?’ question in the post-colonial condition with unparalleled insight. Two
years junior to SBD, GVS is widely regarded as more political than economic,
partly on account of the practical and prescriptive orientation of his work. But
this political reputation grows mostly out of his role in drafting Sri Lanka’s
landmark Paddy Lands Act of 1957 – as Secretary to Philip Gunawardena, the
legendary Minister of Food and Agriculture in the 1956 Mahajana Eksath Per-
amuna (MEP) government, and a founder of the Marxist movement in Sri
Lanka. This Act, it should be recalled, was the first great socialist political act in
3
For a fine critical review of Underdevelopment by a leading Sri Lankan Marxist
theoretician, see Abhayavardhana (2001).
4
The quoted words in this sentence are from the publisher’s description of the book.
independent Sri Lanka, with the immediate objective of establishing tenancy

rights of share-cropping peasants and uprooting the entrenched imbalance of
power between landlords and tenant farmers. Its popular slogan and political–
economic demand – ‘Land to the Tiller’ – remained a lifelong influence on GVS,
whose socialist credentials came to rest also on his lasting commitment to rural
technological and social development as well as his abiding concern for the
self-emancipation of the peasantry from the depredations of actually existing
village life, in Sri Lanka as well as neighbouring countries.
After graduating with honours from the University of Ceylon and a stint at the
London School of Economics, GVS left academia for politics, joining the Ceylon
Communist Party in the early 1950s, before breaking with it over ideological
differences. Henceforth, he laboured as an independent Marxist until his untimely
death in 1980. Even after Philip Gunawardena’s resignation from the MEP
government, in protest of the damage inflicted on the Paddy Lands Act by
vindictive landlords in Parliament, GVS continued his public service with
distinction, holding leading positions in such state institutions as the Industrial
Development Board and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, while also
contributing his expertise to international institutes such as United Nations
Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Asian Institute of Development
(AID) and Participative Institute for Development Alternatives (PIDA). As a
Marxist political economist in search of national strategies for socialist devel-
opment, with the impoverished masses of peasants at the forefront of his original
mind, GVS was keenly interested in two social and geographical relationships:
one between the forces of production and the social relations of production, the
other between the country and the city (De Silva, 1988, p. 1).
GVS’s acute reading of Marx and radical thoughts on socialist development
are now accessible mostly through an edited collection of his work, aptly entitled
Socialism or Barbarism, which includes two of his most iconoclastic essays:
‘Social Change’ and ‘Some Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development’.5
Penned in 1973, the latter still reads like a Sri Lankan ‘communist manifesto’,
scintillating critique and call to action rolled into one. The real-utopian project
GVS lays out here intends to transcend not only the socio-spatial inequalities of
the country but also its location and vocation within the global imperialist
division of labour. How is this to be achieved? ‘The central economic question in
our country’, GVS writes in the first line of ‘Heretical Thoughts’, ‘is the devel-
opment of the rural productive forces’ (83) – a task hindered rather than aided by
the plantation-driven ‘colonial mode of production’, as SBD also demonstrates.
But: ‘Why rural? Why not urban, or both urban and rural?’ (83). In his pene-
trating socio-spatial analysis reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s celebrated critique of
the comprador bourgeoisie, GVS shows why the city is the problem rather than
the solution. For ‘the urban’ is constitutionally incapable of autonomous devel-
opment of productive forces and social relations in a socialist direction because of
5
All references to GVS de Silva (1988) are taken from Socialism or Barbarism, indicated
parenthetically by page numbers in the main text.
the persistently parasitic relationship of the city to the countryside on the hand
and of its subservient relationship to the metropole on the other hand. All efforts
of national development on the way to socialism must, therefore, be concentrated
where they are most needed and likely to succeed – in the countryside rather than
in the city.
What does this socialist agenda look like? It involves ‘the deployment, on an
immense scale, of resources, technology, skills and expertise from the urban to the
rural sector’ (83). But that is not all: ‘equally necessary is a transformation of the
economic relations within . . . which these productive forces operate’ (85). The
economic relations to be so revolutionized are twofold: those ‘between the rural
economy and the urban economy’ and those ‘within the rural economy itself’
(85). Concerning the country–city relation to be deconstructed, GVS notes that
‘the exploitation of the rural economy by the urban takes practically the same
forms as the exploitation of the urban economy, in turn, by the imperialist
economies of the developed countries’ (86). It is this anti-imperialist perspective
that clarifies for him how ‘our rural economy . . . is a doubly exploited one’ (86)
and why its emancipation must be a priority for any realistic
socialist-revolutionary project. For GVS, the rural is essentially ‘a simple com-
modity production economy’ trapped between ‘a senile feudalism and a castrated
capitalism’ (96). The Sri Lankan village – so romanticized by cultural nationalists
and multicultural tourists alike – appears to him for what it is: a ‘fertile breeding
ground of . . . backwardness, low productivity, inefficiency, ignorance, apathy,
lethargy, resistance to new ideas, excessive familism and isolation from the
community’ (97). Yet by virtue of the distance between what the rural is and what
it could be, it is precisely here that we must act in accordance with the ninth of the
ten-point programme Marx and Engels (1998/1848, p. 61) proposed in the
Communist Manifesto: i.e. the ‘combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries’ in conjunction with the ‘gradual abolition of the distinction between
town and country’.
How, then, is the rural economy to be revolutionized? Echoing the New
Economic Policy of the Soviet Union, GVS calls on the state to ‘give a very high
priority to rural electrification, which is the power base for the development of
rural productive forces’ (89). Beyond this electrified base, his enumeration of
related tasks for the state is exhaustive – including investments in agriculture,
irrigation infrastructure, livestock, fisheries, rural industries and research and
technological innovations. The state, in short, is summoned for a ‘technological
revolution in the countryside’ (91).
Research scientists, engineers, technicians and other skilled workers must be made to leave their
laboratories, office desks, conference tables and relatively comfortable urban life, and live and
work among the rural people, educating them and at the same time learning from them.
Agricultural experimentation must be done in the cultivator’s field and technical innovation in
the village smithy, with the full and intelligent participation of the rural people. The village
must be shaken out of its torpor, and turned into a hive of lively discussion, creative thinking,
technical innovation and productive activity, by a well-planned and organized invasion of
skilled and knowledgeable town folk who are anxious to teach and learn in a spirit of humility,
seeking, as it were, atonement for their primordial sin of parasitic existence . . . (91–92).
While the state is accorded a key role in this revolution, an equal if not greater
emphasis in GVS’s thinking falls on democratizing its form, in a well-arranged
marriage of ‘Land to the Tiller’ to ‘Power to the People’. The domicile of this
radical couple is to be the village ‘Community Organization’ (103), proposed by
GVS as the basic political unit of the revolution. In ‘Heretical Thoughts’, GVS
insists on the necessity of ‘a far-reaching decentralization of administration and
decision making’ (103) to effectively revolutionize the forces and relations of
production in the countryside. While the democratic role of ‘producer coopera-
tives’ and ‘consumer cooperatives’ in this process is duly registered by GVS, for
him it requires not a partial but a ‘total organization of the rural economy’ (102).
It is within this holistic horizon that he proposes the political form of the village
‘Community Organization’. Nothing that concerns the revolution is to be alien to
it, which GVS imagines as a hub of ‘public discussion and debate’ leading to
political decisions on all matters of common interest (105). Indeed, ‘the Com-
munity Organization must be the driving force in a mass movement to develop
the productive forces, increase the technological consciousness, widen the intel-
lectual horizon, and unleash the suppressed creative energy of the entire rural
community’ (104). GVS is clear that ‘it should be a thoroughly democratic
organization and not a bureaucratic one imposed from above’ because ‘the
essence of the matter is that the mass of the people must responsibly and
consciously participate in development’ (105).
Politically, GVS’s ‘Heretical Thoughts’ align perfectly with Lenin’s potent but
often-misunderstood slogan: Communism 5 Electrification 1 Soviet Power. For
in this formulaic definition, ‘electrification’ stands for the rapid development of
productive forces in the backward conditions inherited by the Bolshevik Revo-
lution in 1917, and ‘soviet power’ refers to the ‘power to the people’ in antici-
pation of the ‘withering away of the state’ as theorized in Lenin’s (1917) State and
Revolution. GVS’s diagnosis of Sri Lanka’s predicament of underdevelopment in
rural–urban–global terms also reminds us of another pioneering Marxist work on
the profound spatial aspects of capitalist development, published in the same year
as ‘Heretical Thoughts’: The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (1973).
It is in this book that the Welsh literary critic expounded on the fundamental
significance of the relation between the country and the city to the historical
geography of capitalism, from the intensely debated origins of this mode of
production to its present forms: ‘What happened in England has since been
happening ever more widely, in new and dependent relationships between all the
industrialized nations and all the other ‘underdeveloped’ but economically
important lands’. As to what this story of unequal relations means to the colo-
nized countries of the world, Williams (1973, p. 279) is also clear: ‘one of the last
models of “city and country” is the system we now know as imperialism.’ If the
Marxist synergies between GVS and Williams are apparent enough to their
seasoned readers, here it remains to be pointed out that neither is anti-urbanist in
spite of their due attention to the rural and that both have also much in common
with the great Marxist theoretician of space (Henri Lefebvre, 2003/1970, 1991/
1974). Here’s GVS sounding very much like the French philosopher on ‘the
urban’:
What, then, is the future of our cities? Are they doomed . . . ? No. . . . As the rural economy
takes off, it will lift the urban economy up with it, as a junior partner. Cities will once again
grow, not as parasites living on the countryside and exploited in turn by foreign economies, but
as useful satellites of the rural economy. This, however, will not be the end of the story. With
the further development of the rural productive forces, economies of scale will become both
necessary and possible. This will again require the concentration of industry, services and
decision making in urban centres. The decentralization inherent in the development of the rural
economy may then come to into conflict with the increasing need for centralization.
Decentralism and centralism are not absolutes, the decentralization which today is necessary
to liberate the incarcerated rural productive forces, may eventually become a drag on the
growth of the urban productive forces. “Urban centralization” could well be the heretical cry of
a future economist (94–96).
The dialectical and historical materialist qualities of GVS’s thinking are also
palpable in the most theoretically innovative essay written by a Sri Lankan
Marxist: ‘Social Change’ (241–286). It offers a fine measure of the depth of GVS’s
engagement with Marx’s political–economic writings – from the famous ‘Preface’
to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to Grundrisse to Capital –
in search of possibilities for socialist development and transition to communism,
in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In this brilliant essay, GVS sketched a historical
materialist theory of transitions between modes of production by rereading Marx
in the light of revolutionary and evolutionary transformations of social and
political relations from the bourgeois revolutions in Europe to the last decade of
the Cold War, with special attention to the socialist and indeed communist
aspirations of post-colonial societies. A multilinear historical trajectory from
‘pre-capitalism’ to ‘barbarism’ or ‘communism’ emerged in his non-teleological
analysis. In a nutshell, ‘pre-capitalist’ societies harbour the potential to evolve
into either ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’, and both could in turn proceed, under
specified historical and political conditions, towards either ‘barbarism’ or
‘communism’. Fleshed out with concepts of the nature of the state in such social
formations and theorizations of crises of capitalist accumulation, GVS’s matrix
of historical pathways through modes of production yields provocative reflections
on the ‘what-is-to-be-done’ question in the context of unfinished struggles, in
South Asia and beyond, for an exit from actually existing capitalism.
If this brief account of the key writings of SBD and GVS succeeds grasping the
nature of their distinctly Sri Lankan and South Asian contributions to Marxism,
an inevitable question still suggests itself: how well have Underdevelopment and
Socialism or Barbarism aged since their initial publications? GVS and SBD were
both exemplary artisans and partisans of the post-colonial political project of
socialist development, which was essentially conceived and executed with mixed
results, to say the least, in the Cold War era and under the aegis of the
Non-Aligned Movement (Prashad, 2007). Their radical political–economic
aspirations, however, were defeated by Sri Lanka’s neoliberal turn as early as
1977 and the concomitant marginalization of the Marxist political parties in
parliamentary as well as mass politics. In the most commonplace political sense,
then, SBD and GVS seem to belong to a disappointed if not lost generation of
revolutionaries. Yet the worst economic crisis in Sri Lanka since independence in
1948, which brought protestors of various backgrounds in unprecedented
numbers to the streets in the summer of 2022 and deposed a popularly elected
president, has vindicated in no uncertain terms the descriptions and prescriptions
of Underdevelopment and Socialism or Barbarism. As the most astute observers of
this dire economic and political crisis situation including Prabhat Patnaik (2022),
Shiran Illanperuma (2022), Matt Withers (2022) and Devaka Gunawardena and
Ahilan Kadirgamar (2022) have noted, what is called the aragalaya (the struggle)
in Sri Lanka today can only be understood with an historical perspective linking
the ‘colonial mode of production’ to the ‘development of underdevelopment’ in
the neoliberal era, such as we find in Underdevelopment; and the solution to the
present crisis in Sri Lanka lies not in yet more neoliberalism as advisers from the
World Bank or IMF would like to have it but in the kind of ‘Heretical Thoughts’
propounded by GVS. So remain SBD and GVS our contemporaries and com-
rades in Sri Lanka, South Asia and beyond.
REFERENCES
Abhayavardhana, H. (2001). The political economy of underdevelopment. In S. B. D. de Silva (Ed.),
Selected writings (pp. 368–375). Social Scientists Association.
de Silva, S. B. D. (1982). The political economy of underdevelopment. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
de Silva, G. V. S. (1988). The alternatives: Socialism or barbarism. In C. Abeysekera (Ed.), Social
Scientists Association.
Fanon, F. (1963/1961). The wretched of the Earth [trans. C. Farrington]. Grove Press.
Frank, A. G. (1966). The development of underdevelopment. New England Free Press.
Gunawardena, D., & Kadirgamar, A. (2022, April 30). The political economy of the crisis in Sri
Lanka. Economic and Political Weekly, 57(18). www.epw.in. Accessed on May 10, 2022.
Illanperuma, S. (2022, April 8). Is Sri Lanka heading towards further turmoil? Roots of the 2022
economic crisis. Jamhoor. www.jamhoor.org. Accessed on April 8, 2022.
Lefebvre, H. (1991/1974). The production of space [trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, afterword D. Harvey].
Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (2003/1970). The urban revolution [trans. R. Bonomno, foreword N. Smith]. University of
Minnesota Press.
Lenin, V. I. (1917). State and revolution. www.marxists.org. Accessed on May 05, 2022.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998/1848). The Communist Manifesto: A modern edition [intro. Eric Hobs-
bawm]. Verso.
Patnaik, P. (2022, May 18). Neoliberalism and the Sri Lanka economic crisis. The Bullet. www.
socialistproject.ca. Accessed on May 18, 2022.
Patnaik, U., & Patnaik, P. (2021). Capital and imperialism: History, theory and the present. Monthly
Review Press.
Prashad, V. (2007). The darker nations. Boston: A people’s history of the Third World. The New Press.
Sri Bhaggiyadatta, K. (2018, June 19). One of Sri Lanka’s greatest economists: S. B. D. de Silva.
Colombo Telegraph. https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/one-of-sri-lankas-greatest-
economists-sbd-de-silva/).
Sri Bhaggiyadatta, K. (2020, September 2–12). S. B. D. de Silva, Parts 1–7. Gammiris: The Pepper
Spray Club. https://gammiris.lk/author/krisanthasri/
Sri Bhaggiyadatta, K. (2019, present). E-Con, E-News. https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com
Williams, R. (1973). The country and the city. Oxford University Press.
Withers, M. (2022, May 12). The making and masking of Sri Lanka’s debt crisis. East Asia Forum.
www.eastasiaforum.org. Accessed on May 12, 2022.
CHAPTER 3
ALAVI CONTRA ALAVI: TOWARDS A

CONJUNCTURAL AWARENESS
Ayyaz Mallick
University of Liverpool, UK
ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi,
especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations.
In contradistinction to most (partial) uptakes of Alavi, I evaluate his work as
a whole in order to shed light on its continuities and discontinuities. I
demonstrate both the strengths and pitfalls of Alavi’s theorisation of the
post-colonial state, mode of production and ethnicity by placing him in context
of wider Marxist debates at the time. I then suggest that Alavi’s other work
(e.g. on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the
weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, I advocate for
an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society,
arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same, and
their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, ethnicity and kinship.
Keywords: Marxism; state; class; ethnicity; Pakistan; Hamza Alavi
INTRODUCTION
At one point in his letters to the late Stuart Hall, his friend and philosopher
David Scott reflects on the form of Hall’s extensive corpus and how this has
influenced the latter’s reception. For Scott, the often selective uptake of Hall’s
output in different strands of activist and intellectual work is integrally related to
the fact that Hall is, above all, a ‘theorist of the contingency of the present’ who
therefore – and almost exclusively – deployed the essay as ‘the most conducive’
generic form for his scholarship-as-intervention modus operandi. As such then,
the fact that there is no ‘Big Book’ to turn to for ‘Stuart Hall’s Theory of

Copyright © 2024 Ayyaz Mallick
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040004
29
30 Towards a Conjunctural Awareness
Everything’ is congruent with Hall’s ethos of ‘see[ing] virtue – not failing – in the
fragment’, an intellectual (and political) practice animated by ‘an implicit worry
about the false unity of the monograph – the book’s illusion of closure’ (Scott,
2017, pp. 61–62, emphasis in original). It is thus the very form of such scholarship
as intervention that lends itself to partial and one-sided uptakes of an author’s
oeuvre.
Much the same may be said about the fate of another New Left contemporary of
Stuart Hall: the Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi (1921–2003). For Alavi too,
while not being as wedded as Hall to the fragment or – as Hegel would put it – to ‘the
labour of the negative’,1 it is the essay (in the form of journal articles, book chapters,
etc.) which was the paramount form of intervention over a wide-ranging and restless
intellectual journey. That Alavi’s writings have given rise to a selective uptake, often
(over-)emphasising one aspect over the other, is not surprising given the targeted
form and the astonishing range of his interventions.2 Thus, for example, where in
global and subcontinental Marxist debates, Alavi has figured mostly by virtue of his
interventions in debates about the modes of production and on the peasantry
(Thorner, 1982), in Pakistan, it is Alavi’s ruminations on the character of the
post-colonial state and (to a lesser extent) on ethnicity that have generated the most
intense debate (cf. McCartney & Zaidi, 2019). What has rarely been done is to
consider Alavi’s oeuvre as a whole, the uptake of Alavi’s work – especially that on
state theory – being stuck in a kind of one-sidedness and (dare I say) even a pro-
vincialism, which has ignored his continuities and discontinuities with the wider
Marxist milieu within which he was embedded. Consequently, as I will show later,
there has been a lack of critical interrogation of the problematic – i.e. the assump-
tions and pre-suppositions (both conceptual and historical) – of Alavi’s scholarly
output. In turn, this has led to engagements and critiques of Alavi that are limited by
virtue of being confined at the (narrowly) empirical and, indeed, at an empiricist level
(cf. Zaidi, 2014).
This essay therefore has two interrelated aims. First, it aims to shed light on
Hamza Alavi’s oeuvre as a whole, not to chase or even conjure the mirage of a
‘false unity’ where none might be present, but precisely in order to understand the
strengths and pitfalls and the continuities and discontinuities of these different
aspects of Alavi. Second, this chapter will embed Alavi within the context of the
wider critical/Marxist debates of the day to shed light on the implicit and explicit
problematic that animates his theorisation(s). From his wide-ranging essays, I will
specifically consider the writings on colonialism and imperialism, mode of pro-
duction, the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and agrarian relations to
think through the links (or lack thereof) between these, and their relation to
congruent Marxist scholarship. As such, my aim is to both force the Alavian
reception out of the curious – Pakistani or, at best, South Asian – provincialism
1
This works to Alavi’s detriment as we will see.
2
To pinpoint just a few broad areas Alavi wrote on: peasantry and kinship relations,
ethnicity and communalism, neo-imperialism, women in the Third World, post-colonial
state theory, mode of production debate, anti-colonial movements and the Labour Party in
United Kingdom.
AYYAZ MALLICK 31
that has been its fate, and to consider its productivity and limitations both in his
own day and especially today.
THE PITFALLS OF A PROBLEMATIC: ON THE

POST-COLONIAL STATE AND RELATED CONCERNS
As mentioned above, engagement with Alavi’s corpus has rarely attempted to
embed his work in the wider Marxist and post-colonial milieu within which he
carried out his theorising. This has especially been the case in Pakistan where
Alavi’s theorisation of the post-colonial state has been ‘omnipotent and omni-
present’ (Azeem, 2020, p. 1679). Exceptions to this trend may be seen in the work
of Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (2008, 2018), Tariq Amin-Khan (2012) and Muhammad
Azeem (2020). Amin-Khan brings Alavi in conversation with wider debates on
the mode of production, dependency and ‘Political Marxism’ trends regarding the
emergence of capitalism. Azeem, albeit briefly, contrasts Alavi’s approach to
theorising multiple dominant classes in a social formation with those of Pou-
lantzas and Gramsci (although his engagement with Gramsci is rather limited).
Akhtar carries out a concerted critique/correction of Alavi on the question of the
power structure’s legitimation ‘from below’ through Gramsci and cognate
post-colonial/critical scholarship (such as by the Subaltern Studies school,
Sudipta Kaviraj and Nazih Ayubi). However, in these engagements with Alavi
and beyond, there has been a limited elaboration of the tenets of his fundamental
problematic when it comes to the state and the mode of production, nor a linking
of the latter to other aspects of his work.
To recap briefly the main coordinates of Alavi’s theory, he sees the
post-colonial state or the ‘superstructure’ as ‘overdeveloped’ vis a vis the ‘struc-
ture’ in the colony. This is because in societies with a highly stratified ‘feudal’
structure pre-colonisation (such as mediaeval India), the metropolitan bourgeoisie
had to create a ‘state apparatus through which it can exercise dominion over all
the indigenous social classes in the colony’ (Alavi, 1972a, pp. 61; 1982a, p. 183).
As such, the colonial and post-colonial social formation comes to be characterised
by three dominant classes – the indigenous bourgeoisie, metropolitan bourgeoisie
and the landowning class – which are ‘not in antagonistic contradiction’ as they
coexist in the same structure of ‘peripheral capitalism’ (1982b, pp. 297–298). In
stark contrast to Western capitalist states which are the product of and
hegemonised by a single ruling class, the post-colonial state takes on a ‘relatively
autonomy’ of ‘a different order’, i.e. it mediates between the competing (but not
antagonistic) interests of ‘a plurality of fundamental classes’ (1972a, pp. 71–2;
1982b, pp. 298–303). While the different classes may be in a relation of ‘unequal
collaboration’ (e.g. between the metropolitan bourgeoisie and indigenous bour-
geoisie), it is the state and specifically the military-bureaucratic oligarchy which
comes to play a mediatory role between these different interests (1972a, p. 75). In
the process, the military-bureaucratic oligarchy also develops ‘independent
material bases of autonomy’ through networks of (sociopolitical) control and
‘direct appropriation and disposition of a substantial proportion of the economic
32 Towards a Conjunctural Awareness
surplus’ (1972a, p. 72, emphasis added; 1982b, pp. 302–303). It is also in this
outsized significance of the state apparatus that Alavi locates the importance of
the salariat: an ‘auxiliary class’ of educated, professionalised and/or white-collar
employees, located mostly (or at least aspiring to be so) in the (post-)colonial
bureaucratic apparatus (Alavi, 1988, p. 69; 1989, p. 225; 1991, pp. 157–158). For
Alavi, the salariat – due to regionally uneven patterns of development – has a
tendency to fracture and align along ethnic and communal lines in order to draw
wider support in its ‘struggle for access to the limited opportunities for state
employment’ (1991, p. 158).
It is important to note that Alavi’s theorisations of the ‘overdeveloped’
post-colonial state, the political role of the salariat, and ethnic politics in
India–Pakistan, is integrally related to his theorisation of ‘peripheral capitalism’.
Here, Alavi made an intervention in the ongoing debates of his day on the mode
of production in (post-)colonial social formations. Alavi characterises ‘peripheral
capitalism’ as different from the capitalist mode of production proper by dint of
the former’s ‘disarticulation’, i.e. while peripheral societies are characterised by a
generalisation of ‘free’ wage labour and surplus appropriation through economic
coercion alone, the circuit of generalised commodity production and extended
reproduction of capital is satisfied only through the link to the metropolis (1982a,
pp. 179–182). Thus, while localised mechanisms of (pre-colonial) governance are
dissolved along with the generalisation of capitalist private property and wage
labour, the disarticulation of extended reproduction of capital leads to
labour-intensive forms of exploitation (absence of real subsumption), underde-
velopment of productive forces and a lack of internal linkages between different
sectors of the peripheral capitalist economy. It is this disarticulated structure
which leads to a plurality of dominant classes in the social formation and acts as
‘a structural imperative’ (1982b, p. 295; 1983, pp. 62–63) on the state which takes
on a relatively autonomous, ‘overdeveloped’ role to preserve the peripheral
capitalist mode as a whole with its dependent linkages to the metropolis.
Alavi’s provocative theses have drawn engagements and critiques from within
South Asia and beyond. In Pakistan’s case, while we have briefly mentioned some
key interlocutors above, most engagements have not moved beyond critiquing or
affirming the Alavian model at a simply empirical level. Recently, for example,
Zaidi (2014) threw the gauntlet by calling for a re-evaluation of Alavi’s state
theory by bringing focus onto a ‘fracturisation of power’ due to the rise of
assertive institutions outside the bureaucratic-military oligarchy (such as the
private media) and the increasingly informalised nature of power and accumu-
lation in contemporary Pakistan. The essays in response to Zaidi’s call of
(intellectual) arms have evaluated Pakistan’s changing power structure and
modes of accumulation by both affirming the prevailing elite character of the
power bloc (see chapters by Armytage, Javid, and Shah in McCartney & Zaidi,
2019), while also shedding light on new social groups – such as ‘intermediate
classes’ and specific peasant castes transitioning to capitalist accumulation – that
are having determinate effects on the rhythms of power and accumulation in the
country (see chapters by Akhtar, Jan, and Javed in McCartney & Zaidi, 2019).
Moreover, McCartney’s ‘looking backward’ to an evaluation of Alavi’s model in
AYYAZ MALLICK 33
its day casts doubt on both the (relatively) autonomous power of the Pakistani
state and its insulation from different social classes (McCartney, 2019). However,
these empirical (re-)evaluations have not led to a sustained consideration of
Alavi’s fundamental problematic.
It is in fact by placing Alavi’s theorisation in its historical context that one gets
a clearer idea of his fundamental problematic and its strengths-pitfalls. From
within African contexts, the responses to Alavi by John Saul (1974) and Colin
Leys (1976) disputed the former’s characterisation of the ‘independent’ or
‘autonomous’ character of the bureaucracy. Crucially, both Leys and Saul drew
upon (in addition to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire) recent interventions by Nicos
Poulantzas in ongoing debates on the capitalist state in the pages of the New Left
Review and beyond. On a related note, Eqbal Ahmad drew upon Gramscian
concepts of ‘hegemony’, ‘balance of forces’ and ‘analysis of situations’ to dispute
characterisation of the colonial state as ‘overdeveloped’ (1980, pp. 129, 139).
Ahmad critiqued Alavi and other formulations with regards to post-colonial
social formations as having an undue ‘emphasis on uniformities in the patterns
of development while short-circuiting empirical evidence of significant differences
between seemingly comparable state and socioeconomic formations’ (Ahmad,
1980, p. 128). Instead, Ahmad brought focus on the distinct historical anteced-
ents, economical and ideological preferences, formal-legal status and metropol-
itan linkages that are (contingently) concretised in the form of varied ‘systems of
power’ in the Third World, ranging from elective-parliamentary,
dynastic-oligarchical, radical-nationalist and neofascist states.
Others focused attention on the ambiguity of Alavi’s characterisation of
‘peripheral capitalism’ and its associated class formations. Among Latin Amer-
ican engagements with Alavi, Sherry Girling asked the question whether ‘there
[are] really three distinct propertied classes competing within the pcs [postcolonial
state]?’ and whether Alavi’s three dominant classes may not be more usefully
understood as fractions of a single bourgeoisie class (Girling, 1973, p. 50).
Relatedly, Shirling also raised the question of how and if the relative autonomy
and mediatory role of the post-colonial state is different from the mediatory role
of the metropolitan state with regards to different fractions of a single dominant
propertied class (i.e. the bourgeoisie) (Girling, 1973, p. 51). Making a cognate
point to Girling, Wolfgang Hein and Konrad Stenzel, see Alavi’s characterisation
of the ‘overdeveloped’ state as ‘a bit too schematic’ and point to factors such as
the ‘structural heterogeneity’ of underdeveloped societies, the ‘unstable balance
between different dominating classes and fractions’ and the role of the metro-
politan bourgeoisie for understanding the ‘particular autonomy’ of the
bureaucratic-military oligarchy and the frequent change of political regimes in
dependent countries (Hein & Stenzel, 1973, p. 35). In India, Hira Singh and in Sri
Lanka, S.B.D. de Silva also critiqued Alavi for his focus on the geographical
destination of surplus while ignoring more situated relations of/in production,
along with the variegated dialectic of resistance and accommodation to colo-
nialism, which reinforced and even constituted various ‘feudal’ and pre-capitalist
forms of exploitation in colonised social formations (Singh, 1998, p. 48; de Silva,
1982, pp. 469, 473). On a related note, while Hartmut Elsenhans agreed with
Another random document with
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in confusion the robot said, "Ozymandias decipher the language
somehow. Seem to be a sort of guide."
"Why—he's parroting fragments from our conversation yesterday,"
Marshall said.
"I don't think he's parroting," I said. "The words form coherent
concepts. He's talking to us!"
"Built by the ancients to provide information to passersby,"
Ozymandias said.
"Ozymandias!" Leopold said. "Do you speak English?"
The response was a clicking noise, followed moments later by,
"Ozymandias understand. Not have words enough. Talk more."
The five of us trembled with common excitement. It was apparent
now what had happened, and the happening was nothing short of
incredible. Ozymandias had listened patiently to everything we had
said the night before; then, after we had gone, it had applied its
million-year-old mind to the problem of organizing our sounds into
sense, and somehow had succeeded. Now it was merely a matter of
feeding vocabulary to the creature and letting it assimilate the new
words. We had a walking and talking Rosetta Stone!
Two hours flew by so rapidly we hardly noticed their passing. We
tossed words at Ozymandias as fast as we could, defining them
when possible to aid him in relating them to the others already
engraved on his mind.
By the end of that time he could hold a passable conversation with
us. He ripped his legs free of the sand that had bound them for
centuries—and, serving the function for which he had been built
millennia ago, he took us on a guided tour of the civilization that had
been and had built him.
Ozymandias was a fabulous storehouse of archaeological data. We
could mine him for years.
His people, he told us, had called themselves the Thaiquens (or so it
sounded)—they had lived and thrived for three hundred thousand
years, and in the declining days of their history had built him, as an
indestructible guide to their indestructible cities. But the cities had
crumbled, and Ozymandias alone remained—bearing with him
memories of what had been.
"This was the city of Durab. In its day it held eight million people.
Where I stand now was the Temple of Decamon, sixteen hundred
feet of your measurement high. It faced the Street of the Winds—"
"The Eleventh Dynasty was begun by the accession to the Presidium
of Chonnigar IV, in the eighteen thousandth year of the city. It was in
the reign of this dynasty that the neighboring planets first were
reached—"
"The Library of Durab was on this spot. It boasted fourteen million
volumes. None exist today. Long after the builders had gone, I spent
time reading the books of the Library and they are memorized within
me—"
"The Plague struck down nine thousand a day for more than a year,
in that time—"
It went on and on, a cyclopean newsreel, growing in detail as
Ozymandias absorbed our comments and added new words to his
vocabulary. We followed the robot as it wheeled its way through the
desert, our recorders gobbling in each word, our minds numbed and
dazed by the magnitude of our find. In this single robot lay waiting to
be tapped the totality of a culture that had lasted three hundred
thousand years! We could mine Ozymandias the rest of our lives,
and still not exhaust the fund of data implanted in his all-
encompassing mind.
When, finally, we ripped ourselves away and, leaving Ozymandias in
the desert, returned to the base, we were full to bursting. Never in
the history of our science had such a find been vouchsafed: a
complete record, accessible and translated for us.
We agreed to conceal our find from Mattern once again. But, like
small boys newly given a toy of great value, we found it hard to hide
our feelings. Although we said nothing explicit, our overexcited
manner certainly must have hinted to Mattern that we had not had as
fruitless a day as we had claimed.
That, and Leopold's refusal to tell him exactly where we had been
working during the day, must have aroused Mattern's suspicions. In
any event, during the night as we lay in bed I heard the sound of
halftracks rumbling off into the desert; and the following morning,
when we entered the mess-hall for breakfast, Mattern and his men,
unshaven and untidy, turned to look at us with peculiar vindictive
gleams in their eyes.
Mattern said, "Good morning, gentlemen. We've been waiting for

some time for you to arise."
"It's no later than usual, is it?" Leopold asked.
"Not at all. But my men and I have been up all night. We—ah—did a
bit of archaeological prospecting while you slept." The Colonel
leaned forward, fingering his rumpled lapels, and said, "Dr. Leopold,
for what reason did you choose to conceal from me the fact that you
had discovered an object of extreme strategic importance?"
"What do you mean?" Leopold demanded—with a quiver taking the
authority out of his voice.
"I mean," said Mattern quietly, "the robot you named Ozymandias.
Just why did you decide not to tell me about it?"
"I had every intention of doing so before our departure," Leopold
said.
Mattern shrugged. "Be that as it may. You concealed the existence of
your find. But your manner last night led us to investigate the area—
and since the detectors showed a metal object some twenty miles to
the west, we headed that way. Ozymandias was quite surprised to
learn that there were other Earthmen here."
There was a moment of crackling silence. Then Leopold said, "I'll
have to ask you not to meddle with that robot, Colonel Mattern. I
apologize for having neglected to tell you of it—I didn't think you
were quite so interested in our work—but now I must insist you and
your men keep away from it."
"Oh?" Mattern said crisply. "Why?"
"Because it's an archaeological treasure-trove, Colonel. I can't begin
to stress its value to us. Your men might perform some casual
experiment with it and short circuit its memory channels, or
something like that. And so I'll have to invoke the rights of the
archaeological group of this expedition. I'll have to declare
Ozymandias part of our preserve, and off bounds for you."
Mattern's voice suddenly hardened. "Sorry, Dr. Leopold. You can't
invoke that now."
"Why not?"
"Because Ozymandias is part of our preserve. And off bounds for
you, Doctor."
I thought Leopold would have an apoplectic fit right there in the
mess-hall. He stiffened and went white and strode awkwardly across
the room toward Mattern. He choked out a question, inaudible to me.
Mattern replied, "Security, Doctor. Ozymandias is of military use.
Accordingly we've brought him to the ship and placed him in sealed
quarters, under top-level wraps. With the power entrusted to me for
such emergencies, I'm declaring this expedition ended. We return to
Earth at once with Ozymandias."
Leopold's eyes bugged. He looked at us for support, but we said
nothing. Finally, incredulously, he said, "He's—of military use?"
"Of course. He's a storehouse of data on the ancient Thaiquen
weapons. We've already learned things from him that are
unbelievable in their scope. Why do you think this planet is bare of
life, Dr. Leopold? Not even a blade of grass? A million years won't do
that. But a superweapon will. The Thaiquens developed that
weapon. And others, too. Weapons that can make your hair curl.
And Ozymandias knows every detail of them. Do you think we can
waste time letting you people fool with that robot, when he's loaded
with military information that can make America totally impregnable?
Sorry, Doctor. Ozymandias is your find, but he belongs to us. And
we're taking him back to Earth."
Again the room was silent. Leopold looked at me, at Webster, at
Marshall, at Gerhardt. There was nothing that could be said.
This was basically a militaristic mission. Sure, a few anthropologists
had been tacked onto the crew, but fundamentally it was Mattern's
men and not Leopold's who were important. We weren't out here so
much to increase the fund of general knowledge as to find new
weapons and new sources of strategic materials for possible use
against the Other Hemisphere.
And new weapons had been found. New, undreamed-of weapons,
product of a science that had endured for three hundred thousand
years. All locked up in Ozymandias' imperishable skull.
In a harsh voice Leopold said, "Very well, Colonel. I can't stop you, I
suppose."
He turned and shuffled out without touching his food, a broken,
beaten, suddenly very old man.
I felt sick.
Mattern had insisted the planet was useless and that stopping here
was a waste of time; Leopold had disagreed, and Leopold had
turned out to be right. We had found something of great value.
We had found a machine that could spew forth new and awesome
recipes for death. We held in our hands the sum and essence of the
Thaiquen science—the science that had culminated in magnificent
weapons, weapons so superb they had succeeded in destroying all
life on this world. And now we had access to those weapons. Dead
by their own hand, the Thaiquens had thoughtfully left us a heritage
of death.
Grayfaced, I rose from the table and went to my cabin. I wasn't
hungry now.
"We'll be blasting off in an hour," Mattern said behind me as I left.
"Get your things in order."
I hardly heard him. I was thinking of the deadly cargo we carried, the
robot so eager to disgorge its fund of data. I was thinking what would
happen when our scientists back on Earth began learning from
Ozymandias.
The works of the Thaiquens now were ours. I thought of the poet's
lines: "Look on my works, ye mighty—and despair."
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Marxist Thought in South Asia Kristin Plys Full Chapter

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Marxist Thought in South Asia Kristin

Ronald Aminzade Eiko Ikegami

United Kingdom – North America – Japan

First edition 2024

Reprints and permissions service

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-83797-183-1 (Print)

ISSN: 0198-8719 (Series)

About the Editors ix

About the Contributors xi

Chapter 1 Marxist Theory Unbound: Global Perspectives From

Chapter 2 The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of SBD de Silva and

Chapter 3 Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural

Chapter 4 Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial Critique in

Chapter 5 Murder as Praxis? Theorizing Marxist Feminism in

Chapter 6 Mohammad Azharuddin as a Theorist of Shock: The

Chapter 7 Crisis and Revolt in Sri Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon

Chapter 8 Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese

Chapter 9 Interview With Professor Himani Bannerji 181

Chapter 10 Poems of Resistance 189

Kristin Plys is an Associate Professor in the History and Sociology Departments

Priyansh is a PhD Student in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of

Kanishka Goonewardena is a Professor of Geography and Planning at the Uni-

Muhammad Azeem is an Associate Professor at LUMS University Lahore and

Himani Bannerji is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at York

Devaka Gunawardena is a political economist and independent researcher. He

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of

Social Research and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of

Ayyaz Mallick is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Department of

Umaima Miraj is a PhD Student of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her

MARXIST THEORY UNBOUND:

Marxist Thought in South Asia

and Marxism. Together, these essays are forging an anti-imperialist Marxism

MARXISM DURING BRITISH RULE

was staunchly opposed to strikes, and from 1918–1939, workers in Ahmedabad

MARXISM AFTER INDEPENDENCE

MARXIST THEORIZING FROM SOUTH ASIA

On the theoretical front, South Asians Marxists are distinguished by their

OVERVIEW OF THE ISSUE

colonialism and imperialism fatefully undermined the prospects of socialist

Socialism in Sri Lanka: The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of G.V.S. de Silva and

THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST MARXISMS

Marxist Thought in South Asia

country-based study . . . and to examine the problems of underdevelopment in

opportunities for indigenous industrialization in the non-settler colonial parts of

How, then, is Underdevelopment to be assessed? SBD’s pioneering work is best

in the ‘development of underdevelopment’; second, the Manichean line he draws

independent Sri Lanka, with the immediate objective of establishing tenancy

ALAVI CONTRA ALAVI: TOWARDS A

Marxist Thought in South Asia

THE PITFALLS OF A PROBLEMATIC: ON THE

Mattern said, "Good morning, gentlemen. We've been waiting for

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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