The Political Theory of Indian Village Communism

• In Event: Popular Politics and the Legacies of Empire

Abstract

Historians of 20th century political thought have recently begun to identify the important role of non-state and anti-statist discourses within the political imagination of Asian and African anti-imperialism. The critique of centralized state sovereignty is now seen to be an important, long-neglected aspect of anticolonial thought. This paper locates anti-colonial critiques of centralized sovereignty within a new intellectual context: interwar debates about the purpose of state planning in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Focusing on South Asia, I show how ideas of decentralized “village communism” emerged in British India between 1919 and the late 1940s as an attempt to formulate an alternative to the U.S. New Deal, Western European welfare states, and Soviet-style collectivization. I explore the theory of village communism by analyzing the writings of two Indian economists: Shriman Narayan Agarwal (1912-78) and Joseph Kumarappa (1892-1960). The paper thus highlights the importance of the global political moment of the 1930s and 1940s in the rise of ideas about popular sovereignty and socio-economic equality in colonial South Asia.

Author

• Tejas Parasher, University of Cambridge