DALE RlEPE

What a scholar does with mythology, ethnology, anthropology and archaeology will give a crucial clue as to what he is going to do with history. Kosambi tackles these disciplines in amateria- listic way right off the bat. There are no mysterious digressions into uncheckable and unexplorable realmS. Mircea Eliade, for example, a well-known student of mythology, claims that :

The creation of the World being the pre-eminent instance of creation, the cosmogony becomes the exemplary model for "creation" of every kind. (1)

One should note, first of all, that there is no evidence that any world was ever created (by human or divine agency). But that is of only slight interest here. The important point is that . the model for creation in man's life has been the creation of his own kind in the female. To stretch out into some unknown if not unknowable past and pretend to find a model is of course to find a model of the unknown. The unknown may have a model, but we obviously do not know what it is. Therefore to speak of it as Eliade does is simply an attempt to look profound through mystification. Is it too much to ask to begin with human experience and look outwards instead of beginning in some transcendent sphere and then returning to the human? Human productive life is a fine beginning for the creation myths.

Idealistic explanation has been an important human endeavour, but there is little excuse to practise it in! the second half of the twentieth century. Kosambi shows himself aware of this in all his later writings.

More recently Eliade has been working on the origin, meaning, and significance of Shamanism throughout the world. (2) We previously saw that he believed that the world had a creation. Now we see that :

...nothing justifies the supposition that, during the hundreds of thousands of years that preceded the earliest Stone Age, humanity did not have a religious life as intense and as various as in the succeeding periods. (3)

What does justify the supposition that it did? What dges warrant this argument from ignorance? This is comparable to the famous non-argument for the existence of God which goes like this :

A. If you believe in God, prove His existence.
B. I do not have to prove His existence, you prove His non- existence.

Eliade also uses the idealist technique introduced by Pitrim md George Sarton which avoids discovering anything )rimary upon which to build an edifice of explanation. nsequently states that :

...nowhere in the history of religions do we encounter "prinordial" phenomena; for history has been everywhere changing, recasting, enriching, or impoverishing religious epts, mythological creations, rites, techniques of ecstasy.(4)

Yes, it is all so complicated, as Joseph Schumpeter used to economics classes at Harvard University. If we can get it complicated enough, then we have an excuse to turn to mysticism. One trouble with primordial notions is that so much pon who is going to pick them. If it is a materialist, the primordials turn out to be material in nature; if an idealist, they are found to be spiritual or conceptual. As Sarton, the historian of science, says: "It is easy enough to explain some facts retrospectively, especially if one be free to select the convenient ones."(5) On the contrary, it is never easy to explain anything as parents and teachers have known for some time. Sarton presents this as an argument against the use of economic explanations in mathcmatics. He would rather have no explanation than that it should be economic and hence material.

One may also contrast Kosambi's work with that of the widely known German Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943). Zimmer's anti-scientific approach may be seen throughout his work, but an instance of it as associated with art and religion is here cited :

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irrational Vedantism when he should be giving materialistic explanations.

Kosambi, on the other hand, with his feet in the productive process ana his fingers on the facts of social history, gives us viable explanations of myths, religion, and philosophy. In Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture he conceives his task to be :

What Kosambi began to accomplish for the history of Indian religion and philosophy had been earlier initiated for the study of the Aegean by George Thomsons of the University of Birmingham. Whereas Thomson had a partial forerunner in F.M. Cornford, Kosambi looked around the Indian scene in vain. Perhaps some would mention M. N. Roy as a counterpart of Cornford, yet Roy's contribution was to idealize European mechanical materialism. At worst he diverted research from histomat principles by maintaining that it should not be based on social relations but on the "rockbottom of human nature (which) antedates the economic and political organization of society".(10) Roy got off to a bad start by failing to carefully read Marx and Engels. It seems nearly certain that he never read Capital, nor did he read the letters of Marx and Engels. Indeed, a list of the classics of histomat that Roy did not read would be considerably longer than the list that he did read. No student of Marx or Engels could have penned Roy's caricature of Marx's position :

Marx found in Hegelian dialectics a philosophical support for his theory of revolution. Therefore,. dialectics became his sole criterion for judging all other phllosophies and dialectics is admittedly an idealistic conception. Revolutions are not brought about by men; they take place of necessity, that is to say, are predetermined. The dialectical Materialism of Marx, therefore, is materialist only in name; dialectics being its cornerstone, it is essentially an idealistist system. No wonder that it disowned the heritage of the eighteenth century scientific naturalism and fought against the humanist Materialism of Feuerbach and his followers.(11)

This is a model of pithy, encyclopaedic ignorance of Marxism unmatched even by Pitrim Sorokin, the Russian-American sociologist of Harvard University. To refute it properly, beginning even as late as Condorcet, would require another paper as long as this one. One comment is worth making to indicate Roy's misapprehension. In fighting against religious superstition, Roy did noble work in India, but in his ignorance of the history of science he assumed that to be determined implies predetemination. That every effect has a cause is determinism; that every effect has been programmed on a cosmic scale in advance is predeterminism. The first is the view of science; the second, the view of theology. Every religious man at least knows that Marx did not accept the theological view. Roy was not a profound scholar although for most of his life a sincere and hard-working propagandist for bourgeois humanism.(12)

My point is that Kosambi did not get any help from M. N. Roy. To never have read Roy on historical materialism is a kind of unknowingly consummatory experience.

It is important in assessing the contribution of Kosambi to understand just how far he advanced relative to his peers. So far as I am aware the most illustrious of them are Joseph Needham of Cambridge University and George Thomson. Needham has brought scientific order out of Chinese history and Thomson has done it for Greek. What was needed was someone to do the same for India.

Thomson says that Cornford "(i)n relation to the pre- Socratics ...was a materialist, in relation to the Post-Socratics an idealist".(13) A crucial cause of this was that Cornford followed Durkheim's doctrine of collective representations. In essence this was the hypothesis that the structure of human thought, such as logical categories, classes, concepts of space, time, force, and causality are projections on the external world of the structure of human society. (14) This appears plausible. But Thomson raises two questions:

...if the development of thought is determined by the development of society, what determines the development of society? And in what relation does civilized thought stand to the structure of civilized society? Faced with these questions, which cannot be answered without recognizing the class struggle, Durkheim was utterly at loss, and only succeeded in confusing the issue, which Marx and Engels had stated so plainly in the preceding generation.(15)

Kosambi was not lucky enough to have a predecessor who was materialist in relation to pre-Buddhist India, and an idealist in relation to post-Buddhist India. He was on his own. How he was able to proceed is a story worth telling. That Kosambi did ahead applying the principles of histomat makes us for ever indebted to him. Otherwise the demystification of the history of Indian religion and philosophy would have had only the brave voice of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. Kosambi became the first academically trained Indian scholar to apply historical materialist method to Indian history.

Kosambi's method of working is well- illustrated in "Social and Economic Aspect of the Bhagvad- Gita".(16). This is a masterpiece of histomat synopsis, interpretation, and demystification. It demonstrates in history what mechanics could demonstrate in celestial science once the nineteenth century idealist historicizing ended. According to Kosambi, Krsna reveals that he is the creator and destroyer .of an things; that he has devoured an members of the armies about to fight. The moral of the Gita is that: so long as you have faith in ME, all sins are tbrgiven. If duty calls, kill your brother without passion. Such calculated treachery, Kosambi maintains, is also expounded in the Arthashastra (17) the leading Indian political treatise in ancient times, and a work that makes The Prince of Machiavelli read like Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. .

Kosambi asks why was the Gita interpolated into the Mahabharata in the first place? His answer is that the lower classes were the audience of the recitations of the heroic lays of ancient war. The epic served as a vehicle of propaganda for any doctrine that the brahamanas wished to insert. The second question he asks is why was Krsna a chosen to expound the new gospel of the ruling class? His answer is that it was precisely at this time that the Krsna cult was rising in popularity and was associated with the syncretic Narayana. This Narayana who sleeps in his chamber in the midst of waters may be traced to the Sumerian flood- creation myth and later appears among the Jews as Noah. Krsna and not some other god was required because lndra (until then chief of the gods) had lost lustre as a result of intervening Buddhism which had denied yajna. lndra, king of the gods, was pre-eminent only during the pastoral bronze age. The ascendency of Krsna begins around 800 B.C. in the Panjab. After this time he moved south and east as he became useful for syncretic movements. The Deccan Yadavas, for example, traced their genealogy to Krsna in order to raise the chiefs of a local clan above the surrounding people.(18)

Krsna is a synthesis of the following life-like and god-like features: (1) a mischievous and beloved shepherd lad and ( 2) a virile husband of many women (local goddesses, each in her own right spending the night with him, the "husband", thus easing the transition from local1o regional religion). This Aufhebung (19) may also be seen in the marriage of Siva and Parvati, which was supplemented by the hermaphrodite (a god-goddess with one female and one male breast, etc.) just to prevent any possible separation, that is to say, return to the local religious interpretation. The Naga cult was absorbed by placing the cobra around Siva's neck. Earlier, Siva was seated on Nandi the Bull, an earlier pastoral divinity. We can see from this that the function of the Gita from the fourth to the sixth centuries and during the Gupta period of expanding village settlement (with the expansion of agriculture) was the centralization of scattered religious functions.

The Gita could do little, Kosambi maintains, about reconciling differences that began to appear at the end of the reign of Harsa of Kanauj. Even the Hari-Hara cult (with its image of half Siva and half Visnu) fell out of fashion as commodity output dropped. Declining economy brought about sharp divisions. Syncretism turned into the smarta-vaisnava struggle: between the traditionalist or Vedantist vs. Vaisnava doctrines, including that of the followers of Ramanuja, Madhvacarya, and later Vallabhas and Caitanyas. According to Kosambi:

Fusion and tolerance become impossible when the crisis deepens, when there is not enough of the surplus product to go around, and the synthetic method does not lead to increased production.(20)

This reference to the economic relations of religion does not imply that Kosambi is an economic determinist. Like any scientist he is of course a determinist. And his determinism extends over the entire field of knowledge, including society and history. To be a determinist means that one believes that every event has at least one cause and that every effect has a cause. This view is always rightly associated with materialism because it is the materialist who defends this position in the human as well as natural world. Even the positivist (logical as well as Comteian) believes in determinism in natural science but is at best unsure about it in social life or history. He has a split world with determinism in the body and indeterminism in the mind and history.

According to the materialist conccption of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I havc ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic elemcnt is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. ..(also of great importance are) political forms. ..constitutions...juridicial forms...religious views. ..' (21)

Kosambi is a cultural determinist, but not an economic determinist. He knows that economic considerations are enormously important even in the explanation of religions which are themselves part of the struggle for existene.(22) Yet there is always an influence of thc "higher" on the "lower". A cultural determinist will likely bc a histomat which indeed Kosambi was. Emphasis is put upon thc productive basc as a sourcc of explanation rathcr than put on the superstructure. It is a matter of chronology and other modcs of priority. Evcn when religion and philosophy are alleged to "live a life of their own", the power of the base is a constant reminder that sudden changes from this quarter may occur aud thus topple the old relations. This ought to make us pausc when intellectual historians give superlative honour to monumental ideas, as may bc found in E. O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being where the idea of the Platonic form is traced idealistical!y for hundrcds of years. Another idealist historian is M. Rostovtzeff, author of the famous The Social and Economic History of the Hellenctic World, where this learned man states.

The Hellenistic genius might have created more than in effetct it did. Its generative force was undermincd too early in its development. Though it never became sterile and senile ... it was handicappcd in its natural development by external causes (23)

Evidently the Greek genius is a mysterious, internal entity, such that if allowed to unfold, untouched by external circumstances (such as invasions and influences from the East), it would bloom like the radiant lotuses mentioned so often in the Ramayana. Thomson informs us that the Greek "genius" was greatly dependent upon Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in dealing with lndia Kosambi points out just what effccts thc extcrnal circumstanccs have. He thus provides us with explanation instead of clarification and obfuscation. But unlcss one is already a historical materialist it is difficult for onc to see that the approach of Kosambi and Rostovtzcff is separatcd by more than a continent. "Introjective idealism" even when performed by a scholar with ten honorary degrees cannot lead us to knowlcdge of thc causcs of religious and philosophical belicfs and practices.

After this digression, let us return to Kosambi's analysis of tho Gita. During the feudal pcriod in India it served a most useful function that was requircd because of the curtailed and strained production. It formulated the notion of bhakti, or personal devotion.

<Last para missing... page 43)

Earlier the Manusmritis had no samantas, but the king administered everything himself directly or through agents who had no independent status. Feudalism from below consisted of a class of people at the village level who had special rights over the land (cultivation, occupation, or hereditary ownership). To hold such a society together the best religion is one emphasizing bhakti, personal faith. Marco Polo relates that in the thirteenth century the seigneurs in India actually threw themselves on the king's funeral pyre. By some transmogrification this was replaced later by sutee. No eariler tribal chief, says Kosambi, could have expected such loyalty. By the twelfth century the burdened peasantry was paying not only for the extensive palaces, but for the ornate temples as well, indicating the great wealth for which India has been justly famous.

Kosambi's work on the Gita is a major contribution to the understanding of Indian history. One may marvel that it was contributed by a mathematician and statistician as well as all archaeologist and numismatist. Instead of mathematics leading him into the mental jungle of idealism, it made him appreciate quantified materialism. Indologists will come to appreciate D. D. Kosambi more each decade for he set Indian history on a scientific path.

1. Eliade, Myth and Reality (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1004}, p. 21.
2. Eliade, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy tr. Willard R. Trask (rou5tledge& Kegan Paul, London, 1970)
3. Shamism, p. 11
4. Ibid
5. Dirk Struik quoting in his review of The Study of the History of Mathematics, Science and Society, i, no.3 (Spring 1937), 426
6 Zimmer Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell (Harper Torchbooks p. 26)
7. Kosambi, Myth and Reality (Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1962), p.2. 8.
8. Beginning with Aeschylus and Athens (1941) and continuing with Studies in Ancient Greek Society, i, The Prehistoric Aegean (1949), ii, The First Philosophers {1955). (All by Lawrence and Wishart, London).
9. This stands for historical materialist or historical materialism; its parallel form is diamat for dialectical materialist or dialectical materialism.
10. Roy, Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution (Renaissance Publishers Ltd., Calcutta, 1952), ii, 187.
11. 1bid. p. 186.
12. Roy evidently failed to observe "the tendency of the embryonic development of materialim in the seam of religious superstitions". See Kaun Feng and Lin Lu-shih, "Thought of the Yin Dynasty and the Western Chou", Chinese Studies in Philosophy, ii, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall- Winter 1970/71), 38
13. Thomson, The First Philosophers, p 171
14. Ibid. p. 170
15. Ibid.
16. In Myth and Reality.
17. It is important that Kosambi regards the Arthasastra as post- Buddhistic (c. 321-296 B.C.).
18. "Social and Economic Aspects. .', op. cit., p. 27.
19. As in Hegel, sublation, cancellation.
20. "Social and Economic Aspects.. .", op. cit., p. 31.
21. F. Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, London, September 21/22, 1890, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958) ii, 488
22 See Paul Raolin, "Economic Factors in Primitive Religion", Science and Society, i, no I (Fall, 1936), 310f.
23 Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1941, ii, 131L
24. Coined by Sandor Ferenzi, "The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasant Ideas- Advances in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality", The Theory and Technique of Psycho- Analysis (The Hogarth Press Ltd., London, 1950) p. 373
25. "All feudal ethics, such as loyalty, filial piety, moral integrity, faithfulness, propriety, righteousness, incorruptability, and a sense of shame are totally and completely in the service of the landlord class." Knag Feng and Wu Chuan- chi, "Comments on Comrade Wu Han's Theory of Ethics" (1966) Chinese Studies in History, iii, no. 2 (Winter 1969/71), 150