THE MODE OF PRODUCTION, SOCIAL CLASSES AND THE STATE

In this pioneering study of social change Dr. Bhadra explains and illustrates the processes of dependent capitalist development in colonial India. He realizes his objective by focussing on the historical formations of the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist class structure and the capitalist state in colonial India as a dialectical outcome of the historical interplay between the British and the Indian social formations or, what amounts to the same thing, between metropolitan and indigenous forces of societal determination. The examination of the origins and nature of the alterations in the economic, class and political structures, which India experienced in its movement from Mughal feudalism to colonial capitalism, has been conducted in order to establish the historical specificity of colonial social change in terms of dependent capitalist development along the stated dimensions. Furthermore, despite his emphasis on the external forces (i.e. contradictory roles of metropolitan capitalism and its corollary, colonialism) in generating dependent capitalist development, Dr. Bhadra makes it abundantly clear that those external forces, constraints as well as accelerators, were certainly not the exclusive causal agents of social change. They acted on and interacted with both the constraining and the accelerating internal forces in the indigenous social formation, which eventually led to the historical formation of the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist class structure and the capitalist state. Unlike most others concerned with Indian social change, Dr. Bhadra brings home these concrete aspects of India’s dependent capitalist development from the rigorous methodological and theoretical orientations of Marxist Sociology. What follows as a result is an exhaustive sociological analysis, at one and the same time, of the economic roots and their concomitant sociopolitical ramifications of Indian capitalist underdevelopment.