when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot
and with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key
to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies,
an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the
constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and
the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the
economical elements of society remains untouched by the
storm-clouds of the political sky.”
To identify the ‘history’ of India with the history of its
kings and princes, generals and armies, battles, invasions
and conquests – real or mythological – is therefore to miss
Marx’s point entirely. What lent early Indian history its
essential and historically enduring character – its
‘theocratic’ and ‘socialist’ character – lay in it being
essentially a property-less form of social organisation, one
in which both land and natural resources were not regarded
essentially as either the private property of individuals or the
collective property of the villages but rather as something
granted by a higher unity – the divine – as embodied in the
divinely guided person of the ruler and institutionalised by
the unifying functions of the state.
The king and state were not, as in European history, to
represent and serve the interests of a property-owning or
moneyed ‘ruling class’. Instead the state was the ‘ruling
class’ – or more precisely a set of ‘caste’ or ‘castes’ of rulers.
In the words of D.D. Kosambi: “The Arthasastra state was