WHAT IS HINDUISM?
not characteristic of a society in which some new class had
already come into possession of real power before taking
over the state mechanism” (1965, 143-4).
The question of caste
As the Indian Marxist economic historian Irfan Habib
explains:
“Marx saw the Indian caste system as a special solution
to the problem of the division of labour before the rise of
capitalism. Outside of the village community – in towns or
in the trade of surplus goods between villages – castes
traditionally functioned as hereditary guilds. Inside the
village community, where Marx understood there to be no
commodity trade at all, castes functioned as an “unalterable
division of labour” providing for those necessary crafts and
services too specialized to be done in individual peasant
households (and which therefore could not be supplied by
the domestic “blending of agriculture and handicraft”).
These service castes – the barber, the washerman, the
potter, and so on, were “maintained at the expense of the
whole community.” So the caste system allowed each
village to be self-sufficient, while at the same time
maximizing the surplus that could be extracted in the form
of rent by the state.”