Moscow, Mysl Publishing House. 1973. 558 p. Circulation 18,000. Price 2 rubles. 71 kopecks
The problems of Indian history have long attracted the attention of scientists in our country. The Soviet Union has developed a school of indologists who intensively study the problems of history, economy, culture, and social thought of the great Asian country. The result of their efforts was a four-volume major work on the history of India from ancient times to modern times inclusive .
It was on the basis of this work that it became possible to write a generalizing and at the same time concise essay on the history of the country, the authors of which-prominent Soviet indologists from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who actively participated in the creation of the above-mentioned four-volume work-K. A. Antonova, G. M. Bongard-Levin and G. G. Kotovsky However, they also introduced a number of new sources into scientific circulation, set and solved a number of important research tasks. "History of India" helps to understand the complex processes that are taking place in modern India.
The section on the ancient history of Hindustan, written by G. M. Bongard-Levin, introduces the origins of the remarkable culture of the peoples of Hindustan, shows how the Indian civilization was formed. The attraction of archaeological materials along with written sources allowed us to make a number of interesting scientific generalizations, clarify many facts and, in particular, the dating and location of a number of ancient Indian monuments. Thus, it was found that the Rig Veda - the oldest literary monument of the Indo-Aryan peoples-was formed in the north-eastern regions of Punjab. It also analyzes such important problems as the peculiarities of the origin of slavery and the beginning of the formation of feudal relations.
1 "Modern History of India", M. 1959; "New History of India", M. 1961; "History of India in the Middle Ages", M. 1968; "Ancient India", M. 1969.
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the formation of specific socio-economic and social institutions - communities and castes, the formation of religious and philosophical systems-Buddhism and Hinduism.
The analysis of the caste-varna system, its origin and further development, which led to the formation of the caste system, occupies an important place in the work. G. M. Bongard-Levin's hypothesis that Varnas, as class gradations, were already known in the Indo-Iranian period and, quite possibly, could have originated even earlier, as professional divisions within the tribal organization, later turning into class ranks (like archaic class ranks among other peoples), seems interesting and very reasonable.
The book thoroughly and profoundly reveals socio-economic relations in ancient Indian society, the deepening of property and social inequality, the formation of complex relations of dependence, the position of various social strata, in particular, the property and civil status of slaves, based on the materials of later literature of the Sastras. The use of Sanskrit and Pali monuments, epigraphy, and reports from ancient sources made it possible to recreate the picture of the state structure of ancient Indian monarchies and republican associations, the management system,and the mechanism of activity of various departments, primarily tax.
The undoubted ADVANTAGE of THIS section, as well as the section on medieval history, is the inclusion of special chapters on culture and the history of Social Thought. The author may, however, be reproached with the fact that, unlike the other chapters of this section, the essays on Buddhism and Hinduism are somewhat sketchy.
The section on the medieval history of India, written by K. A. Antonova, traces the further development of the feudalization process, the beginning of which was considered in the previous section. The presentation of the ancient and medieval history of India is very well connected. I would like to highlight the chapters devoted to the analysis of land relations, the formation of private ownership of land, the influence of the Muslim conquest on the process of feudalization of society, various forms of public and private land ownership (Khalisa, Jagir, Zamindari and Suyurgal). This is due to the fact that K. A. Antonova is the author of fundamental research on the problems of land ownership and land use in Muslim India.
The analysis of changes in the communal-caste system contained in the sections on the medieval history of India is of great interest. It is well shown how Brahmans become landowners and military leaders, Rajputs begin to consider themselves kshatriyas, and full-fledged community members become sudras - a tax class.
At the same time, the author often proceeds in his assessments from a lower level of social development in India by the beginning of the Mughal period than it actually was. Thus, it was suggested in the literature that the famous Sanskrit literature monument "Arthashastra" already recorded the transformation of the Sudras into the main agricultural taxable estate, and many forms of land ownership (khalisa and japir), considered in the work as specific only for Mughal India, developed in the early Middle Ages, 2 which naturally does not exclude a certain change in the content of these terms in the Mughal Empire. The question of the level of socio-economic development of feudal India on the eve of the English conquest should have been raised more clearly.
Unfortunately, the paper does not provide a comparative description of popular movements and new state formations in India of the XVII-XVIII centuries. Meanwhile, this issue has already been covered in our literature, primarily in the well-known studies of I. M. Reisner3, which are insufficiently taken into account in the sections on the late Middle Ages and the early period of modern history. It would also be interesting to trace how feudal separatism, on the one hand, and the desire to strengthen a centralized feudal state, on the other, were manifested in two trends in the political development of India at the end of the XVII-beginning of the XVIII century. namely, the tendency to revive the former power of the Mughal Empire, on the one hand, and to create new states like-on a homogeneous ethnic basis - on the other. Before-
2 K. Z. Ashrafyan. Agrarian system of Northern India (XIII-mid-XVIII century). Moscow, 1965.
3 See, for example, I. M. Reisner. Popular movements in India of the XVII-XVIII centuries. Moscow, 1961.
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I put it that the creation of such states with a homogeneous ethnic basis on the ruins of the Mughal Empire was not a simple manifestation of feudal separatism, but testified to the emergence of new, progressive trends.
The pages devoted to the culture of medieval India are convincingly and vividly written. The book provides interesting data on the interaction of Hinduism and Islam and the impact of this process on the social development of the country. The material of the book leads the reader to the conclusion about the great contribution made by the peoples of Hindustan to the development of world culture and civilization. At the same time, it allows us to understand what features of the internal development of this subcontinent contributed to the fact that its peoples were enslaved by foreign colonizers.
The third (written by K. A. Antonova and G. G. Kotovsky) and partly the fourth (written by G. G. Kotovsky) parts of the book describe the history of India in the colonial period. The authors give a detailed and reasoned assessment of the colonial conquest and British policy in India, and draw a vivid picture of the heroic struggle of its peoples against British rule. Naturally, this part of the book focuses on the problems of the national liberation struggle. The history of the national uprising of 1867-1859 is well described here. The author tells about the beginning of a new stage of the liberation movement in the late XIX-early XX century. He clearly shows the influence of the revolution of 1905-1907 on the" awakening " of India. Special attention is paid to the influence of the Great October Revolution on the historical destinies of the peoples of Hindustan, and interesting material is given about Lenin's connections with Indian revolutionaries. The book reveals the socio-class nature of the phenomena of social life in India in modern and contemporary times, the role of various classes of Indian society in the national liberation struggle. At the same time, it is quite reasonable to clarify the previously accepted periodization of the history of the Indian national liberation movement, as well as the assessment of the role of the national leaders of India - M. K. Gandhi and J. R. R. Tolkien. Nehru.
The reviewed work summarizes the history of independent India for the first time in Soviet scientific literature .4 The author of this section, G. G. Kotovsky, described the complex processes that unfolded in the former British colony after its conquest of sovereignty, showing how the political course of independent India was formed. Without simplifying complex and sometimes contradictory trends in the development of a great country, the book allows us to understand the social meaning and significance of the processes taking place in it. Much attention is paid to the foreign policy problems of India, which is one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. I would especially like to mention the high scientific level of the paragraphs devoted to the emergence of the communist movement in India, the history of the CPI and its role in independent India. The book pays much attention to Russian-Indian relations and, in particular, the history of relations between the USSR and independent India. As L. I. Brezhnev noted at the XXV Congress of the CPSU, "close political and economic cooperation with the Republic of India is our constant course." 5
The sections on modern and contemporary Indian history are not free, however, from shortcomings. Unlike the first sections, this part of the book does not deal much with cultural history. The problem of INDIAN enlightenment, which played a significant role in the formation of the ideology of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, is not covered. The Indo-Muslim problem is not sufficiently reflected." More attention should also be paid to the problem of national relations, the development of which would allow for a better understanding of the nature of separatist movements in a number of states.
The book is provided with well-chosen and well-reproduced illustrations and is beautifully printed.
4 The Recent History of India covers only the first years of independent India's history.
5 "Materials of the XXV Congress of the CPSU", Moscow, 1976, p. 15.
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