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The great Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, encountered many Indians when he was a student at Cambridge in the late 1930s, but he only travelled to the country for the first time in 1968. In this extract, Emile Chabal explains how Hobsbawm’s writings arrived in India several years before he did as part of an international debate in Marxist theory about the timing of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This pre-emptive notoriety ensured that he was greeted as an academic superstar when he did finally land in India to give a lecture series at Aligarh Muslim University.

It was through this debate that Hobsbawm first made an entry into the Indian intellectual scene. In the early 1960s, he was asked by the CPGB publisher Lawrence & Wishart to produce an introduction to the first English translation of the part of Marx’s Grundrisse that became known as Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. Published in 1964, this inexpensive volume brought to an English-speaking audience for the first time some of Marx’s early reflections about precapitalist social and economic systems and macrolevel historical social change. The subject matter made it of immediate interest to Indian historians, since it included passages where Marx discussed the “Asiatic” or “Oriental” mode of production, which was supposedly characterised by a “despotic class” extracting surplus from an overwhelmingly rural village economy. It seems likely that PreCapitalist Economic Formations was already in small-scale circulation in India by the mid-1960s, and it was certainly being discussed at the time of Hobsbawm’s visit in 1968. It was a sign of the importance of the text that the journal Enquiry, set up by the historian Bipan Chandra in 1959, devoted almost an entire issue in 1969 to a reprint of Hobsbawm’s introduction. This was followed by a lengthy reply by Habib, who accused Hobsbawm of interpreting Marx in such a way as to minimise the importance of class struggle in precapitalist economies.

‘The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian,’ Emile Chabal, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2026

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