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, 2026Republications of this kind played a critical role in bringing foreign authors to an Indian audience. Unless they were republished in cheap Indian editions, foreign books and journals were prohibitively expensive, which meant that access was limited to those who were fortunate enough to have spent time in Europe. The situation was even more complicated for Marxists, since, with the exception of mass-produced Moscow-sponsored official communist publications, there was almost nowhere to get hold of critical Marxist texts of the kind that circulated easily in Western Europe in the 1960s.This inequality in distribution made informal networks a vital part of intellectual life. Those lucky enough to live in Delhi or Calcutta could loiter in the handful of Marxist bookshops, browse the shelves, and try to listen in on conversations between more senior intellectuals. Otherwise, locally produced journals like Enquiry introduced debates by republishing important texts and occasionally translating them into vernacular languages like Bengali. This was supplemented by illegal photocopies, many of which were used as the basis for class teaching, study groups, and discussion circles, like the Marx Club in Calcutta. Above all, the circulation of ideas rested on informal discussions in canteens and cafés and at dhabas (food stands). The most important indicator of intellectual acclaim in 1960s India was not sales figures; it was how often someone was mentioned in serious debate. By appearing to be an interpreter of Marx’s writings on precapitalist economic formations, Hobsbawm guaranteed himself a place in every learned Indian Marxist’s conversations.It would be tempting to think that this local notoriety was the reason behind Hobsbawm’s first trip to India in late 1968, but this was probably not the case. It was the Indian historian Sarvepalli Gopal who approached him in 1967 about the possibility of participating in a visiting scholar programme funded by the British Council and the Indian University Grants Commission. By this point, Gopal, who had been educated, in part, at Balliol College, Oxford in the late 1940s, had already spent several years in England and had just recently been appointed to a position in South Asian history at Oxford. He would therefore have known more about Hobsbawm from his British colleagues than from his Indian ones. In any case, this was an initiative designed to introduce new faces to Indian academia. Neither of the historians who had been invited the previous year (Richard Cobb and Keith Thomas), nor the one who accompanied Hobsbawm (the cofounder of Past and Present, John Morris), had strong connections with India. Regardless, Hobsbawm was happy to accept: the British Council would pay his airfare—although it initially resisted doing so on the grounds of his communist leanings—and he was promised some excursions after his intellectual exertions.In return, he and Morris had to give a series of five morning lectures, each of which was followed by a lecture in the afternoon by an Indian historian. The subjects of Hobsbawm’s three lectures were “Primitive Social Movements,” “Problems of the Study of the Industrial Revolution in England,” and “The Debate About the ‘New Imperialism.’” The accompanying lectures were given by Habib, Satish Chandra, and Gopal himself.The lecture series took place at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). This was not a coincidence. AMU was known to be a hotbed of Marxist thought at the time, with a long tradition of socialist and communist activism. The medieval historian Nurul Hasan, in particular, acted as a focal point for Marxist scholarship, and he mentored younger historians like Habib, Athar Ali, and Iqtidar Alam Khan. In these circles, the work of British Marxists was a known quantity: Hobsbawm’s name circulated amongst AMU students, alongside those of Kiernan, Dobb, Morris, and others, and their ideas were the subject of intense discussion. The arrival of two eminent representatives of British Marxism at AMU was therefore a major intellectual moment. The historian Romila Thapar, who had met Hobsbawm when she was studying in London in the 1950s and was scheduled to give one of the accompanying lectures, remembered that he was virtually “mobbed.” As she put it, “the Aligarh history department was always talking Marxism,” which meant that Hobsbawm was a “big name.” The “crowds of students” at his lectures would “hang on everything he had to say.”166 Even Habib, who was rather less enthusiastic, admitted that Hobsbawm was “very popular” with the students at AMU.After his lecture series was over, Hobsbawm travelled across northern India. On his way to Calcutta, he appears to have visited Khajuraho, Orissa, Varanasi, and parts of Bihar; he returned to Delhi to fly home. As always, he spent no more than a few days in each place, but at least he did not want for friends. He was enthusiastically welcomed by his former Cambridge comrades, who ensured that he circulated within the most elevated circles of the Indian left-wing elite through a series of dinner parties and friendly encounters. Amidst the gossip, Hobsbawm tried to get a grasp on the current political situation. While he was in Bengal he took notes on the relative success of the communist movement in India. Elsewhere his observations were more impressionistic. He attended a communist meeting somewhere in Bihar, at which he noted the proliferation of red communist flags; he remarked encouragingly on the “CP cadres,” who he thought were “tough, reliant, [and] active.” Later, when he reached Bhagalpur in Bihar, he inquired about the rates of pay for rickshaw pullers and shoemakers, and asked his interlocutors which illnesses particularly affected the working class.He was also delighted to learn about Nakshatra Malakar, a Robin Hood-esque bandit turned Communist Party candidate in Bihar, who he thought might form the basis of another case study of social banditry for his forthcoming volume on the subject.Excerpted from The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian by Emile Chabal, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Emile Chabal is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh. He has authored and edited several books, including A Divided Republic: Nation, State, and Citizenship in Contemporary France and States of Ignorance: Governing Irregular Migrants in Western Europe. His writing has appeared in such publications as the Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, Jacobin, and Libération.