Dickens, Shaw and Marx: Contrasting Approaches

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

No two authors could be more unlike than Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Dickens was notorious for the saccharine sentimentality that pervades his novels. His rainbow humour - smiling through tears - endeared him to many readers all over the world. But there are others who complain that his appeal is invariably to the heart, never to the head. Shaw, on the other hand, was a sworn enemy of sentimentalism; rationalism was his forte. Yet quite unabashedly Shaw declared in 1906: '... I am a supersaturated Dickensite' (Shaw on Dickens 65). Again, in June 1914 he wrote: 

I am a Dickensian if by a Dickensian you mean a person who read all Dickens eagerly in his nonage. I read a good deal of him in my childhood before I dreamt of asking whom a book was by. I was a good deal influenced by him (Shaw on Dickens 74).

On yet another occasion (July 1919), readily admitting the influence of Dickens upon him, Shaw made a devastating comment: ‘Nothing but the stupendous illiteracy of modern criticism could have missed this fact’ (qtd. in Shaw on Dickens viii).

Shaw’s Foreword to a revised text of Dickens’s Great Expectations, published in 1947, contains some of his penetrating comments not only on Dickens, but also on what made Dickens so significant to him. 

And yet Shaw was not uncritical in his evaluation of Dickens. In a letter to Kate Perugini, daughter of Dickens, Shaw wrote: ‘His (sc. Dickens’s) limitation was the Shakespearean limitation: the current philosophies and religions of his day (Great Portland St – Good God!) were perfectly useless to him; and he never arrived at a philosophy or religion of his own’ (Shaw on Dickens 63). Nevertheless Shaw was charitable enough to admit that even this ignorance ‘had its advantages; for although it prevented him from understanding things that are intelligible enough to a superior person like myself, it also saved him from cooking his books to fit his philosophy, instead of depending on his enormous power of observation’ (Shaw on Dickens  63). 

Shaw finds fault with both Dickens and Shakespeare for the absence of any philosophy in their works. In his Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman (1903) Shaw said:

 I read Dickens and Shakespear (sic) without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens’s sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear’s pessimism is only his wounded humanity (Shaw on Dickens  108).

Shaw does not deny that

[b]oth have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are oftener saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor’ (Shaw on Dickens  108).

This absence of philosophy, however, was definitely a hindrance: ‘But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple…’ (Shaw on Dickens  108). All this, Shaw says, led to one great fault in their creations: ‘Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character…’ (Shaw on Dickens 109).

Shaw’s evaluation of Dickens is marked by his antipathy towards the latter’s lack of any well thought-out worldview. Shaw dismisses ‘the compact Tale of Two Cities’ as ‘pure sentimental melodrama from beginning to end, and shockingly wanting in any philosophy of history in its view of the French Revolution’ (Shaw on Dickens  46).

 

In a study of Ruskin vis-à-vis Dickens, Shaw asserts:

Charles Dickens was one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, and one of the greatest writers that England has ever produced. One of the greatest books in the English language is Little Dorrit, and when the English nation realises it is a great book and a true book there will be a revolution in this country. One of the reasons I am a revolutionist is that I read Little Dorrit when I was a very small boy (Shaw on Dickens  111). 

In this essay Shaw points out another shortcoming of Dickens:

Yet a comparison between Charles Dickens and John Ruskin, another great writer, brings home how astonishingly Philistine Dickens was. He really knew nothing about anything except literature, and that was a very serious handicap to him. One gets a far broader wisdom very often from Ruskin than from Dickens… (Shaw on Dickens 111).

Shaw explains that he uses the word Philistine ‘in the popular sense of a man who knows nothing about art.’ Dickens in this respect, however, was not an exception, for in England the authors of the nineteenth century were ‘the most appalling Philistines – even the greatest of them’ (Shaw on Dickens 111).

Shaw is at his paradoxical best when he brings Karl Marx in contrast to Dickens: 

The difference between Marx and Dickens was that Marx knew that he was a revolutionist whilst Dickens had not the faintest suspicion of that part of his calling. Compare the young Dickens looking for a job in a lawyer’s office and teaching himself shorthand to escape from his office stool to the reporters’ gallery, with a young Trotsky, the young Lenin, quite deliberately facing disreputable poverty and adopting revolution as their profession with every alternative of bourgeois security and respectability much more fully open to them than to Dickens (Shaw on Dickens 49).

This, however, is not the only reference to Marx in Shaw’s comments on Dickens. As if to compensate for this harsh   judgment, Shaw declares: ‘Yet Little Dorrit is a more seditious book than Das Kapital. All over Europe men and women are in prison for pamphlets and speeches which are to Little Dorrit as red pepper to dynamite’ (Shaw on Dickens 51).¹

 All this comes after a scathing comment on Dickens’s limitations: 

You may read the stories of Dickens from beginning to end without ever learning that he lived through a period of fierce revivals and revolutionary movements in art, in philosophy, in sociology, in religion: in short, in culture. Dean Inge’s remark that “the number of great subjects in which Dickens took no interest whatever is amazing” hits the nail exactly on the head. As to finding such a person as Karl Marx among his characters, one would as soon look for a nautilus in a nursery (Shaw on Dickens 51).

Over and over again Shaw makes a sharp distinction between Dickens the novelist and Dickens the man. It would perhaps be better to say that the distinction is between the man and his works. This no doubt would win the approval of Georg Lukács who insisted on objectivity to the last day of his life (Eörsi 32). Dickens the man was no better than ‘an English gentleman of the professional class, who would not allow his daughter to go on the stage because it was not respectable’ (Shaw and Dickens 52). Shaw again brings in Marx as a typical representative of what Dickens was not. In spite of all his seriousness, Shaw observes,

…Dickens never saw himself as a revolutionist. It never occurred to him to found a Red International, as Marx did, not even to join one out of the dozens of political reform societies that were about him. … He knew so little about revolutionists that when Mazzini called on him and sent in his card, Dickens, much puzzled, concluded that the unknown foreign gentleman wanted money, and very kindly sent him down a sovereign to get rid of him (Shaw on Dickens  52).² 

Shaw brings in Marx in relation to Dickens again in a different context:

Marx and Dickens were contemporaries living in the same city and pursuing the same profession of literature; yet they seem to us like creatures of a different species living in a different world. Dickens, if he had ever become conscious of Karl Marx, would have been classed with him as a revolutionist. The difference between a revolutionist and what Marx called a bourgeois is that the bourgeois regards the existing social order as the permanent and natural order of human society, needing reforms now and then and here and there, but essentially good and sane and right and respectable and proper and everlasting. To the revolutionist, it is transitory, mistaken, objectionable, and pathological: a social disease to be cured, not to be endured (Shaw on Dickens 48).

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It is quite probable that Dickens did not know anything about Marx. But Marx did know much about Dickens. A correspondent of the Chicago Tribune noticed the works of Dickens and Thackeray in Marx’s private collection (Prawer 395-96). There is, however, only one occasion in Marx’s printed works when Dickens is mentioned by name.³  It appears in an essay written in English and published in the New-York Daily Tribune (August 1, 1854). Dickens is named along with Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, and Mrs Gaskell who are said to have painted the English middle class as ‘full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance’ (Marx-Engels 339-40). The editors of Marx-Engels Werke have pointed out that parts of the manuscript of this article were radically revised by the editors of that journal (Prawer 237). Hence everything the essay contains should not be blindly accepted as coming from Marx’s pen. Although much has recently been made of a statement in this essay (‘The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together…’) and the honour of being such an author attributed to Dickens alone (in Wikipedia and several printed works), the authenticity of the text of this essay, particularly this kind of hyperbole, is not beyond question.  

However, there are several allusions to Dickens’s characters in Marx’s works which exhibit his close acquaintance with the works of the English novelist. They are not to be found so much in the works meant for publication but in his letters. Dickens was indeed one of Marx’s favourite authors. As S. S. Prawer observes:

There are also constant additions to Marx’s canon of literary excellence: Homer, Aeschylus, Ovid, Lucretius, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, and Heine are joined, successively, by Dante, Diderot, Cobbett, Balzac, Dickens, and many others (401). 

Marx does not go into the merit of Dickens’s works, nor does he pay much attention to the contents of the novels and the message they convey. Dickens to him was basically a fashioner of typical characters, so typical as to represent any individual who belongs to the type. Dickens was memorable to him as the creator of a variety of odd and curious characters who can be recalled in relation to other people of Marx’s own times. In a letter, for example, Marx speaks of ‘the modern bourgeois Pecksniff- style…’ (qtd. in  Prawer 174), alluding to the notorious self-server in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.  Pecksniff comes handy in reference to Napoleon III of France who is called ‘the imperial Pecksniff’ (Prawer 262).⁴  Similarly in his Ethnological Notebooks (posthumously published) both Jeremy Bentham and Henry Maine are called ‘Pecksniff’ and ‘Pecksniffian’ respectively(Prawer 361-62), apparently as  terms of disapproval. There are references to Tupman, a character in Pickwick Papers (Prawer 186). Marx also speaks of the ‘Pickwickian sense’ in which politicians employ their words (Prawer 252). Richard Cobden is called ‘umble’ like Uriah Heep, a hypocrite in David Copperfield (Prawer 203). Two other characters from Dickens, Wackford Squeers (the cruel headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby ) and Artful Dodger (the nickname of a pickpocket in Oliver Twist ), are mentioned as specimens of cruelty and unscrupulousness (Prawer 252). Marx again mentions Wackford Squeers (Prawer 392) in connection with the editor of the National-Zeitung, Berlin.

Literary allusions are galore in Marx’s less known work, Herr Vogt : English authors, such as Shakespeare, Samuel Butler of Hudibras  fame, Alexander Pope, Lawrence Sterne, Byron, and last but not least, Dickens. Both in Capital , vol. I and Herr Vogt, Bill Sikes, a vicious thief in Oliver Twist, is made to appear as a ‘voluble cut-throat’ (Prawer 340). Marx calls Gladstone’s style of oratory ‘Circumlocution-Office style’ (Prawer 358) and explains the term for the benefit of his German readers who had not read Little Dorrit : it is employed to describe the style of function of Government bureaucracy.

Marx once said, ‘Individuality and specificity are an integral aspect of typicality’ (qtd. in Prawer 410).⁵ Referring to this formulation, Prawer observes:

 In this way a novel by Balzac or Dickens may become a ‘concrete universal’ – it may reveal more of the dynamic of nineteenth-century life in France and England, and of the workings of human nature in its general as well as its temporally and sociologically particular aspect, than the writings of most historians, economists, and sociologists (Prawer 410).

 Marx used to collect literary nicknames from a wide number of sources; they do not show any inclination to choose only such authors who had a philosophy of their own (as Shaw demanded). Marx’s admiration for Dickens is purely literary: he never bothers to reflect on Dickens’s personal views regarding the burning issues of his times. On the contrary, Marx hugely enjoyed the peculiarity of the characters that Dickens created.  

      

To sum up then: Shaw’s evaluation of Dickens is coloured by his own propensity towards philosophizing in his plays and the sense of purpose that must, he felt, permeate every work of art. He discovered in Dickens’s works the full potential of a ‘revolutionist’, although in his personal life and thought Dickens himself was far from being so. Marx, on the other hand, found in Dickens’s novels a delightful gallery of characters who could be picked up and projected as typical representatives of human follies, foibles and vices.

Notes and References

¹ Shaw considers Little Dorrit to be ‘Dickens’s masterpiece among many masterpieces’ and Great Expectation ’his most compactly perfect book’ (46).

² Dan H. Laurence and Martin Quinn, editors of Shaw on Dickens, inform us that Mazzini and Dickens later became friends (52 n6).

³ Engels too is known to have mentioned Dickens once by his pen name, Boz (Marx-Engels 297). He makes a distinction between the older kind of romance and the modern novel dealing with the fates and fortunes of the poor, the despised class, replacing those of kings and princes. As examples of the ‘new class of novel writers’, Engels mentions George Sand, Eugène Sue, and Boz (i.e., Dickens). This distinction between romance and the novel was later explored in more details by Arnold Kettle, a twentieth-century Marxist critic (33-37).

⁴ On another occasion Napoleon III is called ‘the Quasimodo of the French Revolution’ (Prawer 252), alluding to the poor hunchback in Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), not, however, in the sense of a pathetic grotesque figure, but, as Marx himself explains, as a terrifying Quasimodo.

⁵ Engels too appreciated this quality in characterization. In a letter (November 26, 1885) he told Minna Kautsky, a German novelist, that her ‘characters exhibit the sharp individualization so customary in your work. Each of them is a type but at the same time also a definite individual, a “Dieser” [This one], as old Hegel would say, and that is how it should be’ (Marx-Engels 87). In another letter (beginning of April 1888), to Margaret Harkness, an English socialist-feminist author,  Engels defined realism as ‘besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances’ (Marx-Engels 90).

Works Cited

Eörsi, István. György Lukács, Fanatic of Reality, The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol.12.  No.44, Winter 1971, pp.26-34.

Kettle, Arnold. An Introduction to the English Novel, vol.1. London: Arrow Books, 1962 (first published 1951).

Laurence, Dan H. and Martin Quinn (eds.). Shaw on Dickens. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1985.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress Publishers,1976.

Prawer, S.S. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Acknowledgements: Amitava Bhattacharyya, Siddhartha Datta and Sunish Kumar Deb. The usual disclaimers apply.

Prof Ramkrishna Bhattacharya taught English at Unversity of Calcutta, Kolkota and was an Emeritus Fellow of University Grants Commission. He isnow a Fellow of Pavlov Institute, Kolkota


 

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Hegel, Heine, Marx: Hanuman and Sabala

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

  

In ‘The British Rule in India,’ one of his contributions to the New-York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853, Marx waxed both passionate and indignant:  

‘We must not forget that these little [village] communities [in Hindostan] were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances,… exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on the knees in adoration of Kanuman, the Monkey, and Sabbala, the Cow’ (On Britain  pp. 383-84).  

When I first read this passage in the early 1960s quite naturally I took Kanuman as a misprint for Hanuman. Some years later in a collection of extracts from Marx-Engels’s articles and letters entitled On Colonialism, I found the error corrected and the names previously printed in italics now in normal/roman (p.37). Similarly in a collection of articles and letters on the 1857 rebellion known as the Sepoy Mutiny I found the same corrected reading (The First Indian War of Independence 1857-59, pp.20-21). It was also reassuring to learn from the ‘Publishers’ Note’ of this book that ‘[t]he text of the articles which were printed in the New-York Daily Tribune has been reproduced from that newspaper. Certain sentences inserted by the editors of the Daily Tribune and obvious misprints have been eliminated. The spelling of proper names is wherever possible given according to modern sources’ (p.4. Emphasis mine). The Bangla translation of this collection contains the same Editors’ Note and in the passage quoted above there is Hanuman instead of Kanuman (p.20). 

Great was my surprise when in Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol.12 (first published in 1979) I discovered Kanuman making its reappearance (p.132), but this time in roman, not in italics. 

Why should the corrected version be replaced by an obvious misprint?  The answer became crystal clear when I looked at the facsimile (reduced) of a page of the American newspaper in which Marx’s article first appeared (reproduced in MECW vol. 12, p. 129). It was found that the printed version indeed had Kanuman and Sabbala in roman, and that is why the learned editors of the MECW decided to go back to the first printed version, disregarding all attempts at corrections and emendations undertaken by other editors of Marx’s individual works and collections of articles that appeared between 1853 and 1979. A strange editorial policy: instead of advancing from the diplomatic edition to the critical edition, it was the other way round. The Marx Engels Werke (MEW), which includes German translation of this and other articles written in English and French by Marx, however, prints the corrected version: Hamuman, not Kanuman (9:133) but retains Sabbala (which should be Sabala).  

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But this is not the only reason I picked up this passage. Apparently Marx as yet did not know much about totemism, animal worship, etc. Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, the work that impressed and influenced Marx and Engels so much, did not appear till 1877. Marx read Morgan and other works on anthropology and ethnology mostly in 1880-81. Hence in 1853 he did not understand why animals are worshipped in the early stages of human civilization all over the world. Hanuman is a cult figure mainly in the so-called cow belt in north India, not so much because of the original Sanskrit version of the Ramayana but mostly due to the Ram-charit-manas, the rewritten Hindi version of the Ram legend by Tulsidas (sixteenth century). (For a study of this monkey god, see Lutgendorf’s Hanuman’s Tale).

Nor did Marx know that Savalaa or S’avalaa (not Sabbala, as Marx wrote) was not just any cow, but a cow of a rare breed known as kaamadhenu, variously called Aditi, S’avalaa, Surabhi, etc. She, like the fantastic kalpataru (wish-fulfilling tree) or the legendary cornucopia, was believed to provide her devotees with whatever they might desire. The story narrated in the two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, relates her to a sage called Vasistha (Vasis.t.ha), who had her in his hermitage. Visvamitra (Vis’vaamitra), then a king, after seeing her supernatural powers (she fed his whole army without prior notice), offered millions of cows to Vasishtha in exchange of her. Since Vasishtha refused to comply with his request, Visvamitra tried to take away the cow by force, only to be utterly trounced by the soldiers that appeared from her body. 1

We are not told from where Marx learnt about Hanuman; no hint is provided by the editors of MEW or MECW or any other collection of Marx’s writings in which this 1853 article appears.2 But it is interesting to observe that Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the German poet and once Marx’s intimate friend, too did not understand why ‘Wiswamitra’ wanted this cow so badly. In a song (‘Den Koenig Wiswamitra’, To King Visvamitra) Heine wrote: 

The good king Wiswamitra
Has a troublesome life now,
He seeks with fights and penance
To win Wasichta's cow.
Oh, good king Wiswamitra,
You are an ox, and how!
So many fights and penance,
And only for a cow!

[A free translation in http://www.heinrich-heine.net/haupt.htm] 3 

Marx was well acquainted with Heine’s song. In a letter to Antoinette Philips dated 18 March 1866 he paraphrased line 7 [‘der kämpfte und buesste für die Kuh Sabalah’ (sic)].4 He quoted the English translation of lines 5-8 of the song in another letter written on 20 March 1866 (also in English) to his daughter, Laura(MECW: 42:245, letter no. 144) and added: ‘If honest Wiswamitra, like a true Indian, tormented himself for the salvation of the cow Sabala…’ (this time without ‘h’ at the end of the name).5

Marx, apparently following Heine, had connected Visvamitra and Savala, the cow in his 1853 article (see above). But in the legends, there was no question of Visvamitra, then a king, tormenting himself (in extremely painful and arduous tapas, ascetic practice) for the salvation of Savala. Visvamitra originally belonged to the Warrior caste (Kshatriya), but having seen the power of a Brahmin, Vasishtha, who had been made master of every vasu or desirable object by this cornucopia of a cow, he wished to become a Brahmin himself. This is why he devoted himself to the performance of a long penance. Possession of ‘the cow of plenty’ was no longer of primary importance to him; he aspired for Brahminhood. And he was not denied the fruits of his endeavour. He was successively made ‘the royal-sage,’ rajarshi, then a full ‘sage,’ rishi, ‘the great sage,’ maharshi, and ultimately, ‘a Brahmin sage’, brahmarshi.

The story of the conflict between Vishvamitra and Vasishtha has been considered symbolical of the struggle between the Kshatriyas  and the Brahmins. But the variations in the stories concerning these two sages found in Vedic literature, and then in the epics and the Puranas,6 are irreconcilable; any inference to be drawn from any part of the accounts is liable to be false.

Marx apparently knew nothing of all this. But he remembered both ‘Wiswamitra’ and the row over a cow learnt from Heine’s song. But what was the source for Heine’s (mis)understanding of the story?  He had no Sanskrit, but presumably learnt the story of the conflict between Visvamitra and Vasistha from Franz Bopp (1791-1867), the indefatigable Sanskritist and translator. Bopp wrote a book in German on the conjugation system of the Sanskrit language (1816).7 However odd it may seem, the story of Visvamitra is given there in metrical German translation from the original Sanskrit Ramayana (Winternitz 1:14, 388-89, 458 n4). Heine’s song was written in 1823/1824 and included in a book of songs (Die Heimkehr, Homecomings) published in 1827. Marx was then a mere child.  Marx referred to two animals, Hanuman and Sabala, in his 1853 article, and mentioned with occasional misspellings Sabala again in two letters in 1866. The reference to cows was occasioned by a long debate (6–20 Feb 1866) in the British Parliament. Members of both houses wrangled vigorously on the compensation to be awarded to the cattle owners in the event of epizootic diseases.

But Heine does not mention any of the several names of the wish-fulfilling cow (see above). So Marx must have got it from some other source. And wherefrom did he learn of Hanuman? In his student days at Bonn Marx had attended the lectures on philosophy and literature given by the Romantic linguist, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (McLellan p.13), but they were on Homer and Propertius, not on Valmiki and Vyasa. Marx never attempted to learn Sanskrit or any Indian language, although in his article, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’ (22 July 1853, published in the NYDT, No. 3840, 8 August 1853) he extolled India as ‘[the] country [which] has been the source of our languages’ (On Colonialism p. 81; MECW 12:221) as did Hegel (‘In recent times the discovery has been made, that the Sanscrit lies at the foundation of all those further developments which form the languages of Europe; e.g. the Greek, Latin, German.’ Philosophy of Historypp. 141-42).8 There is no evidence that Marx had read the first Books of the Ramayana available in A.W. Schlegel’s Latin translation, or in the English version produced by William Carey and Joshua Marshman published from Serampore, Bengal. Nor is there any other reference to Hanuman or any character of theRamayana in his later writings.

What is the source for Hanuman and Savala juxtaposed, then? The editors of both MEW and MECW offer no help. At long last I have discovered the source. It is Hegel’s Aesthetics. While speaking of imagination, Hegel says: 

‘In the Ramayana, for instance, the friend of Rama, Hanuman, the Prince of Apes, is a chief figure and he accomplishes the boldest deeds. To speak generally, in India, the ape is revered as divine, and there is a whole city of apes. In the ape as this individual ape the infinite content of the Absolute is gazed at with wonder and is deified. Similarly, the cow Sabala appears likewise in the Ramayana in the episode of Vishwamitra’s penances, clothed with boundless might.’ (Aesthetics vol.1 p.336) 

Hegel, as any reader acquainted with the Ramayana will recognize, had thoroughly misunderstood the role of Hanuman in the epic. Hanuman is not at all a prince (Angada, Bali’s son, is the only one), nor can he be called by any stretch of imagination ‘a friend of Rama’.  Marx in his turn fails to comprehend that it was not Sabala, the kaamadhenu who is worshipped; the cow as a species is one of the many objects of animal worship current in India. Furthermore, Sabala was not the object of Visvamitra’s penances; he aspired after attaining Brahminhood. It was not for her salvation that Visamitra performed penance after penance; they were all for his own self. Marx only remembered these two animals and associated them with animal worship which he thought to be demeaning for humans. And thus he condemned the Indian villagers for worshipping Hanuman the monkey and Sabala the cow. Hegel could assimilate deified Hanuman with his concept of the Absolute: Marx saw only disgrace of the homo sapiens in animal worship.

Marx, however, was not the first to denounce animal worship, particularly cow worship. Long before the enlightened Europeans, inheritors of the Florentine neoplatonists’ eulogy of the dignity of humans, visited India, Sriharsha (twelfth century) in his Life of Naisadha (Naishadha-charita), a secondary epic, makes a materialist jeer at the fideists and cow-worshippers: 

‘Books made by gods and Bráhmans are your only authority for paying them homage,–

And see ye not, when ye bow down to the cow, ye debase yourselves even lower than that?’  (17.67. Trans. E.B. Cowell) 

There were always such disbelievers and rationalists in every phase of Indian history. 

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An inquisitive reader may still enquire: Wherefrom did Hegel, who had never studied Sanskrit, learn the story of the Ramayana? It is true that no complete translation of the Ramayana was yet available in any European language,9 yet Hegel was acquainted with the Latin translation of the Ramayana (Books 1-3) done by August Schlegel (mentioned above), which has been acclaimed as his ‘most significant work’ (Winternitz 1:13). Hegel specifically mentions the translations of the Ramayanaand the Mahabharata in his Philosophy of History: ‘Two great epic poems, Ramayana and Mahabharata, have also reached Europe. Three quarto volumes of the former have been printed; the second volume is extremely rare’ (pp. 159-60). The German editor adds in a note: ‘A. W. v. Schlegel has published the first and second Volume (sic); the most important episodes of the Mahabharata have been introduced to public notice by F. Bopp, and a complete Edition had appeared at Calcutta’ (qtd. in Hegel, Philosophy of History p. 160n).  Hegel mentions the story of the descent of the Ganga as described in the Ramayana (Aesthetics 1: 344). Even though A. W. Schlegel had not translated a part of this episode (the scene of Siva lying with Uma in conjugal embrace), Hegel managed to get hold of the Charles Wilkins’s (1749–1836) English version (I wonder how and where he got it). Hegel noticed that Wilkins too ‘had no mind to translate word for word because it is all too wanting in decency and shame’ (1: 344), nevertheless Hegel managed to fill in the gaps in the story. In his usual self-confident way he then proceeded to compare the accounts of theogony of the Indians with those of the Scandinavians and the Greeks (1:345). Hegel further discusses the view of purification and penance based not only on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, ‘but also many other poetic works of art [that] provide the most important samples’ (1: 346-47). There is an indirect reference to Viswamitra’s penance here too (‘The end of acquiring the power of a Bramhana’ 1: 346-47). 

Hegel had read (all in translation of course) more of Indian literature and philosophy than Marx.10 With the kind of self-assurance one usually associates with genius (in case of lesser mortals which would be criticized as audacity), he could expatiate on the two Indian epics, although he could not have read either from cover to cover.11 In spite of his very limited acquaintance with the philosophies of India, he would comment authoritatively on the Indian way of thinking and its relation to the Absolute (see, for instance, Aesthetics 1: 336 quoted above). He never thought that he could have misunderstood any text, which he often did, for example in retelling the story of Nala and Damayanti (Aesthetics 1: 215 and n1, also Philosophy of History, pp. 151-52).12 Marx, by following Hegel and Heine, had merely compounded some follies. However, these follies do not affect Marx’s thesis concerning the nature of the British rule in India; they merely offer some comic relief.

APPENDIX

Marx quoted four lines from Heine’s song in English translation in his letter to Laura:  

Oh, oh, king Wiswamitra,
What fool of an oxen art thou,
That thou so much wrangle’st and suffer’st,
And all that for a cow. 

Whether Marx translated the lines himself or quoted it from someone else’s is not known. The editors of MEW are silent over the matter, and those ofMECW apparently could not make up their mind. At first they say that ‘Marx gives a fee rendering of the words from Heine’s poem’ (p.242 n b), and then ‘Marx quotes an English translation of the second stanza of the poem…’ (p.245 n b).  Prawer however categorically states that Marx himself translated the stanza of Heine’s song ‘into English doggerel’ (p.380).

Special attention, however, is to be paid to the word ‘ox’ (wrongly rendered as ‘oxen’ (in plural) in Marx’s letter) in Heine’s song. Ochs in German, besides meaning an ox, is also used figuratively to suggest a blockhead, a fool (The French translation of Heine’s song by Pierre Mathé (2009) has: ‘Oh quel boeuf tu es’).

Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), German poet and botanist, composed a sonnet, ‘Vom Pithagorieschen Lehrsatz’ (On the Pythagorean Theorem). The second and third stanzas run as follows:  

A splendid sacrifice Pythagoras brought
The gods, who blessed him with this ray divine;
A great burnt offering of a hundred kine,
Proclaimed afar the sage’s gratitude.

#

Now since that day, all cattle [blockheads] when they scent
New truth about to see the light of day,
In frightful bellowings manifest their dismay.

(Gedichte, 1835. Qtd. in Moritz, pp. 308-09) 

Similarly Karl Ludwig Doerne (1786-1837), a German political writer and satirist, observed: ‘After Pythagoras discovered his fundamental theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb of oxen. 13 Since that time all dunces [ochsen] tremble whenever a new truth is discovered’ (Fragmente und Aphorismen aus Meinem Tagebuche, 1840. Qtd. in Moritz, pp. 308).

It may also be mentioned that in Sanskrit, as also in many modern Indian languages, ‘cow’ is a synonym for ‘blockhead’ or ‘dunce’. In Sriharsha’s Life of Naishadha (mentioned above) a materialist pillories the founder of a logical-cum-philosophical system called Nyaya by saying: 

‘He too who propounded his system that a stone’s state is the true liberation, –
You may well call him Gotama, for a superlative fool was he.’
(17.75. Trans. E.B. Cowell) 

Here is an untranslatable pun on the name of Gotama, founder of the Nyaya system, and go + tama, the most bovine (-tama being the marker of the superlative degree).

Notes

1. See Stutley, ‘Vasistha’ and ‘Vishvamitra,’ and Muni, pp.379-80, 524, 835, and 872.  Muni, however, does not mention the name S’abalaa or S’avalaa (as in the Ramayana). In his account, collected from various puranic sources, the name of the cow is Nandini (as in the Mahabharata), an offspring of Surabhi, the original kaamadhenu, who appeared during the Churning of the Ocean (samudra-manthana) or was created by Krishna (as in the Devi-bhagavata-purana 9.49).
2. I have been able to consult only those mentioned above. Several New collections of Marx’s articles on India have recently come out, but I have no access to them. However, from the notices provided on the net, I gather that their editors have not addressed the issue of sources.
3. The German original reads:

Den Koenig Wiswamitra,

den treibts ohne Rast und Ruh,

er will durch Kampf und Buessung

erwerben Wasischtas Kuh.

#

Oh, Koenig Wiswamitra,

oh, welch ein Ochs bist du,

dass du so viel kaempfest und  buessest,

und alles fuer eine Kuh!

[http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=7795]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) rendered this poem (and eight others by Heine) into Bangla from the original German (as a footnote informs the reader) in Rabindranath’s translation of the ‘Wiswamitra’ song has been reprinted in Ghosh and Dasgupta (eds.), p. 108 (second edition, p.137), Rabindra-Rachanabali vol.15 p.388, and more recently in Mandal, p.300.

4. Marx wrote these words in German although the letter was in English. See MECW, vol. 42, letter no. 143, p. 242. Marx was quite fond of Antoinette Philips, a young member of the Dutch section of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International). It was in this letter that Marx told her: ‘.42:242)

5. Both the letters are translated into German in MEW Band 31, letter nos. 48 and 49, S. 503-05, 506-08. Sabalah / Sabala have been uniformly transliterated as Cabala (S. 504, 507)! The 1853 article translated into German in MEWBand 9, however, retains Marx’s original misspelling, ‘Sabbala’ (9:133).The passage from the letter to Laura is also to be found in Karl Marx Privat, pp. 111-12, and quoted from it in Prawer pp. 379-80. Prawer however does not mention MEW 9 letter no. 48 (MECW 42 letter no.143) which also contains a reference to Heine’s song. 

Out of sheer curiosity I checked the French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish translations of Marx’s 1853 article, all available on the net, thanks to Marxists Internet Archive, <www.marxists.org>. No uniformity is to be found in the spelling of the two names: some prefer to stick to the original misspelling; some emend one or the other or both. 

6. Ramayana, Balakanda (Book I), vulgate,  cantos 51-55; critical Edition 50-54; the Mahabharata, Adiparvan (Book I), vulgate and  critical Edition canto 175 (a terse summary of the sprawling narrative in the Ramayana), also Salyaparvan  (Book 9), vul. 45 crit. ed. 41, and Devi bhagavata-Purana vulgate 7.17 and 9.49, etc. 

7. 7The original German title is: Ueber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen,persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic), with a preface by Carl (Karl) Windischmann. 

8. Not in this regard alone, but concerning other aspects of ancient India too, young Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel. The result was not altogether beneficial; Hegel misled him and badly clouded his vision. D.D. Kosambi has rightly contradicted Marx’s views and opinions about Indian history (pp.8-12) that are often mere echoes of Hegel’s. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History has been summarily dismissed by Eric J. Hobsbawm as ‘not illuminating’ (p.21). 

9. The Italian translation by Gaspare Gorresio began to come out in 1847 and was completed in 1858; a French rendering by H. Fauche begun In 1854 and finished in 1858, but Hegel had died in 1855. 

10. Several studies on Hegel vis-à-vis philosophies in India are available. W. Halbfass’s study, pp.107-22, is worth reading. 

11. The whole of Ramayana was not yet available in German. See Winternitz 1:458 nn. The English translation of the Mahabharata by Kishori Mohan Ganguly did not begin to appear till 1883. Translations into other European languages that Hegel could read were still a far cry. 

12. Robert Charles (or Robin) Zaehner (1913-74), son of a Swiss Immigrant domiciled in England and a well-known Orientalist, told T. M. Knox, translator of Hegel’s Aesthetics, what the original story of the Nala and Damayanti was (See Hegel, Aesthetics p. 215n1). Professor Knox notes this but makes a gruesome blunder when he writes that the authority of the story of Nala ‘may be’ W. von Humboldt’s book on the Bhagavad-Gita (1826) which Hegel had reviewed adversely in 1827 (Knox however added that ‘one cannot be sure’, for Hegel had studied so many works on Indian religion when he wrote that review). A look at Humboldt’s book would have disabused Knox of this absurd notion. The most obvious source for Hegel’s knowledge of the Nala story would be Bopp’s critical edition of the Nala episode in the Mahabharata with a Latin rendering published from London in 1819. See Winternitz 1:14n1. The title may now sound rather pompous: Nalus, carmen sanscritum e Mahabharato:  

13. A great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen, from Greek hekatombe, from hekaton ‘hundred’ + bous ‘ox’. C.L.Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) however objected to the sacrifice of no fewer than a hundred oxen – ‘a method of doing honour to Science that has always seemed to me slightly exaggerated and uncalled-for…. It would produce a quite inconvenient supply of beef.’ A New Theory of Parallels (1895). Qtd. in Moritz, p. 308. Emphasis in the original.).

Works Cited

Cowell. E.B. The Carvaka System of Philosophy, The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1862, No. 4, pp. 371-90.

Devibhabhagavata Puranam. Ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna. Kalikata: Nababharat Publishers,1388 Bangala Sal (=1981-82).

Ghosh, Sankha and Alokranjan Dasgupta (eds.), Sapta Sindhu Das Diganta. Kalikata: Natun Sahitya Bhavan, 1369 Bangla Sal (1962); Dey’s Publishing,

 2010,

Halbfass, W. Hegel on the Philosophy of the Hindus, in German Scholars on India, vol. 1. Varanasi: The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1973, pp.107-22.

Hegel, G W F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover Publications ©1956.

Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975

Hobsbawm, E. J. Introduction to Karl Marx. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. New York: International Publishers, 1969 (first published 1965).

Karl Marks o Fredarik Engels. Pratham Bharatiya Svadhinata-Yuddha 1857-1859. Masko: Bideshi Bhashay Sahitya Prakashalay, n.d.

Kosambi, D.D. An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1975.

Lutgendorf, Philip. Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey, New York:  Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mandal, Sujitkumar. Bidesi Phuler Guchchha. Kolkata: Papyrus, 2011.

Marx Karl and Frederick Engels. Collected Works, vol.12. Moscow: Progress Publishers, London:  Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.,  and New York: International Publishers. Inc., 1979.

Marx Karl and Frederick Engels. Marx Engels Werke. Band 9. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960

Marx Karl and Frederick Engels. On Britain. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953.

Marx Karl and Frederick Engels. On Colonialism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.

Marx, K. and F. Engels. The First Indian War of Independence 1857-59. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d. Second Impression (based on the Russian edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1959).

McLellan, David. Karl Marx: A Biography. London: Papermac. 1995.

Moritz, Robert Edouard. On Mathematics: A Collection of Witty, Profound, Amusing Passages about Mathematics and Mathematicians. New York: Dover Publication, 1958 (originally entitled Memorabilia Mathematica, or The Philomath’s Quotation Book, © 1914.

Muni, Vettam. Puranic Encyclopaedia. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984.

Prawer. S. S. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Sriharsha. Naishadhacharita. Ed. Sivadatta and V. L. Panshikar. Mumbai: Nirnay Sagar Press, 1928.

Stutley, Margaret and James. A Dictionary of Hinduism: Its Mythology Folklore and Development 1500 B.C. – A.D. 1500. Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1977.

Thakur, Rabindranath. Rabindra-Rachanabali, Panchadash Khanda (vol 18). Kolkata: Paschimbanga Sarkar (second West Bengal Government edition), 1994.

Winternitz, Maurice. A History of Indian Literature, vol. I. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1981. 

Internet Sources

http://www.heinrich-heine.net/haupt.htm

Acknowledgements: Sourav Basak, Amitava Bhattacharyya, Sunish Kumar Deb, Rindon Kundu, and Nilratan Sarkar. The usual disclaimers apply.

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