He maintained good relations with Marx until the summer of 1881, and was also a friend of Dadabhai Naoroji, who describes him as a ‘friend of India’. Hyndman, one of England’s early social democrats. An indirect contact with Dadabhai Naoroji, India’s indefatigable spokesman in London, could have developed through H.M. among the people” and “the wretched conditions of the workers” in India little is known about the sequel, though the General Council advised the correspondent to open a branch of the International with special attention to “enrolling natives”. In 1871, the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, in which Marx was the moving spirit, received a letter from an unidentified supporter from Calcutta, drawing attention to the “great discontent.
There is no evidence of any direct personal contact between Marx and any Indian opponent of British rule. This needs to be particularly stressed because some radical writers such as Edward Said have been taking Marx to task for an alleged lack of sympathy for the Indian people. When the Great Revolt of 1857 broke out, Marx and Engels were consistent in their defence of the rebels and in condemnation of British atrocities in their writings in the same newspaper. The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether (our italics). In 1853 he wrote in an American newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune: While it is true that, as a standard-bearer of the working-class in the struggle against capitalism, Marx’s main theoretical writings were concerned with the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism and the capitalist exploitation of labour, it is important to remember that his commitment to the cause of India’s national liberation predated any recognizable beginnings of our own National Movement. It is an area in which Marxism exercised the dominant influence. What has come to be defined as the “Left” in the historiography of the National Movement and current political discourse is essentially the assemblage of all elements as owed allegiance to the socialist world-outlook.
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