Tag: Indian Economic Thought

Arun Bose: An Introduction to His Life and Work

This blog post introduces you to the economist Arun Bose (1919-2003) who made important contributions to Sraffian and Marxian literature. Bose was called a ‘Sraffian Marxist’ alongside Ronald Meek and Ian Steedman by Samir Amin in a 2015 article in the Monthly Review. Despite his substantial corpus of published writings, his work seems to have been largely forgotten within India. Therefore this essay provides an introduction to his life and work and ipso facto is a modest attempt at generating interest in Indian economic thought specifically (and more generally in the history of economic thought). In the past, blog posts which fall into this theme dealt with the economics of Krishna Bharadwaj and VKRV Rao. And what follows is a condensed version of Section II of my article ‘Arun Bose on Sraffa: Value Theory and Demand‘ published in Artha Vijnana as part of a 2018 special issue dedicated to the ‘Indian Reception of Piero Sraffa’s Economic Contributions’.”

Born in Calcutta, Bose had become interested in Marxian political economy by the end of high school. He completed his undergraduate studies (Tripos) at Cambridge University between 1937 and 1940. One of Bose’s recollections of Cambridge is the following: ‘During extra-curricular sessions, both Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa discussed economic theory and Marxian political economy, leaving an indelible impression on my mind’. Moreover, Bose was actively involved in student movements there and also joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the decade following this, Bose worked as a full-time activist in the Indian communist movement.’

Around 1957, Bose decided to resume his study of economic theory. Under the Commonwealth Universities Interchange scheme, he spent a year at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1960-1. Subsequently, he was asked to join the newly founded Kirori Mal College in Delhi at the behest of the economist B. N. Ganguli and the English professor Sarup Singh. B. N. Ganguli is the author of Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (1977), one of the handful of books dedicated to Indian economic thought. In memoriam, the Economics Department at Kirori Mal has organised public lectures under the auspices of Arun Bose Memorial Lectures.’

Between 1963 and 1965, Bose closely engaged with Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Bose published a comment in Economic Weekly (now Economic & Political Weekly) in response to Krishna Bharadwaj’s review of Sraffa’s book entitled ‘Value through Exogenous Distribution’. Bose also published responses to the reviews of Sraffa’s book by Roy Harrod and David Collard respectively in the Economic Journal, one of the main international vehicles for the dissemination of economic ideas. And in 1965, he published an article on Sraffa’s book in the Economic Journal. And during this period, they corresponded; Bose sent Sraffa five letters to which he received responses to all but one (more details about the correspondence is available at the online archives of Trinity College).’

Bose’s next publication was after six years: an essay on Marx in the 1971 volume of the History of Political Economy; it continues to be an important journal devoted to the history of economic thought. Next year, he published another essay on Marx in Science & Society. After another brief hiatus from publication, he published a book in 1975 titled Marxian and Post-Marxian Political Economy; he gave a series of lectures at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta with the same title. Bose acknowledges Sukhamoy Chakravarty for reading the book draft and for familiarising him with modern linear economic theory (Chakravarty had also reviewed Sraffa’s book which had appeared in 1961 in Arthaniti, the journal of the Department of Economics, University of Calcutta). I reproduce an excerpt from the book’s preface where Bose describes his reason for being impressed with Sraffa’s work:

‘Piero Sraffa impressed me with his conviction that it was perfectly possible, though difficult, to develop a theory of political economy into an exact science, based on absolute precision of concept ‘ however much we may approximate in empirical work ‘ which would be wielded as effectively as a surgeon’s or a welder’s tools, to dissect or dismantle, and then reassemble the ‘unseen’ interconnections of the economic process, whose cognition is essential for revolutionary political action’ (p. 11; also reproduced in my Artha Vijnana article on p. 29).’

He went on to publish two follow-up books: Political Paradoxes and Puzzles (1977) and Marx on Exploitation and Inequality: An Essay in Marxian Analytical Economics (1980). While a visiting fellow at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) during 1976-7, Bose delivered lectures on capital theory. (Today, in India, to the best of my knowledge, capital theory is a full course (albeit elective/optional) only at the University of Hyderabad; Bharadwaj had played an important role in designing their MA Economics curriculum along with Amiya Bagchi, Amit Bhaduri, and K. L. Krishna.) A year before his retirement from Kirori Mal College in 1985, Bose published a letter in the Economic & Political Weekly titled ‘Piero Sraffa’; this was in response to P. R. Brahmananda’s obituary of Sraffa in 1983, also in the form of a letter. Brahmananda had himself engaged with Sraffa’s book in a set of three articles in 1963 in the Indian Economic Journal; these were later reproduced in the first volume of the 4-volume Piero Sraffa: Critical Assessments edited by J. C. Wood (1995, Routledge).’

After his retirement, Bose employed his ‘Sraffian Marxist’ approach within a wider social scientific framework to explain India’s socioeconomic condition. In this period, he published the following: an article each in Economic & Political Weekly (1986) and International Review of Sociology Series I (1987); and two books in 1989 titled Theories of Development of Material and Human Resources and Education: Requiem or Rethinking’ and India’s Social Crisis: An Essay on Capitalism, Socialism, Individualism and Indian Civilization. In his Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani identifies India’s Social Crisis as an important contribution to ‘historical sociology’ (p. 218).’

To conclude, there are enough published works by Arun Bose for someone who is interested in writing a dissertation or thesis in the area of Indian economic thought. Moreover, his notes, manuscripts, and correspondence are available for purposes of research at Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) although I personally found them to suffer from poor penmanship. It is extremely vital that we engage with the ideas of economists such as Arun Bose who provide an alternative way of understanding our economic surroundings.’

A Review of Trautmann’s Arthashastra

Kautilya’s Arthashastra is considered to be one of the earliest treatises on economics (roughly 2000 years old), more precisely, on economic administration. But note that it is ‘a compendium of earlier treatises’ (p. 9); there were several Arthashastras besides Kautilya’s but none of them survived (p. 16). Kautilya’s Arthashastra was thought to be lost until ‘an anonymous pandit brought a manuscript copy of it to R. Shamashastry, librarian of the Mysore Government Oriental Library, who published a translation in 1906-08 (p. 19).’ R. P. Kangle produced a critical edition in 1960. Kautilya ‘is a Brahmin gotra (clan) name’ (p. 21). ‘This Kautilya ‘ is identified with Chanakya, minister to the first Mauryan king, Chandragupa’ (p. 21). However, the text ‘does not make a single reference to Chandragupta or to the Mauryan Empire or its capital city, Pataliputra’ (p. 23). But this does not suffice as proof that the text was not compiled by Chanakya because Arthashastra is about ‘a hypothetical king ruling a hypothetical kingdom’ (p. 24). The text is dated at about 150 CE.

Thomas Trautmann, being the author of Kautilya and Arthashastra (1971), was chosen to contribute to ‘The Story of Indian Business’ series which is edited by Gurcharan Das. The complete title of Trautmann’s book in this series is: Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth published in 2012. The book has 6 chapters including the introduction and conclusion. The 4 main chapters are titled ‘Kingdoms’, ‘Goods’, ‘Workplaces’ and ‘Markets’ which together come up to a little over 100 pages. This review does not focus on the ‘Kingdoms’ chapter which discusses the then two predominant models of political organization ‘ kingdom (rajya) and republic (sangha).

Arthashastra comes from the Sanskrit word artha ‘ material wellbeing (p. viii). Arthashastra, the ‘science of wealth’ (p. 1), is really the ‘science of kingship, the business of running a state’ (p. 2). Similar to political economy, but different from mainstream economics, ‘in the concept of artha, economics and politics were conjoined as a unit’ (p. 2). As Trautmann writes,

The source of the livelihood (vritti) of men is wealth (artha), in other words, the earth inhabited by human beings. The science which is the means of the acquisition and protection of the earth is Arthashastra. (p. 4)

The main forms of livelihood were farming, herding and trading (p. 99). The military formed the largest class after agriculturists (p. 46). Farming was considered the most productive and luractive (see p. 139).

The pre-eminence of the king arose from his ‘power to tax the productive people living in the territory he possesses’ (p. 4). The king’s share of the crop was one-sixth (p. 18, also see p. 88). Moreover, kingship ‘had the greatest capacity to form pools of capital to undertake large enterprises such as monumental architecture, empire-building through warfare, diplomacy and maintaining peace in the kingdom’ (p. 4). To put it in surplus terms, the agricultural surplus was appropriated by the king which was subsequently spent on empire-building ‘ ‘for social order’ (p. 18). However, to characterize taxation as ‘the foremost enterprise in which the concept of sharing was applied’ is problematic because taxation is an enforcement of power (p. 121). The king was involved in direct production too; he was involved in (1) the care of cattle, horses, elephants; (2) mining; (3) manufacturing weapons for the army; (4) making cloth; and (5) the maintenance of law and order.

From the previous paragraph, it can be seen that the surplus approach to economics (that found in the classical economists and Marx) can provide a conceptual framework to understand economic processes in the Arthashastra. I mention this because the marginalist approach to economics (rational choice theory, marginal productivity theory of income distribution) appears to be an alien frame of reference ‘ both then and now. As in classical economics, wages are at customary subsistence and not at biological subsistence: ‘provisioning depends not only on what we absolutely need to barely live, but what we desire, in order to live richly’ (p. 11). As Trautmann rightly writes: ‘while workers strike the best bargains they can get, there is a notion of customary rates of wages’ (p. 112). More importantly, these were dictated by social norms as the following passage attests.

As regards the quantity of rations to be issues to inmates in the king’s household: for upper-caste (Arya) males, the measure is one prastha of rice, one-fourth prastha curry (supa), salt one-sixteenth of the curry and butter or oil one-fourth of the curry. For lower castes, the measures are less. It is one sixth prastha of curry, and half the butter or oil. For women the measure is less by one quarter, and for children, it is less by one half. Thus ration units are proportionate to the status of the person and the body size. (pp. 57-58)

The social discrimination along the lines of caste and gender is visible from the above excerpt.

Chapter 3 deals with the management of goods to ensure that there are sufficient buffer stocks in terms of famine and to maintain stability of prices. Therefore,

Kingship requires detailed and expert knowledge of goods and the raw materials from which they are made, for provisioning the palace and the army as also for distributing food to people in times of famine. (p. 50)

Therefore, the duties of the director of store include building storehouses for ‘receiving, evaluating and dispensing goods’ (p. 51). Each granary has its own overseer. The stocks come from the king’s own farms and also ‘from produce in lieu of land tax’ (p. 53). The inventory had to be managed: ‘changes in volume have to be understood and tracked so that the total quantity of inventory items is known at all times’ (p. 56). Since Arthashastra is written from a ‘royal point of view’, it ‘reveals a lot about the economics of kingship’ (p. 84).

Chapter 4 discusses the nature of workplaces. The ‘kings arranged the land they inherited or acquired into different economic zones to provision the royal household and to defend the kingdom’ (p. 85). The most important economic zone was the farm, ‘the root of the king’s wealth’ (p. 87). According to Trautmann, the farmers, mostly Shudras, ‘have true private property rights in their lands, being able to sell, mortgage and bequeath’ (p. 91, p. 94). Here, the tendency to find ‘private property rights’ as in capitalist societies is unwarranted. Also, this needs to be qualified because there were social constraints on the way land was bought and sold (p. 125; see below). Akin to the director of stores, the overseer of royal farmland’s duty was ‘to coordinate, oversee and discipline a large and complex body of labourers’ (p. 91). Overseers were there for the mines, mints, salt, gold and textiles (pp. 100-101, pp. 106-107). As is to be expected, the priority was given to farmlands.

The settlement of farmland comes first. The next chapter is ‘Disposal of Non-agricultural Land’, the title of which tells us that all other economic zones are secondary to farmland. Pasture is the next of these zones. (p. 94)

‘all other economic zones are designated only after land suitable for farming has been set aside. (p. 95)

A very similar conception is to be found in William Petty (1623-1687), the founder of the surplus approach to value and distribution. Although farming was mainly for subsistence, a surplus was required in order to pay taxes (p. 109). Who laboured on the farms’ Arthashastra mentions the existence of ‘slavery, forms of debt servitude and the wage-labour or share-cropping by people who do not own farmland’ (p. 110). Landlessness was the prime reason for pushing people into ‘temporary servitude’ (p. 111).

The concern for sustainability/environment is visible in the administration of forests. A strict separation between pasture and forest land is seen in the following sentence: ‘While pasture land is for domestic animals (pashu), forests are for wild animals (mriga)’ (p. 103). Arthashastra also talks about ‘the active protection of elephants and harsh punishment of poachers, the keeping of an ongoing census of elephants in the forest, of different classifications and the use of forest people for the work’ (p. 105).

The next chapter on markets (chapter 5) discusses the idea of a proper price and the administrative ways of curbing extreme price volatility (also p. 140). As Trautmann notes earlier, ‘the text has an underlying idea of the fair or true price of things sold in markets’ (p. 99) as indicated by the following extract from Arthashastra.

In the case of commodities distant in place and time, the Overseer of Trade, expert in determining prices, shall fix the price after calculating the investment, the production of goods, duty, interest, rent and other expenses. (p. 130)

The concept of the true price is found in the classical economists in the form of ‘necessary price’, ‘intrinsic value‘ and ‘natural price’. Similar to proper price, there was a notion of proper profits too.

The notion of fair profit is implied in the advice that the overseer of trade should fix a profit for traders of five per cent above the permitted purchase price of local goods, and ten per cent for foreign goods. (p. 129)

In terms of policy, ‘the king is supposed to act to contain the extremes in price to protect merchants and the people in general’ (p. 116).

The overseer of trade had to be knowledgeable about prices. In case of a fall in prices, ‘the overseer of trade is to concentrate goods in one place by establishing a single marketplace for it and raise the price, so as not to ruin the traders who are the sellers’ (p. 128). However, on examining the way in which land was sold, Trautmann observes that priority was given to ‘a kinsman, neighbor and creditor over the stranger’ (p. 123). In addition, the transactions were transparent (pp. 123-124). Moreover, ‘the King not only levies a tax on the transaction ‘ but he also confiscates the excess amount if bidding among buyers pushes the price above the true value’ (p. 124). After describing the process of land sales, Trautmann concludes ‘that there is true private property in the hypothetical kingdom of the Arthashastra. But it is conditioned by the prior claims of kinship, neighbourhood, indebtedness and other conditions, and it is biased against strangers’ (p. 125). Yet again, there is a tendency to impose alien frameworks of analysis on Arthashastra. Rather than imposing alien concepts, what is required is an understanding of the extant nature of land ownership by examining surviving archival sources. And as Trautmann rightly notes, ‘ancient literary works are mainly written by and for elites and do not often give us a true picture of the lives of people in the lower echelons of society’ (p. 146).

To conclude, Trautmann’s introduction to the Arthashastra is accessible (in language and price) and informative to the interested reader. However, I think that this is not ‘a definitive introduction to the classic text, the Arthashastra‘. A definitive introduction would require more than a simple analysis of the text. It warrants a critical engagement with the text by drawing on archival sources. Finally, the tendency to impose alien frameworks must be resisted.