The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s8.5

c4.s8.5

A little later, Karl Marx seems to have had similar impressions of India—this, despite his great study of British state papers and other extensive material relating to India. Writing in the *New York Daily Tribune* on 25 June 1853, he shared the view of the perennial nature of Indian misery, and approvingly quoted an ancient Indian text which according to him placed ‘the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.’ According to him, Indian life had always been undignified, stagnatory, vegetative, and passive, given to a brutalising worship of nature instead of man being the ‘sovereign of nature’—as contemplated in contemporary European thought. And, thus Karl Marx concluded: ‘Whatever may have been the crimes of England’ in India, ‘she was the unconscious tool of history’ in bringing about—what Marx so anxiously looked forward to—India’s westernisation.