Stadtluft macht frei
In Germany, during the medieval times, a saying came into circulation. “Stadtluft macht frei” meaning ‘urban air makes you free’. A similar thought was expressed by Marx and Engles in their ‘Communist Manifesto’ where they argued cities liberated people from ‘rural idiocy’. These statements sum up neatly the impact that Calcutta had on the minds of its citizens. Paradoxically however, this freedom of thinking and action came within a colonial context.
Marx, the most perceptive social scientist of his times, understood the apparent paradox better than others and he wrote
“Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. “[i]
And he concluded by saying
“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”
[i] Karl Marx “The British Rule in India” New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853
