One of the most recognised statements of Karl Marx pertains to religion being the “opium of the people”. This is understood as exemplifying his criticism of religion as a tool of oppression or a form of delusion. However, the less famous sentence preceding this one says, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Marx’s metaphor was both empathetic and critical. In one of his earlier works he sees religious identity as socially conditioned, and its persistence as being materially rooted. While not celebratory of religion, Marx recognised that religion could potentially serve as a form of resistance.

It is this possibility of religious identity that we see in the engagement of Indian Muslim intellectual traditions with Marx’s explanations of oppression and resistance, during the colonial rule and in post-colonial India.

Marx and India’s Muslim past

Marx had a deep interest in India. As a scholar of his time he remained orientalist in his approach, perhaps also an outcome of the sources he relied upon. These sources were deeply focused on Muslim rule – often presenting it as both despotic and advanced, compared to “Hindu antiquity” or tribal societies. The Mughal empire, in particular, was central to British justifications for conquest, often presented as a corrupt but once-glorious civilisation that the British were now “reforming”.

Critical of colonialism, especially the oppression and violence of the East India Company, Marx still thought within Enlightenment and Eurocentric frameworks.

In his Notes on Indian History (which he did not intend to publish), Karl Marx not only focused on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, but also devoted substantial attention to later Muslim rulers such as Tipu Sultan of Mysore, the Nawabs of Awadh and the Nizams of Hyderabad.

This reinforces the fact that Marx’s interest in Muslim regimes in India was not confined to the canonical empires, but extended to regional powers who confronted British colonial expansion –especially those that offered military or political resistance. From Marx’s 19th-century perspective, Muslim dynasties were the dominant political actors in India for nearly 600 years. Any serious historical account would necessarily foreground this period.

He was broadly interested in how various empires extracted surplus, managed land and labour, and structured the economy. He paid close attention to Mughal land revenue systems (like jagirdari), which allowed him to examine pre-capitalist modes of surplus extraction. He also observed the weakening of centralised authority, internal rebellion, and the shift to British colonial dominance through East India Company’s military-financial interventions.

Marx followed the Indian Rebellion of 1857 closely. In his articles published in The New York Daily Tribune he did not emphasise religious identities explicitly, but reframed some of the Eurocentric narratives.

Muslim modernists

During the second half of 19th century, Indian Muslim reformers and modernists like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, attempted to reinterpret Islamic teachings in light of rationality and scientific laws of nature. This prompted his detractors to label him “nechari”. Though not a Marxist, Syed was influenced by the intellectual currents that included Marxist ideas on materialism and social progress.

As they navigated the ideological influence of Western colonial powers and their own religious traditions, Indian Muslim intellectuals, particularly those engaging in anti-colonial activities found Marx’s criticism of colonialism influential.

Marxist thought was propagated in Urdu literary circles through Urdu translations of Marx’s writings and other Marxists texts by Indian Muslim intellectuals and leftist activists. Prominent Indian Muslim intellectuals such as Maulana Azad had to contend with the rise of Marxism among the youth. Azad incorporated elements of Marxist thinking in his analysis of colonialism and its effects on Indian society, including the Muslim community. In fact, a serialised translation of the Communist Manifesto was published in his weekly newspaper Al-Hilal.

Allama Iqbal, the philosopher-poet of South Asian Islam, was deeply ambivalent about Marx. He admired Marx’s critique of capitalism and colonialism but he criticised Marx’s materialism and rejection of spirituality. In his poem Lenin, Khuda ke Huzoor Mein (appearing before God), Iqbal imagines Lenin complaining to God about capitalism and European modernity using a Marxist idiom. Iqbal though makes Lenin compensate for his perception that Marxism ignores the soul and spirituality even as he approves of its attempt to fix the injustice in the world.

Play

Muslim socialism

During the I World War many Indian Muslims who participated in the Khilafat movement and the defence of the Ottoman Empire in Central Asia and Turkey were disillusioned by the idea of Islamic unity as a political force or Pan-Islamism. The search for anti-colonial solidarity, led some of them to Bolshevism. Soviet Union’s anti-imperialist stance and its overtures to colonised Muslims took them to Tashkent. It was at the Communist International that early Muslim socialism emerged.

Historians like KH Ansari and Farida Zaman have argued that the shift was driven more by political pragmatism and anti-colonial emotion than by doctrinal Marxism.

Even as the motivation may have been instrumental, evidently Marxism and Islamic thought were not impossible to blend. This is perhaps best exemplified in the politics and political expression of Maulana Hasrat Mohani.

Mohani was one of the founders of Communist Party of India, he coined the slogan “Inquilab Zindabad” or Long Live the Revolution, and was a popular cultural figure. Even as he experimented with an array of party affiliations he remained rooted in socialist disdain for capitalist exploitation. Mohani was not a votary of Gandhi’s moderate methods to resist the colonial rule. His advocacy and use of khadi were more a blend of his radical anti-colonial economic analysis and Islamic ethics of simplicity and austerity, than the influence of Gandhi’s charisma.

Marxist ideas contributed to the anti-colonial struggle also by effectively uniting various Indian communities, including Muslims. Notably, during the independence movement, figures like Subhas Chandra Bose and other leftist leaders sought to bridge the gap between Muslim and non-Muslim communities by promoting an anti-colonial ideology and solidarity over religious differences.

Marxist aesthetics

The mixing of Islamic and Marxist aesthetics by Muslim poets, writers, intellectuals and activists is a part of long and continuing history of intellectual dialogue between Islamic and Marxist thought not only in India but in other parts of the Muslim world around anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle.

This history includes Communist parties and groups playing important roles in anticolonial movements in Sudan, Algeria, Egypt and Palestine. It consists of Marxists reinterpretation of Shia martyrdom as revolutionary resistance in Iran. It includes Ali Shariati synthesising Shia theology, framing early Islam especially under Imam Ali as proto-socialist.

Frantz Fanon noted that Islam functioned as a “people’s religion” against French settler colonialism which blended with Marxist frameworks guiding much of the post-independence ideological makeup in Algeria. Many Muslim feminists like Fatima Mernissi and Nadje Al-Ali have used historical-materialist and political-economic methods – shifting the focus from “Islam as a problem” to material conditions and power structures.

Inspired by a blend of Islamic thought and a Marxism-inflected critique of Western modernity, Ziauddin Sardar advocated for decolonial futures rooted in pluralism and ethical justice.

In his explorations of global capitalism and cultural resistance, Marxist critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson has held that Islam represents one of the few remaining serious cultural and political challenges to the homogenising force of late capitalism. Jameson’s view is part of a broader effort to think about non-capitalist cultural forms – including religion – as possible forces that can be counter hegemonic, especially when more conventional leftist alternatives appeared institutionally weak.

Thinkers like Samir Amin and Talal Asad have echoed this by arguing that Islamic movements, and traditions, while varied, shape political life in ways that do not easily fit liberal or capitalist models and may resist capitalist globalisation on their own terms.

Muslims in post-colonial India

In post-Partition India, Marxist affiliations also offered many Muslims an alternative political identity that transcended communal labels. As in the closing scene of Garam Hawa, when Sikandar Mirza and Salim Mirza join a left procession instead of migrating to Pakistan, the moment captures a form of belonging.

The Communist Parties were among the few parties to openly recruit Muslims on ideological grounds, not token representation. Although Jawaharlal Nehru as the prime minister was quite antipathic to communists, arguably, it was his admiration of Marx and his professed socialist ideals which made him popular among Muslim left-leaning intellectuals. They were wary of both religious nationalism and capitalist conservatism, and it provided them a sense of proximity to the ideology in power.

Marxism remained influential in Indian Muslim political circles, particularly during the rise of left-wing movements in the mid-20th century. Communist opposition to right-wing politics has been more steadfast than any other political entity – making Marxist politics an important space for anti-communal politics.

This aspect of left politics had seen some waning, coinciding with the decline in the influence of communist parties in many parts of the country, especially since after the left front chose to walk out of the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance coalition in 2008. They have however remained considerably popular in states with significant Muslim populations, including Kerala, West Bengal and even Kashmir.

One of the reasons of decline in Muslim presence in or their willingness to associate with the left is that, Marxism has also come to be associated largely with atheism due to the policies of the regimes in Communist countries.

Among the South Asian Muslims, this perception was strengthened perhaps due to Maulana Maududi’s aversion to socialism. Maududi decreed socialism as being redundant in Islamic societies or even incompatible with Islam, but it was perhaps also rooted in his defence of private property rights and opposition to nationalisation of resources.

The steady communalisation of all politics in India has strengthened the discourse in left and communist groups that asserts that issues of persecution due to religious identity are not real but a distraction from class struggle.

Another reason for decline in support for Marxism as an ideology is the declining familiarity of the idiomatic mixing of Marxism and anti-colonialism in Urdu poetics, which is being replaced by a blatantly anti-Muslim rhetorical mix of neo-liberalism and cultural nationalism.

The erasure of Islamic idioms and memory of Muslims’ role from the history of Marxist politics has also been affected in India partially by nepotism in left “intellectuals’” of Muslim heritage. They have accrued cultural capital of being secular through perpetuating an intellectually lazy culture of equating religion with cultural nationalism, and of targeting Islam as being especially fanatical, rather than a serious material force, which Marx would have found seriously vulgar.

Marx’s materialist conception of history – which stresses that economic conditions shape societal structures – was evident in the struggles of Indian Muslims, particularly during the period of British colonialism and the Partition of India.

Issues of land ownership and distribution, economic inequalities, and the impact of colonial policies deeply affected the Muslim community. Marxist analysis continues to provide a useful framework for critiquing these social conditions.

May 5 marks Karl Marx’s 207th birth anniversary.

Ghazala Jamil is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.