Market Forces exists at all. Despite such talk of a crisis for more than a decade now, the economy is growing we are told, things are all right, there is no breakdown in the system, no collapse, and by most conventional indicators we are doing fairly well. Despite these indicators, the crisis today substantially stems from the fact that we have not been able to fulfil some of the major promises that our national leadership, the set of people or the alliance of classes that came to power in 1947, made to the people then. Rather than an inability to ensure growth or an inability to ensure some 54 level of economic progress for a certain section of the population, it is this failure that signifies the collapse that many of us have already pointed out in the 1970s. It is very important to understand that there were certain very specific promises made, promises that were bred into the culture of the freedom struggle, which are reflected in the cinema and the literature the national movement itself generated. The first, and most important, promise was one of ensuring economic independence. That was after all what the national movement was all about. The second important promise was about establishing a self-reliant, secular, democratic society. In fulfilling these two promises the leadership of the national movement had to wage two forms of economic struggle which reflected themselves in forms of political, cultural and social struggle. One was against imperialism by definition, the other was against pre-capitalist forms, feudalism if you'd like to call it that, semi-feudalism, precapitalist forms of social organization, pre-capitalist ideologies. If you look at the culture of the nationalist movement, in Bengal for example, in the many progressive movements that took place there, the entire thrust was to fight against the ideological hegemony of imperialism on the one hand, and on the other of feudalism; both concerns were equally foregrounded. Now most of the economic literature of the last 20-30 years, which analyses the different attempts at trying to understanding the role of the post-colonial state and the problems of a state such as one confronts in India (or Mexico or Indonesia or Egypt or any post-colonial society), one arrives at a consensus across a fairly wide range of political opinions and ideological positions: that the two main fetters to the growth of an independent capitalist society or state are/were feudalism and imperialism. And what is remarkable about India is that much of this was fairly explicitly articulated in the freedom struggle itself. Look at the literature of the 40s the speeches of Nehru or the documents of the Indian National Congress, statements made by people like J.R.D. Tata and other industrialists — the famous Bombay Plan, which is one of the most interesting documents anywhere in the Third World about the strategy of development for a Third World middle-class. In fact the Bombay Plan had quite explicit statements about education, the kind of education that should be imparted and the role that the state should play in education. But the Bombay Plan also had a particular perspective in that it saw the state as a buffer against pre-capitalist forces and imperialism, but a buffer that would wither away in time, retreat, once the social and economic base of an indigenous bourgeoisie was established. There is a difference, I believe, between this and the perspective that many of the socialists had — Nehru himself, and others around him, the 'Nehruvians^ — on the role of the state, or more particularly the public sector. They saw it as a socialist Journal of Arts & Ideas