CASTES AND CLASSES 13 Rajasekhara Shetty!! Shetty claims to have made this "discovery" from my article in the Economic and Political Weekly (Special Number, 1979). He also refers to B T Ranadive's article in the same Special Number to make the claim of the CP1 (M) having been forced to acknowledge the superiority of his "Class-Caste Struggle" theory. As if this is not enough, he claims, in a subsequent booklet, that A K Gopalan wrote to him "endorsing my (Shetty's) thesis95! T am not interested in, nor have I the time to polemize against Shetty. Let him have the satisfaction of being superior to Karl Marx! T, however, want to make it clear that my 1977 article published in the Social Scientist and the 1979 article in the Economic and Political Weekly are the result of my own humble attempt at integrating the Marxist theory of social evolution with the Indian reality as revealed to me in the course of my practical-political life. This, however, requires a fairly detailed account of how my own thinking and the thinking of my party on the question under discussion evolved in the course of the development of the revolutionary political movement in India. This is attempted in this paper. Pattern oj Development 1 was in my teens when I started taking active interest in public life. I was deeply tnwucnced by two currents in the modern democratic movement of Indi i, as it was spreading to my home state. The first was the growing revolt against the caste-dominated social life in Kerala — the outmoded customs and manners, superstitious beliefs, family organization, and so on — even of the highest caste (the Namboodiris) in the state to be specific. The second was the freedom movement, which was at that time going through a new wave of mass struggles led by Gandhi, drwaing into its fold hundreds of thousands of young men and women. While in the beginning 1 was only an interested observer keenly watching all developments in the two currents, I was gradually drawn into the vortex of both in the latter half of the 1920s. By the time the next wave of anti-imperialist mass struggle — the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 — swept the entire country, I had already become a radical in both socio-cultural and political fields. On the social plane, I went forward from the efforts to bring about moderate reforms in the family life of the Namboodiri community to the struggle for a radical restructuring of social life at the top ladder of the caste hierarchy. This took me emotionally to the anti-high-caste movements of the "lower" castes in Kerala society, particularly of the Ezhavas who had developed one of the most radical movements of social revolt among the oppressed castes. These oppressed caste leaders being linked with the radical socio-cultural movement led by E V Ramaswamy Naikar of Tamil Nadu, I started