2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST contradictions between the rulers and the people. As the deepening economic crisis accentuates both contradictions, it makes it increasingly possible for the Left forces to find a common meeting ground with bourgeois oppositional forces on the question of States' autonomy; it also makes it increasingly necessary since the movement for autonomy and the fight for preserving the democratic rights of the people, being eroded under the impact of the crisis, are intimately linked. Alam's canvas is wide; the analysis and the emphasis would inevitably raise a number of questions. For that very reason, the paper should arouse wide interest, Vinay BahPs study of the TISCO workers' struggle in the 1920's not only counters the view so assiduously nurtured by the Tatas' propaganda machinery about their being "benevolent employers", but also throws valuable light on the role of the nationalist leadership vis-a-vis the struggles of the working class. An analogous theme occupies Suneet Chopra in his review article on the recently published book Subaltern Studies I. Chopra raises certain basic questions relating to Indian historiography on which we invite further discussion in the pages of this journal. One commonly comes across the view that land reform measures were not "successful" in India. Usually underlying this view is the belief that the land reform laws aimed at a radical redistribution of land, but that these laws were evaded, much like direct-tax laws, by the ingenious and unscrupulous rural rich. This belief betrays however a grossly erroneous understanding. The laws, such as they were, were no doubt evaded; but the laws themselves never intended to bring about any radical land redistribution. As Narendar Pani's detailed study for Karnataka exemplifies, land reform legislation under the Congress regime was motivated not by any considerations of egalitarianism, but by the desire to promote capitalist development in a situation of extreme land concentration. Pani's note should blow up a number of myths that have developed around our land reform legislations. And finally we publish a report by Malini Bhattacharya on a seminar held last June at Kasauli on some of the current problems in Indian aesthetics. This was the second such seminer being held at Kasauli. The first seminar on "Marxism and Aesthetics", it may be recalled, was held there under the auspices of the Indian School of Social Sciences in the autumn of 1979; some of the papers of that seminar were published in a Special Number of Social Scientist (No. 89-90, December 1979-January 1980). Since then a group of artists and other intellectuals have taken the lead in planning a new journal, Journal of Arts and Ideas, whose first number is expected to come out in September this year. The June seminar at Kasauli was organised by the Journal of Arts and Ideas in collaboration with Social Scientist.