SUBALTERN STUDIBS 57 of decomposition, renovation or neo formation; 3. the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them. 4. the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press claims of a limited and partial character; 5. those new formations which assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework; 6. those formations which assert the integral autonomy".4 A footnote to this scheme further clarifies what is meant by points 4, 5 and 6; what is meant is trade union formation, the formation of reformist parties and of communist parties respectively. Moreover, the activities and development of political parties like the Indian National Congress would be covered under points 2 and 5. However, it is precisely such an approach that our 'subaltern historians' exclude if we go by Ranajit Guha's statement "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India". There is, in his approach, a failure to distinguish between the Gramscian definition of 'elite', which corresponds to the Leninist 'vanguard', and that of Mosca, Pareto and the positivists in general, which corresponds to an 'oligarchy'. Let us compare the concept of 'elite' as used by Gramsci and Guha. Gramsci, while speaking of bourgeois elite, says, "If not all entrepreneurs, at least an elite amongst them must have the capacity to be an organiser of society in general...because of the need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class".5 That it is a concept far broader than that of the positivists is obvious from his description of the role of elites in the state and civil society: "At all events, the fact that the State Government, conceived as an autonomous force, should reflect back its prestige upon the class upon which it is based, is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. ...Moreover, this phenomenon is not something exceptional, or characteristic of one kind of state only. It can, it seems, be incorporated into the function of elites or vanguards, i.e., of parties, in relation to the class which they represent".6 Therefore, unless one accepts the proposition of the anarchists that a working class state is inconceivable, this concept applies also to the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. Gramsci is amply clear when he states, "...innovation cannot come from the mass, at least at the beginning, except through the med iation of an elite for whom the conception implicit in human activity has already become to a certain degree a coherent and systematic ever-present awareness and a precise and decisive will' .7 'Again, he points out that "critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not 'distinguish' itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself; and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is,