SOCIAL SCIENTIST militant forms of peasant struggle, but indeed to any struggle on the basic economic demands of the peasantry? Gandhi's opposition to peasant struggles against landlords and merchants is well-known, and well-documented by Kapil Kumar; the imprint of this opposition on the nature of the national movement as well as on the nature of the independence that came is eqeally well-known. The question is: how did Gandhi acquire such a large following among the peasantry despite this? Oudh in the 1920s is a particularly apt place for looking for an answer to this question, since, at the very time that Gandhi's influence began to spread, the Oudh peasantry was already astir. G Thimmaiah's piece on caste and class in Karnataka gives the results of an empirical study of the association between class status and income status, which he takes as a surrogate for class status, as well as between class status and occupational status. The data for the study are based on a State-wide sample survey conducted in 1974-75 by the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. Even though questions may be raised about the validity of the surrogate for clas>s status used in the study, as well as about the nature of the sample, the empirical information provided by the study should be of interest on its own. Finally, we publish two communications, by Javeed Alam and Gabriele Dictrich. Javeed Alam sees the imprint of populism in the theoretical framework underlying the set of important writings brought out recently under the title Subalturn Studies. This raises basic theoretical points which need to be discussed and debated. Dietrich not only questions certain formulations made in an earlier article by Usha Menon in Social Scientist (No 110) but goes far beyond. It raises important questions about the attitude of the Left to the women's movement and critically examines certain parts of Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Dietnch's communication should be stimulating and provocative enough to give rise to a lively discussion in the pages of this journal.