14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST as one of the annual 'tamashas'in which we have been so prolific. Can it not be turned into something more active throughout the year? One way would be to organise groups of local members, perhaps in each university centre, with regular discussion meetings of their own and periodic reports to the centre. ..."9 Several regional bodies for diffusion and increase of time in which historical analyses by junior scholars could be considered, have indeed been formed—with notable success in the Punjab, even in the 1960s, and in North-East India, but without marked results in West Bengal. One way of honouring Professor Sarkar now, would be to consider and revitalise his proposal. I have written elsewhere of Sarkar's inspired, but completely unostentatious, capacity for organisation -demonstrated, for instance, by the way in which he built the Jadavpur University History Department and even in retirement after 1967. The changed circumstances within the Indian communist movement in the 1960s left him anguished. His writings on Antonio Gramsci from as early as 1964, his emphasis on the new perceptions of multi-linear paths of historical progress, hinted at by Karl Marx himself in the Pre-Capitalist Formations section of the Grundrisse, and his courageous stand on the rights of democratic Marxist choice in Czechoslovakia in 1968, are too close for us to forget that he was no factional partisan in the issues which have shaken world socialism. In his last years, he wrote less about a world which was moving through new experiences of a widespread diffusion of self-determined nationality, new alliances and alignments, no more European alone as they had been till Yalta, but moulded by events and locations such as the Bandung non-alignment policy, the Havana Conference which adumbrated Tricontinentalism, the new significance of revolutionary peasantry in Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, and problems of petty bourgeoisification, relapse into proto-industrialisation, and growth of informal sectors and 'black' labour markets among the ex-colonial working class, who were being immjserised in new ways by a "new international division of labour', sponsored by neo-colonial countries in what they called the Third World. The alternative ideals for a new social order, previsaged by the Eurocentric Marxism to which Sarkar's generation had hitched their aspirations, paled before the grim verities of the 1960s and 1970s, when in India in general (and not less so in Calcutta) the democratic heritage of the national movement was dissipated in futile squabbles within the Left movement, the foundations of which he and his generation had done so much to build. Rather, in bis last years, Sarkar wrote more about subjects dear to the nationalism which was the core of his being: the need for developing the mother tongue as a medium of education; the danger to secularism inherent in the communalist, i e, chauvinist religious, interpretation of Indian history; or, in the end, about his memories of great people whom he had known, Rabindranath, Sukumar Ray.