54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property..." "It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seem to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The poini is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society...." Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, Penguin Books, (tr. Martin Nicolous), 1973, pp 106-107. 5 I have done a detailed and substantive critique of Partha Chatterjee's contribution in this volume along with a few other of his writings pertaining to this problem. I have tried to show there how his understanding of the "agrarian situation" and "differentiation" etc. is restrictive and how it deviates from that of Lenin with serious consequences for the understanding of communalism in pre-partition Bangal. See my "Communalism in Pre-Partition Bengal: A Critique on Questions of Approach", Journal of Social Studies (Bangladesh), forthcoming.