34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST tion in ancient India as exceptionally humane with the avowed intention of endowing the industrialist class with the heritage of this unique national tradition of 'exploitation without tears9. If the upper class intelligentsia of the rising Indian industrialists unfurled the anti-imperialist banner ofneo-Hinduistic revivalism for the right of national exploitation, it was but inevitable that the non-Brahmin intellectuals of the regional and rural bourgeois elements raised the banner of anti-Brahminic social reform for the right of exploiting their own nationalities and castes. The non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra took shape in the last half of the nineteenth century primarily under the impact of the violent outbreaks of the Sudra peasantry against the religious oppression of the Brahmins and against their pauperisation by usurer landlords mainly drawn from the Brahmin, Marwari and Gujarati non-agricultural castes and nationalities.10 That is why these two movements, though uterine in their genesis, developed under their own inherent contradictions and hence clashed with each other. The former was anti-imperialist but pro-feudal, while the latter was pro-British or pro-western but anti-feudal; but both relied on the British rulers to gain their objectives. Nevertheless, both being primarily impelled by the germinating seeds of capitalist development sown unwillingly by the British themselves, the need of their mutual conflict passed into their urge for national unity in the third decade of this century. The most influential leaders of the non-Brahmin movement joined Congress and led big masses of Maharashtrian peasantry into the great satyagraha of 1930. A similar situation in Kerala is succinctly summed up by E M S Namboodiripad : ... It is, however, a historical fact that the first form in which the peasant masses rose in struggle against feudalism was in the form of caste organisations. In spite of the fact that they had no clear perspective of changing the social order, of breaking the backs of the landlords as a class, of ending the rent system and redistributing lands, the Nayar peasantry rose against the Brahmin jenmis (landlords by birth) and the E^hava (an untouchable caste) peasantry against their caste-Hindu oppressors, including the Nayars . . . It has become fashionable for those who consider themselves nationalists to denounce these caste organisations as anti-national and 'reactionary9 because they sought the help of the British imperialists in getting their grievances redressed. They, however, forget the main point that in spite of their illusions as to the "progressive democratic character55 of the British—an illusion which they shared with the pre-Tilak generation of nationalists, they roused and organised the masses against some aspects of the oppressive social order. . . . . . . The peasants who were roused by, and organised in, caste organisations in the early years of the twentieth century were subsequently brought into the fold of the anti-imperialist national move-