PEASANTS. POLITICS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 65 treat it as an expression of the historical limits of Capital's universa-lising mission? To choose the latter would require us to abandon a methodological procedure designed to explain the emergence of capitalism as a universal system of generalised commodity production and to substitute in its place one that enables us to identify and explain the limits to the historical actualisation of Capital as a universal economic category. Most Marxists in India have felt it right, or perhaps prudent, to stay within the limits of the terms set by Lenin's debate with the Populists, as revealed clearly in the debate in recent years on the mode of production in Indian agriculture, 1 feet bold enough, and stupid enough, to attempt to supersede the terms of that debate. That, for what it is worth, is my "project". The article in Subaltern Studies I and its elaboration which will appear in Subaltern Studies II are the fiirst tentative statements of this project. Naturally, they imply much more than is spelt out, primarily because I have not yet been able to adequately work out these implications. But this is only one possible approach towards attempting to resolve the fundamental problem of historiography in our time which the Marxist "orthodoxy", as it has established itself, has failed to tackle. There can be other approaches, and I cannot presume that every contributor to Subaltern Studies will subscribe to mine. However, I am sure that they will all feel happy that our combined efforts have succeeded in raising some of these questions in the field of Indian historiography and will hope that this discussion among Indian Marxists will continue. It is therefore somewhat sad that Javeed Alam should attempt to clinch his criticism of Subaltern Studies by a quite unsubstantiated comment that its approach is "nearer to the Frankfurt School than to the Marxist revolutionary theory". It becomes doubly sad when the Editor of Social Scientist points out in his introductory note to the number that "Javeed Alam sees the imprint of populism in the theoretical framework" of Subaltern Studies^ a term which Javeed does not use anywhere in his article. What does this criticism by labal-sticking achieve, except reveal an intellectual indolence which pretends that it can dismiss an uncomfortable idea simply by giving it a bad name? PARTHA CHATTERJEE^ ^Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta,