14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST cash came to be substituted for grain it would appear that there was no proportionate reduction in the interest The borrower would lose by having to sell his grain for the payment of his debt at the most unfavourable rate after harvest, and since the transaction was by a regular deed the lender no longer took any share of the risk of a bad harvest, as it is probable that he was formerly accustomed to do." (p 132-33). 10 See J Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Conditions in South Gujarat, India, Berkeley, California, 1974. 11 Two of the major works on production relations in Indian agriculture in recent years are Krishna Bharadwaj, Production Conditions in Indian. Agriculture, Cambridge, 1974, and Amit Bhaduri, The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture, Delhi, 1983. One major problem studied by Bhaduri is that of finding out when it suits the money-lender to make the borrower default. This question also has its historical dimension. For it is only when land becomes an easily saleable asset and when money-lenders can enter the circle of landlords without facing great difficulties that defaulting borrowers become attractive customers for them. The situation may be reversed again when peasants can put up an affective resistance against money-lenders and powerful landlords grabbing their lands. 12 The issue has been raised by Frank Perlin, "Proto-industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia", Past and Present, No 98, February 1983. 13 A K Bagchi, "Ritwik Ghatak", Frontier, 7 July 1984. 14 It has been argued by some scholars that somehow a proletarian revolution could use a consciousness dating from pre-capitalist days to jump directly into socialism. See, for example, W F Wertheim, Evolution and Revolution, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, ^1974. But as Mao Zedong repeatedly warned, and as the Chinese experience has demonstrated, even when a revolution is effected under the leadership of a communist party, the consciousness of the people may retain many elements of the feudal past. The continuance of feudal infanticide in some regions of China despite decades of effort of the Communist Party of China and the government to stamp it out is a tragic example of such survival. See Mao Zedong, "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party** and "On New Democracy**, in Selected Works of Mao Tedong, Vol II, Peking, 1967. On the survival of pre-socialist relations of production and for a theory of'stages of socialism* in China, see Xue Muqiao, China's Socialist Economy, Beijing, 1981. 15 See, in this connection, A K Bagchi, "1 he Terror and the Squator of East Asian Capitalism," Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January 1984. 16 For a discussion of the issues involved, see Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-insurgency*', in R Guha (ed). Subaltern Studies II, Delhi, 1983, and S Singh. M Menon, P K Dutta, B Pati, R Barik, R Chopra, P Dutta and S Prasad, "Subaltern Studies II*', Social Scientist, Vol 12, No 10, October 1984. 17 Two important contributors to the recent discussion on the consciousness of jute mill workers are Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Dasgupta. See R Dasgupta, Material Conditions and Behavioural Aspects of Calcutta Working Class, 1875-1899, Occasional Paper No. 22, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1979; and D Chakrabarty, 'Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal's Jute Mill-hands in the 1890s", Past and Present, No 91, May 1981; idem, "On Deifying and Defying Authority: Managers and Workers in the Jute Mills of Bengal circa 1890-1940", Past and Present, No 100, August 1983, and idem, "Trade Unions in a Hierarchical Culture : The Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1920-50", in R Guha (ed). Subaltern Studies III, Delhi, 1984.