60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST development whereby political power ultimately moved into the hands of the brown sahibs (echoing the famous statement of Chittaranjan Das). One could question the location of the critical years in the early twenties with references to the at least as cittical years at the time of the civil disobedience movement, the formation of the state governments and the Quit India movement. In the later periods, a by far more vociferous clash of opinions took place in the INC Moreover, the working class had emerged as an independent force led either by INC loyalists, although not by the party, or by the various shades of con munists and socialists. One in fact could argue that both in respect of the agrarian issue and in respect of the capital-labour relations, the confrontation between the nationalism of the oppressed classes and the elite based nationalism was a continuous phenomenon and that the INC, instead of clearing the field, established and generally maintained its hegemonic position over the working classes. Chatterji thinks otherwise : "The INC remained an onlooker to all this" (p. 178). Nationalist politics in an era of mass mobilization, as in the early twenties, throws up two basic features. In the first place, the understanding emerged that any movement against the colonial political domination, in order to possess an effective bargaining power, should automatically involve workers and peasants. In the second place, it simultaneously emerged that with the potential growth of industrial working class consciousness and organization, the all-in unity of a bourgeois-dominated mass movement would come under severe strain. As most authors of a by now considerable number of books on the history of the trade union movement, Chatterji also opens with a survey of the growth of the working class, the early labour movement and the legislative process. The treatment, on the basis of secondary literature and reports, benefits from an attractive style and fiom a logical structuring, but in length is unbalanced with the latter one third of the book which deals with the actual subject matter of nationalism and the working class. Although most of the material is interesting, it is not really germane to the question under discussion. When it is, for example the chapter on the character of the working class, no conclusions are inferred which may be useful in properly assessing the respective roles of Das and Gandhi. In the debate on the class character of industrial labour, two opposite positions have been occupied. On the one hand, taking the lead from Whitley's Royal Commission on Labour in 1929, range the scholars who focus on the village connection resulting in a peasant-cum-worker attitude. Others have stressed the urban anchorage, but at the same time have argued that the emerging working class was in fact to an extent still embedded in traditional hierarchical structures. The worker was often an indentured free labourer, a term coined by Lalita Chakravarty. Chatterji disagrees with both approaches. He sees in the early