76 SOCIAL SCIENTIST He proved by his unique method that Buddhist logic is logic, but it is not Aristotlean. That it is epistemological, but not Kantian, (p. 139). Once the Marxist base of Oriental studies was established on the understanding that the oppressed people of Asia were the natural allies of the class consious workers of Europe, new trends in Soviet Indology began to lead not only European scholarship but also national schools in Asian countries, (p. 148) The first task was to overcome the shortcomings of the research of the thirties, which had not given proper attention to social and economic problems, or even contemporary problems of culture. There was still a tendency to idealize. By this time, the idea of a special path of development (The Asiatic Mode) was debated, but mistakenly approximated with the pattern of European development, with a stress on the slave owning mode of production. However, in the forties and the fifties the work of Osipov Suleikin and Ilyin concentrated on the problems of periodisation and the specific conclusions drawn by Indian historians. The race (Aryan) theory of the Varna system was rejected and the question of slavery was put into a socio-economic context, (p. 157) The work of Soviet historians covered important questions and answered them in the light of evidence from ancient Indian sources and Marx's well-known articles on India. In the contemporary period, the works of Chanana, Kosambi, R.S. Sharma and S. Jaiswal were referred to in the search for the general laws and specific character of the development of Ancient India, the emergence of classes and the state and social and economic formations, (p. 166). The new areas of study included the Harappan civilisation, archeology and anthropology, the contribution of non-Aryan people, and the significance of the "theory of Aryan conquest" which had been over-played in the West. Research is also being done on the Mauryan period, the Kushana period and the social and economic relations in India at the time. (p. 175). In this new work the attitude to ancient sources is more painstaking. The problem of the source-language, understanding its concept and terminology is posed. The complexity of the social structure is accepted. There is also a renewed interest in literary criticism, linguistics and philosophy. In this process all the sources that have been collected in the Soviet Union are being published and the institutional structure also constantly reformed to allow the greatest freedom and assistance to scholars, which has been perhaps the most important input into the high quality of the scholarship that this book reports to the general reader. The wide scope of scholarship that is opening up before us does not allow us to ignore the work of those who have, with sincerity and seriousness, attempted to study the world-historical process in our country. The ideas and the materials they have researched should enrich our own efforts at building a scientific school of national studies, and just as the polemics of our scholars have enriched the insights gained by the Soviet school their criticism of our work will