70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST nationalities with their own languages and literatures in recent times, nationalities acquiring a significant grip over the apparatus of provincial administration. Guha and Das are reluctant to concede that these features have any importance. In my article I have regarded them as the typical features of a nationalism stunted and deformed first by imperialism and then by big capital stepping into its shoes. I have deliberately refrained from calling this bourgeoisie a 'national bourgeoisie' for reasons Guha and Das mention, but I should like to draw their attention to the specific characteristics of this class that would make an identification with general petty-bourgeois masses naive. Guha and Das concede that the state might be used by the Assamese middle class for 'primitive accumulation' of capital but in the next breath deride the idea of "engineers;, managers and . . . clerks" forming a bourgeois class by themselves. Well, technicians and clerks rarely go in for 'primitive accumulation of capital'. In my article I had dealt with the Assamese bourgeoisie in the early stage of its development. At the present moment it has in its ranks millionaire businessmen, millowners and rich peasants aspiring to turn into capitalist farmers. They may be few, and their relation to the big bourgeoisie may be one of subservience, but the fact should not be ignored. The point of my argument is the manifest weakness of a class that aspires for the position of a national bourgeoisie but is prevented by its economic and political subservience from reaching it, Guha and Das should, I think, pay some close attention to this strange phenomenon instead of using old labels brusquely. The subtle interplay of interests between a central government dominated by big capital and fearful of the masses and a state government very closely linked to contractors, big farmers and millowners cannot be understood by referring to Mao Tse-tung. The inadequacy of data mentioned by Guha and Das is also an exaggeration. I was wrong in asserting that prior to the First World War, the Indian National Congress had no influence on the Assamese middle class. Here I accept the correction offered by Guha and Das. But it should be pondered that the dominant political body of the Assamese middle class up to the First World War called itself the Assam Association, thus underlining a sense of separate identity as a national group. In November 1918 the Assam Association elected Nabin Bordoloi as the sole representative from Assam for giving evidence before the Parlimentary Committee set up for finalizing the details of the Reforms scheme.8 The Assam Association was dissolved only in June 1921, and the Provincial Congress set up in its place. The change was not confined to the label alone. From 1916 onwards 'younger men of advanced political views' dominated its platform, and they had doubtless acquired those views directly or indirectly from Calcutta. Even so the all-India perspective never quite suppressed, except during the hectic forties, the exclusive concern for Assam. The nationalist outlook developed steadily in Assam only after Gandhi took the Congress to the masses. The Non-co-operation