2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Tamil chiefs, the cultivators were relegated to the position of sudras, some becoming tenants and the others serfs. Narayanan argues that Burton Stein's thesis of a brahmin-peasant alliance to explain brahmin ascendancy as landed proprietors and controllers of a stratified temple-centred system of exploitation, is not borne out by the historical evidence, which points rather to a clear alliance between the Tamil chiefs and the brahmins against the peasantry. K.K.N. Kurup's paper on the anti-imperialist struggles of the peasantry in Kerala briefly traces the inception of peasant movements under the bourgeois leadership of the national movement and its rapid development after breaking away from this leadership, under the organisation first of the activists of the Congress Socialist Party and subsequently by the Communist Party. The editor's paper on Peasants and Prices deals critically with the Chayanov-Kula approach to the question of the impact of price fluctuations on peasant viability, and outlines schematically the genesis of indebtedness for even well-to-do cultivators under a scenario of cyclical fluctuations. Finally, we also carry in this issue a review by Amal Sanyal of the first two parts of Amiya K. Bagchi's important study on the Evolution of the State Bank of India. UTSA PATNAIK