2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST that the converters too, the Christian missionaries, represented a complex ensemble; Dick Kooiman's paper is interesting for unravelling this latter complexity. The social background of many of the missionaries who came to India was such as to imbue in them a respect for the capitalist ethos. In fighting against practices like slavery, their standpoint was not necessarily transcendentally moral, but was more often practical bourgeois, which frowned upon restrictions on labour mobility and freedom of contract. Not surprisingly it is the coming up of plantations in Travancore that gave a fillip both to the practical abolition of slavery as well as to the intensity of missionary activity, the latter being even sympathetically viewed by non-Christian plantation owners as a factor conducive to the acquisition of a docile work-force. Many of the converts however came to discover that they had merely escaped one form of slavery, that represented by the traditional society, for another kind, namely wage-slavery. To what extent this change represented nonetheless an improvement, both in their social status as well as in their capacity for struggle, are matters which need investigation; but the link between missionary activity and the transition to capitalism needs to be underscored. The post-independence period has witnessed the coming up of a plethora of institutions in the countryside, such as cooperatives, panchayats, etc. Judy Whitehead's paper gives a graphic account of how the relatively more homogeneous class of big landholders that has emerged in recent years, has come to acquire a dominant position in these institutions and to act as an 'intermediary' between the village level and the outside world, notably the national-level State machinery. It then moves on to a discussion of certain issues surrounding the question of hegemony: the manner in which this 'intermediary' position contributes to the exercise of hegemony, the role of violence, the role of political parties, and the way in which the oppressed 'express* themselves. The paper is based on field-work done in Sitapur in 1983. The cleavages which have manifested themselves within rural society in the more recent period and which crystallised around the Mandal issue, fall outside its scope; it would be interesting however to consider ways of locating them within the overall analysis. Finally, we carry two short notes, one on the social specification of use-value in Marx's Capital, and the other on the sort of 'home-grown orientalism' that comes out in ethnographic texts written in India on the Himalayan tribal societies.