54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST follows . . . where a class of land-owners developed within the village, between the state and the peasantry, regularly to wield armed power over the local population'.5 When by the Muslim invasions and mediaeval Muslim state systems shook the Hindu feudal system of the Gupta and Harsa imperial state systems the Indian society and, neither the Hindu belief systems were completely weakened and destroyed by the Mughal state nor the Hindu and Mughal rulers could stand against the powerful attack of the British over India. The gradual expansion of the British rule over India with a decisive battle of Plassey in 1757 and the decisive defeat of the Indian opposition to the British rule in 1857 established complete control of the colonial state over India. The meaning of British conquest of India is quite significant for understanding the problems of contemporary Indian state. It is not only that the declining and decaying Mughal state could not stand against the onslaughts of the British military power, the British rulers also brought an advanced 'mode of production' for the Indian society. Karl Marx observes that: In all cases of conquest, three things are possible. The conquering people subjugates the conquered under its own mode of production (e.g. the English in Ireland in this century, and partly in India); or it leaves the old mode intact and contents itself with a tribute (e.g. Turks and Romans); or a reciprocal interaction takes place whereby something new, a synthesis, arises (the Germanic conquests, in part). In all cases, the mode of production, whether that of the conquering people, that of the conquered, or that emerging from the fusion of both, is decisive for the new distribution which arises.6 The above observation of Karl Marx suggests an important approach to situate the impact of the British rule over India. Since the bourgeois civilization is the most advanced form of civilization till the emergence of the socialist civilization, India was brought under the control of the most advanced form of civilization of the whole nineteenth century and till the middle of the twentieth century. Since the basic goal of the colonial rule over India was to exploit the whole Indian society, the British established a very powerful 'rent-seeking* colonial state and bureaucracy in India. The colonial state in India established many mechanisms of extracting social surplus from India and for this purpose, the British created a very complex system of 'landlordism' in the country. If, on the one hand, the British created a system of land revenue collection on the basis of 'landlordism', on the other, the colonial capital controlled plantation, mines and industry in India. The colonial state followed industrial, fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies which were preferential for the British capital and discriminatory against the emerging indigenous Indian capitalist class. The Indian capitalist class emerged during the last-decades of