28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST have a clearer perception of the role of the intelligentsia in the politics of the rent question in Bengal in the late nineteenth century. Apart from making an attempt to fill this gap in our historical knowledge of the Bengali intelligentsia, I have tried to analyse in this paper the nature of liberal intelligentsia's support to the tenantry. Elites Old and New By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new urban elite which grew out of the compradore elite of the late-eighteenth-century Calcutta gradually stabilized its social position in the new metropolis.4 Most of the men who acquired a higher status in the growing metropolis of Calcutta were high-caste Hindus. They were the beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement, men who took advantage of the agricultural boom of the early nineteenth century to put their surplus resources in land and became, in course of time, prosperous absentee landlords residing more or less permanently in the new metropolis.5 Their wealth enabled them to assume the leadership of the fir^t generation of the Bengali literal! in the carlv decades of the century.6 From the 1820s. however, a change in the social composition oftlie intelligentsia became perceptible. The spread of western education leading to the foundation of the University of Calcutta in 1857 brightened the prospect of gainful employment in government services and easier access to new professions like law, medicine and engineering. Quite naturally Bengali youths belonging to ordinary middle-class families not exclusively dependent on rentier income started to crowd the new English schools with a view to exploring new avenues of employment.7 This trend proved, at least indirectly, that a sizable section of the English-educated Bengalis of the mid-nineteenth century did not or could not depend exclusively on rentier income. These educated Bengalis formed the nucleus of a new literati which had a lower social standing as compared witli that of the earlier generation. II Broadly speaking, this new intelligentsia held relatively progressive or liberal views on various political, social and economic problems. In particular, they were the enthusiastic propagators of tenant right in Bengal and wrote essays and newspaper editorials, fiction and plays to mould the pro-tenant public opinion. Belonging to a lower social group, they were fast acquiring a position of eminence in the "achievement-oriented55 metropolitan society.8 Quite naturally, they were not prepared to accept unhesitatingly the social leadership of the higher social group represented by the landlords.9 Precisely for this reason, the liberals made organized attempts in the 1870s to take over the British Indian Association, the only political organization of the English-educated Bengalis of the time, which was dominated by the landed magnates.10 The failure of these efforts forced an influential group of salaried and professional people