BENGALI INTELLIGENTSIA AND RENT POLITICS 29 led by men like Ananda Mohan Bose, a leading member of the Calcutta Bar and Sishir Kumar Ghose, a journalist of repute, to break away from the British Indian Association to form the rival Indian League in 1875.11 Sishir Kumar who represented "entrepreneurial interests55 of the Bengali upper middle class could not establish any rapport with professional people like Surendranath Banerjee a former civil servant, Dwarkanath Ganguly a teacher, Krishna Kumar Mitra a young rising journalist, Ananda Mohan Bose and others.12 The latter broke with Sishir Kumar and founded in 1876 the Indian Association which was the first political organization of the salaried and professional gentlemen of Bengal.18 Agrarian Issue y Urban Dissension The establishment of this organization had coincided with widespread agrarian unrest in eastern and central Bengal which had put the landlords' organization, the British Indian Association in a tight corner. Naturally, the Indian Association used the rent question to contain politically the rival British Indian Association. Logically enough the Indian Association took its stand on the concept of tenant right. It organized mammoth meetings of the ryots in different parts of Bengal.14 It wholeheartedly supported the recommendations of the Rent Law Commission, 1879. It stated that the Government possessed the right to enact laws for the benefit of the tenantry and suggested a number of pro-tenant measures.15 The pro-tenant activities of the Association thus marked the beginning of a new and distinct phase in the history of mass political agitations in Bengal. Paradoxically enough^, a rural problem thus became the subject of urban politics. In this interesting urban political struggle over a basically rural socio-economic issue, the pro-ryot liberal intelligentsia came face to face with the pro-landlord conservative intelligentsia led by men like Joy-krislma Mukherjee the zamindar of Uttarpara, Krishnadas Pal, Digam-bar Mitra, Narendra Krishna Deb and Jotindra Mohan Tagore.16 These men were also the products of new7 education in Bengal.17. But they saw the problem of agrarian relations from the narrow angle of the landlord class since most of them were in control of rural landed property. Thus, before the new Tenancy Act was put on the books, the Bengali intelligentsia stood divided. Broadly speaking the salaried and the professional people who had little or no rentier income championed tenant right while a section of the intelligentsia which possessed considerable landed property and enjoyed in consequence a higher social status exerted pressure on the government to stabilize the position of the landlords. Ill The liberal intelligentsia could view the problem from an angle materially different from the landlord perspective and tenant point of view. They could grasp the fact that the existing i^ent law had failed to