BOOK REVIEW Labour History: A Marxist Version Sanat Bose, Essays On Indian Labour, Bingsha Shatabdi, Calcutta, 1996, Rs. 50. A slim volume containing three longish essays and a few shorter ones, a consistent tone of scholarly modesty, an impersonal style of narration: one might have thought that another pedestrian work has emerged out of the vast stable of academic history. One could not be more wrong. Most of the essays were written while the author held an academic position, but the work done is much more than academic in the narrow sense, a long history of participation in organized struggle, of sharing the privations of early communist modes of living, of patient learning from international articulations of the world-shattering body of thought called Marxism, lies behind the even voice of the historian. In basic terms, it is the voice of militant reason tackling large questions of nation and class and agency. The book is mainly concerned with the early phase of the formation of Indian labour and labour organizations. There is one essay on the history of indentured labour from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the first World War; the rest tackle various questions of labour movement and labour organization in the twenties of this century. There are two case-studies of workers' strikes in the tea and jute industries and two surveys of labour journalism and labour history in the early period. These are important pioneering studies, but the author's perspective on the history of Indian labour is best reflected in the three major articles which constitute the bulk of the book: 'Parties and Politics in Indian Trade Union Movement—Early Phase (1917-1924)'; 'Communist International and Indian Trade Union Movement (1919-1923)'; and "'Industrial Unrest" and Growth of Labour Unions in Bengal, 1920-1924'. It is in these articles that the polemical overview of the Preface finds its historical and theoretical elaboration. Briefly, what has been called the 'Bengal model' of trade unions is seen as the specific outcome of conditions obtaining in the country at a particular phase in its history and it is suggested that the British model of trade union activities cannot be taken as a cognitive and evaluative model for discussing the history of Indian labour. Bose insists that the nature of industrialization and its concentration in particular sectors and particular geographical locations had a determining influence on the formation of the labour force and the consciousness of the labouring people. Questions on the nature of capitalism in India and its relationship with dominant feudal structures, on the role of the colonial state, on the nature and extent of the struggle for independence, of