4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus [Indians] themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. When the Great Revolt of 1857 broke out, Marx and Engels were consistent in their defence of the rebels and in condemnation of British atrocities in their writings in the same newspaper.1 This needs to be particularly stressed because some radical writers such as Edward Said have been taking Marx to task for a lack of sympathy for the Indian people.2 There is no evidence of any personal contact between Marx and any Indian opponent of British rule. In 1871, the general council of the International Workingmen' s Association, in which Marx was the moving spirit, received a letter from an unidentified supporter from Calcutta drawing attention to the "great discontent... among the people" and "the wretched conditions of the workers" in India; little is known about the sequel, though the general council advised the correspondent to open a branch of the International with special attention to "enrolling natives".3 An indirect contact with Dadabhai Naoroji, India's indefatigable spokesman in London, could have developed through H.M. Hyndman, one of England* s early social democrats. He maintained good relations with Marx until the summer of 1881, and was also a friend of Dadabhai Naoroji, who describes him as a friend of India.4 Some statements by Marx in a letter of early 1881 echo Naoroji' s calculations of the enormous burden of the tribute on India and suggestion of the existence of popular conspiracies against the British, feeding on mass unrest.5 Unfortunately, Hyndman' s break with Marx later that year precluded the possibility of any personal association of Marx with Naoroji. WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT AND NATIONAL LIBERATION Karl Marx died in 1883. Within a few years of his death two important developments took place, giving organisational forms to both Indian nationalism and international socialism. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 at Bombay; and the Second International in 1889 at Paris, the latter uniting under its banner the most advanced sections of the working class movement of Europe and America. Unfortunately owing to the very moderate constitutionalist politics of the Congress