PRADHAN HARISHANKAR PRASAD 95 and Sweezy came from remarkably affluent backgrounds, which suggests that perhaps Pradhanji's own very privileged background was what gave him a degree of immunity against vacillations and opportunism. I first met Pradhanji in the mid-seventies, soon after our joiiiing the Jawaharlal Nehru University. I had of course known of him from his articles in the Economic and Political Weekly, but my first personal contact with him was at a lecture which he gave at Professor Moonis Raza's invitation, where he linked the rise of the intermediate castes in North India with the agrarian transformation that was taking place. These days of course, this constitutes standard wisdom, but to my knowledge Pradhanji was the first to talk and write about it. What struck me most about Pradhanji was his thorough knowledge of what he was talking about. There were no attempts at being smart or clever or "original"; he simply gave us the truth as he saw it. One of his always insightful papers, on the role of usury in rural Bihar, was included in the selection of papers from those published over the years in Economic and Political Weekly by numerous scholars who took part in what came to be known as the Indian 'mode of production' debate. This edited selection under the title Agrarian Relations and Accumulation came out some years ago. We kept meeting from time to time whenever he came to Delhi. He would stay on the campus with the Bhallas, and drop into our house for a chat. Our relations with Pradhanji became closer during the nineties. This was a bad decade. The international and national poitical and economic developments were bad enough, but what was particularly painful at a personal level was having people whom one respected for their integrity suddenly seeing virtues in imperialism when it was launching a new offensive, and singing hosannas to "liberalisation" and "globalisation". Pradhanji's staunch adherence to the progressive cause, coupled with his habit of calling a spade a spade, was particularly endearing at this moment. This is not to say that his ideas remained fixed and rigid. Like any thinking person confronted with a profoundly new and unexpected development, he attempted to cope with it intellectually, but there was not a trace of the "God-that-failed" kind of shallowness about his response. It took, to my knowledge, two forms. While remaining committed to the basic tenets of materialism and the idea of a revolution, he began taking a closer look at Gandhiji, especially his capacity to mobilise vast masses. Indian Marxists have always been intrigued by Gandhi; and it is hardly surprising that at a difficult