BOOK REVIEW 81 logical extension of their ideas regarding the conditions of economic progress in general.11 This is a statement which could have been made against the innumerable authors against whom Marx, Engels and Lenin had in their day polemized. Every one of them adopted the stand they did—the stand which was characterived by Marx, Engels and Lenin as bourgeois in its class essence—not because they were subjectively desirous of defending capitalism but because "they fully agreed with the general values and beliefs prevalent in the historical period to which they belonged" which means, the general values and beliefs of bourgeois society. We for our part would not accuse either the earlier pioneer scholar-politicians or the subsequent school of Gandhians and radical nationalists of being subjectively the champions of capitalism. The point, however, is that the social outlook which they inherited was that of capitalist society (which itself, as the programme of the CPI (M) points out, was superimposed on an essentially precapitalist society) and therefore their values and beliefs were essentially bourgeois with large doses of the pre-capitalist in their class character. The present reviewer in his study of Gandhi, for example, has traced the tragedy of Gandhi to the contradiction between the subjectively idealist man Gandhi and the objectively existing capitalist society (superimposed on a precapitalist society) to whose values and beliefs he subscribed. The same must be said ofRanade, Naoroji, Dutt and so on, as well Nehru, Bose and the rest of them. To say that the class essence of the ideology and policies which impelled the activities of particular leaders were essentially bourgeois in class character does not amount to accusiug them of subjectively desiring to establish capitalist society. The very process of development of agrarian studies before and after independence made by the author yields no other conclusion than that, opposed to each other were the ideologies of two nations—one oppressing and the other oppressed— while within the latter itself were the class forces representing the precapitalist and capitalist societies—and within the latter again, the forces of the proletariat and petty-bourgeois on the one hand and the bourgeoisie on the other. The question of land reforms and thereforce of scientific studies on the land question are inseparably connected with the conflicts and contradictions among these various class and social forces. E M S NAMBOODIRIPAD 1 Land Reforms in India, Trends and Perspectives^ p 2. 2 Ibid. pp3-4. » Ibid, p4. * Ibid. pp 5-6. ^ Ibid. p8. € Ibid. 7 Ibid. p 9. » Ibid. pp 19-20. » Ibid. p 9. 10 Ibid. p8. 11 Ibid. p 16.