GAIL OMVEDT Women and Rural Revolt in India PART Two BETWEEN 1969 and 1975, an important debate on the "mode of production in agriculture" in India took place in the Economic and Political Week]y, a leading Bombay publication. Behind the debate lay the issues raised by the ^green revolution", the partial growth of capitalist agriculture., a' d concurrent poor-peasant and agricultural labour upsurges most dramatically highlighted by the Naxalbari revolt in 1967. The debate was inaugurated by reports of western experts Daniel Thorner24 and Wolf Ladejinsky25 who toured parts of the country and hailed a new type of capitalist farming. But it really began when Ashok Rudra and Usha Patnaik, two Indian economists., published their work on the phenomena and began to debate among themselves and with Paresh Chattopadhyay and N Ram as to whether this meant the emergence and dominance of capitalist relations in agriculture. It was they who began to formulate the question clearly for both contemporary India and the colonial period, as to what a capitalist mode of production as compared to a feudal or semi-feudal one, meant. Other writers inclined to defend the dominance of semi-feudal relations, such as Pradhan Prasad and Ranjit Sair, also began to publish and finally a set of cosmopolitan Marxist theorists—Jairus Banaji, Hamza Alavi and Harry Cleaver among them—also joined the debate.