MARXISM AND THE CASTE SYSTEM 75 movement lagged and only one man—developing independently and in part in antagonism to this Communist leadership—was moving towards a correct approach? This is the kind of question I was trying to answer. The "petty bourgeois" character of Communist leaders is often mentioned as the class basis of various errors in line and practice(that is failure to adopt a "correct approach59). Again, "petty bourgeois" is too abstract a category in the Indian context. As in almost all colonial societies, members of the urban petty bourgeoisie, including its educated intelligentsia sections, have had some kind of connection with land. But there is a difference between those who have kinship and social relations with peasant cultivators (including rich peasants) and those who have relations with people who are predominantly non-cultivating landlords, professionals, teachers, lower bureaucrats and the like. If the latter go to the villages or communicate with people in the villages, their channels of communication and contact "naturally" tend to be through their kin and social relations. And these were, in Mahar-ashtra in particular, the groups threatened by a rising, often crude challenge from the peasant (including rich peasants with the support of their educated kin!) cultivators. It was relatively easy for their urban petty bourgeois kinfolk to absorb the view of these more"feudal"classes, relatively difficult (difficult: not impossible) to throw off years of socialization, family connections, trainiag, style of speech and ways of thinking to commumcate with an aggressive peasantry. To put it another way, it was easy and "natural" to see Tilak, with all his social faults, as a great anti-imperialist; it was more difficult to see Phulc, with his antagonism to the National Congress, as a revolutionary democrats-much less Ambedkar. One shorthand way of describing such facts is to say that there are differences between "petty bourgeois Brahmins" and "petty bourgeois non-Brahmins" that have to be taken into account. But the point is that neither a category such as "Brahmin" by itself or ^petty-bourgeois" by itself is adequate; rather class position has to be understood in terms of the total complex of social relations of the type described above, in which relation to the means of production is mediated through caste and kinship networks that are maintained as part of ongoing feudal relations and/or remnants in Indian society. Race and Caste One final point. Coming from an American society shaken by growing Black, ChicanOj Native American and Asian^American movements, I have had the impression that "caste" is as crucial a feature of social reality in India as "race" is m the United States, ft a.ppears to be as prevalent a topic of discussion and as^such occurs (perhaps in simply a joking form) among Marxists as well as non-Marxists. It was not I who invented such terms as "Brahmin commumsts"; rather they are used by many radicalised members of low caste groups th^t is, those