ISWAR CHANDRA VIDYASAGAR 7 5 'extremist' view is derived in the main from the trenchant remarks of Ashok Mitra, an ICS officer, in his general introduction to the Census Report on West Bengal, 1951!) The educated Bengali bhadralok, as Sen himself shows at some length, were semi-feudal rentiers rather than a class capable of transforming production relations, and had no interest in the vital matter of agrarian reform beyond protecting their vested interests. Hence the high ideals mouthed by the spokesmen for the landlords5 and pleaders9 renaissance were a mere veneer over rotten compromises with feudalism and imperialism.1 It has been the burden of the "extremist" criticism of the conventional view of the Bengal Renaissance that the claim of modern enlightenment made on its behalf is spurious since modernisation and "progress5 without fundamental social change, without in fact a serious class struggle, is bound to be largely sterile. Sen's scornful references to that school of history arc not enough to refute its argument. It is significant that he himself provides damning evidence of the importance of the 'middle class9 in Bengal and relates Vidyasagar's ultimate failure to that barrenness (pp48-49; pp 94-104; pp 107-111). Unlike the 'extremist5 historian, Sen does not seem to find any significance in the series of revolutionary uprisings among the peasantry under the colonial regime. Probably he uncritically acquiesces in the conventional picture of the harried peasant, overburdened by poverty, ignorance and meek submission. Though he exposes quite competently the hypocrisy of the colonial rulers and the idealist verbiage of the middle class on numerous occasions in this work, the fact remains that he is blind to the creative potentiality of an alliance between the peasantry and the revolutionary intellectuals. The middle class failed to realise its dream of reform because it did not share the anti-imperialist thrust of the aspirations of the peasantry. It will not do to say, as Sen seems to do, that such an option was not given by history. Supra-kash Ray narrates the moving life-history of one such intellectual, Harish Chandra Mukhopadhyaya, editor of the Hindu Patriot, who had used his powerful pen to champion the cause of the oppressed peasantry during the indigo revolt. At his death one of the leaders of the Bengal Renaissance paid him this belated tribute: "He had contributed more to the progress of India than Rammohun with his movement against the suttee and Vidyasagar with his campaign for widow-remarriage.))a Most Marxist scholars of our time are agreed that the unfinished tasks of 'modernisation9 in a colonial or semi-colonial