68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST While the importance of these historical forms of caste organization in launching fresh struggles against vicious caste oppression must be noted, it must be emphasized that these had to yield their basic importance to broader mass organizations of the class—and caste—oppressed people worthy of the current age of revolutionary transformation. Such organization grappled, from the forties, with the task of mobilizing the rural poor on the theoretical understanding that just as the complex and difficult caste barrier had to be overcome in the mass struggle to transform agrarian relations, it was only when landlordism, the crux of the agrarian question in India, Was uprooted that the curse of caste oppression could be destroyed. (To be continued) 1 Neelakanta Sastri, The Culture and History of the Tamils, p 90. 2 Manual ofThanjauur District, Government of Madras, 1883, p 396. 8 Madras District Gazetteers, Tanjore, Government of Madras, 1906, p 54. 4 Sastri, op. cit., p 91. 5 Andre Beteille, Caste, Class and Power : Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjvre Village, University of California Press, 1965, p 99. 6 See Kathleen Gough, "Caste m a Tanjore Village*', in^Leach (ed) Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan, 1960. 7 See R L Hardgrave, Tha Nadars of Tamil Nad, Oxford University Press, 1969, for a description of this process. 9 Kathleen Gough, paper on fieldwork in Thanjavur in 1976 (unpublished). a Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India : Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p 55. 10 Gelestin Bougie, Essays on the Caste System, Translated by D F Pocock, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p 34. 11 Debiprasad Ghattopadhyay, Lokayata'A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, People's Publishing House, 1973, p 199. 12 See D Sivertsen, When Caste Barriers Fall, Alien and UnWin; New York, 1963. 1! Government Order No 1693 dated 11.10. 1938, Development Department, Government of Madras. 14 Sivertsen, op. cit. 15 Gough, op. cit., 1960, pp 47-51. 18 Government Order No 2222 Ms. dated 6.6. 1946, Development Department^ Government of Madras. i7 Ibid.