EVOLUTION OF INDIAN SOCIETY 5 and love for the people, he had nothing but sympathy for the Indian people who were undergoing immense suffering, and hatred for the British who were inflicting it on them. This is evident in his sympathetic treatment of the revolt of 1857. 2) This destruction of the old society which had come on the agenda and was being carried out by the foreign occupiers will surely be followed by the construction of a new society. Marx, the proletarian revolutionary, could see that the fruits of the newly emerging Indian society will not go to the people of that country unless the bourgeois rule in the occupying country is replaced by proletarian rule or, the Indian people, through their own struggles, became masters of their destiny. This two-fold truth has never become outmoded, and never will become outmoded, by any amount of new material collected by subsequent generations of scholars, administrators and publicists. This being the essence of Marxism in relation to the study of Indian society and culture, Indologists should guard themselves against two trends in the study of India's society and culture. The first is to laud the ^glorious past" of India whose ''revival" has become the political goal of some organized groups and has gripped the imagination of large sections of the people. This obviously is dangerous both politically as well as from the point of view of an objective study of India's past, present and future. For, it makes the scholars who adopt this attitude blind to the reality that Indian society had long ago started stagnating and decaying, preparing the ground for foreign domination. Correct Assessment Vital The struggle for the political emancipation of the country from foreign rule (and now to maintain that freedom and develop internal democracy) is therefore integrally connected with the struggle for socio-cultural remodelling. The second and equally dangerous trend would be to decry the whole past, ignore the enormous treasure-house of culture produced by a society which, because of inner contradictions, subsequently reached the stage of stagnation and decay instead of having a revolutionary replacement, as happened in other class formations like slavery and European feudalism. This trend, in other words, denies the role played by our people in producing this culture, though it was appropriated and misused by the upper layers of society, and cuts off the scholar, the administrator, the publicist and the politican from the mass of the Indian people and their socio-cultural milieu.