2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST numbers during this year, one around August, and the other around February 1984. As a part of this plan, the current number carries an article by Iqtidar Alam Khan, which examines Marx's and Engels'? writings on Islam and raises certain basic questions about the correct interpretation of their analysis of the role of religion in human history, a subject on which we would welcome further discussion. P S GrewaPs piece on Nanak's teachings and the development of the Sikh Gurudom is an apposite concrete study in this context. Locating Nanak in the intellectual milieu thrown up, inter alia, by the Bhakti movement, Grewal, though sensitive to Nanak's preaching of the religious equality of all castes, emphasises that it was religious equality after all that Nanak was preaching; to read "socialism" into Nanak's preaching, or to interpret it as an attempt to achieve social equality of all castes is in his view erroneous and unhistorical. Tracing the subsequent growth of Sikhism, Grewal shows how feudal milieu permeates Sikhism itself leading to a gradual feudalisation of the Sikh Gurudom. The current number's preoccupation with history does not end here. The article by Kristoffel Lieten as well as the communication by Partha Chatterjee both raise basic questions for modern Indian historiography. Lieten's concern is with refuting the thesis that because of its basic and long-term conflict with imperialism the Indian bourgeoisie as a class always remained within the mainstream of the national movement. He attempts to do so by focussing on the Cavil Disobedience movement, when the danger of social turmoil, he argues, drove the bourgeoisie in its quest for "law and order" into the role of a broker^ between the Congress-led national movement and the colonial government. Lieten's general approach is to emphasise the dual character of the Indian bourgeoisie and hence the necessity for a differentiated assessment of its role in each specific period. Partha Chatterjee was one of the contributors to the important volume of essays entitled Subaltern Studies which was discussed in this journal by Suneet Chopra (No 111) and Javeed Alam (No 117). His response to Javeed Alam's comments contains an exposition of the precise nature of his own theoretical project, which should make further discussion and debate more tractable as well as productive. And this is an area where, -in particular, this journal would welcome a thorough-going debate. We do hope that the readers would find the ewbarras des richesses of material on history and historiography in this number stimulating and provocative. And finally we have the Note by A C Minocha which discusses regional inequalities in India by drawing upon some useful, unpublished statistics, relates these inequalities to the basic economic contours of the Indian society as defined by the existing property relations, and provides a critique of our planning process for not taking into account the spaiial dimension.